Towards equity focused approaches to EdTech: a socio-technical perspective

几十年来，技术一直被推广为解决学校不平等的一种方式。支持者认为，提供更多的数字资源，以获得设备，网络和软件的形式，将导致更大的教育和社会公平。这些基于数字资源的不平等方面当然非常重要，但这种方法只关注高度复杂的社会问题的一个方面，导致不太可能成功的简单化干预。本研究旨在重新构建数字技术在学校中的使用方式，并促进更加注重公平的教育技术方法。七个民族志在英格兰的中学将进行捕捉和探索在学校中使用技术的多方面的影响，以及它可以加强或重新配置现有的教育和社会不公平的方式。它采取了一种关系，社会技术的方法，即关注各种数字技术在课堂上使用的方式，并研究如何使用这种EdTech系统改变或维持教师和学生之间现有的关系和做法，质疑这种技术所促进的内在偏见和基础价值观，并探讨如何获得EdTech及其使用在不同的背景和情况下。这种急需的丰富的民族志研究将有助于公平，数字技术和教学和学习之间的关系的学术理解。通过与社会科学家，数据科学家，教育科技公司，政策制定者，教师，学生和更广泛的公众进行强有力的知识交流和影响战略，该研究还旨在改变学校使用数字技术的方式，促进和设计，以告知未来以公平为重点的教育数字干预方法。

For decades, technology has been promoted as a way to address inequity in schools. Proponents argue that providing more digital resources, in the form of access to equipment, networks and software, will lead to greater educational and social equity. These digital resource based aspects of inequity are of course highly significant, but such an approach focuses only one dimension of a highly complex societal problem which leads to simplistic interventions that are unlikely to be successful. This study aims to reframe the ways that the use of digital technologies in schools is conceptualised and promote a more equity focused approach to EdTech. Seven ethnographies in secondary schools in England will be conducted to capture and explore the multi-faceted implications of the use of technology in schools and the ways it can reinforce or reconfigure existing educational and social inequity. It takes a relational, socio-technical approach, that attends to the ways in which varied digital technologies are used in the classroom and examines how the use of such EdTech systems change or maintain existing relationships and practices between teachers and students, problematizes the inbuilt biases and underpinning values promoted by such technologies, and explores how access to EdTech and its uses varies across contexts and circumstances. This much needed rich ethnographic study will contribute to academic understandings of the relationships between equity, digital technologies and teaching and learning. Through a strong knowledge exchange and impact strategy that engages with social scientists, data scientists, EdTech companies, policy makers, teachers, students and the wider public the study also aims to change the way that the use of digital technology in schools is thought about, promoted and designed in order to inform future equity focused approaches to digital interventions in education.