Data justice in education: Toward a research agenda

Abstract

Educational institutions increasingly rely on digital platforms to deliver content and learning, monitor attendance, communicate with stakeholders, and evaluate institutional performance. Despite the efficiency and accessibility gains they offer, digital platforms are powered by personal data which, through a process of datafication, can be used to track, monitor, and profile staff and students. The insights drawn from this data can be used to shape educational and professional futures. This article examines how datafication has become a social justice issue in education, discussing the implications for well-being, decision-making, governance, and power in education. Using Hintz and colleagues framework for data justice, it applies and explores the three dimensions of data justice to the context of education, including: (1) infrastructures (2) regulation, and (3) informed and knowledgeable stakeholders. The paper discusses the unique challenges to achieving data justice in education and concludes by outlining the key questions for a future research agenda.

Keywords:

• Data justice
• datafication
• education
• privacy
• digital platforms
• infrastructures
• practices

Introduction

In the last decade, schools have increasingly relied on digital technologies for their everyday operations, with the volume and scope of data gathered growing rapidly. This is part of what has become known as ‘the datafication of education’ (Jarke & Breiter, 2019). Many aspects of school life are ‘datafied’– that is, turned into digital data that can be collected, aggregated, and processed to track, profile, and predict student and teacher behaviour, performance, and learning. School work is completed on commercial platforms owned by Google and Microsoft, student behaviours are monitored through apps such as Class Dojo, facial recognition technologies are used to record attendance, and cameras and sensors are used to secure classrooms and schoolgrounds. Datafication re-shapes learning practices in schools and introduces new risks associated with profiling and behavioural prediction, as well as reshaping curriculum and pedagogy (Hooper et al., 2022).

Personal data generated through datafication is regularly processed to produce behavioural and characteristic insights into users, such as where someone lives, their interests, or even to predict how they might perform on an exam. This information has great value in the multi-billion-dollar data broker economy. However, the implications of personal data processing are not experienced evenly by individuals and groups. Inevitably, some communities are more vulnerable than others. For example, a platform used by the Queensland Department of Education, OneSchool, used categories and sorting that led to culturally biased inferences being made about Indigenous students (Clutterbuck et al., 2021). Similarly, Lu et al. (2021) found that ClassDojo resulted in targeted manifestations of existing biases around race and ethnicity, dis/abilities, gender and past behaviour of students by teachers. Algorithmic bias has been researched in a variety of contexts like policing, the justice system, and health (Noble, 2018; Benjamin, 2019). Within education systems and schools there has been insufficient assessment of algorithmic biases and their impacts and outcomes. It is important that schools and researchers act on this important issue to resist replicating or exacerbating existing marginalisation, while also protecting students’ privacy. It is for these reasons that we consider the issue to be a significant social justice imperative.

This article raises the issue of data justice in education. It draws on educational research and critical data studies to tease out the pivotal role played by platforms in the datafication of education and what this might mean for students, teachers, parents and educational bureaucrats. Inspired by the work of Dencik et al. (2022), we explore data justice through a framework adapted to the context of education, with particular focus on what is required to advance data justice in schools. We argue for the need to increase teacher capabilities to navigate the inherent paradoxes of edu-business, and systemic funding issues that underpin datafication in education and call for better regulation and support for schools, teachers and families. The article concludes by outlining a research agenda for moving toward data justice in schools.

The datafication of school education – promises and challenges

Datafication aligns with the overarching paradigm of ‘evidence-based’ governance, where key stakeholders are promised the means to identify, intervene and correct processes and procedures in education that are deemed ‘sub-optimal’. In formal schooling, datafication is often used to hold schools and teachers accountable for students’ learning and development and has been positioned as key to achieving equitable outcomes. There is an assumption within the administrative systems of schooling that increasing the conversion of individuals’ information into data will reveal and therefore help solve the problems that have perennially plagued educators, administrators, and policymakers in school education. However, the reality of learning and working in datafied systems does not live up to these promises. In contrast, there is increasing evidence that datafication is exacerbating and entrenching educational injustice (Lu et al., 2021; Clutterbuck et al., 2021; O’Neil, 2016).

We focus on three features or steps involved in datafication which become problematic when applied to schools (Pangrazio et al., 2022). We outline them here to highlight how the steps of datafication are simultaneously distorting the social complexity of teaching and learning, which can, in turn, lead to bias and harm. The first is the reduction of complex phenomena into a code that can be easily transmitted and stored. All stages of the datafication process rely on human judgment to decide what will be captured, collated and represented to end users. Datafication also relies on the abstraction of aspects of social life from their contexts of origin. An endless amount of data can be abstracted from digital platforms, through users actively sharing data and inferences made through probability-based analytics (Abrams, 2014). Datafication also tends to individualise learning experiences. Individualisation is a central tenet of neoliberalism, which datafication adheres to as an inherently competitive, comparative, and categorising process. Within education, individualisation therefore narrows conceptions of both teaching and learning to fit with the overriding need for measurement (Thompson & Cook, 2017; Bradbury, 2018).

When these three facets of datafication—reduction, abstraction and individualisation—are applied to schools, children and young people, issues emerge. For example, reducing and abstracting social phenomena from their context leads to generalised meanings and values (Boyd & Crawford, 2012). This is particularly problematic in education as many of the issues that schools and teachers face have their origins in structural inequalities, such as class, race, gender, and disability, and can only be understood by considering the social context. As the work of data feminists (D’Ignazio & Klein, 2020) and critical data scholars (Eubanks, 2017; O’Neil, 2016; Benjamin, 2019) have shown, choices about what goes into categorising and labelling data reflect the values and priorities of their designers. In this way, digital education platforms and their datafying practices can intensify and reproduce social injustice.

Fundamentally, digital education platforms derive economic and utility value from the datafication and commodification of the activities and personal information of students, parents and teachers (Van Dijck & Poell, 2018). Once again, the values and assumptions enacted here reflect the priorities of the designers of these platforms. These values and assumptions seek to serve the processes of formalised educational institutions, both in terms of learning and administration. These processes are supposedly served through harnessing the power of data to identify otherwise difficult to measure properties, in turn creating new efficiencies and conveniences for staff. However, data structures and processes also function to make only certain operations and interactions actionable, and to make only certain features of individuals and groups perceptible (Decuypere et al., 2021).

A further issue is that these values and assumptions are not self-evident to ‘users.’ Researchers examining the impacts of platformisation in the fields of media and communication and digital humanities, argue there is an intentional strategy to invisibilise (Gandini, 2019) platformed logics of management, surveillance and control. This opacity enables system changes to be covertly introduced while inhibiting collective action by stakeholders whose information is elicited (Mendonça & Kougiannou, 2022). In this way, platforms act as extractive technologies (Decuypere et al., 2021) that serve managerial rather than educational purposes. Indeed, the logics of platforms align with those of datafication, even if teachers and students are required to adjust practices and complete additional work to make this a reality.

What is data justice?

As data becomes entrenched in social, political and economic life, a range of responses dedicated to critically analysing and revising the role of data in society is growing. In recent years, calls for ‘data justice’, ‘data ethics’ and ‘data governance’ have been coming thick and fast from scholars across a range of disciplines. While they differ in scope and application, they have the common purpose of addressing the issues that emerge from a datafied society.

What consolidates the diverse approaches to data justice is the premise that data cannot be considered as separate from social justice concerns (Dencik et al., 2022). Data justice constitutes data as a means of power and seeks to understand how power is exercised through data. So, where data governance (Abraham et al., 2019) might be focused on issues of data storage and security, data justice might consider the provenance of data and the political economy of the digital technologies involved. Floridi and Taddeo (2016) argue that data ethics might focus on moral issues associated with data generation, capture and processing. (Floridi & Taddeo, 2016), Data justice, however, positions data practices as having an economic rationale that is part of a societal superstructure. Grappling with this broader focus is more challenging for researchers. As Dencik and Sanchez-Monedero (2022, p. 3) explain:

To speak of data justice is thus to recognise not only how data, its collection and use, increasingly impacts on society, but also that datafication is enabled by particular forms of political and economic organisation that advance a normative vision of how social issues should be understood and resolved.

There are three implications of data justice for social researchers. First, data justice is a deliberate attempt to move beyond seeing data as an individual problem and responsibility. Instead, data is framed as a collective concern connected to broader, longstanding patterns of social organisation and injustice (Hintz et al., 2019). Second, data justice means investigating the relationship between data and power, especially information asymmetries. Brunton and Nissenbaum (2015, p. 3) explain that ‘information asymmetries’ emerge when ‘data about us are collected in circumstances we may not understand, for purposes we may not understand, and are used in ways we may not understand’. Third, is the fact that data justice responses are not just about fixing technical issues or adding to regulatory policy. Given its systematic understanding of injustice, data justice calls for disruption, disobedience, resistance and even protest. Here we draw inspiration from data activism (see Milan, 2017; Lehtiniemi & Ruckenstein, 2019), data feminism (D’Ignazio & Klein, 2020) and the ‘good’ data movement (Daly et al., 2019) to find strategies and tactics to do data differently or disobediently (see Bridges, 2021). Above all, data justice encourages a focus on how datafication takes place in context, as both the issues and means to address these issues are determined by the local infrastructures and social actors involved.

Exploring data justice in education

Data justice is committed to helping people to live well and flourish in a datafied society. Briggs and Reiss (2021, p. 4) conceptualise human flourishing as ‘a valuable framework within which to consider the importance of satisfying people’s yearnings for material goods, successful relationships and the hope that we can achieve and experience things that give us a sense of something greater than ourselves—the transcendent’. Hintz et al. (2019) identify three requirements for humans to flourish in a datafied society, including: (1) accessible, stable and trustworthy infrastructure; (2) a supportive legal and regulatory framework for secure online interactions for ‘protecting internet users’ rights’; and (3) informed and knowledgeable understanding for all stakeholders of the technologies in place and how they might be used. We apply this framework to education, critiquing the arrangements in schools and using it to speculate on some ways forward.

Infrastructures

When it comes to the digital infrastructures in schools, we see the perfect storm of an underfunded education systems, increasing parental demands, and increasing commercialisation. Schools in Australia– public and private—are now marketised as the notion of school choice is important to prospective parents and students. Digital infrastructures play a crucial role in positioning the school in the marketplace, particularly through public scrutiny regarding outcomes of high stakes tests and the school’s capacity for parental communication. This was particularly evident in recent research mapping the digital infrastructures in schools (Pangrazio et al., 2022). While all three schools (catholic, independent and government) in the study had what was described as a ‘patchwork of platforms’, the most complex maps were those in both the catholic and independent schools. These schools could afford to procure sophisticated data analytics and monitoring software, in an attempt to lift student performance (a saleable outcome). However, these data analytics were often added in an ad hoc way to fulfil the perceived demands of parents (as customers). Not only can digital infrastructures streamline school enrolment and educational processes, but more sophisticated technologies can provide granular demographic and achievement insights. The trade-off for teachers is usually increased workloads.

There is an assumption that more data and data infrastructures will solve school problems and unlock a competitive advantage. At work there is the ideology of dataism (van Dijck et al., 2018) - the widespread trust and belief in quantification as ‘objective’, ultimately leading to the digital tracking of all kinds of human behaviour and interactions. This ideology justifies the acquisition of data infrastructures and leads to what Dencik et al. (2022) describe as an ‘infrastructural dependency’ on data-driven technologies. This dependency positions schools in a ‘tenancy-type relationship with technology providers, in which it becomes increasingly difficult to shift this political economy over time’ (Dencik et al., 2022, pp. 19–20). Corporations like Google and Microsoft benefit through brand recognition and the ability to scale quickly.

A final issue is that many digital infrastructures are designed without stakeholder input and procured by school principals and administrators who will never work with these technologies themselves. Consequently, a naivety and lack of due diligence permeates design and procurement processes (Decuypere et al., 2021). While it is neither straightforward nor always viable for educators to work alongside developers to achieve data justice in schools (see Tamez-Robledo, 2022), until this is possible, guidance to critically inform school leaders is needed.

A key question for schools to consider is the extent to which the platform changes school processes, as well as the approaches to teaching and learning it promotes. Too often, these realities unfold long after the procurement phase (see Pangrazio & Sefton-Green, 2024). A central concern is that the implications of the platform may not or cannot be fully understood at the time of procurement, but once schools have invested in a new platform, contractual obligations make it difficult to opt out. Further, EdTech trade fairs effectively authorise new and emerging technologies in schools (Gulson & Witzenberger, 2022), even though there may be flimsy evidence for their appropriateness. Moving schools toward data justice might mean providing opportunities for school-based stakeholders to trial the product or sign up on a month-to-month basis. Departments of education could also provide more information to schools about the pedagogical and privacy implications of using a particular platform, so informed decisions can be made before committing their staff and students to such an infrastructure.

Regulation

The impact of datafication on schooling indicates a need for some form of regulation within the edtech sector. With a digital solution to manage every aspect of the everyday—from how schools interact with governments, institutions and organisations, how teachers, parents and students communicate, through to how learning opportunities are accessed and engaged with–it is difficult for governments, institutions and organisations to produce effective anticipatory policy responses. Indeed, it seems that while there is a digital solution to manage every aspect of school life, there is perhaps not a lot of foresight as to the unintended consequences of acquiring promised efficiencies. For example, the purpose of one of the fastest growing categories of software—student activity monitoring software—is the dataveillance of both students and teachers (Pangrazio & Sefton-Green, 2024). However, an unintended consequence of this software is the negative feelings students have about being monitored across home and school, and the detrimental impact this has on the relationships they have with their teachers and peers. In addition, students have reported feelings of ‘resignation’ toward tracking technologies in schools, which undermines their agency regarding school-based digital platforms (Pangrazio et al., 2023).

It is unrealistic to expect that regulatory processes can ever achieve wholesale fortification against constantly emerging digital benefits, risks and threats (Hintz et al., 2019). As digital citizenship is boundaryless, national policy-making processes involve political negotiation between a variety of actors and interests, entangling regional agencies, world summits and trade agreements, but also the business sector and special interest groups (Williamson & Hogan, 2020; Pangrazio & Sefton-Green, 2021), all with cases for and against change. At best, regulation is inadequate, slow and often problematic. Calls for reform can be controversial and therefore accompanied by legal challenges, parliamentary reviews, and independent commissions (Hintz et al., 2019). Nuanced circumstances call for available technologies to be used in nuanced ways, balancing for example, the desire to protect civil rights, freedom of expression and privacy with the affordances of digital surveillance to maintain national security (Hintz et al., 2019).

Despite occasional crises creating the conditions for policy change, the model of user consent has now become the default. This model places the burden on individuals to be informed in how they disclose information and protect their own privacy (Edwards & Veale, 2017). Responsibilisation discourses assure individual control but tend to minimise the social role and remit of regulation, as well as the ethical obligations of EdTech to ensure personal data is collected, stored and used with appropriate safeguards and oversight. Even when feeling overwhelmed by complex technical issues, the ‘responsible citizen’ tends to trust and defer to regulation frameworks and enforcement practices. The reality is that every new digital platform brings new digital practices, as well as unknown and unintended consequences (Pangrazio & Sefton-Green, 2021). The regulation of EdTech platforms is an ongoing and deeply complex challenge for departments and ministries of education and data justice provides a mechanism for ethically engaging in regulation of data generating practices.

Informed and knowledgeable stakeholders

A focus on data justice in education identifies how data generation is often taken for granted within school practices. In an analysis of the influence teachers have in post digital classrooms, Arantes and Buchanan (2022) identify that ‘teachers are conduits in connecting their students (and their data) to commercial entities via the products they incorporate in their teaching practice’ (p. 5). Some tech savvy teachers have large numbers of followers who promote and share information about products and services relevant to education (Arantes & Buchanan, 2022). When government departments and schools partner with commercial entities, teachers often find themselves positioned as brand ambassadors for products that are in tension with data justice, posing a serious conflict of interest and raising questions about schools’ responsibility for ethical and socially responsive education (Saldaña et al., 2021).

An issue to address is how teachers might be supported to develop the critical understandings necessary to enact a culture of care (Nias, 1999) in the classroom when their students are the subjects of data generation and management. There is an urgent need to enhance teachers’ knowledge of platform capitalism more generally (Arantes & Buchanan, 2022) and of the implications for stakeholders in school education. In a context where teachers do not possess this knowledge, their work is made even more difficult in that the terms and conditions related to the student data generated on platforms is very difficult to find. To be clear, we are not arguing that teachers are solely responsible for achieving data justice in education, but that their critical understandings of data infrastructures and technologies would add an important and powerful perspective in advancing the issue. Following Perrotta (2023, p. 6) our argument is that improving teacher’s critical data literacies would help achieve ‘participatory parity’, so they can move toward participating on par and as full partners with other key stakeholders (i.e. edtech companies and developers). In this way, improving teachers’ critical data understanding would strengthen a collective response to data justice.

Indeed, the power of data is such that it comes to supplant other ways of knowing and working with teachers and students in schools (Selwyn et al., 2021a; Selwyn et al., 2021b). For example, as one of the most collected data types in schools, attendance data has been used as a proxy for other student characteristics and capabilities. In this way, it is often used to create student subjectivities, ‘positioning students within narrow terms of performance and attendance’ (Selwyn et al., 2021b, p. 1). In addition, platforms have the power to shape practices and knowledge. For example, recent research highlights the potential for student activity monitoring systems to reconfigure digital literacy and criticality (Pangrazio & Sefton-Green, 2024). As digital literacies are typically developed in relation to digital platforms, the types of platforms in schools are crucially important not only in terms of school practices, but also for how people come to think of ‘digital literacies’. In this way, edtech companies are ‘co-opting’ digital literacies and turning them into a ‘soft power for educational governance’ (Pangrazio & Sefton-Green, 2024, p. 1).

Educating for data justice involves students and teachers learning about how their ‘data (is) collected, for what purposes, who has access to that data and under what conditions’ (Prinsloo et al., 2022, p. 887). While teachers, schools, the government and other agencies already provide programs on cyberbullying, online safety and digital footprints, these programs do not address the issues and unintended consequences that emerge from platforms in schools discussed earlier. Data justice in teaching offers a generative and affirmative lens through which to think about and perhaps begin to address the safety and rights of teachers, students, families, and communities from a more holistic and a more critical perspective on the purpose of education and schooling (Macgilchrist et al., 2021). This contrasts with data science that tends to have a disembodied objectivity with an irrefutable authority which serves to perpetuate the injustices of existing systems (Lee et al., 2022).

When considering what digital citizenship might look like in a datafied world, Hintz et al. (2019) note that new forms of agency and new capacities emerge. However, they caution that agency needs to be ‘re-constituted under the conditions of datafication’ (Hintz et al., 2019, p. 153). If data generation in schools is tied to commercial purposes or to short-term political agendas, then teacher agency is narrowly framed. Similarly, where purposes of education are reduced to instruments of the economy there is a narrow consideration of what is needed and what is possible in terms of teacher agency (Priestley et al., 2016; Skourdoumbis & Lynch, 2017). In contrast, practice-focused scholarship within education research provides expansive theorizations of agency (Lynch et al., 2017) for understanding both the opportunities for agency and the threats to agency amid current infrastructure, regulatory and knowledge conditions. For example, Priestley et al.’s (2016) ecological theory of teacher agency addresses how agency is performed in relation to specific cultural, structural and material situations as they unfold in time. This means that an individual teacher, student or parent might engage data systems agentially in one situation and lack agency in another. Such understandings also address how these stakeholders might both engage data systems with agency while also being subjectified by them.

Engaging with data for the good of students and staff will come from a broad critique of the political, commercial and economic framing of the uses of that data in educational settings (Williamson, 2019), together with a deep consideration of how teacher agency articulates with the conditions of schooling. Learning about data justice is central to both supporting teacher agency for the broader moral purposes of education and growing astute, data-literate students and citizens.

Specific challenges for enacting the data justice framework in education

A lack of just edtech platforms

In outlining the requirements for achieving data justice in education, the complexity and tensions involved quickly come to light. Educators are negotiating the complexity of working towards the moral purposes in education (Biesta, 2015) while the datafication of education promoted by many edtech products is disruptive to these purposes. In this way, the project of data justice is bound by structures embedded in platform design. When schools critically analyse the ‘nature of business ownership and governance emerging under platform capitalism’ (Dencik et al., 2019, p. 875), they are left with few platform alternatives that can be scaled for use across education jurisdictions. We have argued that further consideration of how digital infrastructures in schools are regulated is essential. Strict regulation may not be the answer, but a nuanced approach, which respects and supports school and teacher choice is important. However, without viable alternatives, schools have little choice but to use platforms which may be compromising their privacy or embedding new approaches to teaching, learning and assessment. Complicating this further is the degree of agency schools and teachers have to resist or reshape how they use these platforms, particularly if these issues are not prioritised by departments and ministries of education.

The power of platform pedagogies

Teachers have been negotiating power structures in technology infused contexts for a long time and have often been marginalised as a consequence. In a study of online social spaces inhabited by teachers, Robson (2016) identified the complex relationship between structure and agency. Teachers mostly conformed to the ideals of the online space ‘having little active agentic input’ (Robson, 2016, p. 135) in the ways they shaped their professional identities. Similarly, in the context of data justice, teachers may aim to enact ideal performances of education but are limited by the structures of big tech. In this way, platforms have implicit pedagogies which inculcate new practices for teaching, learning and the development of professional identities. However, striving toward data justice can provide learners with an opportunity to critique taken for granted social and technological arrangements, to reveal how they shape and construct social practices in their life. It also includes understandings of how data systems might differently impact users and the ethical considerations involved; although this aspect of data literacies is rarely addressed. Singh et al. (2014) suggests that if researchers are able to escape the academic categories of critical sociology to tune into teachers’ actual practices, they may learn that, instead of being duped by or resisting external logics and processes, teachers ‘[engage] with a completely different set of ideas about what schooling might be about’ (p. 10), including the development of educational dispositions with respect to data (Hardy, 2014).

Grappling with educational paradoxes

School staff and students can be both subjectified by the logics and regulatory processes of big tech platforms while at the same time upholding critical and political understandings about these same platforms. Furthermore, teachers can inhabit these spaces while also educating students about implications and actions for freedom, justice and equity (Mertala, 2020). Such paradoxes are not unfamiliar to teachers. In educational scholarship, paradoxes have been conceptualised in school leadership (Dolan, 2020), inclusive education (Corcoran et al., 2019) and literacy learning (Auld et al., 2022). Teaching about, through and with data justice is one more paradoxical context for educators to negotiate. Indeed, informed by expansive conceptions of practice, understandings of teacher professional agency and educational change are predicated on the existence of contradictions, where actions for change are necessarily in dialogue with processes and setups that presume the preservation of status quos and/or support the interests of powerful groups and individuals (Lynch, 2017; Singh et al., 2014). Teachers’ performance of agency amid professional challenge rarely results in wide-scale change, particularly when change involves new technologies and contexts of disadvantage (Lynch et al., 2017). Instead, teachers’ navigation of contradictory agendas more commonly involves incremental change and partial success and is part of the everyday work of teachers (Rowan, 2012). In the case of data justice, the socio-material context is a fast moving and largely invisible target, but it is one that intersects with other (il)logics, discourses and politics that teachers and indeed education researchers know well.

Conclusion: Toward a research agenda for data justice in education

Digital data raises just as many issues as its proponents claim it solves. As a group of critical education scholars, we believe that data justice is a generative way to begin addressing these issues. Not only does it help us to identify and organise the different issues that emerge in the context of education, but it ensures that we do not narrow our focus to data alone. As we have discussed throughout this article, data is not inherently the problem. Data practices in schools are shaped by the broader education system and the political economy of the digital infrastructures that exist in schools. In this way, data becomes inextricably linked with power and can therefore intensify existing biases and social justice issues. Data justice encourages us to see data as part of a complex and troubled education system, as opposed to being both problem and, consequently, solution. This article has brought to light the various challenges, issues and tensions that emerge when advancing data justice in education. From this perspective the following questions point to some areas that require further ongoing and in-depth research and investigation:

• Does datafication intensify existing forms of educational bias? How does it impact students differentially and what are the short- and long-term implications of datafication on their educational and vocational opportunities?

• How are edtech platforms procured and what do key stakeholders know about these systems? What should they know about these systems and platforms?

• In what ways can departments and ministries of education support schools to protect the digital rights and privacy of students and teachers without hampering innovation in digital learning?

• What knowledge and information do preservice teachers need to work in a datafied education system? What sort of education program would be most effective? How can professional development networks provide ongoing support for teachers and staff working in schools?

• To what extent can learning about the paradoxical nature of teaching for data justice bring critical awareness to other tensions and challenges within education?

• In what ways can we support the development of students’ and families’ knowledge and agency regarding education data?

Education about data justice covers more than privacy and includes relationships people have to historical, social and discursive agendas (Dencik & Sanchez-Monedero, 2022). Underpinning these different strands of data justice in education is the need to disentangle data from the apparent economic and managerial ‘logics’ into which it has been mobilised. The challenge is complex and layered, however, if we are to have any hope of addressing these issues, we need to involve stakeholders at all levels of the education system in an approach that places justice at the forefront.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

Dr Luci Pangrazio is the recipient of an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Award (Project DE230100652) funded by the Australian Government

Notes on contributors

Luci Pangrazio

Luci Pangrazio is a research fellow in digital literacies and datafication at Deakin University. Her research focuses on digital and data literacies, datafication in the home and school, and the politics of digital platforms. Her most recent book is Critical Data Literacies (with Neil Selwyn, 2023, MIT Press).

Glenn Auld

Glenn Auld is an uninvited guest living and working on unceded lands researching social justice in literacy education. His research is filled with paradoxes seeking the good life in literacy learning while knowing justice can never happen on stolen land.

Julianne Lynch

Julianne Lynch is a transdisciplinary researcher and teacher educator who studies everyday technology practices, innovation, and change—in and out of school. She is passionate about affirming the expertise of young people and teachers working in circumstances associated with disadvantage.

Carly Sawatzki

Carly Sawatzki is a teacher educator and educational researcher at Deakin University. She supports teachers of mathematics to teach differently, by helping them to connect students’ classroom learning with the real world. Carly is internationally recognised for her thought leadership on young people’s financial education.

Gavin Duffy

Gavin Duffy is a Research Fellow at Deakin University, as part of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child. His research focuses on how digital technologies are understood by both producers and audiences, and how educational technologies can be made more transparent for parents and teachers.

Shelley Hannigan

Shelley Hannigan works as a Senior Lecturer in Art Education at Deakin University where she divides her time between teaching pre-service teachers and research. Her research portfolio draws on her multiple practices/fields of creative arts therapy, art education and over 30 year practice as a visual artist.

Jo O’Mara

Joanne O’Mara is a Professor of Education at Deakin University. She is chair of the secondary subject English Curriculum Inquiry units. Her research interests include: practitioner inquiry; language, literature and literacy teaching, learning and curriculum. She is the current president of the Victorian Association for the Teaching of English.