Critical and participatory design in-between the tensions of daily schooling: working towards sustainable and reflective digital school development

ABSTRACT

Using Critical Design (CD) and Participatory Design (PD) as analytical and normative vantage points, this contribution reflects on how characteristics of both approaches can be useful for a reflective and inclusive engagement with educational technology in school development processes. Illustrating initial empirical findings from the research project Smart Schools, we analyse how characteristics of CD and PD are challenged or affirmed when unfolding in school practice. Our data show how three key logics substantially challenge ideas of CD and PD in digital school development processes, namely: (1) the idea of digital school development as a set of sequential processes; (2) an understanding of digital and analogue as opposing conditions; and (3) the conceptualisation of knowledge hierarchies between students, teachers, and external stakeholders. Simultaneously, we observe perspectives that affirm both approaches. Consequently, we argue that the notions of critique and participation must be rethought to apply CD and PD in everyday school development processes.

KEYWORDS:

• critical design
• participatory design
• digital school development
• educational futures
• design ethnography

Introduction

Around the world, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused rapidly increased use of technology in schooling, including the reactionary implementation of IT-infrastructures and the rollout of (oftentimes) standard software solutions provided by EdTech companies (Kerres 2020; Williamson, Macgilchrist, and Potter 2021). However, initial research on the implications of this reaction indicates that such ‘quick’, easily scalable digital solutions seem less likely to revolutionise education than to reproduce the downsides of traditional teaching methods (Reich 2020) and introduce new risks for, e.g., equality and democracy (e.g., Hartong 2021). Continuing this discussion, in recent years, there has been a growing call for more critical, participatory, pedagogically- and long-term-focused approaches in the design and research of educational technology that equally acknowledge today’s complex entanglements of digital and analogue conditions (e.g., Knox 2019; Spoden and Schrader 2021).

The plea for such critical and participatory approaches demands questioning and reshaping of existing design practices not only in the EdTech industry, but also in educational research. On industry level, algorithmic decisions and visualisations in tools are commonly designed by IT-specialists or product developers, while pedagogical practitioners – who are the experts in their field – are only involved to a limited extent. On research level, the fast pace and outsourcing of educational technology development to the EdTech industry make it near impossible for pedagogical staff and researchers to assess the actual implications of technological designs on individual pedagogical settings. Design-based research (DBR)¹ is therefore suggested as an approach in educational sciences to capture the complex, quickly changing dynamics of digital school environments (Spoden and Schrader 2021). The approach was coined to describe research-practice collaborations in which tools, materials, or concepts are designed in iterative design cycles, while producing scientific knowledge about how such designs enhance learning or can be integrated into educational settings (e.g., Bakker 2019). However, Richter and Allert (2017, 2019) argue that, at least so far, the majority of DBR studies strongly relate to an engineering-oriented understanding of design, which mainly focuses on the improvement of learning outcomes and skill development for the digital age. Questioning such an understanding, they suggest using design as a means for critical reflection and knowledge production on the value creation and social/political implications that go along with technology implementation.

While there are initial studies that elaborate a more critical (e.g., Richter and Allert 2019) or participatory approach (e.g., Dindler, Smith, and Iversen 2020) to design in the field of educational technology research, empirical investigation of how characteristics of Critical (CD) and Participatory Design (PD) unfold in digital school development processes and their everyday implementation has been extremely limited. Addressing this research gap, this contribution illustrates how both approaches can unfold in challenging ways in practice as they, in some regards, substantially clash with the logics by which schools operate even if there is a strong interest in reflective and participatory practices perceivable among school staff. Using initial empirical insights from the research project Smart Schools (SMASCH)² we show how (1) the idea of digital school development as a set of sequential processes, (2) an underlying understanding of digital and analogue as opposing conditions, and (3) the conceptualisation of knowledge hierarchies between students, teachers, and external stakeholders challenge characteristics of CD and PD in school practice. We then discuss how the approaches can be rethought in the continuing design process to face the schools’ needs and interest in a reflective and sustainable engagement with educational technology.

Design in digital school development: situating the study in the context of critical and participatory design

While Germany’s pre-COVID situation was characterised by a cautious, slow development of digital education strategies (Hartong, Förschler, and Dabisch 2021), when the pandemic hit, schools had to quickly implement standard IT-solutions without having a long-term concept as to how to ensure their individual and pedagogical needs (Cone et al. 2021). Addressing this conceptual deficit, the research project SMASCH aims to co-design individual digital settings with schools in Hamburg that on the long run empower them to take informed decisions on how to use educational technology and reflect on its pedagogical and organisational implications. For that, each school is accompanied by a researcher, a school development coach and media educators contributing their professional perspective to the process. The idea is not to design finalised digitisation concepts within the project period, but to implement structures in the project schools that enable design and critical reflection processes also over and above the project period. Thus, we approach the matter of EdTech-design with an interest in the overall organisational dynamics caused by digitisation in schools and critical perspectives on the use of educational technology in this paper.

Focusing on the process-oriented and participatory character of the project, this contribution refers to Latour’s (2004) differentiation between things (scientific objects) and Things (gatherings of material and non-material objects) to define EdTech-design not as a technological process that is finalised before a technology enters schools but as the development of ‘socio-material-assemblies’ (Bjögvinsson, Ehn, and Hillgren 2012, 102) in which humans and non-humans interrelate and mutually constitute the design ‘object’. From this perspective, design is a process that individually unfolds in each school context (even if the same digital tool is implemented). This shift away from the pure technical design of a tool towards its coming into being in the individual school context goes along with a shift in the temporal definition and the purpose of design as a practice. Firstly, the constantly changing context in which a technology is embedded asks for continuous adaption so that a starting and ending point of design can hardly be identified and the creation of (infra)structures for a continuous re-design is a central part of the process (e.g., infrastructuring in Karasti and Blomberg 2018; design-after-design in Storni 2014). Secondly, the focus on the interaction between humans and technologies when designing Things emphasises the role of the school community as design-partners to jointly reflect on the implications educational technology has on their work and individual context (Bjögvinsson, Ehn, and Hillgren 2012).

Taking SMASCH’s critical and participatory approach towards EdTech-design into consideration this contribution will especially focus on two design concepts that offer the possibility to critically engage with social norms enforced by technology and focus on the diverse stakeholder involvement in design. Firstly, we draw on the characteristics of Critical Design (CD), originally proposed by Dunne and Raby (2001) to critique the social, cultural, and economic norms promulgated through industrial design. To counteract this notion of design as a mostly positive and technically affirmative method, CD operates as a tool ‘to create reflection, provoke and to offer alternatives and critical ways to relate to a phenomenon’ (Isaksson et al. 2017). Through this engagement, CD primarily aims to produce knowledge for the creation of alternative, more heterogenous futures instead of tangible products (Bardzell and Bardzell 2013). While CD was not originally meant to be a research tool and frequently criticised (Ward 2019), several fields have adapted the approach to make it methodologically generative (e.g., Isaksson et al. 2017 in ethnography). Elaborated by Richter and Allert (2017) for the field of education, CD is described as a process in which problems are not predefined but (re-)constructed throughout the design. As exemplary CD practices, Richter and Allert (2017) suggest ‘envision[ing] products that are technically feasible but appear unacceptable, useless or questionable under the given social and cultural conditions’ (7) or engaging participants in the ‘creative re-use of available technologies […] to devise new tools for themselves’ (8), also defined as bricolage. Thus, CD does not work towards one, generalisable solution but rather opens up a space for speculation about what alternative futures could look like. This engagement with potential futures is supposed to foster critical reflection on the values and conditions that evolve through the implementation of technical designs within a specific context. Still, as Iivari and Kuutti (2017) visualise in their table on the variety of critical design approaches (988), CD is mostly designer-led and misses out the actual empowerment of users in the process.

Therefore, we secondly draw on ideas from Scandinavian Participatory Design (PD) to enforce the idea of user-participation. PD evolved in Scandinavia’s industrial sector during the 1970s to include workers in the design of their workplace and by that put a stronger focus on the relevance of human and social factors in IT-design (Simonsen and Robertson 2013). ‘Enabling whole communities to influence design decisions is seen to lead to more relevant and sustainable design outcomes, as well as realizing core values of democracy, inclusivity and empowerment through the design process’ (Cumbo and Selwyn 2021, 3; emphasis in italics added by author). Over the course of the twenty-first century, PD has been adapted to a variety of contexts, often with the result of reframing user-participation for the sake of better product quality instead of enforcing its democratic character (Iivari and Kuutti 2017). To counteract this tendency, Cumbo and Selwyn (2021), especially focus on Scandinavian PD when reflecting on its potential in educational (technology) research. Referring to Simonsen and Robertson (2013), they especially emphasise the notion of design as a mutual learning process, in which all future stakeholders affected by a design take part in its development, not only by providing the designers with information but jointly making sense of a given situation and creating knowledge. This focus on joint learning experiences through the design of an artefact also implies that design is conceptualised as a ‘collective “reflection in action”’ (8; see also Schön 1983). Thus, designs evolve in use and are shaped by all stakeholders through constant experimentation and engagement with the context in which they are embedded.

While both approaches – CD and PD – offer promising frameworks for further developing design-based research on educational technology and school development, they have, at least so far, been mainly applied in isolated project settings or in a conceptual manner. As for PD, Cumbo and Selwyn (2021) criticise that it has often been implemented in ‘not-so-real scenarios’ (8), e.g., especially assigned workshops, even if current research proposes to also focus on the everyday ‘backstage work’ in PD processes (Bødker, Dindler, and Iversen 2017). In the case of CD, there is generally little knowledge about how to empirically research such approaches and scrutinise how they unfold e.g., within the everyday life of schools as they undergo digitisation (Iivari and Kuutti 2017). Addressing this research gap, the goal of this contribution is to empirically explore the potentials and restrictions of using PD and CD in schools’ everyday practices.

Methodological approach

‘Design practice and principles are increasingly significant in how contemporary societies and organisations are planned, envisioned and in interventions made by actors representing industry, policy and activist stakeholders. Yet to design for responsible and ethical futures we need: deep ethnographic understandings of the people, things, environments and feelings that constitute the worlds we live in and hope for.' (Pink et al. 2022, 4).

As Pink et al. make clear, ethnography is an essential part of design projects to understand not only the context in which designers intervene (‘worlds we live in’) but also the future contexts to be designed (‘worlds we hope for’). Therefore, we understand the ethnographic work that was done in this study not only as an informing practice for future design processes but ‘as deeply integrated into the doing of design’ (Blomberg and Karasti in Simonsen and Robertson 2013, 99). This entanglement of design and ethnographic practices especially challenges the positioning of the researcher. On the one hand, and drawing on the above-described PD-framework, the researcher becomes a design partner that mutually creates meaning with the other stakeholders. On the other hand, the researcher observes the situations through a certain analytical perspective which is in this case coined by the theoretical ideas of CD and PD. This scientific lens in turn, has an impact on how the empirical field is constructed, in the moment the researcher actively takes part in design activities (Karasti and Blomberg 2018). Having this challenging position of the researcher in mind this study puts a special focus on how the different actors in digital school development processes ‘become “with” one another’ (Akama, Pink, and Fergusson 2015, 533). Reflecting on how different practices and perspectives on digital school development came together in the initial phase of the SMASCH project, this study turns its focus away from the design of a product towards a ‘deep ethnographic understanding of the people, things, environments and feelings’ (Pink et al. 2022, 4) that constitute the long-term design processes in the individual schools (Karasti and Blomberg 2018).

Using the key characteristics of CD and PD, namely (critical/value-based) reflection, speculation, mutual learning, empowerment and experimentation (chapter 2), as analytical vantage points, the ethnographically collected material was analysed and interpreted along the guiding research question – how are CD and PD approaches, transported into schools by the researcher, challenged or supported through different stakeholders’ practices and understandings of digital school development? The analysis especially focussed on the moments in which the key characteristics of CD and PD became visible (in an affirming or contradicting manner) in the digital school development work either through dialogue or interaction between the different school stakeholders, coaches and the researcher. With regards to the just explained ethnographic approach this means that the CD and PD characteristics did not simply serve as a template that is compared to schools’ everyday life. Instead we assume that the characteristics were one determining factor in the process of ‘becom[ing] “with” one another’ (Akama, Pink, and Fergusson 2015, 533) between all stakeholders in the field. Due to the researcher’s active positioning of PD and CD characteristics in the field, they were present in everyone’s mind during the encounters. Therefore, those characteristics did not only serve as an analytical tool in the aftermath but had an impact on the stakeholders’ interactions and the construction of the empirical field.

The ethnographic research was conducted in two elementary schools in Hamburg during the first two months of the SMASCH project and documented in form of transcripts of audio recorded group discussions as well as field protocols.³ Both schools were closely accompanied by one of the authors so that a ‘thick description’ (Geertz 1973) of the context in which the researcher intervened seemed possible. During the analysed period, the researcher, coaches and school members co-organised workshops and meetings to discuss teachers’, principals’ and other staff members’ perspectives on digitisation in education and envision development steps that should be addressed in the project period ahead. Therefore, the selected time frame seems useful to ethnographically illustrate the initial conditions in which school actors (human and non-human), researchers and coaches came together and use these first insights for the further adaption of the design (research) approaches in use. While one school started the SMASCH process with an introductory workshop including all staff members and built upon the results in an existing working group as well as a second workshop with all staff members, the other school created an assigned SMASCH working group that elaborated a vision and possible sub-projects over the course of weekly meetings to present its results to the whole school community at a later point in time.⁴ In both schools, the researcher and coaches were in constant interaction with the school staff presenting SMASCH’s critical and participatory approach and taking part in discussions. Due to this, as described above, the researcher and coaches ‘engaged in forming the object of inquiry during fieldwork, informed by their interests and motivations and enabled by specific resources, situations and opportunities’ (Karasti and Blomberg 2018, 10).

Critical and participatory design in-between the tensions of daily schooling

The following analysis is divided into two sections. Section one focusses on how CD unfolds within different understandings and practices related to a meaningful implementation of digital tools and concepts. Section two places PD in focus and describes how the interrelation of different stakeholders in digital school development is connected to certain understandings of knowledge creation and transfer.

Critical design meets daily school practices

T1: If they want everything to work somehow presentable […], the two pre-requisites are, that we have an [IT]-support [person], who is able to do it […] and Wifi.

T2: And yes, if that is not available, you can throw all the other goals into the bin.

T3: Yes, because it also slows down the motivation. Right? […] you invest time and energy into learning something new and in the end, you have prepared everything at home/. And I have already experienced several times that I // wanted to hold a class on the Smartboard, prepared the file at home and then ‘boom’ it did not work again. Then I postponed it for weeks, and then the topic was already over.

During a group discussion, teachers were asked to formulate needs, wishes, and expectations to be addressed in the course of the SMASCH project. The discussion revealed a strong focus on the implementation of IT-infrastructures as a pre-condition for further conceptual work on digital integration with pedagogical practices. According to the teachers’ logic, technical problems first had to be solved, before entering a pedagogical reflection process. As the discussion went on, they argued that using the Smartboard caused additional preparation work and often disturbed long-term lesson planning when unexpected IT-problems occurred. This reduced their motivation to dive deeper into digital school development. On the one hand, the discussion showed that the capacity to think of long-term, speculative futures was harmed by a strong focus on technological pre-requisites and institutionally structured lesson plans influencing the daily work of teachers. On the other hand, there did not seem to be an awareness of the fact that the technical (miss-)conditions already had an impact on a pedagogical level when the Smartboard breakdown forced the teachers to adapt their teaching to the given circumstances. A similar situation was observed in a meeting at the other school, when a teacher argued that she would need an iPad for each student instead of two for the whole class as a pre-requisite for pedagogically meaningful teaching, her main reason being the discussions she would have to have with the students if only two of them could work with a digital device at the same time. In this case sufficient technological equipment was framed as a pre-condition for pedagogical work while at the same time her description of the classroom situation with only two iPads showed how the technical conditions already had an impact on the pedagogical setting.

As chapter two made clear, a key feature of CD is its potential to illustrate speculative, alternative futures through the means of design. Consequentially, the designed artefact is not primarily meant to provide a solution for a specific problem but rather a result of mutual reflection (Bardzell and Bardzell 2013). The illustrated cases show, however, that this idea of designing speculative products is fundamentally challenged by the immediate technical and infrastructural needs of everyday school practice, which operate based on the structural and temporal logics of the school and its institutional frameworks. The idea of designing speculative futures thus clashes with pre-structured institutional curricula as well as sequential logics, meaning that, for teachers, design on a content- or long-term-level is only possible when IT-problems are solved. While the original concept of CD has been criticised for ‘neglect[ing] the near and direct urgency of now’ (Ward 2019), the examples make clear that thinking about speculative futures has to start within the here and now, adapting to schools’ established structures and logics. In the illustrated cases, this would mean making teachers aware of the fact that IT breakdowns or insufficient equipment, as material actors, were already having an impact on their pedagogical work and, therefore, including them in long-term reflections (for IT-breakdowns see also Alirezabeigi, Masschelein, and Decuypere 2020).

However, the need for tangible working solutions in the form of functioning IT-devices is only one side of the story. This becomes evident when looking at the quote from a principal during a workshop preparation meeting:

P: Basically, it was already touched upon at the beginning that hitherto we always had to react. There was a situation and then we reacted quickly and promptly. We handed out all our rental IT-devices – over 200 – and so on. But what is absolutely important is an inner attitude. What do we want to achieve with it? […] that it will be embedded on a content level and on an emotional level, that we as teaching staff basically formulate a framework for where we want to go on a methodological and didactic level.

Referring to the reactionary mode in which the school had to operate during the COVID-19 pandemic, the principal emphasised the need for emotionally grounded guiding principles for further digital school development. With the expectation of developing a shared, value-based attitude towards the development of digitisation, the CD idea of putting reflection and value-rational questions at the heart of the design process was reinforced. Furthermore, the assistant principal of the other school described that colleagues have to be ‘animated […] to approach the topic of digitisation in an imaginative manner’, and by that emphasised the creative, speculative character of CD. Especially on a leadership level or in SMASCH working groups, the need to develop a shared, value-based vision of the schools’ digital educational future was expressed. Contrasting the former cases that focussed on IT-infrastructures with this argument, it becomes clear that digital school development is torn between teachers’ daily needs and structural pre-requisites on the one hand, and an interest in critical and creative reflection on a managing level on the other hand. However, reflection or vision development is often not connected to daily school practices, but instead considered as a separate process. For example, this became visible when a leadership team member in a workshop preparation meeting suggested that we should not ‘stick with the philosophical’ over the course of the workshop but instead end with the design of concrete teaching materials. As described in the first example, a sequential logic was often prevalent in the data that conceived of school development as several self-contained processes, in which one refers to reflection and another to practical implementation, instead of conceptualising the implementation process as an occasion for critical reflection as suggested by CD (Dunne and Raby 2001).

In addition to this interest in reflection and vision development on a process level, the workshops also revealed critical perspectives towards educational technology in pedagogical practice. These mainly unfolded in discussions on teaching contexts in which digital or analogue practices are more meaningful. In contrast to CD, which understands critical reflection as a process of designing alternative environments by using technology differently, the discussions frequently framed digital technology as being in opposition to analogue practices:

T: And then to learn how to judge at which points in class digital learning is more meaningful than analogue learning, so that we value our normal work as highly as the potentials of digitisation and doublecheck what causes more work for more effect to me? Or the other way around, what makes sense?

This teacher contrasted digital learning to her ‘normal work’ which primarily takes place in the analogue world, thus revealing an understanding of education as a still primarily analogue practice. Critical reflection in this case was unfolded by the weighing of either digital or analogue against each other, operating as separate and isolated spheres within school practices. Keeping up the logic of a digital versus an analogue world challenges the CD idea of designing alternative futures that overcome predominant values transmitted by standardised EdTech solutions. It re-installs the dichotomy of either resisting technological progress by staying with analogue concepts or affirming existing technological designs by using them the way they are offered (Dunne and Raby 2001). At several points in the data, this opposition between the digital and the analogue was reinforced through connecting digital practices to the organisational or technological concerns of schools, thus primarily placing them at the administrative level or relating them to the form of practices, while analogue practices were considered as maintaining a focus on engagement with content and pedagogy. Especially in the elementary schools, pedagogical staff members signalled the importance of ‘experiencing nature’ (teacher) and ‘working practically’ (teacher) with the youngest-aged children to mediate the real, haptic world to them. On the one hand, maintaining this dichotomy in the design process precludes reflection on the pedagogical impact that a digital ‘work facilitator’ brings about. Even if digital tools are considered as only improving classroom management or student administration on a structural level, their designs entail certain ideas about pedagogy and interact with the individual classroom context (Amiel and Reeves 2008). On the other hand, this dichotomy disregards the innovative potential of technology for alternative educational futures. While the design of critical digitisation concepts requires engagement with digital tools and digitality to enable a reflection process at all, a rejection of the digital in favour of ‘good’ analogue education, or a reduction of the digital to a ‘neutral’ work facilitator, prevents reflection on the possible potentials of the digital in terms of enhancing pedagogical values and interacting with analogue conditions.

In conclusion, initial encounters among school staff and the SMASCH team highlighted a general interest in developing long-term concepts that put the question of pedagogical value and creativity at the heart of their design process. Nonetheless, the schools’ temporal logics, which are thought of in a sequential way, install the implementation of IT-infrastructures as a hindering pre-requisite for critical and pedagogical reflections around digital design. This gives rise to rethinking the speculative character of CD as a practice that includes dealing with existing material conditions as part of the process. Additionally, the dichotomous conceptualisation of the digital and the analogue, challenges the idea that CD engages with technology to then develop alternative scenarios, since this first of all, asks for an engagement with the digital in place of rejecting it in favour of analogue practices.

Participatory design meets daily school practices

While PD shares several characteristics with CD (Iivari and Kuutti 2017), this section puts forth a more nuanced insight into how relevant stakeholders in design processes interact and how the notion of participation was challenged or affirmed in the first SMASCH meetings.

Whereas Simonsen and Robertson (2013) define PD as ‘collective “reflection in action”’ (8), the school meetings often revealed an understanding of reflection or knowledge creation as something that happens before any action. As such, participation on an internal school level (student-teacher relations) was especially challenged. This was reflected by an ICT-coordinator in a working group meeting:

ICT: […] because I also wrote ‘training on LMS [learning management system] and so on’ here, which is about that the colleagues are secure from the moment on we start working with it, and not become secure while working.

Instead of creating knowledge about the use of the learning management system in the classroom together with the students, the coordinator underlined the necessity of first offering training to teachers so that they could gain confidence in handling the system. Focussing on this aspect, he followed the logic that teachers transfer knowledge to students and thus have to be secure in what they are doing. This logic was reemphasised by another teacher during a workshop: ‘we want intensive trainings for these apps, so that we learn to explain them to the children […] so that we first understand them ourselves.’ The original PD idea of ‘collectiveness’, that all future users of an IT-infrastructure become part of its design process, is substituted by a hierarchical understanding that gives teachers a more important role than studentsin the design process. Additionally, the notion of ‘reflection in action’ is challenged by a linear, sequential logic of first gaining knowledge and then applying it. The idea of designing a digital tool while using it in its pedagogical environment, and by that empowering the community (Storni 2014), is opposed by a perceived need for security, which seems to stem from a certain hierarchical logic existing between teachers and students.

This linear logic of first being secure in the use of technology before application also leads to a certain understanding of how teachers wish to acquire knowledge on educational technology and how participation is thus conceptualised between teachers and external stakeholders. During a working group session, one teacher pointed to the necessity of attending formalised training in the use of Smartboards instead of trying things out on one’s own initiative:

T: What directly comes to my mind and also applies to me: The Smartboard. It is more or less only used as a blackboard at the moment. […] But I would really like to know and master this program well, because it gives me so many opportunities. Many other opportunities to work with it in class, maybe to code little tasks yourself. […] Somehow you do not have the time to engage with it yourself. Somehow you need this ‘Look, there is this special training now’ or I don’t know. These fixed timeframes and then you actually do it because somehow it gets lost in the everyday routine. And I would find this for example […] great, if we get resources and people who support us with that.

Even though the teacher was aware of the manifold possibilities that a Smartboard offers (e.g., coding tasks), she found specially arranged training essential for her readiness to actually use it. Her argument for acquiring knowledge through extra training was based on a lack of time to experiment with technology in the normal school routine. During a working group meeting at the other school this idea was reinforced by a leadership team member uttering the wish to invite representatives of school book companies to present their digital materials to the colleagues while they ‘lean back’ and learn. Valuing external knowledge, which enters schools through specially booked training sessions or predesigned materials, more highly than engagement with the tool on one’s own initiative challenges PD on two levels: Firstly, if external training providers are considered to be the primary valid knowledge providers, a mutual learning process and sense-making of educational technologies amongst school actors is only partially possible. Technologies from this perspective are considered pre-defined entities that must be explained on a functional level, but not as tools that the teachers have to adapt to their specific teaching contexts and that ‘become part of already existing ecologies of devices, in people’s already ongoing lifeworlds’ (Bjögvinsson, Ehn, and Hillgren 2012). Secondly, while training puts teachers into the role of uninformed knowledge consumers, their expertise on the individual school context is disregarded as a key element for the successful embedment of technologies. Reflection on how the technological design of a tool is entrenched within particular pedagogical ideas and routines, might empower teachers to rely on their pedagogical capacities and develop an informed, self-conscious handling of digital tools.

Interactions between researchers and teachers also pointed to the logic that knowledge on digitisation comes from external ‘professionals’. In some situations, teachers approached researchers to ask about technical concerns (e.g., how to use Padlet) or process strategies. Even though the researchers were presented as scientific companions to the schools, they were assumed to be more proficient in the use of technology or conceptualisation of development processes. This observation reinforces the argument that many teachers conceptualise themselves as detached from digital technologies and therefore less proficient in comparison to other professional groups. In opposition to PD’s core idea of developing mutual sense-making processes between researchers and teachers to foster teachers’ interest in experimental engagement with technology and thus empower them to face new challenges, teachers considered researchers to possess advanced knowledge on educational technology. As such, not only is the idea of all stakeholders as equal ‘design-partner[s]’ (Cumbo and Selwyn 2021, 3) challenged, but it also becomes clear that teachers expect researchers to have a certain concept in mind of what digital school development should look like. The original idea of CD and PD as exploratory processes, in which different solutions can be ‘right’ did not yet seem to be established in the research-practice collaboration.

While the previous examples demonstrate how PD was challenged in the field, there were also affirming situations. In several encounters with school representatives, the idea of their school as an ‘experimental laboratory’ (ICT coordinator) or their self-perception as researchers was emphasised:

ICT: So, when I address [the school community as] ‘You researcher’, then I also address myself with this. And I basically find that interesting. […] Let’s go on an expedition together. This does by no means mean that we on the 26th [of September] […] that we immediately have to tick off a milestone by then, but let’s start together and think of formats for how we can muddle through this expedition together. Because hey, how shall we know (laughing), how this all works?

This working group developed an initial vision in which all stakeholders in the school development process were conceptualised as researchers who together explore an unknown world. Instead of pre-defining milestones for the design process in a selected group, they wanted their process to ‘respond to situated needs, experiences and perspectives of all involved’ (Cumbo and Selwyn 2021, 4). Deep understanding of practices and dynamics within the school was prioritised to create a mutual understanding of the context with all stakeholders, instead of quickly implementing a concept developed by only few. The idea of understanding the design process as an expedition or experimental laboratory not only invokes the PD characteristic of mutual, equal knowledge creation, but also connects to the idea that CD processes are configured as ‘thought-provoking’ instead of ‘verifiable truthclaims’ (Richter and Allert 2017, 6). Or as another ICT coordinator put it: ‘I find the understanding very important that this is a process and that mistakes will be made and things will go wrong and that we can still rethink things after some weeks.’ Interestingly, this perspective on school development was mainly expressed by ICT coordinators or SMASCH working group members in the schools. The reason for that could be that they already feel more proficient in the handling of technology, since they are the ‘media experts’ of their schools, and do not feel the aforementioned need for security through guided knowledge acquisition.

In sum, this section has shown that schools’ logics about where knowledge comes from and how it is created have a strong impact on how participation is understood and practiced. As such, acquiring knowledge about how digital technologies work before attempting application is deemed crucial, limiting the scope for experimentation and design-in-use. Additionally, since teachers regard themselves as less proficient in using educational technology than external stakeholders, even though their pedagogical knowledge plays an important role, knowledge needs to come from external bodies, hence shaping participation in a unidirectional way. Despite these logics, which are closely connected to a need for security as well as established frameworks of schooling that constrain teachers’ practices, there are other school actors (e.g., ICT coordinators) who address the design process as an exploratory endeavour. This need for external knowledge on the one hand, and experimentation on the other, should not be understood as opposing poles but should be equally integrated into design processes, given that the identified insecurity needs to be overcome to develop more participatory settings in which teachers feel empowered.

Discussion: rethinking CD and PD in digital school development

Brought together, the analysis has pointed to three key findings on how everyday practices and understandings of digital school development challenge CD and PD when they unfold in practice. Firstly, there was a prevalent idea of digital school development as a set of sequential procedures, where one step (e.g., infrastructural measures) needs to be accomplished before the other (e.g., pedagogical concepts). As actors have to navigate their reactions within fast-changing situations with respect to digital technologies in everyday schooling, they operate within different temporal logics focussing on ‘quick fixes’ such as technical devices. As such, reflection is seen as an action that is disconnected from the implementation of educational technology. Secondly, the digital and the analogue world are often understood as different spheres, with teachers relating more strongly to the analogue world. This goes along with a distinction by which the digital is often connected to questions of form and function while the analogue is associated with content and pedagogy. Thirdly, the idea of design as a mutual learning process is often challenged by the conceptualisation of knowledge hierarchies between students, teachers and external stakeholders. Many teachers do not see themselves as professionals but want to gain knowledge from external sources and, thus, a sense of security handling educational technologies before using them in the classroom, instead of experimenting with it through use. At the same time, the empirical material has pointed to schools’ interest in characteristics of CD and PD on a process level and revealed practices that affirm both approaches. The following discussion therefore reflects how CD and PD can be rethought in order to mutually address immediate needs and long-term visions, digital and analogue practices, and internal and external knowledge acquisition.

Looking at the immediate needs articulated by the teachers and their prior wish for tangible working solutions, it became clear in the analysis that the theoretical CD idea of designing speculative, unusable products or ‘micro-utopias’ (Richter and Allert 2017, 8), as practices that are detached from the existing circumstances, does not seem very feasible in the school context. While Iivari and Kuutti (2017) suggest to strengthen deconstructive ideas of original Critical Theory in CD, the finding that technical conditions already have an impact on long-term pedagogical planning, often without teachers realising it, makes clear that critique has to build upon the existing circumstances. Therefore, we consider Latour’s take on critique as ‘composition’ as more useful (Latour 2010). Compositionism refers to critique as a re-assemblage of existing objects and participants in the ‘real’ world instead of deconstructing it in hope of a ‘better’ world. From this perspective design processes do not primarily become critical by inventing speculative products that counteract reality but rather by gathering existing objects and humans in a new way. Following this idea, we consider the CD practice of bricolage, as suggested by Richter and Allert (2017), as fruitful. Instead of designing new, speculative tools, that might not be applicable within the institutional frameworks of schools, it seems more feasible to take the existing conditions (material and non-material) into account and start thinking about how to adapt or combine them to design alternative technological scenarios that do not necessarily contradict existing standard solutions on all levels.

Defining CD as a re-assemblage of existing materials also means combining analogue and digital conditions in the design process (Macgilchrist 2021). This ‘low-level convergence’ (Jandrić and Knox 2021, 8) should of course not be an end in itself, but make global phenomena (e.g., ecology or colonialism) visible (Jandrić and Knox 2021). Focussing on the analogue conditions of a digital tool can, for example, make them an object of content-related inquiry in the classroom. For instance, instead of using an iPad to work with an app in class, it could also be used to engage with its physical construction to incentivise reflection on the production conditions and environmental consequences that accompany its use. Thinking of the relation between digital and analogue in this way would counteract the analysed logic that the digital is mainly a work facilitator giving form to educational settings. The aim of CD should consequently be to (re-)assemble digital as well as analogue conditions to engage with content- and value-related questions regarding global social phenomena. We consider such an approach also helpful to possibly overcome the prevalent sequential logic that IT first has to be sufficiently implemented before working on a pedagogical level.

The analysis further showed that the configuration of knowledge acquisition and participation needs to be re-thought if school development is deeply entangled with digital technologies. Engeström (2006) used the fungus with its tiny fruiting body (the visible technology) and a huge invisible organic network (socio-technical entanglements) as a metaphor to make clear that technologies substantially transform organisations on a cultural level into horizontal networks in which relevant knowledge is distributed among all stakeholders. In contrast the analysis has shown that schools continue thinking in a hierarchical, vertical logic of knowledge transfer. Even if the metaphor, so far, has mainly been used as an analytical device, it seems that it could be a memorable image to foster sensitivity within the school community that humans and technology ‘“mutually constitute” each other’ (Hayes in Jandrić et al. 2019, 168) and therefore teachers constantly have to acquire new knowledge and will never be completely secure before applying educational technology.

However, while this reconfiguration of knowledge acquisition as a horizontal mycelium-like process might be internalised on a long-term scale, it does not resolve the tension between the PD-idea of mutual learning and teachers’ need to acquire ‘digital skills’ before attempting application in the classroom context on a short- and mid-term level. Even if this idea of unilateral knowledge transfer does not affirm the original principles of PD, it seems that this acquisition of external knowledge is strongly connected to feelings of security among teachers and should therefore not be ignored in the course of the process. Additionally, the conceptualisation of SMASCH as an interventionist research project and the above-explained idea of researchers influencing the field with their scientific knowledge already presupposes that external knowledge is entering schools. Therefore, we suggest to follow up on the question how the acquisition of external knowledge (training or material) can lead to empowerment of pedagogical staff, enabling them to experiment at a later point, instead of making them dependent from certain stakeholders that keep up a hierarchical knowledge distribution. Hayes (in Jandrić et al. 2019) argues that dialogue ‘may be constrained if language is loaded with economically based assumptions and individualized agendas which restrict how we might collectively imagine alternative futures’ (168). Therefore, a continuous reflection on which values and agendas schools integrate into their design processes when inviting training providers or introducing pre-designed tools as non-human stakeholders needs to take place. One idea that evolved in the SMASCH project for taking teachers’ need for external knowledge seriously, while at the same time empowering them, is the integration of open, non-commercial digital platforms into the design process as a means for exchanging ideas and materials between teachers as well as external coaches to foster more ‘horizontal networks of communication’ (in Jandrić et al. 2019, 169).

Nonetheless, while these ideas for re-thinking PD and CD offer potential possibilities for further school development work, two determining factors remain challenging: Firstly, even if re-assembling existing materials and integrating selected external knowledge into the design process tackle certain structural problems, these activities are still time intensive. Secondly, schools are still bound to curricula and frameworks that are pre-determined by local and national authorities. Experimenting with technology and reinterpreting its functions presents a constant risk of exceeding the boundaries of educational administration. Due to these restrictions, it is important not to rigidly maintain idealistic notions of CD and PD, but instead adapt to the given circumstances and constantly prioritise which further steps to take, remaining aware of the advantages and disadvantages of each decision.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This research paper out of the project ‘Smart Schools’ (SMASCH) is funded by dtec.bw – Digitalization and Technology Research Center of the Bundeswehr.

Notes

1 For reasons of clarity and consistency this contribution uses the term design-based research and its abbreviation DBR, remaining aware of the fact that there is a variety of terms referring to the concept of using design as a tool for inquiry in educational sciences.

2 https://www.smasch.eu/; The project aims to co-design pedagogically meaningful, context-related and sustainable digitisation strategies with schools in Hamburg and Belgium.

3 Ensuring ethical standards, the research was approved by the Institute for Education Monitoring and Quality Development (Institut für Bildungsmonitoring und Qualitätsentwicklung – IfBQ), which is part of the educational authority in Hamburg. Additionally, written consent was obtained from all school research participants.

4 The working groups at both schools consisted of leadership team members, ICT coordinators, teachers and child care workers.