Symposium – Reclaiming the Digital Classroom: Advancing Public Value in EdTech through Co-Design and Democratic Evaluation

Workshop 2 - Janskerkhof 2-3, room 0.21

Beyond fear and guilt: Building pathways towards digital sovereignty and agency of the school actors
Organizers: Dr. Judith Jacovkis & Dr. Pablo Rivera-Vargas (University of Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain)

This workshop focuses on identifying and strengthening collective pathways for schools to reclaim digital sovereignty and to enable teachers, students, and school leaders to participate meaningfully and democratically in processes of educational digitalization. Building on insights from the DigiProtEd project — which examines how digitalization reshapes the protection of children across digital and non-digital environments—we explore how schools can move beyond reactive or fear-driven responses toward proactive, value-based digital strategies. The session begins with a brief diagnosis of current approaches taken by school actors, policymakers, and technology companies to safeguard children’s rights in the use of digital resources. This sets the stage for a collaborative discussion around four lines of action that aim to expand the agency of educational communities and move beyond reactive and fragmented positionings guided by fear and guilt: (1) Strengthening data agency; (2) Fostering co-design ecosystems; (3) Facing digital myths and fears through pedagogical projects; (4) Promoting public governance structures.

Workshop 2 - Janskerkhof 2-3, room 1.15

Meeting halfway – More Inclusive Infrastructures in Home-School Communication
Organizer: Prof. Dr. Annika Bergviken Rensfeldt (University of Gothenburg, Sweden)

As schools become increasingly digitalized, a key question emerges: how can digital infrastructures meaningfully include “partially digital citizens”—parents and students who struggle with access, connectivity, or the practical know-how required to navigate school platforms? Digital parental portals and communication systems are often presented as universal, one-size-fits-all solutions, yet they depend on access to national digital ID systems, reliable connectivity, and specific forms of digital and bureaucratic literacy. Not all families possess these resources, resulting in uneven participation and new forms of exclusion. This workshop uses critical co-design to explore how home–school communication infrastructures can become more equitable, democratic, and attentive to the lived realities of those at the margins. Participants will work with concrete examples to identify inclusive design principles, while also examining the value conflicts and practical tensions that arise when attempting to “meet halfway” between institutional expectations, technological constraints, and families’ diverse capacities. Drawing on insights from the Nordic research project Infrastructures for Partially Digital Citizens: Supporting Informal Welfare Work in the Digitized State, as well as from Sweden’s highly digitalized public education system—now experiencing a “digital backlash”—the workshop invites participants to rethink how digital infrastructures can support care, oversight, and meaningful participation for all.

Workshop 5 - Janskerkhof 2-3, room 0.21

Fostering Swiss Teachers’ Critical Reflexive Agency in Platform-Mediated Pedagogies
Organizer: Prof. Dr. Judith Hangartner (Bern University of Teacher Education, Switzerland)

Corporate digital platforms are spreading rapidly across Swiss schools, promising efficiency and improved learning. Yet concerns about their broader impact—commercialization, unresolved data security issues, data-driven surveillance, and algorithmic biases—are increasing. Such platforms are not neutral tools: they embed pedagogical logics and governance models that shape teachers’ professional autonomy and classroom practices.
Against this backdrop, strengthening teachers’ critical digital literacy and reflexive agency has become essential for reclaiming control over digital technology in education. This workshop presents a participatory, design-based research project in which Swiss primary and secondary teachers collaborate as co-designers of platform-mediated learning scenarios. By engaging directly with the pedagogical challenges of digitalization, teachers articulate their own needs, values, and concerns, and experiment with alternative approaches to platform-mediated pedagogical practices. 

Workshop 6 - Janskerkhof 2-3, room 1.15

“Click Here if You Agree”: To Reclaim the EdTech Classroom through Speculative Co-design
Organizers: Dr. Michał Wieczorek (University College Dublin, Ireland), Dr. Eamon Costello (Dublin City University, Ireland)

To answer the call to reclaim the digital classroom, we must first identify what we have lost, including the language that surrenders our choices, diminishes our agency, and limits the scope of our imagination to the visions pushed by the powerful few. This workshop focuses on how EdTech is framed — through hype-driven marketing, technical jargon, legalistic terms of service, and privacy policies—and how these divergent linguistic registers create confusion, limit critical engagement, and obscure underlying values and power relations. Building on this, we introduce speculative and creative co-design methods to help (student) teachers engage in critical and deeper conversations on edtech in the classroom. Through short, playful, and hands-on activities involving the application of edtech language to well-familiar, old-school classroom tools, attendees develop practical critical lenses for navigating EdTech marketing and terms of use and for engaging more skillfully and critically in debates about digital technology—from the level of the classroom to the broader school context. Note: an optional activity will involve using scissors, and left-handed scissors will be provided. No participants will be harmed in the making of this workshop.

Workshop 8 - Janskerkhof 2-3, room 0.21

Doing more with less: Lessons from the Danish school takeover project
Organizer: Dr. Lucas Cone (University of Copenhagen, Denmark)

In this workshop, you will hear about how a group of small schools in Denmark are engaging in efforts to reclaim digital autonomy as part of a “School takeover project.” Still in its early phases, the project aims for a complete overhaul of the school’s existing digital infrastructure based on an idea of putting pedagogy and planet first. In collaboration with a group of researchers, the schools are now in a process of realigning the needs and values which can enable the work toward creating sustainable digital school practices. The workshop will outline the idea and scope of the takeover project as well as give participants an opportunity to try out one of the speculative exercises that were used in framing the project.

Workshop 9 - Janskerkhof 2-3, room 1.15

Research Carousel: A Showcase of New Projects
Organizer: EU Researchers Present at the Symposium