Symposium - Digital Technology, Education Policy and the Commodification of Schools

This symposium addresses the “Faustian” relationship that is increasingly linking schools (and schools’ reform processes) to a set of neoliberal ideas that create profit opportunities for edu-business, and ultimately redefine the educational experience and what it means to teach and to learn today (Ball 2012, 2018). Increasingly in the last few years, techno-giants from the Silicon Valley have begun remaking the very nature of schooling influencing subjects and disciplines, tools and methods, approaches and visions to learning. Profit opportunities for edu-business occur both at an infrastructural level in a shift from state to private provision and at more cultural level with reform processes and initiatives somehow related to digitalisation (pedagogy, teacher education, assessment, learning analytics, personalized learning, etc.).