Towards the end of school? Using Social Science Fiction to explore pedagogical perspectives on technology

Abstract

As the investment expectations for EdTech businesses have been growing during the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, there is a need to reflect critically about the pedagogical implications of trends like datafication, platformisation and technological solutionism. Recently, social science fiction has been used to stimulate critical, sociological imagination about the future uses of educational technology (Macgilchrist et al., 2020; Selwyn et al., 2020). This paper expands the use of social science fiction for the current Italian context as a method for critical analysis in research and in teacher education. Two vignettes are developed to illustrate two scenarios of possible configurations of educational technology within primary schools in the year 2026. It is shown how opposite technological configurations manifest different under- lying pedagogical assumptions regarding children and teacher agency, literacy and the politics of knowledge. By relating the use of educational media to issues of pedagogy and didactics, writing and discussing social science fiction provides a significant opportunity to promote reflexive uses of technology in education.