Hartong, Sigrid

Over the past years, there has been an increasing prevalence of ‘nudge thinking’ in the educational field. While (critical) research on the rising adoption of nudging has increasingly proliferated in the broader social sciences over the past decades, nudging in education–what we designate here as Edunudge–is, however, only starting to be given substantial academic attention and still requires more nuanced conceptual and empirical investigation. As we argue in this contribution, such investigations should not only carefully disentangle the enormous complexity of nudging in education, including the role of digital and automated technologies. Equally, they should take more systematically into account the traditional closeness of the fields of pedagogy and behavioral insights. In line with that argumentation, the goal of this article is to develop foundations of such an Edunudge research program, focusing on four different dimensions: the technomodalities, the political economy, the spacetimes, and the pedagogies of Edunudge.

Over the last decades, the way we think about space and time in relation to the field of education has changed substantially. New societal evolutions have urged scholars to come to grips with the increasing difficulty of approaching educational practices in terms of existing “static” (e.g. topographical) representations of space and “linear” (e.g. chronological) models of time. As a result, different lines of research have been developed that seek to extend our spatiotemporal understanding not only conceptually and theoretically, but also through novel methodologies and new kinds of empirical analyses. This Special Issue extensively discusses and further elaborates on one approach informing these lines of research: (social) topology. In this editorial, we outline the topological lens and discuss its origins in the field of mathematics. After discussing how topology was adopted in the broad field of the social sciences, we show how it has gradually come to inform educational research as well. We argue that the topological lens is particularly fruitful to investigate the (mutual) construction of space and time. Briefly discussing each contribution in the Special Issue, we show how the Special Issue contributes to the further development, and making accessible, of topology as an educational research approach.

With schools and universities closing across Europe, the Covid-19 lockdown left actors in the field of education battling with the unprecedented challenge of finding a meaningful way to keep the wheels of education turning online. The sudden need for digital solutions across the field of education resulted in the emergence of a variety of digital networks and collaborative online platforms. In this joint article from scholars around Europe, we explore the Covid-19 lockdowns of physical education across the European region, and the different processes of emergency digitalization that followed in their wake. Spanning perspectives from Italy, Germany, Belgium, and the Nordic countries, the article’s five cases provide a glimpse of how these processes have at the same time accelerated and consolidated the involvement of various commercial and non-commercial actors in public education infrastructures. By gathering documentation, registering dynamics, and making intimations of the crisis as it unfolded, the aim of the joint paper is to provide an opportunity for considering the implications of these accelerations and consolidations for the heterogeneous futures of European education.

This paper contributes to a growing body of research on the increasing datafication of schooling, which has become a salient topic in comparative education and education policy research. Specifically, we address the rising scholarly concern about the meaning of (comparing) contexts as bounded localities facing an increasingly fluid and generative process of datafication. This concern is closely related to wider (and also older) calls to denaturalize space as a territory and instead to approach space as relational and consisting of complex constellations of changing topologies. Topological theorizing emphasizes spatial complexity and dynamism, and it simultaneously maintains that it is necessary to bridge topological and topographical perspectives and to understand their mutually constitutive nature in space-(re)making. Accordingly, we use the recent expansion of standardized assessments in Germany and Russia to illustrate the coming-together of topological and topographical space-making in datafication. One of our arguments is that the value of the concept of data infrastructures does not stop with pointing to the topological ‘side’ of datafication, but may also help to capture the complexity of the interplay of multiple topological and topographical moments of bordering, their mutual constitution and simultaneity at different phases of data design, collection, processing, analysis and reporting.