Transformation von Governance in Bildung und Gesellschaft

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.