When EdTech makes us wait: Temporal bordering and inequalities in European classrooms

Abstract

While the integration of digital technologies in European schools often promises pedagogical and technological innovation, efficiency, and equality, we know that in practice regularly the opposite plays out: social inequalities are reproduced or even exacerbated in EdTech implementation. This study shows how these processes can even unfold in the most mundane and unexpected ways – particularly through practices of waiting. Based on a 1-year ethnographic study in German and Swedish schools, we analyse how EdTech makes certain students, teachers, families and schools wait more often, for longer periods, and under more precarious conditions than others. Bringing together critical research on temporalities in education and migration studies’ conceptualisations of temporal bordering, we show how waiting as social practice reconfigures life in schools by evaluating the time of certain actors as more valuable than that of others. We identify three key waiting practices – waiting for connexion, waiting for repair, and waiting for help – and illustrate how EdTech shapes classrooms in ways that reproduce structural disadvantages. Our study contributes to the critical literature on EdTech not only by showing how power, technology and time interplay in European classrooms, but also by teasing out the seemingly unspectacular moments in everyday practice in which inequality materialises.