Visions of artificial intelligence, biometrics and digital surveillance in schools

The Education Futures project contributes to international policy development and debate surrounding changes taking place within education systems as well as within wider society.

The current project runs from September 2024 to September 2025 and is funded by the Passau Interdisciplinary Centre for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies (PICAIS) and IOE, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society.

Background

We are addressing the question of what new technologies might mean for children and young people, especially in relation to education and schooling systems, and how this links to the changing external environment. We achieve this through group interviews, scenario-building exercises and written imaginaries, asking teachers and students to think ahead to a range of possible futures, communicating this to us in different ways. 

In this way, we can identify vectors of change, particularly:

  • the impact of technological development on the lives of children and young people
  • shifts in the conceptualisation of personal identity
  • changes in the nature of society, and
  • newly developing educational philosophies and conceptualisations of professionalism. 

This allows us to:

  • explore potentially surprising or innovative solutions to problems that new forms of technology may claim to solve, and
  • make recommendations as to the best way of gearing policy development to take societal changes into account.

Our approach reveals the drivers of, levers for, and barriers to different forms of change. 

In terms of the scenario-building exercises, we carry this out via an analysis of education’s external environment. This is adapted by us to suit our research participants, from what is known in management science as a ‘PEST’ analysis.

This approach enables us to examine political, economic, social and technological factors through the eyes of those involved with education at a grassroots level.

It is based on scenario planning, a technique developed from the work of Wack (1985) and van der Heijden (1997), and used in many large international organisations such as the EU, OECD as well as business and industry. 

The technique takes stakeholders’ existing mental models as a starting point. From this we establish new perspectives.

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Methodology

The study elicits rich qualitative case study data through:

  • semi-structured group interviews, and
  • a series of scenario-related activities derived from management science and futurology, which allow for the broadest possible range of responses.

The findings contribute to a growing body of international research on:

  • education digitalisation, and
  • the impact of change on differing national and regional education systems.

The research sample includes work in schools in Germany and England. In each school, we carry out scenario-building workshops for teachers and students. Alternatively, we host them at local universities as an outreach exercise.

We are looking for information regarding how technologies may differentially affect:

  • individuals (adults and students), and
  • communities (schools).

This depends on a range of characteristics, including:

  • urban or rural geography
  • economic advantage
  • age
  • gender-sex
  • status
  • local network infrastructure, and
  • digital competence.

We are also interested in differential conceptualisations of power and technology adoption in schools, through the eyes of these research participants. Who drives innovation in teaching and learning, as opposed to being subject to it? How does this relate to social positioning within schools?

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Scenario-building

The scenario-building exercises do some or all of the following, depending on the situation in each case.

Aim 1

Ask participants to discuss future scenarios provided by us. These are based on our prior published work. The related discussions cover political, economic, social and technological aspects of education. They also include impressions of institutional change.

Aim 2

Help participants to create their own future scenarios through a series of individual and group engagement activities. These resemble creative and highly engaging writing workshops. They are based on age-appropriate stimuli that we provide, to promote thinking and discussion.

Activities include:

  • developing individual insights as well as joining with groups to build narratives of 400–500 words, and
  • describing possible futures for technology in teaching and learning, which each incorporate negative and positive aspects (conforming to the standard scenario-building methodology described above).

Aim 3

Enable us to build our own future scenarios in response to the insights of our research participants. We encourage further ‘imaginaries’ (‘what if?’ scenarios), in line with the scenario-building element of our data collection methods. In other words, asking research participants to project possible alternative futures based on the topics under discussion.

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Team

Project lead

Collaborating partner

  • Professor Jutta Mägdefrau, University of Passau, Germany

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Related links

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Contact

Curriculum, Pedagogy and Assessment 
IOE, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society
University College London
20 Bedford Way
London WC1H 0AL

Professor Sandra Leaton Gray
email: s.leaton-gray@ucl.ac.uk