Beyond products and policies: transformative consultancy for schooling in the digital age

This paper positions itself within a growing body of critical scholarship on the increasing impact of private sector actors, including various types of intermediaries and brokers, on the implementation of educational technologies (ed-tech) in public schooling. While we argue that such research has been crucial in raising awareness of the many problematic effects of digitalization, we aim to challenge the implicit assumption and dichotomous narrative that casts private actors as ‘harmful’ and the public sector as inherently ‘good’. To support this argument, we present insights from interviews with (private, local, and big-tech-independent) consultancy actors involved in (digital) school development. These actors understand themselves as ‘transformative’ in the sense of being fundamentally critical of both the public and the ed-tech sector's prevalent approaches toward integrating digital technologies in schools. We use a ‘constellations of valuation’ approach to analyze consultants' narrations, disentangling their notions of non-/transformative valuations and their strategies to navigate or enact them. The findings expand existing research perspectives by highlighting the heterogeneity within the landscape of educational consultants, as – unlike common tech-solutionist approaches – ‘transformative’ consultants aim to promote more holistic, participatory, sustainable and humanistic approaches to school development in the digital age.