Teachers’ reflexive valuations of digital platforms in schools: a comparative study of Chile and England

Abstract

Digital platforms have become central infrastructures in contemporary schooling, mediating administrative processes, communication with families, and everyday pedagogical practices. Critical scholarship on the platformisation of education has provided important insights into the structural dynamics of EdTech industries, data infrastructures, and platform governance, while other studies have examined how educators experience and use these systems in practice. This article builds on these strands of research by integrating structural analyses of platformisation with an examination of teachers’ concerns, interpretations, and everyday practices. Adopting a critical realist perspective, the study explores how teachers reflexively engage with digital platforms and how new professional practices emerge from their interaction with institutional and technological structures. Drawing on qualitative interviews with twelve teachers in Chile and England – two contexts that differ in educational governance and the development of EdTech markets – the analysis shows how teachers evaluate communicative expectations, organisational constraints, and managerial visibility associated with digital platforms. Through these reflexive processes, platforms contribute to the emergence of new forms of communicative labour, boundary negotiation with families, and micropolitical dynamics within schools. By foregrounding reflexivity and emergence, the article proposes a framework connecting structural analyses of platformisation with teachers’ situated experiences of digital infrastructures in schooling.