No abstract

All over the world, education is undergoing substantial changes in the wake of rapid technological developments. As our world is becoming ever more digitized, the educational sector is increasingly infused with digital games, apps, websites, social media, and learning environments. The Covid-19 pandemic, and associated measures of social distancing and school closures all over the world, have accelerated this digitization, triggering an urgent need for critical, up-close scrutiny of how this digitization is reshaping the worlds of education. The focus of this Special Issue is especially on digital education platforms. Over the last years, such platforms have become progressively prevalent, and both global and local technology companies have become omnipresent providers of such platforms, in private as well as in in public education (Van Dijck et al., 2018). From platforms tailored to primary and secondary schools to platforms specifically constructed for the field of higher education; from digital environments designed to manage pupils' learning to environments focused on the monitoring of their behavior; and from digital spaces bundling a variety of functionalities to interfaces with a more singular function: no matter the focus, there seems to exist a corresponding digital platform used within (and often especially made for) the educational field (Hillman et al., 2020; Robertson, 2019; Williamson, 2019). Furthermore, the worldwide growth and ubiquity of digital education platforms has greatly accelerated since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic and the associated newly emerging 'emergency pedagogies' that needed to be devised, often with help of both existing and newly developed digital education platforms (Williamson et al., 2020). In that sense, and in line with related scholarship on how education is taking-and changing-dedicated shapes, we advance the general thesis here that, under the influence of digital platforms, educational practices are gradually changing form (e.g., Decuypere & Vanden Broeck, 2020; Lewis, 2020b). Despite the steady rise and ubiquity of digital education platforms, however, educational research that adopts a critical gaze vis-à-vis such platforms is still surprisingly limited (

With schools and universities closing across Europe, the Covid-19 lockdown left actors in the field of education battling with the unprecedented challenge of finding a meaningful way to keep the wheels of education turning online. The sudden need for digital solutions across the field of education resulted in the emergence of a variety of digital networks and collaborative online platforms. In this joint article from scholars around Europe, we explore the Covid-19 lockdowns of physical education across the European region, and the different processes of emergency digitalization that followed in their wake. Spanning perspectives from Italy, Germany, Belgium, and the Nordic countries, the article’s five cases provide a glimpse of how these processes have at the same time accelerated and consolidated the involvement of various commercial and non-commercial actors in public education infrastructures. By gathering documentation, registering dynamics, and making intimations of the crisis as it unfolded, the aim of the joint paper is to provide an opportunity for considering the implications of these accelerations and consolidations for the heterogeneous futures of European education.

Although the global Covid-19 pandemic is still affecting our lives enormously, we know that a new era of deep reflection about ‘normality’, our planet and our existence on it has also begun. The ‘Education in Europe and the Covid-19 Pandemic’ double Special Issue intends to be part of this reflexive discussion about the post-pandemic European education policy and research space. This is a space shaped continuously by crises and opportunities, by utopias of a shared progressive and liberal education for all, but also the dystopias of nationalism, populism, climate destruction and now a global health emergency. This editorial offers an overview of the current crisis context and of the articles; further, it positions the journal within the post-pandemic research and policy debate about how to understand the impact of the pandemic on the changing forms of education and its enduring inequalities.