This article is a part of a series about stuckness in science and technology. Read the introduction to the series here.
If you are one of the millions of people who have watched Sal Khan’s recent TED talk, you might think AI is poised to rescue struggling education systems all over the world. The UK government certainly seemed to agree when it announced that it was investing £2m to develop an AI lesson-planning tool for teachers, describing this project as “…a perfect example of the revolutionary benefits this technology can bring.” We, like other critical scholars of “EdTech” (see Macgilchrist, 2021), are not convinced.
What we see instead is the latest version of a story that is all too familiar to our colleagues in Education – hope leading to massive investments, heightened expectations that classrooms will accommodate revolutionary technologies, and then disillusionment when technology fails to “fix” education. As early as 1995, Terry Mayes, then Director of Research at Heriot-Watt’s Institute for Computer-Based Learning, had already described the “awful familiarity of [feeling] caught in a flow of events which will unfold in an entirely predictable way […], characterized by a cyclical failure to learn from the past.” In 2008, Diana Laurillard, Professor of Learning with Digital Technology, offered a vision of “21st century learning” noting that, “[e]ducation is on the brink of being transformed through learning technologies; however, it has been on that brink for some decades now.” To this day, a sentiment of being stuck is evoked again and again, with critical scholars such as EdTech journalist Audrey Watters lamenting, “earlier pedagogies and technologies are utterly ignored—education has been “static to the present day”—as new developments try to position themselves as innovative and original” (2021: 247).
In Information Studies, the ethnographer Christo Sims documented EdTech’s stuckness almost a decade ago (2017). His study of an innovative new public school in New York City describes how its unconventional digital games-based curriculum was heralded by corporate leaders, policymakers, school administrators, technologists, academic researchers, and families as a cutting-edge remedy for pedagogical shortcomings and socio-economic disparities in the U.S. public education system. But the school failed to live up to its promise: reformers’ imaginaries about inclusivity and playful lesson plans interfered with national and state school standards, inspection systems, university admissions requirements, and parents’ desires to secure good grades and physical “safety” for their children. To work past these differences, reformers held on to their idealism even as traditional educational conventions continued to shape schooling in recognizable ways.
Connecting his account to the rise and fall of other highly-touted Edtech interventions of the past (e.g. film, radio, television, and computers, as well MOOCs and ICTs for international development), Sims evoked the idea of being stuck, asking, “how [do] concerns about the putrescence of inherited institutions as well as longings for a promised polity come to be fixated on apparently unprecedented versions of familiar mechanisms for making social change, despite decades and decades of disappointing results” (p. 4)? Sims introduced “fixation” as a metaphor to analyze the stuckness of this stubborn techno-idealism. Fixation can refer to a “seemingly unhealthy psychological, cognitive, or cathectic attachment, much like an obsession or an idée fixe […],” excluding awareness of and concern with just about everything else (Sims 2017: 11). However, it can also connote “alchemic practices […] that transform volatile energies and forces into something more settled and stable,” evoking “material processes of trying to make order from apparent disorder,” akin with the verb to fix, as in to repair (Sims 2017: 11). Working through these different usages of fixation, Sims presents a sociomaterial and situated account of techno-idealism in Edtech, in which stuckness can be understood as an affective and material practice of repair.
Still Stuck, After All These Years
Sims’ ethnographic study of fixation in EdTech resonated with us, not so much as anthropologists or ethnographers, but as academics in an institution that has conducted research in, on, and around teacher education for more than a century. Parallels between Sim’s work and what happens in our sector were obvious. Like Sims, we have drawn from Science and Technology Studies (STS) to explore the ways that technologies become stuck in educational reforms. Our research contributes to a body of scholarship which adopts sociomaterial sensibilities to analyze topics in Education such as educational futures (Williamson & Komljenovic 2023), school and university governance (Landri, 2018), curriculum development (Taylor, 2019), classroom pedagogy (Fenwick & Edwards 2010), assessment regimes (Henry & Oliver, 2022) and learners’ experiences (Macknight, 2016).
In our study of the UK’s investment in AI for schools, we used situational analysis (Clarke, 2005) as a methodology to explore how care ethics are woven into fixations with technology in education. Care ethics is a theory of moral philosophy proposed several decades ago by feminist academics who argued that forms of “the good” based on “moral reasoning” were individualistic rather than relational, and reductively rational. Through dialogue with political theorists and STS scholars, this ethical theory is attuned to how invisible labors of caring are normalized for marginalized groups in society (in this case, school teachers), and to the more-than-human entanglements of ethics in practice (see Oliver & Henry, 2026). The empirical focus of our research was motivated by an article in The Conversation by education scholars Warren-Lee and Grant. The piece was critical of the UK government’s decision in 2023 to disburse two million pounds to a state-owned public body to develop an AI tool for lesson planning in order to reduce teachers’ workloads.
Earlier that year, a National Education Union survey had featured the headline that 16% of British teachers planned to leave the profession within two years, and 41% within 5 years. Of those planning to leave, 73% gave rising workloads as a reason. In its press release, the UK’s Department for Education justified the public investment as part of a commitment to reducing teachers’ workloads by 5 hours per week. The Education Secretary stated, “by tapping into the benefits of AI we will be able to reduce teachers’ workloads so that they can focus on what they do best – teaching and supporting their pupils.” On the X/Twitter thread where the investment was announced, a flurry of responses opposed the decision, arguing that money could have been better spent fixing crumbling school buildings, paying teachers more, or automating some of the bureaucracy and administration that teachers spend much of their time on. Instead, policymakers and developers sought to automate a task that was considered central to many teachers’ professional identity and expertise (Grant, 2022).
As we proceeded with our analysis, we recognized an all-too familiar pattern—large investments in technology to improve an ailing education sector; educational challenges that are problematized in terms of the particular resources and expertise of individual reformers; and tensions when reformers’ narrow fixations do not align with how learning environments, pedagogies, users, and local communities actually function “in the wild.” Like any utopian vision, the idea of reducing teachers’ workloads seems unobjectionable—even morally imperative—until it is relocated in the messy worlds of practice (Law & Mol, 2002). From our vantage point as researchers of education, course instructors, and also as parents in school systems, something clearly seemed stuck here—but it wasn’t necessarily the technology or the public education system.
Education “In the Cloud”
At the 2025 Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) annual meeting panel that inspired this series, we illustrated our presentation slides with photos of clouds. This wasn’t decoration or whimsy, or an allusion to networked data centers: we presented these specific types of clouds as a metaphor to explain the kind of “stuck” that we think characterizes technology in education. The clouds we allude to are lenticular clouds that appear to hang stationary in the sky, even on windy days. They are created by turbulence, such as wind hitting a mountain; moisture in the air condenses above these geographic features, then evaporates again as it leaves the turbulent zone. The distinctive feature of these clouds is that the air and water they consist of aren’t stationary—but the site of turbulence that these pass through is. So, what appears to be a fixed cloud is really a stream of air in motion, each part of which is transformed temporarily as it passes through persistent environmental conditions.
Lenticular clouds courtesy of Acaro under a Creative Commons license.
In education, the reason philanthropists, disruptive innovators, and anthropologists deploy the trope that education is “stuck” is that they may only see the appearance of fixity, not the ever-changing, churning mass of people and things in motion that cohere, briefly but beautifully, in this thing society recognizes as “education.” What makes education recognizable are the stable social and cultural conditions that continuously shape it: well-established curricula, standards of assessment, professional values, parental demands, inspection regimes, chronic underfunding and conservative policies. As Sims observed, these are the complex things that developers typically write off as “externalities” when they create educational technology “solutions,” as if education was simply a matter of individual access to information.
Less visible from the outside are all the people and materials flowing into and out of these sites: new lessons to teach, new assignments to mark, each year’s new pupils, teachers being replaced as they quit, changing ministers and policymakers, and technological innovation after technological innovation. With the sense of pace and overwork associated with the practices of education, it should be no surprise that from inside the cloud, all that is visible is the churn.
Caring Fixations
The metaphor of lenticular clouds emerged from our situational analysis of AI investments in UK schools, which drew from Joan Tronto’s political theory of care (1993). Tronto provides sensitizing concepts for mapping three social worlds: national policy bodies seeking to stimulate and govern activity in this area (i.e. caring about); developers and school administrators creating tools, services, and training for teachers (i.e. taking care of); and classroom teachers embedded in the day-to-day labor of working with pupils and parents (i.e. care-giving and care-receiving). Those who “care” for education from these different social worlds encounter schools and classrooms in distinct ways. Policymakers and developers often experience schools and classrooms as conservative and relatively static places, stuck in their ways, unwilling or unable to modernize and improve education. Educators, on the other hand, experience schools and classrooms as turbulent and precarious. To them, it is policy and industry that is stuck, locked into the production of technologies that repeatedly fail to address education’s most pressing challenges, launching innovation after innovation into systems that teachers are already struggling to hold together.
Lenticular clouds courtesy of Sierra Farris through a Pixabay content license.
It is in working through this tension that the figure of the lenticular cloud becomes analytically useful. Lenticular clouds appear fixed in the sky even under strong winds, their apparent stillness produced by continuous movement passing through relatively stable atmospheric conditions. What looks like a stable object is in fact a sustained relation between turbulence, form, and ongoing maintenance that holds that form in place. This configuration, we suggest, clarifies a distinction between being stuck and sticking with it. To be stuck is to encounter only the apparent stillness and recognizable form of the cloud, without registering the reparative processes through which it is produced and maintained. By contrast, sticking with it names the capacity to remain with the moving conditions that generate and require continual repair of the form of education itself: working within turbulence while participating in the ongoing maintenance of relatively stable arrangements. The cloud does not resolve movement into stasis; it holds movement in a form that must be continually repaired in order to persist.
Importantly, this phenomena does not apply uniquely to teachers. Policymakers and developers also “stick with it,” persisting through cycles of revision, relaunch, and repair of technologies, even when earlier interventions fail to deliver on their promises. In policy and industry settings, this persistence is often critiqued as techno-optimism: the stubborn belief that educational systems are fundamentally open to improvement through technological interventions. From this position, continued adjustment and reinvestment can appear as the caring response to systems not yet properly made to work. However partial or misplaced, educational technology fixations can be productively understood as attempts to respond to experiences of fragility and breakdown within the social worlds of policymakers and developers.
Lenticular clouds invite reflection on our own position as researchers of educational technology. As Sims notes, fixation is not a problem only for reformers and educators. Social researchers might also be stuck in the cycle of hype, promise, and disappointment, replicating familiar concepts and methods to show over and over again how promised transformations do not arrive (see Traberg, Roozenbeek, & van der Linden, 2026). Inspired by Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s notion of “care-ful” scholarship, we suggest critical research is itself situated within the same landscape, alongside policymakers addressing teacher shortages, developers seeking to reduce workload, school leaders managing limited resources, and teachers working under pressure—all practices of repair that produce varying forms of “stuckness.” Perhaps the challenge for academics is not to abandon their scholarly fixations, but to rework them as caring ones, as ways of “sticking with it” that remain attentive to the mundane labor of maintenance, repair, and collective survival. Rather than asking if technology “transforms” education, this directs attention to how educational worlds are held together, and to the kind of labor that makes such “stuckness” possible.
This post was curated by Contributing Editor Michelle Venetucci and Shoko Yamada, and edited with the help of Contributing Editor Iris Zhou.
References
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