Reports Part of series: Education in a digital age: BERA Small Grants Fund research reports
An analysis of the seemingly balanced policy discourse on artificial intelligence in education
With the recent surge in generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) applications, there has been increased public attention on discussions that focus on how to leverage GenAI and AI more broadly to tackle issues in education in England. Supported by BERA’s 2023/24 Small Grants Fund, this research project examined policy documents to identify the main themes in discourse related to AI and how the discourse is shaped by stakeholders with different interests.
The discourse analysis helped to uncover the interests and power dynamics influencing policies around AI in education. The resulting report calls for shifting away from a technological solutionistic view, and instead advocates for addressing practices and challenges in education as emerging from specific social, political and economic conditions.
This study examines relevant policy documents that discuss the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in education and investigates the perspectives of government and non-government stakeholders. The study analyses these documents as discourses reflecting various perspectives and interests, identifying seven key discursive themes. Overall, the discourse around AI in education is marked by discussions that appear to balance the issues, weighing AI’s potential benefits and risks, yet in-depth reflections are rare. This approach can serve as a rhetorical strategy to pre-empt potential criticism without fully addressing the underlying structural issues that have contributed to the very problems technologies are supposed to solve. Furthermore, the narratives often imply the inevitability of innovation through digitalisation, diverting attention away from possible alternatives to technological solutions.
This study also examines the narratives in relation to the positions of organisations that have authored these documents and points out how narratives can be strategically utilised to justify investment decisions and may be shaped by collaborations and alliances between stakeholders with varied interests. The diverse motivations of actors involved can influence the tone and focus of the published documents, weaving a policy discourse that illustrates the interplay of actors and interests. By investigating the AI discourse as narratives of power and interests, this study calls for shifting away from a technological solutionistic view, and instead advocates for addressing practices and challenges in education as emerging from specific social, political and economic conditions.
Lecturer at University of Oxford
Lulu Shi’s research focuses on digital education from a sociological perspective. Her work investigates the role of EdTech firms – who can be seen as the architects behind the technology – in shaping education by considering the...
PhD Student at University of Glasgow
Ted Palenski is currently completing his PhD at the University of Glasgow, under the ESRC project Digital Citizenship: Data Ethics in the Classroom and Beyond. His research explores the uses of digital technology in schools across the UK, with a...