Thinkpiece on the impact of AI on academic language

Efforts to desegregate schools have consistently been undermined by privileged parents finding ways to avoid undesirable schools. In some contexts, a more complex picture is emerging, where ‘progressive’ privileged parents choose ‘diverse’ schools but still reproduce segregation. We demonstrate how the desegregation aims of an Indian education policy are similarly undermined by seemingly well-intentioned privileged actors. India’s Right to Education Act of 2009 requires private schools to educate disadvantaged children for free. The architects of this policy imagined that it would not only provide access to quality education for disadvantaged children, but also desegregate schools. Beneficiaries of the policy share the policymakers’ vision of desegregation. However, various elite and middle-class actors prioritise access over integration, and assert that segregated classrooms may be in the best interests of underprivileged children. This highlights how desegregation policies can fail not just as a result of direct opposition but also through discourses of benevolence.

This paper examines how language-based artificial intelligence is envisaged to imagine new futures for indigenous languages. It draws on the visions, programmes, and plans of six language initiatives that are developing language technology for often-marginalised indigenous, tribal, and minority (ITM) languages, such as Gondi, Maithili, Rajasthani and Mundari, in India. We note three distinct discourses: (1) technological optimism in utilising these new opportunities by claiming space for otherwise-marginalised languages, (2) the imperative for collaborative and collective work in order to address sparse datasets, and (3) the need to negotiate the contested nature of imagining a new collective future. This paper argues that indigenous language technology is not just a technical project but a contested process of subverting linguistic hierarchy through the 'active presencing' of these languages. Overall, the paper emphasizes the need for a nuanced approach that recognizes the interplay between technology, language education, and broader social and political factors

Online learning has been celebrated as a mode through which education can happen anywhere at any time. However, prolonged school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic revealed that space and time significantly impact children’s ability to access online learning. Many responded to these inequalities with a focus on creating separate distance learning modes adapted to the needs of disadvantaged children. However, we suggest that disadvantaged parents’ persistent calls for schools to reopen point to the need to rethink the importance of synchronicity to learning equity and to revisit the ideal of the neighbourhood school where all students from the vicinity learn together. We juxtapose experiences of distance learning during the pandemic with research on implementation of Section 12(1)(c) of India’s Right to Education Act, which requires private schools to educate underprivileged students without charging fees. In this context, policy makers sought to reduce differences between children by giving them a common experience of learning synchronously in the same classroom at the same time. Juxtaposing these two contexts reveals parallels in working-class families’ experiences of asynchronicity as disadvantage or discrimination, highlighting the importance of reviving political commitment to the neighbourhood school.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, most Indian schools were closed for nearly two years, despite extensive evidence showing most children could not access online learning. In our interviews with those affected by school closures in North India, teachers and parents who could access online learning described it as ‘the only option’. This aligns with the dominant framing of EdTech, both nationally and globally, as a positive and inevitable feature of learning futures. However, parents who could not access online learning stressed that it was not an option for them and called for in-person learning to resume. Although several alternatives to online learning were available, and all interviewees described some of these, for many this did not dislodge the idea that online learning was ‘the only option’. This marginalisation of alternatives is a form of ‘technological inevitabilism’ that facilitated a lack of urgency in reopening schools and a widening of education inequities.

Mapping India’s vast, complex, and unruly education system through the systematic generation of accurate and current data, and encouraging accountability by persuading a diverse array of actors to engage with such data, is an ambitious, if not heroic, project. Yet this is what India’s Education Information Management System (EMIS), the Unified District Information System of Education (U-DISE), has set out to do. This digital platform must persuade actors in India’s 1.5 million schools to regularly upload trustworthy data to populate the database. A range of actors must be cajoled into becoming data-informed, to plan and strategize, and to enforce accountability. This paper traces how U-DISE attempts to impose its desires on a range of distributed actors, and how these actors respond to its overtures. Using concepts from Science and Technology Studies (STS), and based on interviews with the designers of U-DISE, central and state government officials, school-level data coordinators and NGOs and activists, as well as policy documents and government websites, we argue in this paper that, to realise their ambitions, digital platforms not only aim to be ‘user friendly’, but also engage in efforts to make the user friendly.

In this paper, we explore the improvisations made in examination practices in higher education during the pandemic of 2020. Drawing on STS, we start from the theoretical assumption that examinations constitute an obligatory passage point in universities and colleges: a sacred point which students need to pass if they want to gain recognized qualifications. We base our analysis of higher education examinations on cases from six countries around the world: Australia, Belgium, Chile, India, Sweden and the UK. We use the analytical heuristic of choreography to follow the movements, tensions and resistance of the ‘emergency examinations’ as well as the re-orderings of actors and stages that have inevitably occurred. In our analytical stories we see the interplay between the maintenance of fixed and sacred aspects of examinations and the fluidity of improvisations aimed at meeting threats of spreading Covid-19. These measures have forced the complex network of examinations both to reinforce some conventional actors and to assemble new actors and stages, thus creating radically new choreographies. Although higher education teaching and didactics are being framed as a playground for pedagogical innovation with digital technologies, it is clear from our data that not all educational activities can be so easily replicated.