“Back to the future”: Socio-technical imaginaries in 50 years of school digitalization curriculum reforms

Abstract

This paper examines major Swedish school digitalization curriculum reforms over the past 50 years by analyzing similarities and differences between the late 1960s, mid-1990s, and early 2010s curricular reforms. By drawing on Jasanoff’s (2015) socio-technical imaginary concept, we examine how digitalization reforms are constituted discursively and materially in struggles over curricular knowledge content, preferred citizenship roles, and infrastructural investments and especially by relating curricular reforms to governance transformations. One recurrent strategy of reform is what we call the back to the future argument, where curricula address an ideal citizenship of future societies, politically used to support change. We suggest that in the more than 50 years of school digitalization issues, it has been surrounded by strong and shifting struggles over the curriculum content and governance transformations. This pendulum movement (Englund, 2012) has taken place partly through central, state-led or new monopolized technology governance and infrastructures and partly through decentralized forms of governing (e.g., in municipal contexts and via IT-supported networks).