Whose technology, under whose control, in whose interests, with what consequences?

When asked to describe the “benefits of technology for instructing culturally diverse students,” it is important to begin by naming the prejudices and bias in the question itself. Both “technology” and “culturally diverse students” are presented as neutral, technical categories. Critical literature on education and technology reminds us that digital tools are never just tools; they are embedded in social relations of power, ownership, and labor, and are deeply entangled with race and class. (Selwyn, 2015, 2021).

So instead of simply listing benefits and challenges, I address a different question underneath the official one: Whose technology, under whose control, in whose interests, and with what consequences for oppressed students and for public education as a whole?

In much mainstream writing, “technology” is treated as an inherently progressive force. If we just add learning management systems, adaptive software, and data dashboards, achievement will rise and instruction for “culturally diverse” learners will improve. Corporate training literature, for instance, celebrates integrated systems (HRIS, LMS, mentoring software) as ‘future-focused’ solutions that will optimize learning and workforce development (Weinstein, 2016).

Critical work in the field argues that educational technology must be understood as sociotechnical: shaped by and shaping wider economic, political, and ideological dynamics (Selwyn, 2015; Williamson, 2017). Data-driven platforms, big-data infrastructures, and “learning analytics” do not float above society; they help reorganize the labor of teaching and learning, often to centralize control and expand opportunities for profit (Williamson, 2017).

Likewise, the phrase “culturally diverse students” functions as a polite way of talking about Black, Brown, immigrant, multilingual, and working-class students without naming the structural racism, class exploitation, and underfunding that shape their schooling. Critical analyses of urban education show how neoliberal education reform, especially in cities like Chicago, is inseparable from racialized state violence, privatization, and displacement (Lipman, 2011, 2017).

This matters for technology because students most likely to be described as “culturally diverse” are also those most exposed to punitive accountability systems, narrowed, test-aligned curricula, heavy classroom and data surveillance, under-resourced schools and unstable staffing, etc. Therefore, before we can responsibly talk about the “benefits” of technology, we must acknowledge that it enters unequal schools, under attack, in an unequal society.

Within that context, there is genuine use-value when technology is used under the empowerment of educators and communities, rather than vendors and test scores. Several lines of research help articulate this.

For multilingual students, digital tools can expand access to rigorous content by supporting translanguaging practices: reading, writing, and producing work across languages. This aligns with research on authentic learning for English language learners, which emphasizes meaningful, real-world tasks, reflection, and audiences beyond the classroom as ways to deepen both language and academic proficiency (Zwahlen, 2017). When technology becomes a medium for authentic projects that can take many forms from podcasts and multimodal presentations to community investigations, it can support the development of both academic language and critical consciousness, rather than just delivering isolated grammar drills.

Digital media also broadens what “counts” as legitimate academic work. Students may create data visualizations about environmental conditions in their neighborhood, record oral histories with family members, or produce video essays and interactive texts. This disrupts narrow, monolingual, print-only norms that have historically marginalized the literacies of Black, Brown, and immigrant communities.

Online archives, independent journalism, and critical resources allow students to encounter histories and analyses of racism, labor, colonialism, environmental injustice, that are often absent from official curriculum. When combined with locally relevant inquiry (for instance, investigating school closings, gentrification, or policing), technology can help students connect their own experiences to broader structures, echoing the kind of structural analysis Lipman (2011, 2017) calls for in urban education.

Finally, collaborative tools can connect classrooms across neighborhoods and countries, enabling students to see patterns of inequality, resistance, and possibility as shared rather than isolated. This is especially important for students whose communities are often pathologized in isolation.

All of this is use-value that matters particularly for marginalized and multilingual students, but only when these tools are oriented toward humanizing, collective, empowering, inquiry-based work, not toward intensified individual monitoring.

The difficulty is that educational technology is not being rolled out into a neutral system. It is being layered onto decades of high-stakes testing, privatization, and austerity, which have already reshaped what teaching and learning look like in many “culturally diverse” schools.

Research on high-stakes testing shows that it narrows the curriculum, fragments knowledge, and pushes pedagogy toward test preparation, especially in schools serving poor students and students of color (Au, 2007). Popham (2014) further argues that while many standardized tests may be technically adequate measures of certain content, they are profoundly misused as indicators of teacher quality and school worth, leading to distorted incentives and instructional practices.

Digital platforms plug directly into this regime. Learning management systems, adaptive practice software, and data dashboards feed the same accountability apparatus that has already been shown to distort curriculum and practice. Critical work on big data and platformization in education documents how students and teachers are increasingly datafied and governed through algorithmic systems, raising concerns about surveillance, privatization, and the redistribution of power toward edu-businesses and tech firms (Williamson, 2017).

For working-class and racialized students, this frequently translates into three anti-social reforms. 1) More surveillance: behavior-tracking apps, time-on-task metrics, and proctoring tools that normalize constant monitoring. 2) More standardization: “personalized” platforms that actually fragment knowledge into micro-skills aligned to tests, squeezing out local histories, critique, and creative exploration (Au, 2007). 3) Less teacher autonomy: scripted, vendor-designed “solutions” that position teachers as implementers and troubleshooters rather than curriculum makers and intellectuals (Selwyn, 2015). In other words, technology under current conditions often intensifies the very forms of racialized, classed control that critical scholars have documented in neoliberal education reform (Lipman, 2011, 2017).

Another layer is how data-driven technologies intersect with teacher expectations and racial bias. Gershenson and Papageorge (2018) find that teachers systematically hold lower expectations for Black students than for white students, and that these expectations have measurable effects on long-term attainment, including college completion.

When we overlay algorithmic recommendation systems, predictive analytics, and risk flags on top of already racialized expectations, there is a real danger that bias becomes encoded and naturalized. “Objective” dashboards can end up laundering subjective expectations into quantitative signals, further justifying differential treatment and tracking. In that sense, technology can function to stabilize racism in new forms, even when marketed as a tool for equity.

Because of all this, it is misleading to frame the main “challenges with technology” as a lack of training, access, or buy-in. Those are real, but secondary. The deeper problem is that technology is being used within a wider political-economic project to privatize curriculum and infrastructure, expand markets for corporate “solutions,” and manage and pacify communities through data, testing, and discipline.

Critical analyses of urban school reform show how these dynamics play out through school closings, charter expansion, and corporate partnerships, particularly in cities like Chicago (Lipman, 2011, 2017). Technology is part of that story: think of district-wide purchases of proprietary platforms, vendor-branded “innovation” initiatives, and corporate-sponsored digital curricula that come packaged not only with content, but with particular visions of the future worker and citizen (Weinstein, 2016; Williamson, 2017).

Any honest effort to address the “challenges of technology” must be tied to defending and transforming public education itself instead of reductively optimizing within a privatized, test-driven status quo.

That said, technology can play a positive role for students from historically oppressed communities, but only when it is subordinated to a very different vision of schooling. A vision based on four tenets.

First, technology should supplement, not substitute for, stable staffing, small classes, libraries, arts, counseling, and special education services. A tablet is not an answer to an overcrowded classroom in a crumbling building. This aligns with critiques of using tests and data as cheap proxies for real investment (Au, 2007; Popham, 2014). That is to say, universal, equal, and full funding for public education as an economic right.

Second, teachers, students, and communities, not vendors, should decide which technologies to adopt, how data is collected and used, and how digital tools are woven into curriculum. Critical scholars urge us to treat technology as a terrain of struggle, where questions of ownership, governance, and purpose are explicitly debated rather than assumed (Selwyn, 2015; Bulfin et al., 2015). That is, democratic control over curriculum and infrastructure.

Thirdly, “modern” does not mean the latest device. Rather, a curriculum that takes seriously contemporary science (e.g., climate, public health, data literacy), centers anti-racist and anti-colonial histories, and equips students to critically analyze the economic and political systems shaping their lives.

Technology’s role, then, is to support inquiry, collaboration, and action. The kind of authentic, real-world learning Zwahlen (2017) describes for ELLs, scaled up to the level of social analysis. That is, a modern curriculum grounded in science and human emancipation, not profit.

In short, the key question for any tool is: Does this widen students’ and teachers’ capacity to think, create, organize, and act together in pursuit of their own needs and interests? Or does it primarily generate data for others, discipline bodies, narrow the curriculum, and erode teacher autonomy? That is, technology used to expand, not replace, human relationships and collective power.

The central issue is not whether technology is “good” or “bad” for culturally diverse students, but who controls it and toward what ends (Selwyn, 2015). Actually addressing the challenges of technology requires confronting the broader attacks on public education and fighting for a modern system based on universality, equal and full funding, and a science-based curriculum organized around human needs rather than corporate profit (Gershenson & Papageorge, 2018; Popham, 2014).

References:

Au, W. (2007). High-Stakes Testing and Curricular Control: A Qualitative Metasynthesis. Educational Researcher, 36(5), 258-267. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X07306523

Bulfin, S., Johnson, N. F., & Bigum, C. (Eds.). (2015). Critical perspectives on technology and education. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137385451

Gershenson, S., & Papageorge, N. (2018). The power of teacher expectations: How racial bias hinders student attainment. Education Next, 18(1), 64–70.

Lipman, P. (2011). The new political economy of urban education: Neoliberalism, race, and the right to the city. Routledge.

Lipman, P. (2017). The landscape of education “reform” in Chicago: Neoliberalism meets a grassroots movement. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 25(54). https://doi.org/10.14507/epaa.25.2660

Popham, W. J. (2014). The right test for the wrong reason. Phi Delta Kappan, 96(1), 46–52. https://doi.org/10.1177/0031721714547862

Selwyn, N. (2015). Technology and education--Why it’s crucial to be critical. In S. Bulfin, N. F. Johnson, & C. Bigum (Eds.), Critical perspectives on technology and education (pp. 245–255). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137385451_14

Selwyn, N. (2021). Education and technology: Key issues and debates (2nd ed.). Bloomsbury.

Weinstein, M. (2016). Future focus. Training, 53(6), 22-26.

Williamson, B. (2017). Big data in education: The digital future of learning, policy and practice. Sage. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781529714920

Zwahlen, C. P. (2017). Authentic learning: Boosting ELL language and academic proficiency development. International Schools Journal, 36(2), 37-43.