This article is a part of a series about stuckness in science and technology. Read the introduction to the series here<\/a>.<\/p>\n If you are one of the millions of people who have watched Sal Khan\u2019s recent TED talk<\/a>, 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 \u00a32m to develop an AI lesson-planning tool for teachers, describing this project as \u201c\u2026a perfect example of the revolutionary benefits this technology can bring.\u201d We, like other critical scholars of \u201cEdTech\u201d (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 \u2013 hope leading to massive investments, heightened expectations that classrooms will accommodate revolutionary technologies, and then disillusionment when technology fails to \u201cfix\u201d education. As early as 1995, Terry Mayes, then Director of Research at Heriot-Watt\u2019s Institute for Computer-Based Learning, had already described the \u201cawful familiarity of [feeling] caught in a flow of events which will unfold in an entirely predictable way [\u2026], characterized by a cyclical failure to learn from the past.\u201d In 2008, Diana Laurillard, Professor of Learning with Digital Technology, offered a vision of \u201c21st century learning\u201d noting that, \u201c[e]ducation is on the brink of being transformed through learning technologies; however, it has been on that brink for some decades now.\u201d To this day, a sentiment of being stuck is evoked again and again, with critical scholars such as EdTech journalist Audrey Watters lamenting, \u201cearlier pedagogies and technologies are utterly ignored\u2014education has been \u201cstatic to the present day\u201d\u2014as new developments try to position themselves as innovative and original\u201d (2021: 247).<\/p>\n In Information Studies, the ethnographer Christo Sims documented EdTech\u2019s 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\u2019 imaginaries about inclusivity and playful lesson plans interfered with national and state school standards, inspection systems, university admissions requirements, and parents\u2019 desires to secure good grades and physical \u201csafety\u201d 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.<\/p>\n Connecting his account to the rise and fall of other highly-touted Edtech interventions of the past (e.g. film, radio, television, and computers<\/a>, as well MOOCs<\/a> and ICTs for international development<\/a>), Sims evoked the idea of being stuck, asking, \u201chow [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\u201d (p. 4)? Sims introduced \u201cfixation\u201d as a metaphor to analyze the stuckness of this stubborn techno-idealism. Fixation can refer to a \u201cseemingly unhealthy psychological, cognitive, or cathectic attachment, much like an obsession or an id\u00e9e fixe [\u2026],\u201d excluding awareness of and concern with just about everything else (Sims 2017: 11). However, it can also connote \u201calchemic practices [\u2026] that transform volatile energies and forces into something more settled and stable,\u201d evoking \u201cmaterial processes of trying to make order from apparent disorder,\u201d akin with the verb to fix<\/em>, as in to repair<\/em> (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.<\/p>\n Sims\u2019 ethnographic study of fixation in EdTech resonated with us, not so much as anthropologists or ethnographers, but as academics in an institution<\/a> that has conducted research in, on, and around teacher education<\/a> for more than a century. Parallels between Sim\u2019s 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\u2019 experiences (Macknight, 2016).<\/p>\n In our study of the UK\u2019s 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 \u201cthe good\u201d based on \u201cmoral reasoning\u201d 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<\/a> by education scholars Warren-Lee and Grant. The piece was critical of the UK government\u2019s decision<\/a> in 2023 to disburse two million pounds to a state-owned public body<\/a> to develop an AI tool for lesson planning in order to reduce teachers\u2019 workloads.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>, the UK\u2019s Department for Education justified the public investment as part of a commitment to reducing teachers\u2019 workloads by 5 hours per week. The Education Secretary stated, \u201cby tapping into the bene\ufb01ts of AI we will be able to reduce teachers\u2019 workloads so that they can focus on what they do best \u2013 teaching and supporting their pupils.\u201d 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\u2019 professional identity and expertise (Grant, 2022).<\/p>\n As we proceeded with our analysis, we recognized an all-too familiar pattern\u2014large 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\u2019 narrow fixations do not align with how learning environments, pedagogies, users, and local communities actually function \u201cin the wild.\u201d Like any utopian vision, the idea of reducing teachers\u2019 workloads seems unobjectionable\u2014even morally imperative\u2014until 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\u2014but it wasn\u2019t necessarily the technology or the public education system.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t 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 \u201cstuck\u201d that we think characterizes technology in education. The clouds we allude to are lenticular clouds<\/a> 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\u2019t stationary\u2014but 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.<\/p>\n Lenticular clouds courtesy of Acaro<\/a> under a Creative Commons<\/a> license.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n In education, the reason philanthropists, disruptive innovators, and anthropologists deploy the trope that education is \u201cstuck\u201d 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 \u201ceducation.\u201d 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 \u201cexternalities\u201d when they create educational technology \u201csolutions,\u201d as if<\/em> education was simply a matter of individual access to information.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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<\/em> the cloud, all that is visible is the churn.<\/p>\n The metaphor of lenticular clouds emerged from our situational analysis of AI investments in UK schools, which drew from Joan Tronto\u2019s 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 \u201ccare\u201d 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\u2019s most pressing challenges, launching innovation after innovation into systems that teachers are already struggling to hold together.<\/p>\n Lenticular clouds courtesy of Sierra Farris<\/a>\u00a0through a\u00a0Pixabay content license<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n 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<\/em> and sticking with it<\/em>. 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<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n Importantly, this phenomena does not apply uniquely to teachers. Policymakers and developers also \u201cstick with it,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s notion of \u201ccare-ful\u201d 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\u2014all practices of repair that produce varying forms of \u201cstuckness.\u201d Perhaps the challenge for academics is not to abandon their scholarly fixations, but to rework them as caring ones, as ways of \u201csticking with it\u201d that remain attentive to the mundane labor of maintenance, repair, and collective survival. Rather than asking if technology \u201ctransforms\u201d education, this directs attention to how educational worlds are held together, and to the kind of labor that makes such \u201cstuckness\u201d possible.<\/p>\n This post was curated by Contributing Editor Michelle Venetucci<\/a> and Shoko Yamada<\/a>, and edited with the help of Contributing Editor Iris Zhou<\/a>.<\/p>\n Clarke, A. E., (2005). Situational Analysis: Grounded Theory After the Postmodern Turn. SAGE.<\/cite><\/p>\n DfE (2003) Press Release: New Support for Teachers Powered by Artificial Intelligence. London: Department for Education.<\/cite><\/p>\n Fenwick, T., & Edwards, R. (2010). Actor-Network Theory in Education. London: Routledge.<\/cite><\/p>\n Grant, L. (2022). Reconfiguring Education Through Data: How Data Practices Reconfigure Teacher Professionalism and Curriculum. In New Perspectives in Critical Data Studies: The Ambivalences of Data Power (pp. 217-241). Cham: Springer International Publishing.<\/cite><\/p>\n Henry, J.V. & Oliver, M. (2022) Who Will Watch the Watchmen? The Ethico-political Arrangements of Algorithmic Proctoring for Academic Integrity. Postdigital Science & Education, 4, 330\u2013353. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1007\/s42438-021-00273-1<\/a><\/cite><\/p>\n Landri, P. (2018) Digital Governance of Education. London: Bloomsbury.<\/cite><\/p>\n Laurillard, D. (2008). Digital Technologies and Their Role in Achieving Our Ambitions for Education. Institute of Education, University of London.<\/cite><\/p>\n Law, J., & Mol, A. (2002). Local Entanglements or Utopian Moves: An Inquiry into Train Accidents. The Sociological Review, 50(S1), 82\u2013105.<\/cite><\/p>\n Macgilchrist, F. (2021). What is \u2018Critical\u2019 in Critical Studies of Edtech? Three responses. Learning, Media and Technology, 46(3), 243\u2013249. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1080\/17439884.2021.1958843<\/a><\/cite><\/p>\n Macknight, V. (2016). Imagining Classrooms: Stories of Children, Teaching, and Ethnography. London: Mattering Press.<\/cite><\/p>\n Mayes, J.T. (1995) Learning Technology and Groundhog Day. In W. Strang, V.B. Simpson & D. Slater (Eds.), Hypermedia at Work: Practice and Theory in Higher Education. University of Kent Press: Can- terbury.<\/cite><\/p>\n Menter, I. (2023). \u2018Teacher Education Research in the Twenty-First Century\u2019. in Menter, I. (ed.) The Palgrave Handbook of Teacher Education Research. Cham: Springer International Publishing, pp. 3\u201331. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1007\/978-3-031-16193-3_85<\/a><\/cite><\/p>\n NEU (2023) State of Education: Recruitment and retention. London: National Education Union. Sims, C. (2017). Disruptive Fixation: School Reform and the Pitfalls of Techno-Idealism. Princeton University Press.<\/cite><\/p>\n Taylor, C. A. (2019). Diffracting the Curriculum: Putting \u201cNew\u201d Material Feminism to Work to Reconfigure Knowledge-Making Practices in Undergraduate Higher Education. In Huisman, J. & Tight, M. (Eds), Theory and Method in Higher Education Research. Bingley: Emerald Publishing.<\/cite><\/p>\n Traberg, C. S., Roozenbeek, J., & van der Linden, S. (2026). AI is Turning Research Into a Scientific Monoculture. Communications Psychology, 4(1), 37.<\/cite><\/p>\n Tronto, J. C. (1993). Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. Routledge.<\/cite> Warren-Lee, N. & Grant, L. (2023) UK Announces AI Funding for Teachers: How This Technology Could Change the Profession. The Conversation, 9th November.<\/cite><\/p>\n Watters, A. (2023). Teaching machines: The History of Personalized Learning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.<\/cite><\/p>\n Williamson, B., & Komljenovic, J. (2023). Investing in Imagined Digital Futures: The Techno-Financial \u2018Futuring\u2019 of Edtech Investors in Higher Education. Critical Studies in Education, 64(3), 234\u2013249. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1080\/17508487.2022.2081587<\/a><\/cite><\/p>\n<\/div>\n
<\/p>\nStill Stuck, After All These Years<\/h2>\n
Education \u201cIn the Cloud\u201d<\/h2>\n
![\"Two](\"http:\/\/blog.castac.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2026\/06\/Altocumulus_lenticularis_Arctowski_Station_HD.jpg\")
<\/p>\nCaring Fixations<\/h2>\n
![\"This](\"http:\/\/blog.castac.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2026\/06\/sierrafarris-mountain-2457382_1920.jpg\")
<\/p>\nReferences<\/h2>\n
Oliver, M. & Henry, J. V. (2026) The speculative making(s) of ethics-in-practice in universities. Learning, Media and Technology, 1\u201323. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1080\/17439884.2026.2678190<\/a><\/cite><\/p>\n
![Acaro<\/a> under a](\"https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:Altocumulus_lenticularis_Arctowski_Station_HD.JPG\"){kind=link}