The experience of imposed digitalization of education provision across sectors: Comparative autoethnographic experiences through a Foucauldian lens

Worldwide, over the course of the global COVID-19 pandemic, major disruption to schooling and education provision at all levels has presented governments, school leaders, faculty, teachers, parents and students with a host of challenges. These challenges also brought increased attention to how ill-prepared education institutions were to ‘pivot’ from face-to-face teaching and learning to online forms of remote provision. In this paper, we will explore how this imposed digitalization affected leadership and governance from the experience of the various stakeholders involved. In exploring the imposed digitalization of education provision across educational sectors in two different geographical and cultural contexts, Malta and Turkey, we utilize a critical autoethnography to question how power and knowledge reflexively generated our actions and interpretations, as well as critically reflect on our own practice as researchers. As researchers, through reflexivity and introspection, we engage in self-study as participants, recognizing our interpretation of facts as shaped by our sociocultural circumstances. Regarding education institutions as a key test site for digital technologies and a ripe field for critical educational research, we thus explore the leadership and governance experiences of this imposed digitalization and its ensuing effects through the prism of social theory, specifically a Foucauldian perspective using his ‘trident’ of problematization, critique and scepticism. Our autoethnographic exploration of imposed digitalization across distinct education sectors in diverse cultural contexts has implications for theory, policy and practice.