Structured participation pathways in AI-driven education governance: the case of South Korea’s AI digital textbook initiative

This study examines participation in South Korea’s Artificial Intelligence Digital Textbook (AIDT) initiative, a state-led, multi-actor EdTech governance project. Moving beyond frameworks that conceptualize EdTech governance as either centralized state control or decentralized market activity, it examines how participation is institutionally organized within a nationally coordinated yet distributed AI education reform system. It develops the concept of structured participation pathways as an analytical lens for understanding how institutional arrangements shape actors’ access, visibility, and recognition across interconnected governance sites. Drawing on semi-structured interviews, policy documents, and institutional mapping, the analysis traces participation across pilot programs, procurement systems, teacher professional development, and university-based Soft Labs. Findings show that participation is organized through processes of selection, validation, and recirculation that systematically shape actors’ visibility, institutional recognition, and positions within AI education reform networks. Intermediary institutions structure these participation pathways across governance sites while serving as spaces where expertise, technologies, and implementation practices are validated. By shifting attention from governance actors to the institutional arrangements organizing participation, this study contributes to critical EdTech scholarship by showing how distributed governance can generate patterned differences in participation without requiring centralized control or explicit exclusionary mechanisms.