The means to build resilience and deal with global challenges are relevant to society as a whole, and especially to higher education institutions (HEIs). As custodians of tradition and hubs of innovation, HEIs find themselves at the center of a rapidly progressing digital transformation and have most recently needed to react to global challenges, which required them to quickly adopt technology in order to keep teaching going. This paper delves into the domain of knowledge governance by examining the discourses surrounding educational technology at universities during a time of upheaval, notably before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic.
Using critical discourse analysis, the paper analyzes publications of university associations, policymakers, unions and think tanks in Germany and internationally. This study employs Fairclough's Three-Dimensional Model of discourse (1993) to critically examine publications on resilience and educational technology in higher education before, during, and after the COVID-19 crisis. Drawing upon publicly available texts such as policy papers, articles and mission statements from higher education institutions, the analysis encompasses materials collected between 2019 and 2023. The document collection process started with a keyword search, focusing on the Edtech implementation of universities during the pandemic, and was enhanced by the site-ation pearl growing technique (Ramer 2005), a method which involves using one relevant source to find other relevant sources on a topic. The dataset, divided into federal and state-level publications in Germany and extended to the international level, consists of 68 documents (44 German, 24 International). The selection criteria prioritize texts emphasizing digital teaching or educational technology in crisis situations, providing a robust foundation for the critical discourse analysis.
During the analysis, we observed how describing internal and external challenges as crises is used to justify actions, to redirect responsibility and also to stabilize a certain idea of resilient universities as societal actors. Thus "crisis talk" is utilized as a means to shape narratives of change and opportunity and also to sustain myths about digitalization. Additionally, crisis talk is discursively linked to resilience on an individual, organizational, as well as a societal level. We thus discuss our results in light of literature on university resilience, which is commonly understood as the ability of higher education institutions to maintain their core activities of teaching and learning under adverse circumstances. While university resilience depends on the individual ways in which students and academics cope with crisis, it also requires capabilities of the university as a whole to anticipate, cope and adapt to crisis.
Our results point to the discursive foundation of higher education governance and offer insight on the roles of the different actors involved in it. The observed actors construct the university as a place of social and societal responsibility but leave an ambiguous picture, when it comes to the daily realities of digital teaching and learning. Observing these dynamics of accountability attribution contributes to an understanding of the multi-actor-assemblages that govern higher education institutions with the aim of making them ready to face global challenges.
