Making edtech through adaptation: how a Chinese education technology industry changes and stabilises in Jiangsu province

Education technology (edtech) is increasingly positioned as requiring adaptation to education contexts, yet industry products are often maladapted and implemented regardless. Critical edtech studies have predominantly examined edtech in Western contexts but have given less attention to East Asian ones. Therefore, this study aims to understand ways edtech actors make technology and, in turn, shape an edtech industry in Jiangsu Province, China. Informed by Chinese philosophy and Science and Technology Studies (STS), the study scrutinises how edtech is made through modes of adapting, patterned ways of gradually adjusting – and learning to adjust – to surrounding entities. Drawing on 25 interviews, the results present three modes: (1) ecological, endowing edtech with naturalistic, biological metaphors to ensure it roots, lands, and grows in industrialised environments, (2) ethical, balancing obligations of edtech towards these environments, and (3) cybernetic, governing the pace/scale of and feedback from such environments. The article invites us to rethink industries as discursively ordered through the adaptation of organisations, professionals, and technologies to their environment, conceptualised as education's industrialised soil. It concludes that edtech professionals describe/prescribe adapting as a practice of adjusting in, to, and learning from contexts, and that STS, alongside philosophy, helps understand/intervene in making well-adapted edtech.