With schools and universities closing across Europe, the Covid-19 lockdown left actors in the field of education battling with the unprecedented challenge of finding a meaningful way to keep the wheels of education turning online. The sudden need for digital solutions across the field of education resulted in the emergence of a variety of digital networks and collaborative online platforms. In this joint article from scholars around Europe, we explore the Covid-19 lockdowns of physical education across the European region, and the different processes of emergency digitalization that followed in their wake. Spanning perspectives from Italy, Germany, Belgium, and the Nordic countries, the article's five cases provide a glimpse of how these processes have at the same time accelerated and consolidated the involvement of various commercial and non-commercial actors in public education infrastructures. By gathering documentation, registering dynamics, and making intimations of the crisis as it unfolded, the aim of the joint paper is to provide an opportunity for considering the implications of these accelerations and consolidations for the heterogeneous futures of European education.

The aim of this study is to examine how a particular object for consumption, professional development for teachers and principals, is marketed to schools, and what propositions and understandings are embedded in such offers. Adopting a conceptualization of marketing as a “perpetual questioning machine,” the study deploys and develops a theoretical approach from marketing studies to a new context: edu-marketing. The study is guided by the assumption that marketing functions as projection screen for the products and services offered to schools, but, also as a social and cultural space where dreams and desires are performed and governed. As such, marketing to school is not exclusively about selling things; but about what to be or who to become. Besides the theoretical contribution, the study contributes with empirical knowledge about (1) what concerns and desires this marketing “questioning machine” mobilizes and circulates and (2) how objects for consumption are de/stabilized in the education market. Thereby, it demonstrates some of the intricate relations between the growing education market and the values that those who work in schools are invited to strive for. It is argued that consumption at the education market-place is a question of identity, and therefore of branding and possible success.