Bernard Stiegler

The accelerated integration of digital technologies into education has renewed longstanding philosophical debates concerning the nature, role, and consequences of technology in schooling. While international scholarship has increasingly emphasized the importance of interrogating the philosophical assumptions underpinning teachers’ engagement with technology, little work has examined such orientations in the Iranian context. This qualitative study explores Iranian secondary school teachers’ implicit philosophies of educational technology and critically evaluates them through the conceptual frameworks of Andrew Feenberg’s philosophy of technology and Bernard Stiegler’s pharmacological perspective. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with twelve teachers and employing a hybrid deductive–inductive thematic analysis, this study identifies four Philosophical–Pedagogical Themes in Educational Technology (PPTET), each of which is revealed through the binary logic inherent in the pharmacological integration of technology in education. Through a Stieglerian reading, such dualisms are shown to obscure the constitutive and ambivalent nature of technological mediation in processes of teaching, learning, and individuation. The findings reveal a need to move beyond access-oriented and utilitarian narratives toward cultivating critical digital judgment and fostering pedagogical practices grounded in care, attention, and reflective technological engagement.