Mutual capabilities: digital platforms in unpredictable pedagogical encounters

• This paper takes on the rise and implications of platforms as a repertoire for knowing, doing, and relating the intensities of pandemic restrictions on teaching and schoolwork. Building on critical work on platformisation in education, the paper investigates what work platforms do and how in the unpredictable everyday of pedagogical encounters. To do so, the paper explores a methodological potential with platforms’ capabilities to pull some things together while supressing others. Drawing on ethnographic interviews with teachers and students in upper secondary education in Sweden in 2021, everyday platform practices are analysed such as dealing with assignments, requests to ‘connect online’, strategies with web cameras, and coping with repetitive notifications. Working with actor-network theory and sensibilities towards tensions of discomforts, resistance, trust and intimacy, the paper unfolds acknowledgements of digital platforms as relationally enacted and more complex objects than shaping pedagogical encounters from the outside or prior to their practices. Instead, capabilities emerge as mutually rendered. The analysis shows that platforming well-bounded domains for clearer and more flexible teaching and schoolwork incoherently make educational practices less so. At the same time, the platform becomes weak and unreasonable. Incoherence and unpredictability stress critical openings to surprise and curiosity of pedagogical encounters.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Utbildningsvetenskap -- Pedagogik (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Educational Sciences -- Pedagogy (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

digital platforms

actor-network theory

upper secondary education

Covid-19

material semiotics

Publikations- och innehållstyp

vet (ämneskategori)

ovr (ämneskategori)