Mutual capabilities: digital platforms in unpredictable pedagogical encounters

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the implications of platforms as a repertoire for knowing and relating the intensities of pandemic restrictions on teaching and schoolwork. Building on platformisation in education, what work platforms do in unpredictable everyday pedagogical encounters is investigated. Specifically, 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 Sweden in 2021, everyday platform practices such as handling assignments, requests to connect online, and repetitive notifications are analysed with actor-network theory. Tensions of discomforts, resistance, and trust unfold critical acknowledgements of digital platforms as more complex objects than shaping pedagogical encounters 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, highlighting crucial openings to surprise and curiosity of pedagogical encounters.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital platforms
• actor-network theory
• upper secondary education
• Covid-19
• material semiotics

Introduction

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the rise of ubiquitous digital platforms in education intensified and with it the well-studied and ongoing educational issues of platformisation, surveillance and digital educational governance (Decuypere, Grimaldi, and Landri 2021; Nichols and Garcia 2022). What is the work that platforms do here and how? This paper contributes to the discussion about rising platforms with empirical explorations of everyday teaching, schoolwork, and digital platforms in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. As a major and unequal disruption to schools and ways of teaching, the COVID-19 pandemic unwittingly lent support to a futuristic discourse of education technology, including the re-cycling of hype, precisely if its mundane and even trivial specificities are allowed to disappear from scholarly and empirical debates (Chan 2019; Williamson, Eynon, and Potter 2020). Materialities of digital platforms, of educational spaces, and of bodies vulnerable to pandemic viruses stress how co-existence and human dependencies with the world can be acknowledged. As argued in posthumanist education scholarship, the sociomaterial matters of pedagogy, technology, and ecology bring into question the human exceptionalism that education has played a role in achieving (Bozalek and Zembylas 2023; Juelskjær 2020; Snaza et al. 2016). To that end, it is motivated to stay with the pandemic as an educational-empirical event and pay attention to how neglected sociomaterial relations and everyday practices with platforms can surface surprising and vital actors at work in pedagogical encounters.

There are a few different premises for how to account for digital platform in the pandemic. Some studies emphasise digital platforms as flexible enablers of emergency transition to online teaching (e.g., Adedoyin and Soykan 2023; Bond 2021). The premise of this study, however, is that digital platforms as replacements of classroom gatherings during COVID-19 needs critical unpacking (Gravett, Taylor, and Fairchild 2021; Grek and Landri 2021; Masschelein 2023). Subsequently, the objective is not to repeat a dominant notion that digital platforms have become intensely used as means to educational ends in physical isolation caused by the pandemic. Although such observations have served well in gaining insights of education in precarious times, there is a tendency to fixate on platforms as isolated from and prior to a lively educational practice with a digital backdrop. By attuning to what goes on in mundane pedagogical encounters with digital platforms, ordinary and everyday practices become significant as too unruly, incoherent, and unpredictable to sustain the notion that isolated objects like a digital platform can replace spatiotemporal infrastructures of classrooms with no or very little consequence.

Furthermore, the platform as an isolated object can too easily and unproblematically take on the character of an enabling instrument for teaching and for doing schoolwork. In education, tools and human competence routinely become individualised achievements. How competence and instrumentalism take part in the making of oppositional parings of subject-object divisions in pedagogy has engaged posthumanist educational scholars. For example, Bozalek and Zembylas (2023) discuss how (in)competence allows privileged groups to excuse themselves of responsibility. On a similar note, Juelskjær (2020, 58) urges education research to fixate less on the competence of humans in favour of a ‘fundamentally different ability’ that is the ‘capability to remain open to what may be/come’. This is a capacity to respond and allow for responsiveness that emerges in reciprocal entanglements in which subject and object become inseparable (Bozalek and Zembylas 2023). In extending entangled responsiveness to the study of digital platforms in education, reciprocity allows for openings, instead of repetitions. Thereby, as suggested in education platform scholarship, articulating how a taken-for-granted notion about platform competence as an individualising and necessary professional and pedagogical skill can be re-considered (Pangrazio and Julian 2023; Perrotta and Pangrazio 2023).

These ideas have led to calls for relationally grounded nuance and analytic innovation of platforms’ participation in educational practice (Hartong and Decuypere 2023; Perrotta 2021; Perrotta and Pangrazio 2023; Perrotta et al. 2021). In response, this study foregrounds a relational materialist approach with actor-network theory (ANT) to digital platforms in education practice as co-constituted (Latour 2005, 2017; Law 2004, 2007; Mol 2010). This approach stresses that digital technology in education is not just ‘merely there’ as analytically prior to its entanglements with the everyday practices of teaching and schoolwork. Working specifically with the principle of material semiotics, explained below, the argument that the paper unfolds is that everyday dimensions of education acknowledge digital platforms as more complex educational objects than shaping and exerting force on education in a one-way relation from the ‘outside’. Hence, the aim is to explore digital platforms as they are co-constituted in everyday educational practice and the research question is a reciprocal one: How did digital platforms assemble everyday teaching and school work in the pandemic and how do platforms become assembled in these educational practices?

The paper is organised by first situating the study within critical educational research on platformisation of education. The specific approach of the study is then crafted with cues from Science and Technology studies (STS) to decentre platforms as mainly computational in favour of platforms as methodological. It is further theorised with the principle of material semiotics from ANT which leads to the analysis of empirical engagements with ‘Pine Grove’ upper secondary school in Sweden. The main part of the paper presents various everyday practices at Pine Grove in which aspects of the platform were enrolledfor example, dealing with assignments, connecting online to the classroom, and notifications. These empirical encounters are analysed as wider platforming assemblages of everyday schoolwork and teaching in the pandemic. The attached tensions and alignments demonstrate how the platform became differently enacted, including how the research method carried influence on platforms. The paper concludes with a discussion of the empirical insights of incoherence and unpredictability with regard to educational technology and pedagogical encounters.

Digital platforms in education and research

The digital platform explored in this study was Microsoft Teams which serves users in educational setting by drawing together, in the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, everyday functionalities such as course feeds, chat messages, accompanying notifications, online calls, folders and assignments, etc. The number of users of Microsoft Teams rose remarkably with the pandemic outbreak, from 20 million users in November 2019 to 300 million users in 2022 (Curry 2023). As argued by Perrotta, et al. (2021), the dominant position of Microsoft Teams and other ‘Big Tech’ platformsfor instance, Google, warrants sustained investigation of how they become enacted, gain privileged access, and manifest corporate imprints on education.

For education research, platform studies have been advanced especially by critical studies of digital education platforms informed by critical theory, STS, and ANT (Decuypere and Landri 2020; Decuypere, Grimaldi, and Landri 2021; Gorur and Dey 2021). This research has examined a range of pressing educational issues; teacher professionalism (Hartong and Decuypere 2023; Perrotta 2023), digital neocolonialism (Adam 2019), the making of educational markets in higher education (Williamson 2021), speculative futures in the decentralised education system in Sweden (Hillman, Bergviken Rensfeldt, and Ivarsson 2020), automations of teacher work (BergvikenRensfeldt and Rahm 2023), day-to-day classroom interactions (Cone 2023), and digital educational platforms as epistemic machineries for how we know what we know (Ramiel and Fisher 2023). Furthermore, digital platforms in education are not limited to the big names of global corporations. A reported case from COVID-19 is the locally developed and publicly funded platform KlasClement in Belgium, whose curation process standardised abundant materials into coherence by privileging some contents over others (Cone et al. 2021).

Attesting to the issues of ongoing digital transformation of education, the above critical body of work on platforms in education has advanced the explorations of platformisation, the processes that allow digital platforms to become productive in exerting force on education. The perspective stresses that the platform as both thing and process converge in software, market, and governance infrastructure (Dijck and Thomas 2018; Poell, Nieborg, and van Dijck 2019). A platform’s computational features, e.g., application programming interfaces (APIs), allow for third-party applications and data extraction from various tech providers. The graphical user interfaces (GUIs) pull together disparate parts into a singular and well-defined object. Hence, platformisation interplays among the social, technical, and political-economic dimensions of education often surfacing the social impact on use and outcome (Nichols and Garcia 2022).

Alongside platformisation is the matter of how its impact on everyday teaching and schoolwork can be explored. In response to this, this study considers Sørensen’s (2009) early sociomaterial work on education-technology practice and some more recent scholarly commentary on platforms. Sørensen (2009) introduced principles from ANT and STS to the education and technology field before the rise of platforms but in engagement with online avatars and virtual worlds in primary school teaching. She insists that, to be curious towards educational materialities is to be concerned with how ‘humans and things come to be – how they become – as effects of the arrangements in which they are entangled’ (Sørensen 2009, 13 emphasis in original). Taking Sørensen’s ideas to the study of digital platforms in education suggests they too require empirical exploration as to how they become enacted and co-constituted of educational practices rather than prior to them. Aligned with this, STS-inspired ethnographic approaches to digital platforms and automation in education have foregrounded how platform success is not achieved by inherent features but by exchanging abilities in co-production with users (Cone 2023; Gorur and Dey 2021; Wagener-Böck et al. 2023).

The matter of how platform studies in education can extend the lines of inquiry without losing its critical edge has been raised by Perrotta and Pangrazio (2023, 9), ‘[a]fter all, platformisation can create issues, but it does not always lead to a predetermined outcome, and while governance through surveillance and automation can certainly be oppressive, there is still some unpredictability to it’. By stressing the necessity to explore new possibilities of critique with platforms, the authors identify unpredictable pedagogical encounters with platforms as something of a blind spot in critical studies of education and technology (cf. Gorur, Landri, and Normand 2024; Selwyn 2024). Explored next is how taking the platform as repertoire for critique is how space is offered with this study for assembling and adding to digital platforms in teaching and schoolwork.

Platforms as repertoire for critique

The approach to platforms taken in this study buildt on the above platformisation in education and addsed to it ideas from Gillespie (2010) and Lury (2020) to pay attention to the platform as a critical-creative repertoire for knowing, doing and relating. In ‘the politics of “platforms”’, digital media theorist Gillespie (2010) notes that ‘a platform’, i.e., a raised surface level, combines computational, architectural, and figurative meanings with political meanings. Think, for example, about ‘a platform’ as the foundational ‘stage’ on which opportunity and success become possible. Taking into account platforms as material and semiotic, the politics at work with platforms is the smoothing out effect of pulling differences together into one coherent and well-bounded object. In this performativity, platforms achieve success by wiping out their tensions and contradictions. Commenting on Gillespie’s ideas, STS scholar Lury (2020, 3) suggests that this can be understood as an effect of the platform’s compositional ability recognised in ‘the action of putting things together’. As a compositional methodology, she argues that platformisation has significant methodological and creative implication. In other words, the platform ‘lifts-out’ and in the same move becomes (a well-bounded) platform. It is not merely existing as self-contained outside or prior to the platforming practice. The platformed and the platform become mutually enacted in the boundaries and relations that assemble. This study draws specifically on these identified methodological implications. It is acknowledged by decentring the platform as first and foremost computational to education practice in favour of the platform as methodological.

What is gained for platform studies in education is a methodological step to intervene in a particular ‘platform gaze’ on education without forsaking the platform as a critical and non-neutral object in education. A ‘platform gaze’ has been criticised for mainly engaging with education practice from an elevated view at a distance, via design and platform interfaces (Decuypere, Grimaldi, and Landri 2021; Perrotta and Pangrazio 2023). Instead, here is a methodological potential to analytically engage with situated and unpredictable educational practices and experimenting with platform relations at the margins. It aligns with feminist proposals from STS to examine the invisible work and the bodies that lend unity to powerful technology (e.g., Star 1990; Suchman 2008). Furthermore, as pointed out by Lury (2020), the process of platformisation corresponds to Law’s (2004) ANT-inflected method assemblage (see also Suchman 2012). Thereby, a methodological implication of platforms recognises enactments of shifting boundaries and the crafting of some things by suppressing, silencing, and obscuring others (Law 2004).

Thinking pedagogy and teaching as material-semiotic assemblages has advanced education research away from individualising and separational preoccupations in favour of relationality and entanglements (Fenwick and Landri 2012; Mulcahy and Healy 2023; Sundström Sjödin and Wahlström 2022). Being sensitised to platforms as methodological means that platform assemblages are temporary and heterogenous arrangements of mundane and ordinary events, affects, relations, cuts, and practices, in which platforms achieve their platforming capabilities. Therefore, closer accounts of empirical events and relations in educational practice need to be brought into this platform study in ways that are outlined next.

Studying platforms in teaching and schoolwork with actor-network theory

In this study, the theoretical approach to how platforms matter is taken with the principle of material semiotics, coming from the relational materialist ontology of ANT (Latour 2005; Law 2004, 2015; Mol 2010). The principle says not to decide before empirical inquiry what an actor, human or non-human, can do so that attention is paid to relations instead. Unlike Saussarian semiotics which concerns meaning, material semiotics is the very relatedness by which any phenomenon is brought into existence (Law 2004; Mol 2010). The principle is central to allowing the sensibilities of relational materialisms to address pedagogy, teaching and other educational practices as relationally co-constituted (Bodén et al. 2019; Sundström Sjödin and Wahlström 2022). In line with the above discussion on platforms as methodological, material semiotics suggest that there is no fixed mediating position of go-between as intermediary that an educational platform can be assumed to take and gain its coherence from. Instead, to the extent that specific sociomaterial collectives assemble and gain platforming capabilities, which is not inevitable, it is the relational effect of specifically aligned attachments rather than inherent and universal technical, material, or figurative features. Putting the material semiotic principle to work thereby emphasises the empirical matter of how platforming capabilities are achieved and with what effect.

This study draws on ethnographic engagements that followed the Microsoft Teams platform in everyday teaching practices at Pine Grove School (the fictional name for an upper secondary school in Sweden), from May 2020 to June 2021 (Mörtsell 2024). Specifically, the materials analysed in this study come from online semi-structured interviews with teachers Therese and Alex and students Nina, Ellen, Sandra, Kerstin, Thomas and Olivia (all pseudonyms) between March and June 2021, about 1 year into the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions. When classes at Pine Grove gradually returned to school on-and-off, pandemic restrictions were in place that regulated the distance of bodies at all times, specifically the visiting researcher’s body. With the difficulties of hearing and spontaneously approaching laptop screens, hands, notebooks, and bodies, online interviews became an approximation of engaging with teachers and students between lessons. The interviews are to be understood as integrated in the overall fieldwork and ethnographic materials. Apart from interviews, I participated in some 40 online class calls on Teams and visited school-based lessons of the eight courses that were part of the project (Mörtsell 2023).¹ The interviews were about how the platform was handled in everyday practice of pandemic restrictions. The students were interviewed in groups of two or three and the platform made spontaneous appearances in these accounts. For example, Nina and Ellen jointly talked about schoolwork while scrolling the platform albeit not in a shared view with the researcher. The teachers were interviewed individually with screen-sharing to sensitise the interview to platforming events in education in which not only humans speak (Alirezabeigi, Masschelein, and Decuypere 2023; Thompson and Adams 2020).

In order not to get stuck on the platform as a single and fixed frame, the principle of material semiotics stresses that the analytic task is to incorporate the platform on the same ontological footing as education (Bodén et al. 2019; Gunnarsson and Bodén 2021; Zembylas 2017). In analysing the ethnographic materials, the analytic concepts at work are tensions and attachments, following Latour (2005). Tensions attune the analysis to the multiplicity of colliding realities and assemblages that make empirical events happen. By staying with the tensions, the aim of this analysis is not to pit humans or groups of humans, e.g., teachers and students, against each other, or to disentangle right from wrong, but to stay alert to the relations of which platformings become achieved. This is the sensibility of material semiotics at work. Attachments suggest Latour (2005, 217–18), point less to an end point than ‘actor’ does which speaks to the ‘large network of attachments making it act’. Attachments are the elements that in assembled associations can ‘afford each other their existence and capabilities’ (Mol 2010, 260).

Platforming assemblages in the everyday of pandemic education

The following three sections group together platform practices at Pine Grove in specific alignments of people, things, education, and the pandemic. The analysis traces tensions and attachments of these assemblages to articulate the multiple yet ambiguously overlapping platforming effects in everyday teaching and schoolwork.

Assignments and schoolwork

In the interview with Alex, one of the language teachers at Pine Grove, the topic of how to be subtle with the platform came up in relation to teaching.

Alex: It is not so subtle to call someone up individually on Teams. It takes both time and it changes the focus completely compared to walking up to an ongoing activity in the room, listen in, hear whisperings, and quietly suggest something or confirm ideas that students are stuck on. Some students want an individual call on Teams, but others don’t and I won’t hear from them and then they say they weren’t sure about what the task was. Some students won’t initiate an individual Teams call for a very minor thing that might actually be major.

In Alex’s story, tensions of (un)subtleties emerge, of peering out over the classroom and mundane noticing that does not correspond to the directness of calling students individually on Teams. With the platform, individual tasks and assignments become amplified in a complex field of everyday schoolwork – there is the task of the school assignment and in addition there is the task of taking it on and judging whether to reach out with questions or not. In the multiple attachments of pandemic, noticing and platform, tasks multiply so they become no longer the same task. In this assemblage, the assignment becomes a dominant and moving matter of schoolwork that moulds the platform with discomfort. Individual and unambiguous online calls have no room for the uncertainty of whispers. The platform becomes a temporarily stabilised effect of amplified tasks and silenced noticing and whisperings. Simultaneously, the platform is unstable as ‘some students want an individual call on Teams, but others don’t’.

Coping with the bursts of tasks and assignments that come with the schoolwork and the pandemic restrictions was a concern for final-year students Ellen and Nina.

Ellen: Well, I feel like now that we’re on distance teaching, there is more of, like, they are pumping out assignments for us.

Nina: Oh yeah, exactly.

Ellen: … and that before there was more of, ok, now let’s do this and check out this PowerPoint and sit down and discuss it. There was so much more variation, but now it’s like, we have to write a project outline and she shows us quickly what a project outline is on a PowerPoint or just posts the PowerPoint for us to watch and then there’s a deadline for submitting it. It feels like there are just so many more assignments now, especially in this final term. I know that we have raised this issue. I get that there is a curriculum to consider, but when we’ve told them we have too many assignments and they say they understand, but it’s really like they don’t because there is no change.

Nina: more and more. I think so too.

In the assemblage of classroom, PowerPoints, curriculum and discussions, teaching can be variously aligned in ways that become inaccessible with teaching and the platform. Instead, the ‘pumping out’ of assignments was immune to requests for change. Ellen and Nina’s story produced tensions with what teachers do and what students say they need. This could be analysed as a familiar difference in perspectives, i.e., teachers’ and students’ ‘different points of view’ on educational matters like teaching. Student complaints may demand explanations that call on discourses of youth laziness, student shortcomings, or the need for more learning and platform competence. However, human-centred (in)competencies repeat, rather than disrupt, the digital platform as singular, stable, and unchanging. With material semiotics, capturing a ‘one-world world’ cannot be the objective of the analysis (Law 2015). Instead, tracing the tension produced by Ellen and Nina’s concern – that ‘there is no change’ – hints at and sets in motion a pandemic reality that was ignored, detached, and not brought into existence but was nevertheless significant. A particular version of platform becomes assembled rather than another one.

Later in the interview, Ellen and Nina talked about an upcoming deadline for one of the major final assignments. Confusion and giggles erupted as they browsed and clicked through the Teams platform and the designated ‘assignment’ function.

Ellen: [giggles] hang on…

Nina: I don’t think they’ve made an ‘assignment’

Ellen: Haven’t they written one?

Sara: Where are you looking, Ellen?

Ellen: What?

Sara: Where are you looking right now?

Ellen: On Teams

Nina: Under ‘assignments’

Ellen: Yeah, that’s another thing, they post ‘assignments’ for us on Teams!

Nina: It’s on the 19th, Ellen!

Ellen: the 19th?

Nina: After spring break, it’s on Monday after spring break.

Ellen: That’s all right then. But they can post an ‘assignment’ and then keep posting information about it, but most of the time they don’t add anything about what the ‘assignment’ is, it’s just an assignment file.

Sara: Where you’re supposed to submit it?

Ellen: Yeah, that’s right. So, if you have lots of other assignments you’re working on and need to prioritise you forget what that assignment was about. I mean, I don’t get why you can’t just write down the details of the assignment where it’s posted and where it will be submitted.

Nina: Yeah, I agree.

Ellen: I mean, it’s just so much easier for us and it can’t exactly be difficult to write down a few sentences on what the assignment is.

Sara: And teachers do things differently or?

Nina: Yes.

Ellen: Because on Teams you have, it says ‘assignments’ on the page, and the deadline and some are in red if they’re not submitted yet. So, you get on that page and then you know for example that [teacher’s name] usually writes down ‘this assignment is to choose to write about this or that’ and she’ll put down the textbook page numbers for more details and assessment rubrics, or whatever it’s called, so we know what’s important to think about. In that case you know when you get to ‘assignment’ what to do and what pages to read and questions to answer and that. Some of the ‘assignments’ are just empty, with only a submission file, like Nina said.

The quotidian practice of scrolling for a piece of information here stresses the platform’s contingency on a manifold of relations. The platform gains its logic from accommodating communications between users, e.g., teachers and students. And yet, the empirical event destabilises that platform logic in relation to the misaligned and ‘just empty’ function ‘assignments’. Instead, it becomes a stirrer of intense nuisance. Curious about the platform practices associated with assignments, I asked what Nina and Ellen needed to do in order to find out the more details about the assignment, other than the deadline and where on the platform to submit which is displayed under the ‘assignments’ function (‘page’) of Teams.

Ellen: In one course for example, I just wrote to the teacher and asked about what the assignment was, and she told me how to find the details about it.

Nina: Was it the one we just had?

Ellen: No, the other one. I needed to go to ’files’ and then ’course materials’ and then find it there somewhere. But it would have been just so much easier if that document had been with the actual ’assignment’. We were so stressed out about not knowing what the assignment was. The other thing is that you don’t want to ask about it when so much time has already gone. So, you just end up postponing it.

Nina: That’s just so bloody true – when you’ve put off starting on an assignment for a long time, you can’t just send a question about it like that.

Ellen: Yeah, I know.

Nina: Something you were supposed to start on weeks ago! You just end up falling behind even more. Unless someone else on the course, sometimes you can ask someone else, and they can explain. But some of them just don’t want to tell you.

Ellen: Yeah, that’s right.

Nina: Some just don’t want to say anything about what to do on the assignment or what they’ve done. They don’t want to help you but then it turns out there are others who haven’t started either and that’s great, to know that you’re not the only one who hasn’t started. For instance, the final examination assignment, I was really late in starting on that, but it turned out many others were just like me in that respect, so it was [inaudible] – sorry what? [to Ellen]

Ellen: It was a relief.

Nina: Exactly.

In schoolwork practices with a digital platform, assignments are difficult to gather, to understand, to prioritise, to make time for. In the assemblage produced in Ellen and Nina’s account, the platform became a thorny attachment enacted of stress, shame, falling behind, and relief. The assemblage put emphasis on how doing school work correctly in the pandemic depended on putting trust in the digital technology which involved acknowledging vulnerability of both other and self (Bozalek and Zembylas 2023).

The tensions in Nina and Ellen’s, and Alex’ stories recognised that digital platforms are not neutrally operating in the background without affecting what gets worked on and not. In the same move of platforming assignments in schoolwork, the effect was that variation, whisperings, and discussions were silenced. The thorny platform shifts in how it becomes foregrounded and backgrounded.

Bodies and participation

In one of the interviews with screen sharing, Alex showed a posted message on the course feed from a student asking, ‘Can I connect online?’. Indeed, it was a recurring request posted over the previous few months. For reasons of sickness, symptoms, or sharing living with someone with symptoms, the students were sometimes restricted by the local pandemic protocols to come to school for school-scheduled lessons but still wanted to connect to the lesson from home. Alex tried to accommodate the requests, but it was not straightforward, and some teachers would not allow it. The following is from interviewing Therese on the matter of connecting online to the classroom.

Sara: Have there been times when you’ve tried or wanted to connect students online at the same time as you’ve had students in the classroom? If students have had to stay at home with symptoms for example?

Therese: No because I’ve refused that from the start. So, if someone has connected online to the classroom it’s been because they’ve worked in groups and someone in the classroom will tell me or message that another student can’t come into school but wants to connect online. In that case I’ve suggested they call that student from their computer and work together that way. But I have not had any students online on my computer when I’ve had lessons at school. (Long silence). Was that the answer to your question?

Sara: Sure.

Therese: Yeah, sure. Early on I decided that I’m not gonna do both classroom and online at the same time because it just doesn’t work. So, I haven’t allowed it.

The requests to ‘connect online’ became a valuable empirical event in which relations and tensions were made visible. How was the resistance that Therese articulates produced? In the classroom, the digital platform ‘on my computer’ became a powerful and ambiguous site of teaching and participation. It put matters of ‘good teaching’, such as fairness and responsibility, at stake. In practice, ‘it just doesn’t work’ rendered following the digital platform unreasonable. With the principle of material semiotics, attention to the refusal is not as a representation of Therese’s individual choice or preference (Bodén et al. 2019). The online platform does not discriminate between bodies at home and bodies in the classroom. Instead, they are pulled together and platformed in ways that produce normative expectations of successful pedagogical participation that we might recognise as ‘flexible’. Nevertheless, the platforming simultaneously imposed that a position must be taken (Gillespie 2010). It is not a matter of unproblematic and flexible access to education as the platforming assemblage produces resistance as part of the response (Bozalek and Zembylas 2023). A raised platform promises opportunity and future achievement and yet, in relation to teaching, classroom and pandemic protocols, positions become betrayed, limited, and forced. What becomes significant here is how the empirical event demonstrates more ‘messy’ ways of participation, in which requests and resistance acknowledge more specific and challenging forms of participation and non-flexible access, than a normalised binary of ‘online or classroom’.

The request ‘to connect online’ was performative and sticky with attachments since, as stressed by Mol (2010, 259), it ‘is not introduced into an empty world’. Another way to phrase this encounter at Pine Grove is that it became reasonable to post requests to join online, and unreasonable to allow it. The tension enacted the platform as multiple. The recurrent practice of asking to ‘connect online’ foregrounded the intricacy of public health protocols, symptoms, vulnerable bodies, internet connection and classroom that enacted the platform as incoherent. Instead of universally replacing every way of participating in teaching, the tensions show how, in practice, the platform became simultaneously shaped of, and gave shape to, specific ways of teaching.

Participation in teaching was never only online and at Pine Grove, students had many strategies for how to negotiate tensions with platform, body, homes, and study. For example, the joint capabilities of noisy bodies and the platform made interactions awkward, as told by Olivia:

Olivia: If someone asks me a question, I’ll turn on the microphone but pretty quickly I’ll mute and turn it off again.

Sara: Is it important to have the microphone turned off?

Olivia: Yes, it is in some ways because everybody’s mike is. But actually, it’s unnatural to blip on an off in conversation with others. Perhaps it’s safe to know that no one will hear the noises from turning in bed.

‘Blipping’ the microphone in relation to body, bed, noises, and the ‘unnatural’ conversation with others moulded the platform with negotiated safety. Negotiations also happened with the camera, the body, and the home, as Thomas explained:

Thomas: In the beginning I hardly ever had the camera on, but then I realised that all I do is sit there so I might as well have the camera on.

The platform connects and exposes bodies in ways that can be uncomfortable while at the same time offering the techniques of opting out.

Kerstin: I’ve had the camera off most of the time lately. I rather not be seen right now.

In my interview with Sandra, the opting out of platform exposure was mobilised to improve the connectivity of our Teams call as Sandra wanted to avoid our call accidently ‘freezing’.

Sara: In what kinds of situations do you have your camera on and off in a Teams lesson? Sandra: If I want to say something, or if I see that the others have their cameras on. I don’t want to be the only one with the camera on because you end up enlarged on the screen and that makes me uncomfortable.

Kerstin and Sandra explained that the platform became uncomfortable with the body and the exposure on the big screen. There were also connectivity issues that could accidentally freeze the video at any (wrong) moment. Relations were unpredictable and it was ambiguous who/what came to be studied, heard, and seen. With these ambiguities, platforming assemblages were produced of the tensions of self/other and shifting subjects/objects of public study (cf. Masschelein 2023). What is gathered and kept at bay for teaching and study to ‘work’ becomes vastly uncertain. There were doubts as to whether the platform could accommodate the body, yet, in compromise, like the ‘unnatural’ blipping, accommodation was achieved by mobilising its mute and camera buttons. The platform became the effect of mutual capabilities and rendering each other capable of response (Bozalek and Zembylas 2023; Juelskjær 2020).

The trust put in technology was of an intimate kind. Refusals, blipping, and turned off cameras were in tension with a particular promissory value of online teaching and participation that the platform brought together. These events of pandemic teaching emphasise how bodies critically matter for education technology. As examined in feminist STS, standardised technology has specific ramifications for marginalising and erasing bodies (Star 1990; Suchman 2008). The assembled compromise of blipping, refusal, classroom, technology, student/teacher/researcher participation calls into question any clear divides or boundaries of technology and body. For example, in Therese’s story of refusal, the classroom arrangement became an active co-producer of specific participation. Accommodating the platform became less about safeguarding unspoilt teaching by technological replacement and more about mutual ongoing re-attachments of more-than human body (cf. Suchman 2008).

Assistance and instruction

At Pine Grove, the Teams platform routinely assisted with notifications and instructions for responses in chats and feed channel messages. The following excerpt is from an interview with Therese in which her laptop view of Teams was screen shared as we talked about the notifications that come with it. The screen activities are narrated into the interview transcript with square brackets.

Therese: What I find really hard is that I have to do stuff in Teams, such as – [with a sound, a chat message appears in the lower right corner of the screen with icon, name, the message, and a line prompting an answer] – Oh, look there’s another one. When I do stuff in Teams I’ll get these messages and it’s like I must check them straight away. [The cursor circulates on the new message making it stick in the lower part of the screen]. Sometimes it depends on what it says down here on this ‘sign’ [the cursor circulates on the squared dialogue displaying the message]. I can see now that this is from a teacher chat group, but it can just as well come from a student and starting with something that shows it can be urgent and I feel I have to get to it and answer straight away. In that case I have to click away from the stuff I’m doing on Teams. And after I have to click my way back and it takes time.

Sara: I see.

Therese: There are just so many clicks. [A click on the message opens up the chat window in Teams with the new message placed at the top of other messages on the left. On the right is the teacher group chat dialogue displayed with the most recent message at the bottom, under which there is an empty line with the prompt ‘write a new message’].

Therese: (reads the message out loud in an exaggerated and commanding voice) ’Don’t forget 2 pm today’. (We giggle). I’ll just put ‘sure thing’ [the words ‘sure thing’ appears on the line and is sent into the chat window].

In the research interview, we were amused by the instrumental mundanity of the chat message prompt that seemed to playfully co-script the brief answer in the chat, ‘sure thing’. But processes of assisting are not trivial. Instrumentalism, by which assistance is not noticed as more than a means to an end, reinforce repeated and dichotomising cuts that maintain ignorance towards how assistance ‘come to be’ (Bozalek and Zembylas 2023). In wrapping up on the notifications, I asked Therese about something she had said earlier in the field work about the little red notification icon with the count indicating the number of unread messages.

Sara: So, about the notifications, you’ve mentioned that you want it to look like what we see here now, that there isn’t a red dot?

Therese: Yeah, that’s right.

Sara: So that would indicate that you have no unread messages?

Therese: Yea, because otherwise it looks like I have to do something, you know, that I have stuff to do [the cursor hovers on the chat icon in the top left corner of the screen, now without the red dot]. It’s like people are queueing up (brief giggle) to talk to me. Yeah.

In this event, the platform’s assistant technology, assembled of sound, stress, signs that flash up, was persistently insisting on sending notifications, aggregating messages, reminding, listing, and intrusively prompting what ‘to do’. A platforming assemblage with assisting instructions produces sets of suitable actions for pandemic teaching. However, Therese’s concern that it’s ‘really hard’ shows that what counted as suitable was never settled. The repetitive encounters with notifications and ‘so many clicks’ enacted a platforming assemblage in which who/what assists and is assisted, in practice, became ambiguous. As Latour (2005, 195) reminds us, just because global sites like Microsoft Teams can script local action without ‘determining’ action ‘doesn’t mean you can conclude they do nothing’. What became platformed in the assisting assemblage was individual efficiency to streamline, control and reduce complexity, such as care of unpredictable school urgencies, and do what ‘really counts’ in the ‘business’ of teaching (cf. Chan 2019). The script to ‘do more teaching’ was thereby simultaneously contradicted with the platform since ‘less teaching’ became amplified with ‘so many clicks’. ‘Good teaching’ became naturalised as controlling and monitoring the unread messages count on the red dot.

Before moving on to the concluding discussion, it is worth considering the participation of interviews here. The encounter with screens, notifications, and research interview highlights knowledge production as part of platform assemblages and not a neutral recording of events. It is a problematic and reproductive cut that the interview setup insists on by imposing attachments with humans by describing the social, and being somewhat blinded to the attachments of the myriad of material processes that make the interview-platform-method assemblage hold and bring knowledge into being (Law and Lin 2020; Mörtsell and Gunnarsson 2023). Erasures of the material platform happen when research methods struggle to account for the ambiguous screen-cursor movements (bracketed) and the attachments distributed beyond (not even bracketed), while what is being said in the interview is ‘made clear’. Empirically, the above account of assistant technology demonstrates that platform practices are possible in contradictory ways and that this is in tension with method assemblages and norms of research practice. The empirical account stresses that how digital platforms are made researchable and what is possible and not in education is not a separate matter from research and knowledge production.

Concluding remarks on platforms and mutual capabilities

The rise of digital platforms significantly accelerated with the COVID-19 pandemic and it has necessitated critical unpacking of the work that platforms do in everyday education and how relations are forged and challenged. While not denying that platformisation, surveillance, and digital governance become problematic for educational practices, the focus in this paper has been on empirical everyday events with platforms that do not have predetermined outcomes. In this unpredictable setting, it becomes possible to provide some answers to what work platforms do and suggest how co-existence can be examined while keeping in mind non-neutrality (Gorur, Landri, and Normand 2024; Perrotta and Pangrazio 2023; Selwyn 2024). I argue that taking the platform as a material semiotic repertoire for critique surfaces overlooked relations in educational practice. In conclusion, I want to emphasise what empirical insights are gained and the theoretical resources that they provide.

As foregrounded in the analysis, various mutual relations enact platforming capabilities. Assignments and schoolwork multiply with the platform and mould it with stress, shame of falling behind, and relief. The platform is not a neutral replacement for classrooms as it silences crucial aspects of classroom teaching and schoolwork. These events along with the principle of material semiotics stress that human shortcomings or mastery cannot settle the matter. Staying with the tension of ‘there is no change’ orients towards unrealised realities which speak to the sensibility of multiple platform assemblages. How can an assemblage that remains unattached and ignored at the margins become acknowledged? And who do we (students, teachers, and researcher) become with this other(wise) assemblage? It resonates with Gorur and Dey (2021), ‘digital platforms are implicated in struggles over the power to define what counts in education’.

Furthermore, there are considerable negotiations of body, technology, sounds and exposure which make surveillance not a complete totality but an unstable component. Pedagogic encounters with platforms are moulded with intimate trust of reciprocal and unpredictable vulnerabilities. With vulnerable bodies, the platform, and pandemic protocols to follow, the request to connect online became reasonable. But, at the same time, access to teaching became inflexible. When the platform becomes unreasonable to follow with classroom arrangements it relies on other alliances for homes and classrooms to get connected. These practices challenge flexibility not only as a flawed account of what digital platforms allow but they demonstrate other and inflexible ways to participate. It highlights how flexibility and stability are only flexible and stable for some (cf. Star 1990). Platforming capabilities insist on responsive entanglements with students, teachers, assignments, classrooms, and bodies as mutual and worlding each other (Bozalek and Zembylas 2023; Juelskjær 2020).

Dealing with notifications in teaching produce the platform as a well-bounded surface by assisting, instructing, and facilitating pandemic teaching and schoolwork from the background. However, in practice, it increases the difficulties and boundaries become blurred. What Law (2004, 2) suggests for method assemblages resonates in the performativity of the explored platform assemblages, ‘[t]he very attempt to be clear simply increases the mess’. The observation should not be casually dismissed as mere irony since it has implications for how platforms produce educational realities. I suggest that platforms as methodological become helpful in articulating this.

Finally, what are the implications for digital platforms becoming platforms in the acts of platforming (cf. Lury 2020)? Analytically deciding beforehand what the body can do or what forces digital platforms exert on everyday pedagogical encounters becomes problematic for an account of the empirical events of teaching and schoolwork in the pandemic. Instead, they put forth how a digital platform’s capabilities are not given but enacted (cf. Gorur and Dey 2021). There are empirical gains with this. First, a platform gaze from above can shift to wander nearer the margins of platforms in pedagogical encounters where outcomes are not predetermined. Secondly, digital platforms in educational practice can be re-casted as much less autonomous than when they are studied outside everyday educational events. They become relationally co-constituted, as incoherent, multiple, and shifting along with users, teaching, body, etc. Thereby, mutual capabilities challenge dominant divides and shift meanings and matter that transverse the boarders of inside and outside education.

So, how can we understand what platforms do in teaching and schoolwork? ANT scholarship stresses that incoherence ‘is a chronic condition’ (Law 2015, 130). Acknowledging incoherence, instead of smoothing it over, opens for unpredictability as a vital component in education. The significance of mutual capabilities is that what might seem ironic, or contradictory is really a profound and complex opening for pedagogical encounters. Unpredictability comes attached to curiosity and surprise, which have the transformative capacity for pedagogical encounters (Juelskjær 2020).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The Swedish Ethical Review Agency approval 2019-06,448.