Critical analyses of the relation between digitalization in education and the transformation of teaching have shown how it seems unlikely that teachers’ practices and roles in everyday schooling

will be radically altered or replaced in the near future (Selwyn, 2019). At the same time, the debate on the digitalization and platformisation in/of education is increasingly producing a significant body of knowledge on the power and pervasiveness of the new imaginaries and pedagogical logics that underly globally used educational digital platforms like G-Suite for Education, Blackboard or Moodle (Perrotta et al. 2021; Grimaldi and Ball, 2021; Decuypere et al. 2021). At face of these achievements in the debate, we argue that there is a clear need for research exploring in greater detail how imaginaries and possibilities for the teaching practice emerging from the assemblage (DeLanda, 2016) with digital platforms are enacted in the situated contexts of everyday schooling and how educational digital platforms are part of a re-making of the labour of teaching and pedagogy.

This presentation is part of an ongoing and collective research project whose aim is to understand the effects produced by educational digital platforms on the contemporary experience of teaching and learning (Van Dijck et al. 2018), scrutinising the processes and imaginaries of world-building and user-generation at stake (Williamson, 2016). In particular, this work discusses the role of digital platforms in the re-framing of the teaching experience, with a specific reference to the changes in the spatial, temporal and ethical frames of education (Grimaldi and Ball, 2019). The specific aim of this presentation is to problematise how platforms’ functioning influences the practices of teaching and the making of the teacher as a subject (Decuypere et al, 2021), but also how teachers enact digital platforms within iterative processes that involve the assemblage between: a) the discursive practices that act as frames for the processes of teaching; b) the non-discursive practices of education (recruitment and staff, budget, buildings, technologies and infrastructures); c) contextual discursive and non-discursive elements which act as situated educational environments (local contexts, school histories, school intake, enrolments, professional cultures); and d) the subjective processes of interpretation, translation and recontextualization (Ball et al. 2012). The aim of this presentation is to contribute to understanding and documenting the ways in which schools and teachers actually deal with educational digital technologies and the multiple processes of ‘blending’ that are connected with their introduction in school contexts.

Using the analytical scheme outlined above, the presentation will discuss the diverse ways in which teachers, at the same time, are fabricated by and fabricate and forge their work practices assembled with digital technologies and educational ideas related to the imaginary of digital education in the space of possibilities offered by their situated realities. Following Ball et al. (2012) we call this process ‘enactment’.

Empirically, the presentation will discuss the findings of an ethnographic research which is currently being carried on in a comprehensive school in the South of Italy, the St. Mary. As renown, Italy has been seriously hit by the pandemics in 2020 and, since then, schools and teachers have been forced to move all their activities online. To carry on what has been called Distance Education, schools and teachers have adopted digital educational platforms like G-Suite for Education, Microsoft Teams, Edmodo, Moodle, Blackboard and similar. In January 2021 at the time when pandemics has started to slow down and schools have re-opened, adopted platforms have established themselves as part of the technological infrastructure of Italian schools. St. Mary is one of the many Italian schools that have continued their activities using the G-Suite for Education. St. Mary teachers are currently engaging in the process of reorganising their teaching practices and pedagogical labour in brick-and-mortar classrooms, but exploiting the possibilities offered by the G-Suite. Using document/artefacts analysis, in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations of teaching practices of St. Mary teachers involved in the adoption of the G-Suite, the delivery of Distance Education and the re-organization of the teaching labour in the new ‘blended’ setting, the research has the aim to explore how: a) St. Mary teachers have interpreted and translated the pedagogical logics underlying the G-Suite and the teaching possibilities it offered during the school closure and how those interpretations and translations are evolving in the transition to the blended-mode; b) how these processes of interpretation and translation can be understood in the light of their interplay with the discursive frames that inform school action, the non-discursive elements of education and the other contextual factors quoted above.

The presentation will contribute to the debate on how one of the most used educational digital platforms, the G-Suite for Education, is contributing to the re-making of the labour of teaching and pedagogy in everyday schooling and the remaking of teachers as subjects. Looking at the enactment of the G-Suite as part of the teacher work-as-assembling, we will discuss: a) how St. Mary teachers have used the G-Suite in the period of Distance Education and how the move to a virtual classroom has changed their curricular, pedagogical and evaluative practices; b) how some distinctive traits of the G-Suite for Education as a platform have been enacted and other not, through processes of selection, translation, interpretation, decoding, mediation, opposition, and exclusion in the daily practices of teaching; c) how platforms’ functioning shapes the practices of teaching and, at the same time, is influenced by them, bringing out a re-making of the teacher as a particular kind of subject, who is enabled with distinct modes of acting, intervening and directing the learning experience (Decuypere et al, 2021). In looking at the three points above, we will look, first, at the new configurations of the digital or blended educational space and analyze the kind of reason according to which the teacher emerges as a subject through the educational experience of inhabiting such a space. Second, we will consider the temporal sequencing and pace of the teaching experience, and relate this to the teleological features of such an experience. Third, we will look at the kind of norms through which teaching experience and teachers are given and take value and at the overall difference that is produced.

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