Digital technologies of today are generally considered to foster high-quality teaching and equal learning opportunities for all (Klette et al., 2018; OECD, 2019). In line, notions of agency have become increasingly foregrounded in education technology literature. With the liberal humanist education discourse in front, there is a strong emphasis on individuality, responsibility and competitiveness, ahead of new sociomaterial, relational and ecological framings of agency in new generation learning environments (Charteris & Smardon, 2018). The development and implementation of technological artifacts has, however, challenged and shaped prevailing onto-epistemological conceptions of not only traditional and new modern schooling spaces and materialities, but also subjectivity itself (Braidotti, 2013).

This qualitative study explores technological agency in digitalized lower secondary classrooms in Finland and Sweden. The aim is to investigate how agency is co-constituted by different participants in the material-discursive classroom practices. Theoretically, a posthumanist framework is applied, evoking the sociomateriality and entangledness of contemporary Nordic classrooms. The following research question is posed: how is technological agency enacted in the material-discursive classroom practices?

In this study, agency is conceptualized as a temporally emergent entanglement of human and nonhuman elements (Barad, 2003, 2007; Pickering, 1993). Classrooms are analysed as sites of human and material agency. Hence, what the teachers, students and artifacts do in the classroom, can be seen as an outcome of an entangled dialectic play between the different participants. Previous research in a Nordic context shows, for instance, that mobile phones themselves may challenge traditional spaces and agencies of schools and classrooms (Paakkari, 2020).

The aim in this research is to move towards a more nuanced understanding of the material-discursive classroom practices in the Nordics. In order to deepen the understanding, and to discuss any implications of how and/or why digital technologies are used as they are in Nordic lower secondary classrooms, I believe there is an evident need to examine closer the relationality and materiality of contemporary classroom spaces. In contrast to an instrumentalist conceptualisation of material objects in educational settings, posthuman social theory calls for a re-positioning of the nature of the human subject and its relation to material objects, not least technology (Bayne, 2016). The question of what digital technologies really are doing in the classrooms have become topical.

The study is part of the Connected Classrooms Nordic (CCN) –project within the research centre Quality in Nordic Teaching (QUINT) funded by NordForsk. CCN is a three-year longitudinal video-ethnographic study aiming to follow the same lower secondary classrooms in three cycles in all Nordic countries. In this study, data from the first cycle from Finland and Sweden within CCN is used. The data consists of video-recorded lessons (n=22) in the school subjects Language Arts, Mathematics and Social Science/History. Each lesson, 1-2 focus students were followed more closely. The participating schools and classes were recruited based on voluntary participation. A survey request with informed consent were required from the participants (students, caregivers and teachers). To optimize the interest to participate in the study, teachers and students got information about the project on site at the school before the consent survey was conducted. In general, video-ethnography has shown to be effective for studying the complexity of social practices (Blikstad-Balas, 2017). Video-ethnography provides real-time, multimodal, durable, malleable, and shareable data records (Clarke & Chan, 2019), allowing close investigation of the teachers’ and focus students’ classroom activities in real-time when digital technologies (both hardware and software) are used in the teaching. The video-recordings were carried out by local researchers in CCN and appointed assistant(s). A set of three cameras and three microphones was used: one camera stood in the back of the class following the teacher’s actions and whole-class teaching. One camera was placed behind or beside the focus student (one camera per focus student) aiming to follow the student’s activities with a special focus on the screen whenever a digital device was used by the student. If there was one focus student, the third camera was placed in front of the class towards the focus student. Both the focus student(s) and the teacher were equipped with own microphones for audio recording. Field notes were collected additionally. When drawing on a posthumanist framework, in which agency is viewed as co-constitution of matter and discourse, also the researchers and their technical equipment become a crucial part of the research context and analysis (Jackson, 2013). For instance, how the cameras and microphones locate in the classroom, where the researchers physically stand, among other things, become an inseparable part of the material-discursive classroom practices. This calls for a context-sensitive study of how agency is co-produced by different participants.

Inasmuch as the students and teachers can act agentically, preliminary findings in the study point that also technological tools and artifacts powerfully co-constitute agencies through the entanglement of human and nonhuman material elements in the classroom. In engaging with digital literacy practices, for instance, technology may become an active agent when using a specific word processing software programme. Digital writing composes a complex entanglement of matter and discourse, as the software programmes possess performative qualities; they work in certain ways with specific properties and functions (i.e. each human move is met with a countermove by the device). Writing as a doing, then, is not determined solely by the internal goals and intentions of students and teachers, nor the materiality of technology, but rather by the entanglement of these in the classroom. Hence, it is expected that the performativity of technology cannot always be reduced to the intentionality of its users, or even those who have designed the software. That is, what actually happens in the classroom does not always necessarily equal to what the teacher and students intend to do.

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