Digital education platforms are in tremendous upsurge, where COVID-19 acted as a catalyst, and have increasingly found their way into the core of various education institutions. Critical education scholarship has extensively studied these developments and the intricate ways in which these platforms (re-)shape what it means to (be) educate(d) (Williamson, 2017) and how education itself is changing form (Decuypere et al., 2021). Recently, growing concerns have been expressed regarding the differential implications for teacher professionalism in an increasingly ‘platformised’ school environment, where digital education platforms are not only increasingly grounded as new forms of educational experts, but where the central role and expertise of teachers itself is equally destabilising and losing its self-evidence (Hartong & Decuypere, 2023). Put differently, what it means to be a teacher in a school, is increasingly becoming entangled with the presence of digital education platforms, shaping the pedagogical autonomy and labour of teachers, and the (potentially) perpetual need for professionalisation this implies (cf. Lewis & Decuypere, 2023; Selwyn et al., 2017).  

Given these developments, it is crucial to articulate empirical accounts of the complexities of how teachers’ professionality is being reshaped, and how the teacher and teaching itself are being negotiated through platform logics, as well as the type of educational participation these platforms envision (Perrotta et al., 2021). Such accounts of platformised teacher professionalities are still largely absent in the literature (but see e.g. Landri, 2021), most significantly of all in relation to cases of non-proprietary and free and open-source (FOSS) platforms. That is to say, contemporary critical scholarship has predominantly based its critiques on the study of proprietary platforms such as Google Classroom or ClassDojo (e.g. Manolev et al., 2019), thereby largely sidestepping prominent ‘open’ alternatives such as Moodle. However, Moodle is increasingly being implemented across Europe in schools and other educational institutions as a central learning management system and learning platform to counter the contemporary dominance of proprietary actors exerting large amounts of power on education (Moodle, 2021; also Kuran et al., 2017). Fostering the four freedoms of FOSS (using, studying, altering, and improving the code ‘freely’), Moodle principally envisions teachers, firstly, as being technically capable of redesigning the open infrastructure of its platform and, secondly, as willing to open up their teaching practice by collaborating with other teachers internationally (https//moodle.com/about/open-source/). At present, we lack understanding of how this enforces different responsibilities and foci within teachers’ professionality.

To address this gap, this paper closely engages with the embedded Moodle infrastructure of one school, so as to understand how teacher professionalities (i.e. what it means to teach and be a teacher, and what is required to sustain this) are shaped through the platform. The objective of this study is primarily to analyse the educational consequences of such platforms regarding teacher professionality beyond often-mentioned privately induced logics. That is, this study focuses on the changing nature of pedagogy, responsibility, autonomy, and care, in the teacher’s professionality. By focusing on a platform that in essence still has to be designed by local schools because of Moodle’s open and customisable nature, we aim to go beyond a critical attitude that considers digital platformisation as a general external development affecting education in largely problematic ways. Rather, we approach Moodle as a case through which we can conceptualise the context-specificity of school platformisation: not as a process where schools and teachers are passively affected by an external development, but as an educational process itself to which actors actively relate. This contribution consequently analyses the configuration of teacher professionalities up close through one localised school platform, and the way teachers ‘inhabit’ and enact this platformised environment (cf. Perrotta, 2023).

The theoretical and methodological framework of this study is informed by the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS). Broadly speaking, STS conceives of technologies such as digital education platforms as at once acting (that is, doing something to the world and structuring educational practices) as well as enacting (that is, making users think and act in particular and predefined manners) (Decuypere, 2019). For STS, platforms are, then, not neutral tools that are to be taken for granted; they rather performatively give shape to the world (Law, 2017), formatting new educational practices and configuring teachers and their professionality in distinct ways. Thus, platforms give form to or bring into being what it means to be a teacher and what it means to teach (cf. Woolgar, 1990). Embedded within this framework, the methodological focus of this contribution is twofold. First, a walkthrough method has been employed to initially develop a comprehensive overview of Moodle’s vision of and engagement with school education. Studying Moodle’s website, broader documentation, and the specific documentation of one school, generated the localised environment of expected use which regulates user activity. Subsequently, a technical walkthrough has been performed to study teacher interfaces of the localised Moodle platform of this school to examine how the platform envisions teachers to use Moodle and, consequently, how the teacher is designated a very specific educational, and platformised, shape (Light et al., 2018; Suchman, 2012). To do this walkthrough, different teacher interfaces were studied by the first author by actively navigating them as a regular user (van de Oudeweetering & Decuypere, 2022), covering a wide array of educational trajectories, each requiring distinct teaching activities (general science education, STEM education, arts education, vocational education). A protocol was designed to scrutinise the relational qualities of Moodle and the ways this digital architecture invites (inter-)actions of teachers. Second, to not overrationalise the performative power the digital platform exerts on ‘the figure of the teacher’, tailored interviews were conducted with teachers to scrutinise how teachers are configured together with Moodle and how teacher professionality emerges within this entanglement (cf. Suchman, 2012). Combining these methodological vantage points, this contribution ventures precisely at the compromised crossroad of digital platforms’ agency subtly (re-)configuring teachers and acts of teachers un-/binding themselves within platformised environments (cf. Perrotta, 2023).

This research project has a double finality. First, the study contributes to an empirical and conceptual understanding of platform-teacher configurations and the formation of teacher professionality through platformised environments. Moodle at once urges teachers to acquire and sustain new pedagogical-computational knowledge and expertise – while simultaneously shifting the locus of educational care and concern of teaching itself. Echoing a desire to remove spatiotemporal barriers between Moodle teachers all over the world and to reclaim ownership of one’s platform infrastructure, teachers are increasingly positioned as frictionless and technically proficient craftsmen in the platformised school environment. Teaching furthermore appears as at once necessarily caring for what takes place within the physical contours of the classroom while being simultaneously projected as a timeless and hypermediated endeavour. Lastly, platformised teacher professionality, and hence what it means to be a teacher, posits a politicised educational care of minimising dissent between various education actors and avoiding the risk of individual teachers’ wrongdoings. In conclusion, teachers’ pedagogical responsibility comes into being as re-spatialised (i.e. shifting boundaries of teachers’ concern and responsibility), perpetually synchronised and made present (i.e. perpetual care for pupils’ present activity), and synthetically entangled (i.e. conjunction of platformised and human agency) (cf. Gulson et al., 2022). Second, besides contributing to the conceptual complexity of platformised teacher professionalities, this study commits to a participatory engagement premised on a critical understanding of school platformisation. Based on the conceptual findings of this paper, the researchers also think with teachers about meaningful and educationally sustainable narratives of implementing digital education platforms. Arguing for shifts in pedagogical responsibility because of school platformisation allows not only to deconstruct the entangled nature of teacher professionality, but also to reconstruct practices with teachers that make teaching in these platformised environments more ‘habitable’ (i.e. to find an educational common ground) (https://www.smasch.eu/en/).

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