Educational media are often viewed as 'objects' or 'tools'. Practice focusses e.g. on features of tablets, their usability and their capabilities to reach the given learning objectives (e.g. Stoltenhoff 2019). Research regularly focuses on how media can support the learning processes of students (e.g. Bernard et. al., 2018). From a media studies point of view, those perspectives are problematic, since they usually leave out e.g. the medial preconditions of knowledge production, cultural practices, or power relations and the constitution of subjects (e.g. McLuhan 1964; Winkler 2004) that are also important for education / ‘Bildung’ (Allert/Richter 2018). Moreover, those perspectives reproduce the ‘invisibility of media’ that media theory problematizes and aims to overcome (Krämer 1998, Winkler 2004). Instead, our approach assumes that medial preconditions are crucial for a critical research and practice of EdTech, and that they can be heuristically analysed as 'media constellations' (Weich 2020). This implies to understand media as a mutual interplay and production of materialities, knowledge/practices, subject positions and contents, and that reflection should begin with the analysis of this interplay. Based on this understanding, one can e.g. pose questions that probe how adaptive learning systems address students and teachers as objects and subjects of (self-)optimization and (self-)surveillance; how the learning content is constituted by technological and conceptual preconditions; what power relations, discourses and practices are inscribed in the system (Weich/Deny/Priedigkeit/Troeger 2021); and how students and teachers appropriate them in classroom practices. In various workshops with schools, we use the media constellation analysis (MCA) to analyse and reflect on educational media together with teachers. Teachers name challenges or planned undertakings concerning educational media. After the group decides which of the challenges/undertakings should be worked on first, subsequently a brainstorming is conducted about elements that are crucial for the given media constellation and try to map their interplay. Based on the question which of these elements and entanglements are beneficial or problematic, the workshop finally collects and discusses possible modifications that might change the media constellation for the better. The presentation will first outline the MCA. It proceeds by some examples from our research (e.g., on the adaptive math program bettermarks. In the last step, concepts of media reflection workshops with teachers, and some of their experiences based on MCA are shown. By sharing insight into our continuous re-modelling of workshop concepts, we will also discuss recurring problems and possible pathways for adapting this concept for teacher workshops.

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