In many countries all over the world, digitalization has, during the last decades, had an impact on teaching practices. This has led to opportunities for teachers, e.g. more accessible colleagues and material via the internet, and challenges, e.g. teachers’ decreased autonomy to self-regulate their work due to platformization, i.e. digital platforms designed in particular ways for communication, assessment, and schoolwork, finding their way into the teaching practice (Selwyn et al., 2017; Williamson, 2017). In this environment, European policies aim at supporting schools to take advantage of digitalization and to promote teachers’ professional digital competence (PDC), where one aspect is to facilitate students’ digital competence (European Commission, 2020; European Commission et al., 2022; Redecker & Punie, 2017). Previous research highlights teachers’ complexity in utilizing PDC, leading to dilemmas and negotiations in practice (Löfving et al., 2023). However, in the literature, there is a focus on teachers’ PDC concerning technological and pedagogical competences on an individual level rather than as a collective responsibility in the school organization, leaving other aspects sometimes unattended (Skantz-Åberg et al., 2022). Further, research on PDC often draws on teachers’ self-evaluation through surveys (Moltudal et al., 2019; Svoboda et al., 2020; Tomczyk, 2020; van de Oudeweetering & Voogt, 2018). Even if these findings are valuable, we here want to investigate teachers’ PDC through their everyday work as part of a larger organization. 

The present study is part of the project Reconfigurations of Educational In/Equality in a Digital World (RED) (https://www.edu-digitalinequality.org). We contribute with an ethnographic approach to be able to explore teachers’ daily experiences and interactions connected to their PDC that take place in practice. We use the lens of disruptive fixation, where educational reforms addressing digitalization, and calling for disruptive solutions, often are framed by powerful outsiders in a first cycle, reworked in a second cycle by educational experts who present solutions, and then executed in a third cycle by, here, teachers. However, the problematization and the reforms seldom take all unmeasurable aspects into account. Instead, teachers must respond to unanticipated destabilizing forces. Thus, the objective is to unpack what in the teaching practice particularly enables and constrains teachers to utilize various aspects of PDC when teachers are understood to be part of a digital teaching practice that reaches beyond the individual teacher and the classroom.

The results show that new time-consuming teaching tasks, e.g., administrating digital technology and instructing students how to use a wide range of such technology, are identified to constrain teachers utilizing diverse aspects of PDC. Additionally, there are enabling factors, e.g., a wide range of resources and infrastructures for communication. We will elaborate further on these constraining and enabling factors.

The study takes place in a highly digitalized teaching practice. Thus the results are useful for researchers and school organizations in other emerging digital teaching practices in Europe and other parts of the world. We hope for interesting discussions on how our contribution can illuminate how organizations can further facilitate diverse aspects of teachers’ PDC.

The study takes its departure in qualitative ethnography, where it seeks to understand teachers’ PDC through their work in a Swedish highly digitalized school (grades 6-9). Sweden is of particular interest as it is part of the Nordic countries in Europe, where there is a long tradition of a high degree of self-determination for teachers to interpret policies in their local teaching practices (Klette, 2002). The methodology is chosen to gain first-hand knowledge by observing what is happening in situ for an extended period (Hammersley and Atkinson, 2007). The data was gathered for one year in 2022 and 2023 when two researchers observed five teachers’ work. The researchers wrote fieldnotes, collected documents, took pictures of artifacts, interviewed, and had shorter conversations with various staff members in, and in close connection to, the school. The interviews have been transcribed, then read and re-read, and together with the other data material, discussed by the participating researchers to gradually identify themes in the entire data set during the fieldwork. Writing field notes and comparing and discussing them with others is often an essential part of ethnographic work (Emerson (2011). Using this methodology, we, the researchers, could reflect on what we had observed and decide how to conduct the fieldwork further. The involvement of several researchers provided a nuanced understanding of the teaching practices by observing with various concerns in mind (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007), and multiple interpretations were discussed and reformulated during the year of observation. Findings were also discussed with researchers in the international RED project during online meetings throughout the year. The findings presented here derive from analysis using a disruptive fixation lens previously used in ethnographic educational studies (Sims, 2020). Disruptive fixation means that educational reforms addressing digitalization often are “based in technologically centered formulations” and “move through cycles of ‘disruptive fixation’ that consolidate, rather than dismantle, inherited patterns and inequities” (Sims, 2020 p.183). That means powerful outsiders, e.g., politicians, formulate problems that call for disruptive solutions. These solutions are formulated in a second cycle by educational experts who try to meet the needs and gain support from those powerful outsiders. In a third cycle, the ones who are supposed to execute the reform initiatives, here the teachers, tend to look for well-known stabilizing resources to lean on. All the cycles are part of digital reforms in education, even if we focus on the teachers.

While teachers in this study are tool-oriented, as Selwyn et al. (2017) previously have identified in other contexts, other aspects of PDC are more or less left out. Even if this teaching practice is highly digitalized and centered around various platforms, the teachers spend much time instructing students on how to use these artifacts. This finding adds to previous results on platformization by Williamson (2017) and can be regarded as a new teaching task constraining opportunities to focus on other areas of PDC. The different platforms thereby constitute teachers’ PDC in several ways. Even if there are enabling factors such as infrastructures for communication and moments of actively engaging students, e.g., when teachers instruct the students to film their speeches, extensive and diverse expressions of creativity in the teaching practice seem to be constrained by activities steered by the platforms. However, further research is needed on how school organizations can facilitate teachers’ PDC, not leaving it to single teachers to interpret and utilize all by themselves.

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