Digital infrastructure as a media environment must be understood as embedded in social processes and spatial structures. Considering measures aimed at digitalisation of schools at the knowledge and infrastructure level and practices teachers and pupils develop in building digitally enhanced environments in the classroom, questions about changes to teaching situations arise. Situational analysis (Clarke et al., 2022) allows research on the complexity of spatial-material and communicative-discursive networks. Taking digitally extended learning environments as an example, combinations of situation-analytical mappings prove helpful in depicting interactions of social actors and nonhuman actants (Clarke et al., 2022, p. 12) and their positioning in constructing teaching and learning situations.

Digital artifacts and their implementation and integration in classroom practices are at the core of recent discourses in education. Measures of saturating institutionalised pedagogical contexts (School, University) with digital technologies. In the European context the examples of Austria, Germany and Switzerland (BMBWF, 2018; Educa, 2021; KMK, 2021) show measures aiming at three levels:

• Expansion of digital infrastructure (equipping schools, school staff and pupils with digital devices) and its management (creation of administration units and platforms)
• Redefinition of new knowledge structures for teaching (competency frameworks, curriculum reforms)
• Restructuring of teaching through teacher training and further education regarding the use of digital teaching/learning materials and corresponding models of teaching and learning

This meets structural indicators of curriculum, teachers, assessment and a so-called “digital education ecosystem” (Eurydice, 2023) for digital change at the European level. Initiatives to digitalize institutionalized pedagogical spaces provide specific infrastructures. These infrastructures are inscribed with certain ways of acting and convey particular ways of knowledge construction into classroom situations. Also, digital devices like smartphones as always available technological artefacts shape everyday classroom practice not planned by administrative measures. The ways teachers engage with the learning environment and use options of providing and communicating the use of digital media could be planned (cf. Petko, 2020; Schmid et al., 2020). In this process, “a specific teaching and learning environment” (Petko, 2020, p. 115) is constructed. There is still little research on spontaneous situations that arise in the classroom without having planned the use of technical devices in advance.

Discourses of progress associated with digitalisation promote assumptions of teaching situations being “improved” by digital artifacts (Selwyn, 2022, p. 26f). The paper discusses how educational research may be inspired by Science and Technology Studies. Technical artifacts are analysed as part of knowledge construction (Wyatt, 2008) and teaching is understood as an institutionalized and professionalised “situation” (Terhart, 2009, p. 103) of normative character (Hollstein et al., 2016, p. 44) in the classroom as a socially and communicatively constructed space (Christmann, 2022; Knoblauch & Steets, 2022). The paper aims at developing an informed position by discussing technological determinism (Wyatt, 2008) and how it is enacted in the ways teachers select and position technology and technological artefacts in the classroom. Therefore, the guiding question of the paper is how digital artefacts are used in classroom situations and how they are situated as artefacts in the course of knowledge construction.

Drawing on situational analysis (Friese, 2023), and inspirations from Science and Technology Studies (Hackett et al., 2008) the idea of following artifacts – as opposed to following the actors (Wyatt, 2008, p. 170) – is taken up. Complexities of teaching in classrooms as socio-technical situations will be analysed so as to better understand and challenge ways of thinking about school and knowledge (cf. Lynch, 2008, p. 10). Classroom practices and the construction of digitally enriched learning environments is often linked to planning classroom settings. At present, schools have very different conditions for digital teaching. It is therefore not possible to assume “stable, circumscribed situations” (Friese, 2023, p. 115). Given different starting conditions, the classroom infrastructure and digital artefacts as a constitutive element in the creation of situations move to the centre of observation. Especially their role in established classroom practices of knowledge construction help to identify, if proclaimed changes or progresses are made and what role they actually play in teaching and learning. Situational analysis and analytical maps are used in order to reconstruct situation-specific discourses, arenas and positions (Clarke, 2016). Focusing on digital artefacts in use in the classroom, the paper draws on the four possible kinds of maps exemplified by Clarke et al. (Clarke et al., 2022), situational maps help to identify “major human, nonhuman, discursive, historical, symbolic, cultural, political and other elements” (Clarke et al., 2022, p. 10) and identify key elements to be mapped in relational maps that “explore relations among all the key elements” (Clarke et al., 2022, p. 13). Especially for detangling “social, organizational and institutional dimensions of the situation”, social worlds/arenas are key elements in the analysis of classroom situations, distinguishing the social world inside classroom walls from the social arena of school for instance (Clarke et al., 2022, p. 14). Positional maps shed light on discursive positions in the situation and lay out “axes of concern and controversy” (Clarke et al., 2022, p. 15) enabling a differentiated look at knowledge as constructed issue in teaching situations. Characteristically, all four kinds of maps take nonhuman actants “seriously as active, coconstitutive elements” (Clarke et al., 2022, p. 15). Questions of where and how digital elements are placed in learning environments and how discourses and dynamics are developed in relation to their placing are therefore met with this methodological approach. This opens up new perspectives on educational media research on teaching and digital media.

The following example is a social science class in a fifth grade. In this class personal smartphones of pupils turn into artifacts of engagement with an exhibition about school back in time, today and tomorrow organised within the school building. As soon as technical artefacts are located or placed in the physical learning space, presuppositions about their role in knowledge construction are enacted. Situated opportunities of action are realised by teachers and learners within the classroom situation in relation to the spatial-technical-social environment. In the example pupils use their smartphones to take photos and videos of the exhibits. The sequence offers potential to take a closer look at media and digital media placed within the infrastructure of the lesson and ways of interaction by different actors. Practices range from distancing to engaging with the exhibits. Different ways of knowledge construction enfold as pupils interact with each other as well as the exhibits and their personal smartphones, producing media-representations of their experience. Questions of knowledge construction through media engagement, power and participation, connected to digital artefacts could be transferred to platforms, software solutions and digital teaching materials. But the focus will shift from effects of technologies on teaching towards processes of knowledge construction in specific situations, of use and placement of digital artefacts in classroom interactions. Following artefacts and asking for how they are communicatively integrated in knowledge construction in classroom situations proves useful with regard to complex structures and varying technical arrangements, social roles and practices. Situation analysis brings implicit aspects to the surface in order to better understand the relationship between education and its technology.

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