With the aim to equip young people with skills, knowledge and competences for dealing with the challenges and uncertainties of the 21st century, educational experts have come to the realisation that this cannot be accomplished by school alone and should not be reduced to subject-specific learning. To understand and enhance students’ ability to navigate a digitally connected world and to steer this world to new futures, studies have adopted broader approaches which involve schooling and educational media and look beyond the school at further relations, practices and systems in which young people live. A decade of research from the Connected Learning Alliance (CLA) has shown that students learn most when educators give them the opportunity to follow their interests, to embed their learning in social relationships, and to connect their learning to real-world opportunities beyond the classroom (Ito et al., 2020).

Many emerging initiatives around the world have taken an ‘ecological’ approach to learning ecosystems (cf. Otto/Kerres 2023), which have been described as ‘a potential game-changer for today’s learners’ (Al-Fadala, WISE, in Hannon et al. 2019, p. i). In connecting different in and out of school learning spaces like schools, museums, libraries, youth centers under the umbrella of “educational ecosystems”, providers aim to offer young people more open and expanded learning opportunities. However, despite the thorough engagement with ecosystem research, projects mostly retain the individualist epistemology underlying mainstream educational research or focus on the communication and governance between the institutions involved (Huber et al. 2020). This stands in tension with a thorough conception of an ecosystem which emphasizes the interconnectedness and inter-relationships among biological, physical and chemical actors. In building on previous research in education we aim to adopt the conception of an ecosystem as ‘a fundamental organizational unit of the biosphere in which biological communities interact with their non-biological environment through energy flows and material cycles’ (Yu et al., 2021, p. 151). In this way, ‘ecosystem science is the study of patterns, processes, and services of ecosystems’ (ibid.).

In our presentation we will present the findings of a study of three such educational ecosystem projects in Germany which are funded by a company foundation. With a common slogan these networks offer STEAM based learning through gaming, robotic, digital production in makerspaces and youth centers or research-based learning in museum and school. Key underlying questions are how digital media technologies are embedded in these ecosystems, how they relate to traditional media and what kind of practices evolve within their contexts. One of the underlying theses of our research is that educational ecosystems can be considered as media ecosystems in which the interplay between different ‘media constellations’ (Weich 2020; 2023) is crucial. Media constellations can be conceptualized as a co-constitutive entanglement of materialities, knowledge/practices, content and subject positions. Between institutions within a given ecosystem, there might be continuities and compatibilities as well as frictions and tensions between their media constellations which can stabilise the ecosystem, helping it to thrive, but could also destabilise the ecosystem, potentially leading to rupture.

The presentation compares these three educational ecosystems with the following questions: Which goals are being pursued by the different actors in the network? Which media constellations do they create to reach their goals? What expectations, fulfillments and disappointments do the actors experience? And which frictions and tensions can be observed in these spaces?

Based on ethnographic research we aim to provide deep insights into how these educational ecosystems are developed, what they offer for participating youth and most importantly what young people make of these opportunities.

The research design is rooted in an ethnographic qualitative research paradigm, with participant observation, interviews, and thematic analysis, and draws from media anthropology (Coman 2005) and media theory (Easterling, 2021; Krämer, 2008). The project focuses on three maximally contrasting cases: 1) Pop-up Makerspace/ City library: Developing/Changing ecosystem 2) Research Learning/Museum of Natural History, Partner schools. Emerging ecosystem 3) Maker mobile/ City, Youth Centers: Stable ecosystem One key method to explore participants’ experiences is semi-structured interviewing. Providers are interviewed in two stages: Stage 1 explore goals, barriers and enablers. Further interviews with providers and young people are identified via a snowball method, until saturation is achieved. Stage 2 interviews reflect on initial findings, exploring whether findings resonate across cases. The second key method is an ethnographic sensitivity to ‘following’ threads, i.e., following things, actors and institutions across time and space (Marcus, 1995) within and across media constellations. Interview partners are likely to mention objects, people, institutions, practices, discourse or content which they consider key to the ecosystem. The research team identifies one object and one institution to ‘follow’ for each case study, i.e. to visit, to conduct participant observation, and to write extensive fieldnotes (Emerson et al., 2011). In each case study, two young people have been invited as key informants. The researcher follows their practices across the locations of the ecosystem. The focus lies on observing how media constellations unfold and how objects and students move across media constellations within the ecosystem. Analysis of the interviews and fieldnotes uses thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006; 2020), coding the interview material and fieldnotes, systematising these codes to central themes that respond to the three sub-questions ([i] goals, [ii] barriers and enablers, [iii] harms and benefits). Analysis also crafts contextualised user stories, to add nuance, complexity and narrative richness in order to understand how young people traverse the media constellations in which they are involved. From this, the project develops a systematic broader response to the overarching research question, teasing out which patterns, practices and services are visible in educational ecosystems. This cascade of findings enables the team to identify implications for practitioners creating, catalysing or managing educational ecosystems.

The findings tease out how divergent media constellations constitute educational ecosystems, what enables them to thrive or fail, and what renders them stable or fragile. By identifying emerging themes and key media constellations across educational ecosystems, the paper presents continuities/compatibilities and frictions/tensions within the ecosystems. By crafting user stories rooted in young people’s experiences of the ecosystems, we aim to show their ‘journeys’ between different media constellations, and the impact of these journeys on young people’s narratives of self, community, connections, learning and technology. In addition to these findings, the project aims to contribute to academic debates on ecosystems in education by exploring the different understandings of this key word “ecosystems” as enacted in practice. The paper ends by reflecting on implications for future research and for creating and sustaining educational ecosystems.

Braun, V., & Clarke, V. (2006). Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 3(2), 77-101. https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa Braun, V., & Clarke, V. (2020). One size fits all? What counts as quality practice in (reflexive) thematic analysis? Qualitative Research in Psychology, 18(3), 328-352. https://doi.org/10.1080/14780887.2020.1769238 Coman, Mihai. (2005). Media anthropology: An overview. http://www. media-anthropology. net/coman_maoverview. pdf Easterling, K. (2021). Medium Design: Knowing How to Work on the World. Verso. Krämer, S. (2008). Medium, Bote, Übertragung: Kleine Metaphysik der Medialität. Suhrkamp. Emerson, R. M., Fretz, R. I., & Shaw, L. L. (2011). Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes. University of Chicago Press. Hannon, V., Thomas, L., Ward, S., & Beresford, T. (2019). Local Learning Ecosystems: Emerging Models. https://www.wise-qatar.org/2019-wise-research-learning-ecosystems-innovation-unit/ Huber, S. G., Werner, R., Koszuta, A., Schwander, M., Strietholt, R., Bacso, M. A., & Nonnenmacher, L. (2020). Zusammenarbeit und Bildungsangebote in Bildungsnetzwerken–Entwicklungen, Nutzen und Gelingensbedingungen. IBB Pädagogische Hochschule Zug. Ito, M., Arum, R., Conley, D., Gutiérrez, K., Kirshner, B., Livingstone, S., Michalchik, V., Penuel, W., Peppler, K., Pinkard, N., Jean Rhodes, K., Tekinbaş, S., Schor, J., Sefton-Green, J., & Watkins, S. C. (2020). The Connected Learning Research Network. Reflections on a Decade of Engaged Scholarship. Connected Learning Alliance. https://clalliance.org/publications/theconnected-learning-research-network-reflections-on-a-decade-of-engaged-scholarship/ Otto, D., & Michael K. (2023). Distributed Learning Ecosystems in Education: A Guide to the Debate. Distributed Learning Ecosystems: Concepts, Resources, and Repositories. Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden, 13-30. Weich, A., Koch, K., & Othmer, J. (2020). Medienreflexion als Teil „digitaler Kompetenzen“ von Lehrkräften? Eine interdisziplinäre Analyse des TPACK und DigCompEdu-Modells. k:ON -Kölner Online Journal für Lehrer*innenbildung, 1(1), 43-64. https://doi.org/10.18716/ojs/kON/2020.1.3 Weich, A. (2023). Medienkonstellationsanalyse. In L. Niebling, F. Raczkowski, & S.Stollfuß (Eds.): Handbuch digitale Medien und Methoden. Springer VS. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-36629-2_28-1 Marcus, G. (1995). Ethnography on/of the world system: The emergence of multi-site ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology, 24, 95-117 Yu, G., Piao, S., Zhang, Y., Liu, L., Peng, J., & Niu, S. (2021). Moving toward a new era of ecosystem science. Geography and Sustainability, 2(3), 151-162. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geosus.2021.06.004