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This article explores lesson enactments as co-constitutive of human-technology relationality in everyday schooling, rather than neutral backdrops for educational activities. In doing so, the article introduces maintenance as its key concept, drawing on insights from maintenance studies and actor-network theory (ANT). Being both theoretically and empirically informed, maintenance means reconsidering lessons, and digital technologies, as part of lively and vulnerable objects achieved in sociomaterial practices and not merely stable in function and use. The empirical case of lesson enactments comes from fieldwork with an upper secondary school in Sweden during Covid-19. The article analyses situations of maintenance with online class calls and scheduling meetings. Herein, lessons turn into a topic of concern and mechanisms of maintenance enact educational order and prevent disorder. The article demonstrates how putting maintenance to work articulates and identifies so far neglected and mundane practices with digital technology in education. In light of this, the article argues for recognising maintenance in educational practice as too long overshadowed by use, reinforced by a persistent user-technology dichotomy. Finally, the article discusses how maintenance invites reconsiderations of the dominant before-after debate that the Covid-19 pandemic attracts and calls attention to the mundane maintenance of lessons regardless of breakdowns.

The thesis investigates everyday teaching with digital technology during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021. The pandemic was one of the world’s largest disruptions to everyday education with both health and education at stake. With the pandemic control measures affecting upper secondary education in Sweden, gathering in the classroom cannot be taken for granted and digital technologies accelerated and intensified everyday practices. The aim is to explore the relation of teaching and digital technology. How can we understand the ways in which digital technology and teaching become jointly experimented with to cope with pandemic uncertainty?

With an Actor-Network theory (ANT) approach, the thesis puts emphasis on how everyday teaching holds together at the pandemic intersection of routine and breakdown. The everyday teaching practices during the pandemic is an empirical focal point for inquiry into how they become enacted and, secondly, what the implications are for knowledge production when examining this novel educational practice with ANT’s relational materialism. To answer these questions, ethnographic methods are used with an upper secondary school in Sweden from May 2020 to June 2021. The fieldwork consists of empirical engagements in school visits, interviews, and online observations. In line with recent ANT scholarship, the methodological approach is articulated as a care-ful methodology. It implies tracing vulnerable and stable relations that enact sociomaterial practice and acknowledging cuts and becoming.

The results show how a manifold of more-than-digital practices enact everyday teaching. The included studies in the thesis examine attendability and mundane rituals, lesson enactments of scheduling practices, and digital platforms that co-produce specific practices while obscuring others. Teaching in the pandemic challenges taken-for-granted notions of a rapid transition to distance and online teaching. By surfacing neglected aspects of everyday teaching with digital technology the thesis discusses how ‘digitalisation of teaching’ erases the local work of everyday teaching as an equipped practice. In conclusion, the proposal is made that maintaining teaching takes into account the materiality, abilities, care, and vulnerabilities that enact everyday teaching.

This paper examines the implications of platforms as a repertoire for knowing and relating the intensities of pandemic restrictions on teaching and schoolwork. Building on platformisation in education, what work platforms do in unpredictable everyday pedagogical encounters is investigated. Specifically, the paper explores a methodological potential with platforms’ capabilities to pull some things together while supressing others. Drawing on ethnographic interviews with teachers and students in Sweden in 2021, everyday platform practices such as handling assignments, requests to connect online, and repetitive notifications are analysed with actor-network theory. Tensions of discomforts, resistance, and trust unfold critical acknowledgements of digital platforms as more complex objects than shaping pedagogical encounters prior to their practices. Instead, capabilities emerge as mutually rendered. The analysis shows that platforming well-bounded domains for clearer and more flexible teaching and schoolwork incoherently make educational practices less so, highlighting crucial openings to surprise and curiosity of pedagogical encounters.

In this chapter, we introduce the configuration of caring cuts. Composed of care and cuts, two key notions in feminist posthumanism and Actor-Network Theory (ANT), caring cuts addresses the entanglement of epistemology and ontology. By putting to work an ontology of relational materialisms, the chapter explores how to respond to the mess, emergence, and elusive objects that become centred by our concern and ways of producing knowledge with and on postdigital worlds. It means that vital methodological questions are raised for postdigital relationalities in education and elsewhere. Instead of seeking to untangle the postdigital, caring cuts is put to work to examine mundane research events with sensibilities of the world-making practices of research. We argue that caring cuts affords acknowledgements of the collective responsibilities that research practices involve and bring attention to the inevitably untidy and non-innocent character of knowledge production and making worlds researchable. With caring cuts, modest interruptions and uneventful events suggest a methodological sensibility of not too hastily putting things ‘right’ but acknowledging that other worlds are possible. This means that caring cuts invites thinking and researching more-than-digital relations anew.

This article is a collective response to the 2020 iteration of The Manifesto for Teaching Online. Originally published in 2011 as 20 simple but provocative statements, the aim was, and continues to be, to critically challenge the normalization of education as techno-corporate enterprise and the failure to properly account for digital methods in teaching in Higher Education. The 2020 Manifesto continues in the same critically provocative fashion, and, as the response collected here demonstrates, its publication could not be timelier. Though the Manifesto was written before the Covid-19 pandemic, many of the responses gathered here inevitably reflect on the experiences of moving to digital, distant, online teaching under unprecedented conditions. As these contributions reveal, the challenges were many and varied, ranging from the positive, breakthrough opportunities that digital learning offered to many students, including the disabled, to the problematic, such as poor digital networks and access, and simple digital poverty. Regardless of the nature of each response, taken together, what they show is that The Manifesto for Teaching Online offers welcome insights into and practical advice on how to teach online, and creatively confront the supremacy of face-to-face teaching.

Mass school closures and restricted mobility during the Covid-19 pandemic have intensified matters of technology, teaching, and participation in schools. In response to this situation, this paper examines how attendance practices work during school closure and screen-saturated pandemic isolation at a Swedish upper secondary school. The aim is to empirically and theoretically explore school closure attendance by focusing on the sets of strategies and enactments that make school ‘attendable’ when being ‘in the right place at the right time’ becomes ambiguous. A relational materialist methodology is deployed with online interviews with six teachers during the first pandemic wave in 2020. The analysis traces empirical events that enact different school closure attendance devices: the video roll call, attendance performance, and ‘click like’ in the Microsoft Team-feed. The article highlights how attendance monitoring shifts and how attendance acts upon teaching, and vice versa.

This paper takes on the rise and implications of platforms as a repertoire for knowing, doing, and relating the intensities of pandemic restrictions on teaching and schoolwork. Building on critical work on platformisation in education, the paper investigates what work platforms do and how in the unpredictable everyday of pedagogical encounters. To do so, the paper explores a methodological potential with platforms’ capabilities to pull some things together while supressing others. Drawing on ethnographic interviews with teachers and students in upper secondary education in Sweden in 2021, everyday platform practices are analysed such as dealing with assignments, requests to ‘connect online’, strategies with web cameras, and coping with repetitive notifications. Working with actor-network theory and sensibilities towards tensions of discomforts, resistance, trust and intimacy, the paper unfolds acknowledgements of digital platforms as relationally enacted and more complex objects than shaping pedagogical encounters from the outside or prior to their practices. Instead, capabilities emerge as mutually rendered. The analysis shows that platforming well-bounded domains for clearer and more flexible teaching and schoolwork incoherently make educational practices less so. At the same time, the platform becomes weak and unreasonable. Incoherence and unpredictability stress critical openings to surprise and curiosity of pedagogical encounters.