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There is an apparent lack of theoretically robust definitions of digitalization and digital transformation in educational research. This article purposes to contribute to educational research and practice by understanding digitalization and digital transformation through educational theory. The approach to the research problem was first to theoretically define digitalization and digital transformation in schools in terms of human learning and development. This perspective suggested that digitalization may be a requirement for digital transformation but not an enabler. Moreover, it suggests that digitalization and digital transformation in schools are always anchored to human learning and development. Secondly, the approach empirically tests this theoretical development via a quantitative questionnaire survey with seventeen Swedish school leaders. The data indicated the theoretical development seems to hold in school practice as well as conceptually. Limitations to the approach were discussed, and suggestions to future research of remote teaching in rural schools are given. In particular, future research is suggested to develop, contrast, and use the definition.

The aim of this paper is to contribute to theoretical development within a field otherwise mostly characterized by empirical contributions, with a primary focus on the practice and perspectives of on-site facilitators. To theoretically understand the development and use of remote teaching, we focus on the interaction between systems of human activity in education and the relationships enacted in practice through their interaction, with a focus on on-site facilitators’ work. In doing so, we use the concept levels of scale in situated learning. Through levels of scale, we conceptualize the historical development of remote teaching as the large scale and the remote learning environment as the small scale. Integrating the levels of scale and tracing the historical development of remote teaching in Sweden into the enactments taking place in a classroom of modern language teaching is the concrete theoretical development that our aim entails.

Few notions seem to capture the imagination of education policymakers today as completely as digitalization and leadership. Through these two, schools are believed to become transformed, and in turn, these transformed schools will transform people and society. This paper critically analyzes a Swedish official digital policy instrument that materializes digitalized school leadership practice. The policy instrument is made available as a ‘helpful tool’ by a Swedish official education agency. The paper scrutinizes the policy knowledge process set to work within the instrument by the agency. Particularly, how the instrument may influence people to come to know and change schools, and how responsibility and risk of digitalization in schools seems to first be transferred to, and then between, people in schools. The paper is concluded by a discussion of how (a) three knowledge phases interact in the knowledge process of the instrument, (b) the technical – rather than social – solution that digitalized school leadership practice is found to be, and (c) implications for digitalization in schools as a social, cultural and historical phenomenon of interest to research.

The article adopts a critical approach regarding the political ambition of educational technologies (edtech) in schools. The focus of the article is to understand how school digitalization policy works on people in schools through meaning-making objects for thinking and acting towards digitalization in schools. A case of Swedish principals working with digitalization in schools was investigated in their municipal context of school development, where they were guided by a policy instrument of the Swedish National Agency for Education. Policy documents, from the agency’s instrument, transcribed interviews with principals, and principals ‘development plans’ (local policy), were analyzed with a focus on what objects seem to guide the thinking and actions of the principals. Specifically, the focus of the analysis regards what meaning digitalization school policy may be conveying to principals in schools, what meanings they attribute to edtech, and how they orient their and teachers’ work towards objects of digitalization in schools.