This dissertation explores the media environments of visual arts education in Sweden and Estonia and how educators understand, negotiate and enable this infrastructure. Based on the notion that the ongoing digitalization of the educational system in these countries makes established practices appear, it further discusses how visual arts education as a school subject is shaped in relation to different technologies for image making and school administration. The comparative perspective makes visible how these practices have emerged in specific cultural settings, including the historical development of compulsory education and the organization of teacher training in each country. The two-way relation in which media technologies used in education to some extent condition pedagogical practice at the same time as being dependent on the work of educators, is conceptualized in the title as enabling media.

Theoretically, the dissertation draws on infrastructuralism, suggested by Peters (2015), as a unifying concept for media studies interested in the logistical qualities of media. By using this perspective to study schools as media environments, the dissertation builds on an established interest within medium theory on the relation between compulsory education and media technologies. This tradition is developed here through theoretical perspectives and concepts from media philosophy, German media theory, infrastructure studies and science and technology studies.

Infrastructure studies also informed the methodological approach of this dissertation, a combination of short time ethnographic field work, site visits, interviews, and visual methods.

The results of the dissertation indicate that it is not only established media literacy competences such as the ability to interpret and create media content that visual arts education can contribute in our contemporary media society, but also the ability to recognize, visualize and reimagine the infrastructures and technologies involved in the distribution of media. This ability is conceptualized here as infrastructure literacy (Parks, 2010) and concretized in a tentative curriculum, including lesson plans and assignments designed to facilitate historicizing, explorative and material approaches to media in school art education.

This essay is a visual interpretation of the media ecologies of visual art education in Sweden and Estonia. As the title of the article suggests, an ecology of visual art education means infrastructures for accessing, producing, showing and sharing images. The study is empirically informed by social network analysis conducted in online communities and by interviews with teachers who are active in those communities. Graphs of activity and connectedness in online communities are included in a media ecology model, based on the teacher interviews. The model visually relates online collaboration with material technologies, such as classroom computers or cameras, and different forms of governance, such as curricula. The essay attempts to contribute to the existing literature regarding the relation between technologies and educational practice by combining digital methods with media ecology and infrastructure theory, and methodologically by using visual methods for interpretation.

Future workshops were originally developed to facilitate civic participation among groups that otherwise seldom take part in decision making processes, such as children and young people (Jungk & Mullert, 1987). It is a collaborative method where participants identify problems within a specific context and come up with concrete solutions together. This text combines the future workshop model with creative and participatory approaches as a way to discuss and imagine alternative futures for visual arts education with students in teacher training.

Här presenteras en modell för att arbeta med presentationsprogrammet Prezi i seminarier. Det pedagogiska upplägget fokuserar på hur Prezi kan användas för att stimulera samarbete och interaktion mellan studenterna och synliggöra den akademiska litteracitet som seminarieformen kräver. Modellen har testats under två år på ett seminarium i textkritik på Södertörns högskola, och har utvärderats av studenterna på kursen. Texten sammanfattar reflektionerna hos såväl undervisande lärande som hos studenter och argumenterar för att digitala medier kan användas för att öka studentaktiviteten samt att synliggöra processen att tolka och diskutera texter.

This chapter is a reading of one of Marshall McLuhan’s more experimental texts, The Medium Is the Massage (1967). The book comprises photographs, cartoons, collages and short texts that illustrate one of the key ideas in medium theory: namely, that media are environments that expand our senses and our way of organising time and space. This chapter discusses the relevance of this perspective in the hypermediated society of today and describes the theoretical legacy of McLuhan and medium theory in contemporary technology-oriented media research. It also addresses the context in which the book was written and attempts to nuance the contemporary understanding of McLuhan’s writing as techno deterministic. The Medium Is the Massage can serve as an introduction to McLuhan’s other work and is discussed here as a pedagogical text of relevance, not least for media education.

This case describes the development and implementation of the Future workshops method (Jungk and Müllert 1987), as part of a mixed methodology in a PhD project about media technologies and future imaginaries in school art education. The workshop method described here is an attempt to visualize media infrastructures in teaching and the imaginaries surrounding them, thereby making them possible for the research participants to discuss and critique. The practical lessons learned from this case are that designing a functioning research workshop resembles the pedagogic planning done in teaching. Ritual aspects and emotional labor are highlighted as necessary in the process, as well as staying sensitive to the context where the workshops are performed, and to my role as a researcher in this context. Discussing some of the shortcomings of creative methods, the study concludes that workshop methods benefit from being combined with other methods to include, for example, historical perspectives in the analysis. The messiness and non-linearity of the research process is described in the text as a simultaneous development of research questions, theoretical concepts, experiences, and methods.

Kapitlet diskuterar skolans digitalisering från ett lärarperspektiv med särskilt fokus på relationen mellan transparens och övervakning. Digitala system marknadsförs ofta som ett sätt att öka transparensen i skolan, att göra lärandet synligt och att tydliggöra kunskapskrav och bedömningsgrunder för elever och föräldrar. Samtidigt upplever många lärare att denna transparens också innebär ett slags övervakning av verksamheten som minskar möjligheten till improvisation, kreativitet och öppna lärprocesser.

Everyday communication is increasingly taking place within media at the same time as media is shaping our society and social life (Couldry & Hepp, 2017). In education we can see this process as the interplay between organizational reforms in schools, often through the entrance of digital administration tools pushed by commercial interest, and the use of data generated through digital systems to measure, compare and evaluate schools (Selwyn & Facer, 2013; Williamson, 2017). The introduction of digital technologies and systems into education is often advertised as increasing transparency – to make learning more visible for students and teachers, to explain previously opaque grading procedures and qualifications to parents and students and to improve communication between schools and the home environment. This paper explores how these claims resonate with how teachers experience the mediatization of their professional environment.

The proposed article draws on material from a recent study on how visual art educators relate to media and mediatic change within their subject. It suggests that while teachers do see the advantages of school digitalization as increasing the visibility of their subject and, by extension, also their professional status, it also makes possible processes of surveillance and standardization. By exploring how teachers recognize and negotiate the built-in biases of digital technologies, the article wants to contribute with a view on schools as mediatized environments and of teachers not only as media workers but also as agents of change. Theoretically, it draws on critical studies of educational technology, addressing the need not only to acknowledge the sociopolitical and financial interests embedded in educational technology and the relation between these markets and the policy sector (e.g. Selwyn & Facer, 2013; Williamson, 2017) but also to focus more on the everyday encounters that teachers and students have with digital technology (Selwyn, 2011). It also uses theoretical conepts from educational sociology (Ball, 2006) and literature from science and technology studies about the relation between professional practices, infrastructures and visibility (Star & Strauss, 1999; Suchman, 1995).

As both Star and Strauss (1999) and Suchman (1995) have shown, all representations of work risk leading to a reduction in complexity. From this perspective, the striving to make educational practices visible might come at the cost of specificity and autonomy. This dilemma is summed up by one of the teachers interviewed for this study, saying that “the digital brings the importance of new forms of knowledge to the fore, at the same time as it enables mechanisms of control”. Indeed, much work remains invisible for good reason, including the work of nurses and teachers who “may quietly carry out work reflecting a holistic view of the student or patient, carefully kept out of the range of a more bureaucratic, reductionist set of values” (Star & Strauss, 1999, p. 23). The messy processes of learning, including such elements as play, chaos, failure and confusion, is perhaps best kept at distance from management and parents.

The teachers in this study accounts for different strategies to keep at least parts of their classroom practices invisible. One of these strategies is to avoid using digital learning management systems and instead focus on interpersonal communication. Another one is to produce convincing manual paperwork in accordance with the perceived demands from an increasingly neoliberal school system as a kind of scene to hide behind. By presenting one thing and doing another, teachers can maintain established work practices and act in accordance with their professional beliefs despite changes in the educational policy landscape.

These approaches to pedagogical planning and documentation can be defined as what educational sociologist Stephen Ball (2006) calls fabrications, the conscious performance of pedagogical practice. Fabrications is in one sense the opposite to transparency as their aim is not to give a true image of what is going on in the classroom or to help student recognize their own learning, but rather at meeting the constraints of contemporary education. “Truthfulness is not the point – the point is their effectiveness” as Ball (2006, p. 696) puts it. For Ball, the process by which “[w]e articulate ourselves within the representational games of competition, intensification and quality” points to a “struggle over visibility” (p. 693) where teachers on the one hand submit to instrumental models of structuring and monitoring teaching and learning processes, and on the other hand produce convincing representations of these models as a strategy of invisibility.

The proposed paper discusses how fabrication in used in different ways to manage the demands of accountability and visible learning of the contemporary school system: on the one hand, a strategy double entries, where fabrications are kept at bay from everyday pedagogical practice, and on the other, anoverall dismissal of fabrications based on the fear that they will reshape the idea of education into a reductionist and instrumental model. The latter approach builds on some kind of fidelity to policy and guidelines and relies on the invisibility granted by not entering into systems of monitoring and documentation, whereas the former uses fabrications as a screen behind which other practices can be partly hidden, requiring a distanced and creative view on written rules and standards.

Digital activities are a natural part of children's and young people's everyday lives and offers opportunities for meaning and learning. Accessible technology has changed the producer and consumer role, and created what Henry Jenkins (2008) call a participation culture. This culture provides possibilities for a kind of collective learning, something that is necessary to master in order to participate in the new media society. In school, this becomes relevant in two ways. Firstly, by empowering all children and young people to participate in digital media culture. This is to overcome the “participation gap” that occurs when only those already interested in digital activities develop and produce content while that majority stays passive (Jenkins 2009, Kalmus et al 2009). Secondly, by using digital platforms in the knowledge and professional development for teachers. The latter has been increasingly used by teachers to create informal networks, forums and archives online to share and develop knowledge (Johnson et al 2014).

This study aims to understand how art teachers in Sweden understand media as a part of their subject, and how this understanding is brought forward in collegial online communities. The study is a part of an ongoing PhD project that aims to compare this Swedish online collaboration with that between art teachers in Estonia and Finland. The study is conducted as a media ethnography, combining tracings of discussions taking place in digital places (in written and multimodal texts) with interviews conducted with the participating teachers. To understand what online communication tools where used by art teachers and to what purpose, a survey was carried out through a union organizing most Swedish art teachers (Lärarförbundet). The survey was answered by 78 teachers and the results are discussed in this paper, together with material in the form of discussions taking place in online forums, both formal (like the Swedish Department of Education), semiformal (sites designed for teachers) and informal (like Facebook, Twitter or private blogs).

The results showed that online collaborative learning is very common among Swedish art teachers. They mainly use informal forums and they use it to 1, Discuss specific topics (like suggestions for lessons on a certain theme or recommendations of digital tools), 2. Share own content (like students work or planning) and 3. Engage in meta reflection on the conditions of art education and digital media. In my discussion this is connected to the history and terms for the subject as such. Visual arts education as a school subject in Sweden has undergone a change: from a focus on drawing to a focus on visual culture at large. This narrative is important for the teacher community and has lead to an ongoing discourse on the boundaries and content of the subject. Further, visual art education is a small subject and most art teachers are alone in their subject at their schools. The surveys show a connection between having few or no school colleges in the same subject and the tendency to engage in collegial discussions with other art teachers online.

This paper suggests that a broadening of MIL to include what Lisa Parks (2010) call infrastructure literacy - a close understanding of the material and infrastructural conditions of our current media landscape – is necessary in order for citizens to develop the critical skills needed to navigate and participate in the contemporary media society, as well as to shape the world of tomorrow. By exploring digitalization policy and K-12 curricula for Sweden, the paper shows that the field is currently dominated by an understanding of media as content or tools for communication, and of the future as predetermined by technology. It also shows a lack of critical perspectives when it comes to media used within education.

Virtual reality (VR) in educational settings is often promoted by commercial actors as a way to experience environments outside the classroom and a soon-to-be part of everyday teaching and learning. This study follows the development of an educational software package in a Swedish municipality that combines VR technology with 360° live footage from museums and science centers to enable students to visit these spaces from the classroom via their headsets. By focusing on the workarounds and configurations intuitively performed by teachers, students, museum staff, and technicians in this pilot project, different kinds of articulation work performed to make the technology fit with local conditions are identified, from hands-on repair and maintenance to the facilitation of interaction and presence. The collective effort put into making the technology disappear and create a feeling of unmediated experience or immediacy shows how global imaginaries about VR as an immersive technology are enacted by the participants, at the same time as the work put into the project made them challenge the idea of VR as a new everyday technology. This tension between the desire for immediacy and the hands-on work in the physical environment that goes into fulfilling these imaginaries points to the need for local production of educational technologies that recognizes their co-constructive, embodied, and situated nature.

Figure and ground are analytical concepts used to discuss how some elements of a lived situation dominate perception, while others remain in the background. This applies not least to media and research from the medium theoretical tradition as well as later scholarship on media infrastructures, which have been keen to explore the taken for granted or invisible aspects of the media landscape. In media education, however, there is still a tendency to focus on the figure of digital media by treating media technologies as tools or to focus on the critical evaluation of media content. This article draws on McLuhan’s co-authored textbook City as Classroom to suggest a pedagogical turn towards the ground of the internet. Based on concrete examples from middle school digital citizenship education, the article shows how a focus on the ground of digitalization actualizes topics such as environmental concerns, global inequalities and data privacy. These topics are conceptualized and discussed through the environmental/spatial metaphors clouds, exhaust and architecture.

Landets lärarutbildningar har problem med att förbereda framtidens lärare för den alltmer digitaliserade skolan. Digital kompetens är redan en integrerad del i skolornas verksamhet men lärarstudenter, skolor, lärarfack, politiker, teknikföretag och andra pekar på att landets lärarutbildningar släpar efter. Vår uppkopplade samtid behöver också satsningar på medie- och informationskunnighet (MIK). I den här artikeln beskriver och reflekterar tre lärarutbildare från Södertörns högskola över sitt arbete med MIK som inom ramen för en pågående satsning i lärarutbildningen används som samlingsterm för tre förmågor som både lärarstudenter och lärarutbildare bör nå: digital kompetens, mediekunnighet och informationskunnighet. Målsättningen med att implementera dessa tre förmågor och begrepp på lärarutbildningen har varit att kombinera konkret tillämpning och kritisk reflektion för att på så sätt skapa förutsättningar för att utbilda medie- och teknikmedvetna lärare för den digitaliserade skolan och det medialiserade samhället. I artikeln diskuteras organisatoriska och praktiska utmaningar med ett sådant utvecklingsarbete samt vikten av samverkan, erfarenhetsutbyte och kontinuitet. En slutsats är att det är viktigt att tänka på digitala medier inte bara i termer av verktyg utan också som miljöer inom vilka lärarutbildningen ska utbilda digitalt kompetenta lärare för framtiden och samtidigt behålla sin autonomi visavi starka externa ekonomiska, politiska och pedagogiska krafter.

Contemporary education in Sweden is characterized by two parallel processes: the implementation of digital tools in the classroom, on the one hand, and an increased emphasis on brain-based learning, on the other. Proponents of the latter strand of 'neuroeducation' claim that digital media might have harmful effects on learning and cognitive development. How do they then deal with school digitalization? By examining popular science books by influential neuroscience actors in the Swedish educational context, this study identifies two diverging discourses where digital technologies are discussed both as distractions in the classroom and as promising tools for personalized and self-optimizing learning. This ambiguity reflects a cautious criticism against school digitalization as overhastly, a critique that is also emphasized in recent policy changes in the Swedish school system. The article concludes that the impact of brain-based perspectives on educational digitalization policy have positioned neuroscience actors as a new kind of digital experts.

Visuell kultur är i dag en central del av skolämnet bild och kan användas för att beskriva både de visuella uttryck som omger oss och metoder för att skapa och visualisera ny kunskap. I den här boken lyfter författarna fram visuell kultur både som ett kunskapsobjekt och som en undersökningsmetod. Boken erbjuder ingångar till olika sätt att arbeta med bild i grund­skolan. Alla kapitel innehåller konkreta förslag på uppgifter eller övningar som kan anpassas och utvecklas vidare. Boken riktar sig till lärarstudenter och verksamma lärare i F-6 och på fritidshem. Den kan användas både i bildundervisning och i ämnes­övergripande eller tematiska projekt. Redaktörerna forskar inom området visuell kultur och har alla tre erfarenhet av att undervisa blivande lärare i bild mot yngre åldrar och fritidshem.

The work of creators of digital media today is profoundly reliant on the use of specialised software. Yet, software is not merely an instrument of labour. The current hegemonies of society are incorporated in the technological design of tools, explicating what Feenberg (2009) calls technical rationality. Different production frameworks can embed distinct forms of such rationality depending on the goals of their creators. Drawing on theories of knowledge and feminist theory of technological development, Forsler and Velkova present an analysis of the production frameworks of three different manufactures of software tools for computer graphics, both industrial and user-driven. The chapter contributes with a conceptual theoretical model of how these frameworks are underpinned by different epistemological assumptions and competing visions of media practitioners.

This article focuses on developing the idea process in visual art education by using digital peer feedback. In the school subject visual art, the visual idea process, e.g. when students sketch their ideas, is an important phase in a project. When an idea takes form, there is the possibility for considering the idea in a new way, for others to study and discuss it, and most importantly, for generating new ideas. By digitally sharing their visual ideas and providing feedback, students might become more aware of their own and others' processes. This study aimed to explore how eighth-grade students develop and share visual ideas supported by digital peer feedback. Thematic analysis was used to identify different types of feedback provided by students. A qualitative survey was used to investigate student perceptions of the feedback. Many students appreciated receiving feedback from peers. Some students made significant or minor changes to their visual ideas based on the peer feedback, while other students abandoned their initial sketches and created entirely new ones, or did not make any changes to their initial idea. These results suggest that giving and receiving peer feedback is something that needs to be practiced in different specific school subjects. 

Estonia has since the liberation from the Soviet Union in 1991 successfully branded itself as a digital society and an education nation. This transformation builds on a sociotechnical imaginary where the progression of learning and the advancement of future citizens is postulated by a restructuring of the classroom through digital solutions. In this case study, we look at a prototype of a future classroom that was set up at the Estonian pavilion at the world fair EXPO 2020 in Dubai, as part of a nation branding process, promoting the nation's educational system and prosperous ed-tech sector. The future classroom was promoted using slogans and futuristic visuals that targeted foreign investors and policy makers, in a way that suggested that the anticipated digital future already exists in Estonia, and therefore, is available for foreign investment, while at the same time connecting to a national and historical narrative of Estonia as part of the European cultural sphere.

Taking stock of media activist initiatives in the Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) region, this article discusses findings from case study research informing the media education platform “diraya.media.” Through participatory methodology, the case studies and the bilingual (Arabic/English) website aim to analyze and strengthen local media literacy pedagogies by learning with and from media activists in the region. This article reports on six case studies of SWANA-based media activist organizations and pedagogical material for the media literacy classroom. The goal is to reflect and discuss the methodological and theoretical ramifications of Diraya as a pedagogical space for reflection and knowledge exchange between media activists and other learners in the region and beyond. Drawing on the participating activists’ experiences, Diraya is embedded in the turn toward radical media education and civic media literacies, contributing to (1) de-Westernizing media literacy education, (2) creating more learning materials based on local activist knowledge as important resources to increase media literacy, and (3) enabling of long-term collaborations by archiving and making public experiences from SWANA-based media activists.