Lesson Enactments: Maintenance in Everyday Educational Practice

Abstract

Abstract 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.