Conference Agenda

In recent years, attention has globally been drawn to what is perceived as an educational challenge of increased school attendance problems (Kearney & Gonzálvez, 2022; Tunkkari et al., 2025). In parallel, teachers’ workload has been noted to increase (Creagh et al., 2025), a tendency influenced by increased demands for data reporting, including documenting students’ attendance at schools. On a policy level in Finland, the problem of school absenteeism has been thought to most efficiently be tackled by accurate attendance data that can help predict which students are at risk for developing habits of much school absence, leading them to being left behind educationally (OKM, 2023). This focus builds on the assumption that accurate and large amounts of data are needed to be able to understand the scope of the social problem of school absenteeism and create profiles of at-risk students that should be targeted with early interventions. In 2021, a project aimed at reducing the number of absences and creating a unified monitoring system for the creation of statistics on school absence was launched by the Finnish Ministry of Education, targeting all compulsory education for 6-18-year-olds (OKM, 2023). The project led to an amendment in the Basic Education Act in 2023, requiring schools to “prevent absences and systematically monitor and intervene in them” (OKM, 2023, p. 5).

In this policy environment, the understanding is that absence is an indicator for student well-being (Kearney & Gonzálvez, 2022) and that the datafication of students’ schooldays will improve data management (Bodén, 2016), providing data to be able to find out how to lower the rates of absence. Until 2023, there was, in Finland, no unified statistics on school absences or a standardized way of gathering said data due to municipal autonomy (Sandhaug et al., 2022). The report introduced ready-made categories that every school had to collect data on using a school administration platform. The report did not state which platform had to be used, but at the time in 2021 to the present day, Wilma (provided by the private multinational corporation Visma) is used by nearly all Finnish educational institutions, from early childhood education to secondary education. Therefore, Wilma is at the center of the monitoring of absences in Finland.

In this article, we scrutinize the intertwining of platformization of education and teachers’ work regarding the supervision of students’ attendance at school. We refer to this intertwining of usage of platforms and teachers’ educational work as datafication practices. The aim of this study is to ethnographically understand teachers’ datafication practices as these unfold intertwined with the teachers’ professional considerations and the affordances provided by a school platform. Thus, we strive to identify how platform choices determining what is technically and socially possible on the platform are informing pedagogical practices. How are teachers enacting datafication as part of their professional practices?

Through our study, we draw attention to how the platform is used to tackle what is constructed as the problem of unattendance through the regime of datafication, realized through teachers’ datafication practices. Through an abductive process during and after fieldwork, our analysis came to focus on three aspects of datafication of education (Pangrazio et al., 2024): reduction, abstraction and individualization. Reduction entails the practice of reducing complex social phenomena to single data points in a predefined categorization system. Abstraction points to the fact that said social phenomena are abstracted from their embedded social contexts, including the abstraction of data from the platform itself. Lastly, individualization calls attention to the fact that datafication turbocharges a neoliberal form of competition, measurement and comparison between individuals to be able to categorize them based on their datasheet.

The rising prevalence of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and widespread use of digital technology in schools raises questions about how relations between humans and machines influence human relationships, how we perceive knowledge, and how power is distributed in educational spaces at all levels. In this paper, I will discuss what role educational ethnography can play in understanding these questions and why participant observation and long-term ethnographic fieldwork play an important part in understanding a changing world for both educators and pupils/students. The research question for this paper is “What role can ethnography play in understanding social relationships in educational settings shaped by digital technologies and GenAI”?

In my own ethnographic fieldwork with middle school boys in Inland Norway, I saw how digital technology and social media permeated their social life and understanding of the world around them. This is true for Norwegian schools in general, as over 90% of Norwegian pupils have access to personal digital devices at school (The Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training, 2024), 94% of 9-11-year-olds have their own cellphone, and 84% of youth between 9 and 18 use social media (The Norwegian Media Authority, 2024). Furthermore, the rise of GenAI gives both optimism and concern to educators, pupils, students, parents, and others. The prevalence of digital platforms and the growth of AI make it crucial for educational science to understand how these platforms fit into pupils’ and students’ lives, and what they are doing to and for them. Einar Duenger Bøhn, for instance, worry that delegating reading and writing to GenAI affects our ability to think, know, and learn, and that relying on an outside authority (the AI) when thinking and working counteracts the possibility of being enlightened and educated (2024).

This paper will discuss ethnographic approaches to understanding the intersection between digital and non-digital everyday lives, how they influence each other, and how we can access and understand the rapidly changing worlds of young people in educational settings. To do so, I will combine perspectives on ethnographic fieldwork in the more traditional sense from the late Norwegian anthropologist Signe Howell (2018), where ethnography is presented as long-term and holistic in scope (p.2), with newer approaches to digital ethnography or netnography (Miller, 2018; Kozinets, 2019). Netnography is described as a way of gaining cultural understanding through “systematic, immersive, and multimodal use of observations, digital traces, and/or elicitations” (Kozinets & Gretzel, 2024, p.1). I will discuss how these approaches can be combined, and whether a new ethnographic ‘ideal’ is necessary to grasp the world as it currently is, perhaps in the form of a patchwork ethnography (Günel & Watanabe, 2023) that includes digital spaces.

A methodological discussion regarding educational ethnography in a changing world is connected to the kinds of questions we ask as researchers. Our methodological choices need to address whether the digital and non-digital can be neatly separated in any sensible way, how we can follow our participants into and between platforms and spheres online and offline, and how we can trace influences going back and forth between spheres. Furthermore, we must consider what an educational space currently is, as self-improvement, learning, and growth is often sought after in online spaces in forums, YouTube, and social media. And what role does AI play in all of this? This paper will not answer all these questions but discuss how ethnography can contribute to a deeper understanding of these topics. These discussions and questions are broadly of interest to the field of educational ethnography, not just the Norwegian context.

This paper analyzes the educational impact of the development and use of digital platforms in school contexts, with a special focus on digital governance processes, the platformization of education, and the expansion of datafication systems in secondary education. This research focuses on two levels. First, it highlights the impact at the pedagogical level, that is, on the teaching-learning process. Second, it focuses on the implications at the organizational level and seeks to explore how digitization has changed the dynamics of the school with students, families, teaching teams and departments, management teams, training centers, and administrations.

The first part presents a theoretical overview focusing on the main debates on digital governance in education, technological acceleration, and educational transformation on a global scale, as well as the ways in which these processes are being appropriated and reinterpreted by different actors in the educational community. It shows how the deployment of digital infrastructures is redefining education systems on a global scale (Perrota et al., 2021). Recent research indicates that the intensive adoption of educational software and hardware, accelerated especially during the pandemic, has produced profound transformations in school governance, based on imaginaries that prioritize efficiency, measurement, and optimization of educational processes through increasingly automated algorithmic logics and coding systems (Decuypere et al., 2021).

The study draws on the concept of socio-technical imaginaries to examine how certain views on digitization, artificial intelligence, and the educational use of data shape pedagogical, organizational, and management practices in educational institutions. Based on a case study conducted in the autonomous community of Castilla y León, in Spain, it analyzes the perceptions and experiences of the educational community in relation to the use of digital platforms, paying attention to their impact on teaching and learning processes, school organization, teacher professional autonomy, and educational governance.

The results show how digital platforms, especially Microsoft 365, are reshaping school governance through anticipatory logic, automation processes, and new teacher training models, with significant effects on educational practice and the organizational culture of schools. They reinforce techno-solutionist approaches to educational improvement, while introducing new forms of managerialism and educational marketing linked to artificial intelligence systems and predictive algorithms, with effects on educational processes at different scales (Swist & Gulson, 2023).

The study concludes with a series of reflections and proposals aimed at rethinking digital governance from an educational perspective, focusing on digital sovereignty, the critical use of data, and the strengthening of professional autonomy in secondary schools.