The use of digital technologies in school lessons has now become a matter of course. While this has long been empirically demonstrated primarily by the digitally modified presentation, processing and teaching of school material, there are now also significant, digitally enabled forms of presence and representation of people: Today, students are not only at a (their) place in class, but also, for example, as customizable avatars in classroom management apps, as telepresence robots in the classroom that can be controlled from home or as a callable (performance) data corpus on learning platforms. The project addresses this distribution by focusing on being a student not as a role of the physically delimited person, but as a specific practice of execution in which presence and representation technologies participate. Data corpora, avatars and telepresence robots seem to be insufficiently contoured and typified by traditional, fixed entity boundaries, as they overlap sign-like, physical, artefact- and person-related facets. The guiding question of the ethnographic project is how these shares of the distributed student:in-being are proceduralized and proceduralizingly involved in its execution. The analyses connect to current discourses on the dissolution of boundaries and the digitalization of schooling, but relate these developments to the participants themselves. By addressing this desideratum, the resources and challenges of being a distributed student are clarified and the entanglements of digital and analog worlds are explored. Furthermore, it will be possible to re-examine being a student in relation to being in the classroom (body-centered and spatio-temporally defined).

Funded by: German Research Foundation (DFG)
Duration: 36 months