Distributed pupil-being. On the process of pupil-being as a practice with digital presence and representation technologies.

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Jochen Lange
• Subject Area: Educational Research on Socialization, Welfare and Professionalism
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 552189138

The use of digital technologies in educational settings has become a matter of course. For a long time, this primarily affected digitally modified presentation, processing and teaching of subject material. In recent years, however, digitally enabled forms of presence and representation of people have also been proven to be relevant for everyday school life: Pupils are no longer located in just one place. They are also present and represented as customizable avatars in classroom management apps, as telepresence robots that can be controlled from home, or as an accessible corpus of data on learning plattforms etc. The research project focusses on this distribution by understanding pupil-being not as a role of an body-bounded person, but as a specific practice in which presence and representation technologies are involved. It seems that avatars, telepresence robots and data corpuses cannot be adequately contoured and typified by traditional, clearly fixated entity boundaries as they overlap symbolic, bodily, artifactual and personal facets. The central question of this ethnographic project is how these proportions of the distributed pupil-being are involved in its practical performance in an proceduralized and proceduralizing way. The analyses affiliate to current discourses on the digitalization and translocality of educational settings, however, relate these developments to the participants themselves. By addressing this research gap, resources and challenges of the distributed pupil-being are identified and the entanglements of digital and analog spaces are explored. Furthermore, it is possible to re-examine being a pupil in its relation to the (body-centered and spatio-temporally defined) being in class.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants