Introduction

The postdigital condition posits that technologies are an integrated part of learning environments and practices (Knox 2019; Jandrić and Knox 2022; Jopling 2023). This is visible across education including curricula (Aitken and Jones 2023), pedagogies (Fawns 2023), everyday learning and teaching (Carvalho and Yeoman 2023), and the organization of learning spaces (Carvalho and Lamb 2023; Lamb 2023). Structuring future social relations and educational possibilities, technologies are invariably future oriented (Macgilchrist et al. 2024). Educational technologies (EdTech) have become important signifiers in the production of future visions, where school technologization is put forth as a precondition for educational progression (Selwyn and Facer 2013).

From these points of departure, the postdigital classroom can be seen as the production site of educational futures. Broadly speaking, the classroom is the designated place where ‘calculated intervention’ takes place (Spindler and Spindler 1987: 6). These interventions are underpinned by global and national politics but also shaped by in and through the interaction of human and non-human agents in the classroom, including teachers, learners, management, and maintenance technicians as well furniture, devices, and infrastructures.

Postdigital classrooms thus open a plethora of questions regarding the processes behind the making of educational futures. How are educational futures produced in and through postdigital classrooms? Who are the producers? Where are they produced and what are the differences across the globe?

To address these and similar questions, we suggest the trope, the future postdigital classroom, to denote ongoing materializations and enactments of new formats for the technological, pedagogical, and social organization of learning spaces. The future postdigital classroom also works as a figuration and projection for emerging, potential, and possible spaces for education, including extended and alternative classrooms.

We are interested in how such realizations and visions are produced and negotiated (e.g., by tech corporations and companies, governmental institutions, policy makers, researchers, teachers, and students), where they are situated (e.g., in national contexts, local school environment, and global/local policy events), as well as how they are visually and discursively represented (e.g., in prototypes, reports, advertising, and stock photos). These questions lend themselves to a postdigital research approach ‘which implies a gathering of various research approaches around a common problem’ (Jandrić and Knox 2022: 790).

Main Influences

Studies of future postdigital classrooms draw from two major bodies of literature, both of which have recently undergone significant postdigital reconfiguration and development. The first body of literature broadly refers to future studies and the second body of literature broadly refers to studies of learning spaces.

The Future Classroom

The future postdigital classroom relates to the ongoing discussions on how the future of education is imagined and designed as part of and a trajectory for the postdigital landscape. Much work in this area addresses future imaginaries underpinning the design of digital technologies and the gap ‘between imaginaries and realities’ that, according to Lindberg and Johansson (2023: 2), ‘often leads to disappointment’. This disappointment reflects a distance between visions and products produced by policy makers and EdTech entrepreneurs, and the everyday realities of technology users.

An influential concept in this strand of research is sociotechnical imaginaries, introduced by Jasanoff (2015) to describe shared visions of a preferred future, enabled by technological progress. Studies drawing on this concept has shown how the sociotechnical imaginaries stemming from the EdTech and policy sector are often characterized by a digital hype and technological solutionism (Williamson 2018; Hrastinski et al. 2019; Rensfeldt and Player-Koro 2020; Rahm 2023).

In a Special Issue titled ‘Designing Postdigital Futures’, Macgilchrist et al. (2024) explore the gap between the production of future imaginaries through technology, policy, and educational formats and everyday experiences of these interventions. The articles in the collection point towards a contradiction between an understanding of education as ‘intentionally designed’ and at the same time ‘indeterminate’. This topic is further explored in the recent collection, Framing Futures in Postdigital Education: Critical Concepts for Data-driven Practices, edited by Buch et al. (2024) in which the authors focus especially on new technologies for learning analytics and their discursive framing, exploring the sociotechnical imaginaries underpinning data-driven practices in education.

In another Special Issue ‘Instituting socio-technical education futures: Encounters with/through technical democracy, data justice, and imaginaries’, Swist and Gulson (2023) focus on the instituting of sociotechnical educational futures in different learning contexts, with the aim of democratizing technologies. The editors suggest that one way of doing this is to ‘investigate alternatives to data and commercially-led visions of socio-technical education futures’ (Swist and Gulson 2023: 184).

Questioning dominant narratives through generating alternatives has been a top priority on the postdigital and critical EdTech agenda. For example, Ross (2023) question the anticipatory regimes that appeal to the categories of realism and necessity, which in the end serve reactionary agendas robbing different collectives of the power to dream. Calling into doubt a discourse centered on risks, he also suggest speculative approaches to explore a space of uncertainty and use it creatively. In the same vein, Rahm and Rahm-Skågeby (2023) advocate deliberately destructive speculative design, which would aim at identifying which technological assemblies should be dismantled or destroyed ‘to make things better’.

Other researchers have gone down a similar path by making use of different types of fictions such as speculative fiction (Selwyn et al. 2020; Mann et al. 2022; Hrastinski and Jandrić 2023), education fiction (Houlden and Veletsianos 2023; Hrastinski 2023), and critical design fiction (Sharma et al. 2021; Ventä-Olkkonen et al. 2021; Iivari et al. 2022).

The Postdigital Classroom

The future postdigital classroom relates to research about learning spaces as hybrid, interconnected environments. This discussion was initiated in the 1990s by researchers in the field of Networked Learning who highlighted the sociomaterial nature of learning spaces. By moving beyond the traditional dichotomy of online versus face-to-face learning, they emphasized that learning spaces are not just physical or digital environments, but dynamic entities shaped by the interactions between people, tools, and activities (Goodyear et al. 2004). Networked Learning research can be understood as a reaction against the technological determinism surrounding the introduction of digital technologies in education at the time (Hodgson and McConnell 2019).

The hybrid and co-constructed nature of learning environments is explored in the book Place-Based Spaces for Networked Learning, edited by Carvalho et al. (2016). Here, Gourlay and Oliver (2016) examine how students create and personalize their study spaces, both physical and digital, to support their learning needs. Students’ abilities to shape their educational surroundings is further discussed by Gallagher et al. (2016), showing how digital technologies enable online distance learners to create a sense of place in online environments.

By showing how physical and digital elements coalesce to support learning activities, this line of research can be used by educators and designers to create environments and experiences that is valuable for the learners. As suggested by Hodgson and McConnell (2019), this combination of pedagogical and sociomaterial perspectives aligns Networked Learning with postdigital approaches to education, and the research on learning environments have been advanced in this direction.

For example, the simplified distinction between the physical classroom and virtual spaces has been further discussed by Fawns (2019) who suggests a postdigital perspective on education to understand the ways in which digital technology shape the way students and teachers interact with each other and relate to information even in tech-free learning environments. Educational technologies are not ‘something about which we make simple decisions to use or not use’ but ‘something in which we are entangled in complex ways, and which is embedded in the wider culture’ (Fawns 2019: 142).

Similar ideas have been developed by Lamb et al. (2022) in their Special Issue titled ‘The Postdigital Learning Spaces of Higher Education’, where they suggest that the distinction between online and campus teaching ‘ignores the postdigital reality of contemporary learning’ (4). In a later article, Lamb (2023) develops on how this postdigital perspective complements established sociomaterial approaches in educational research by allowing a focus on specific technologies in the wider assembly of human and non-human actors.

Most work in this area concerns learning spaces in higher education. A notable exception is the edited volume, Postdigital Learning Spaces: Towards Convivial, Equitable, and Sustainable Spaces for Learning (Lamb and Carvalho 2024), that extends the scope of postdigital learning spaces research approach by exploring learning environments outside higher education, including compulsory schools, outdoor education, and learning spaces connected to cultural heritage and creative arts. The collection also carries forward the critical legacy from networked learning by asking about the role of digital technologies in the creation of sustainable and equitable learning spaces. What we propose is a continuation of this inquiry that explores what kind of educational futures are produced in the creation of learning spaces and representations of the classroom.

The Future Postdigital Classroom

Our trope, the future postdigital classroom, is an attempt to frame and delimit the vast research area that emerges in the meeting between postdigital future studies and postdigital learning spaces research, while at the same time maintaining and benefitting from the open and undefined concept of the postdigital (Jandrić et al. 2023a, b). In policy and advertising, the classroom is used as a metonymy, a rhetorical figure denoting the larger field of education. These visual and textual representations can be explored by researchers to understand the imaginaries underpinning educational development and future making, but we can also make use of this rhetorical technique ourselves by using the postmodifier ‘classroom’ as a prism to understand the complexities of postdigital education.

To begin with, the future postdigital classroom can serve as a materialization of what Lindberg and Johansson (2023) call ‘futures in the present’, the way in which future imaginaries of education are formulated, spread, and stabilized in society. This production of educational futures takes parts through textual and visual representations of future classrooms as a connected, technology-integrated spaces, but also within physical classrooms across the globe where these imaginaries are enacted, challenged, and negotiated. Attending to national and local differences between postdigital classrooms will highlight the relation between learning spaces and future making and might also challenge what may appear to be one globally dominant, prescriptive, sociotechnical imaginary for how the future of education should be organized (see also Good and Hof 2024).

The focus on postdigital classrooms can also serve as a method to study specific technologies in a broader context, a starting point to from which to ‘zoom in and out, from fine-grained features and micro-level activity, to broader assemblages and contexts’ (Fawns et al. 2023: 83). This ‘dual focus’ is a key ingredient in postdigital research that attends to the messiness and local configurations involved in the making, testing, and enactment of EdTech while simultaneously considering ‘the wider systems and structures to which it is connected’ (Knox 2023: 4). In this process, the classroom can be studied both as the figure in which digital technologies become visible and tangible and as the ground, the mundane and invisible environment in which these technologies are integrated (see McLuhan et al. 1977).

Studies on how the future postdigital classroom is produced, negotiated, and represented within and across geographical locations and spaces invite inquiries on the connections between these central aspects of the postdigital educational landscape—the production of educational futures and the entangled nature of digital technologies in learning.