Written by: Fred Rune Bjordal

Abstract: This article explores how and in what ways digital artefacts become active participants in teachers’ reflections concerning their professional practice. Digitalisation is an important part of teachers’ professional environments, requiring them to relate to digital artefacts in various ways as part of their professional practice. Through semi-structured interviews with 15 lower-secondary school teachers, teachers’ reflections on being professionals in an increasingly digitalised teaching environment are analysed using a conceptual framework of what-, why-, how-, and where-to-artefacts. The article argues that affordances are constructed in the relationship between artefacts and humans, and that these characterise the regulating qualities of both parts of the relationship. The article shows that when teachers interact with digital artefacts, different spaces for negotiating affordances between teachers and such artefacts are created. The article argues that although teachers dominate the teacher–artefact relationship, they activate the digital artefacts as dominant due to an impression of such artefacts as un-transformable. The article contributes with valuable insights to teachers’ notions of their relationship with digital artefacts in a time where digital technology is becoming increasingly complex and therefore complexifying the teachers’ ways of being professionals.

Keywords: digital artefacts,  digitalisation,  lower-secondary education, teaching