From Automation to Symmation: Ethnographic Perspectives on What Happens in Front of the Screen

The work of automation in education is not automatic but needs to be ‘done’. Grounded in an ethnographic study which followed a Grade 9/10 class through their daily activities in a ‘regular’ high school for a year, this paper asks how automation is enacted by students and teachers, and what these practices imply for forms of knowledge and relationality. Inspired by feminist technoscience, and drawing on recent work on everyday automation, the paper suggests that the ‘auto-’ of automation in practice is very often more of a ‘sym-’, a ‘with’, in which students and machines co-produce something that looks like automation. Rather than ‘automation’, observing practices in classrooms shows practices of ‘symmation’. The paper elaborates on symmation scenes of realigning, revising and reworking relations. Automation is, in these scenes, deeply embedded in social relations, involving the processing of ability, difference and hierarchy. Rather than the industry hype of automation, these sets of socio-technical practices alert us to the messy, non-linear, contested, warm realities of education (and not just learning) in schools today. The paper identifies specific aspects of how these socio-technical realities impact knowledge and teacher-student relations.