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This dissertation explores how digital media and tools can be integrated into creative and relational processes within the subject of Art and Crafts in primary school. The study challenges teaching approaches that primarily associate the digital with individual achievement, and instead asks what might occur when digital technologies are encountered through the process-oriented and experimental practices of the Art and Crafts subject. When digital media and tools are activated in such contexts, aspects of the digital come into view that otherwise often remain hidden. The digital reveals itself as something malleable, disruptive, embodied, and relational.
The research is grounded in an a/r/tographic methodology (Irwin et al., 2006), in which the researcher moves between artistic, pedagogical, and scholarly positions. Through three articles, a theoretical and practical framework is developed that sheds light on different approaches to the digital as material in education. Article 1 (Elmies-Vestergren & Kukkonen, 2024) draws on Foucault’s (1975/1991) critique of discipline and control, and Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987/2020) theory of assemblage, to conceptualize the digital as a shifting and dynamic material. Article 2 (Elmies Vestergren, 2023) builds on the theory of sensuous didactic design (Østern et al., 2019) and investigates how encounters with tablets inspired by contemporary art can be both creative and exploratory. Article 3 (Elmies-Vestergren, 2024) explores how the teacher’s role is reshaped in relation to the digital, using the framework of professional digital competence (Kelentrić et al., 2017).
The dissertation is largely based on explorations conducted with a firstgrade class in the spring of 2021, where the pupils participated in workshops inspired by the works and practices of contemporary artists Petra Cortright and Cory Arcangel. The workshops supported an open and inquiry-based approach, where the aim was not to learn technology, but to create with and through digital media. The children used tablets to experiment, fail, collaborate, and investigate, with the teacher acting as co creator and guide within this space (Elmies-Vestergren, 2023; 2024). In these situations, the digital did not appear as a neutral tool but emerged as a material with the potential to foster community, disrupt expectations, and open spaces for exploration.
A recurring theme in the dissertation is how Art and Crafts, as a school subject, offers a particularly meaningful space for raising critical questions about the role of technology in education. When the digital is encountered through the subject’s process-oriented and relational practices, both its possibilities and limitations become visible. The digital can be co-creative, but it can also regulate, isolate, and constrain. The dissertation shows that such experiences cannot be predetermined; they must be explored in practice—in the creative and relational space between teacher, pupil, and material.
In the discussion, I examine more closely how the creative and the relational, within an a/r/tographic approach, emerge as mutually reinforcing dimensions. Creative practice opens space for process-oriented exploration and meaning-making in encounters with the digital as material, while relationality enables a pedagogical practice—and a shift in the teacher’s role—that allows space for the shared, the unpredictable, and the co-creative.
This dissertation does not conclude in a traditional sense, but presents a research contribution that points to the need for new approaches in a reality where the digital and the analogue are increasingly interwoven. My contribution lies in making visible how Art and Crafts, as a creative and relational subject, offers a unique entry point for engaging with digital media and tools in primary education. In this subject, the digital is not only understood as a tool, but encountered sensuously, materially, and in community—as something to explore, negotiate with, and critically examine. This opens space to investigate what the digital does to us, what we want to use it for, and what we perhaps should avoid.
This is particularly important when working with young children, who are in the process of forming foundational understandings of both technology and of themselves as creative and sensing beings. Contemporary art (Rebentisch, 2015) contributes with approaches that invite participation in, rather than acceptance or judgement of, the digital world we are part of. This points toward a conception of the digital in schools that emphasizes embodiment, wonder, materiality, and relation—and it is within this orientation that my contribution to the field is situated.
