Making sense of digital communication between students, parents, teachers and school leaders in Danish state schools

Abstract

Communication in Danish schools takes place with the aid of digital platforms developed and/or subsidised by the public sector and has done so for more than two decades. Within the same time frame, commercial social media platforms have emerged and become successfully integrated with key communicative practices. In order to understand how these communicative practices come about, we conducted interviews with students (from two different age groups), parents, teachers and school leaders in two primary and lower secondary schools in Denmark. The interviews focus on sense-making processes in digital communication and were analysed using Lomborg’s concept of communicative genres in social media. The analysis yielded four analytical categories through which the meaningfulness of using different digital platforms was assessed: (1) importance, (2) precision, (3) speed and (4) frequency. The findings are discussed in the framework of platformisation as well as the notion of technology paternalism. We argue that critical reflection on the use of commercial platforms in public institutions is needed. When key communicative practices in this arena rely on the services of data broking commercial actors, we risk further normalisation of problematic datafication.