Proto-practice: fostering postdigital school development

Postdigital culture extends beyond the mere interwovenness of digital and analogue, representing a fundamental cultural transformation characterized by sociomaterial heterogeneity, institutional disruption, and uncertainty. In this context, postdigital school development demands an axiological principle that rejects linear, instrumental understandings of change, instead embracing complexity, multiplicity, and ongoing negotiation. We introduce proto-practices – emergent, not-yet-realized proposals for future school practices rooted in existing ones – as a lens for examining, better understanding, and designing this development. Drawing on fieldwork in six Future Classroom Labs across three European countries, we present a typology of proto-practice comprising six dimensions: design, feasibility, continuous deformation, horizontal diffusion, distributed agency, and affectivity. This framework addresses a gap in critical edtech studies (CES) by theorizing school development as an evolving, participatory process that challenges technological determinism. By infusing CES with insights from practice theory, our analysis foregrounds the cultural shifts of postdigitality, offering both a theoretical intervention and a practical vantage point for engaging with the complexities of postdigital education in general, and edtech in particular.