Enacting Multiple Childhoods: Micro‐Politics of Individualization and Collectivity in Norwegian Classrooms

Abstract Childhood in Norwegian schools is increasingly shaped by digitalization, framed in public discourse as both a risk and a necessity. Policy promotes digital competence as a basic skill, and digital technologies in classrooms form part of socio‐material practices that negotiate tensions between neoliberal individualization and Nordic welfare ideals of equity and collectivity. This study examines how learner positions in everyday classroom practices participate in the enactment of multiple childhoods, and how such enactments materialize broader societal struggles over autonomy, responsibility, and collectivity in Norwegian education. Using a relational ontological approach, we conducted a focused ethnography in a 5th‐grade Norwegian classroom. Data included two days of video‐recorded lessons and four semi‐structured focus group interviews with teachers and students. Analysis traced how assemblages of students, teachers, curriculum, digital technologies, and spatial arrangements participate in enacting learner positions and multiple childhoods. We found that learners were enacted in two dominant but intertwined ways: as autonomous individuals responsible for self‐regulated progress and as collaborative participants in collective practices. Digital technologies, work plans, and seating arrangements often scripted individualized learning, yet peer interactions and spatial configurations enabled moments of shared engagement. These enactments reflect contested ideals of childhood and education, revealing how neoliberal logics and welfare‐state values coexist and collide in everyday schooling. Childhoods in digitalized classrooms emerge as relational and fluid, enacted through socio‐material practices that negotiate competing norms of individualization and collectivity. Attending to the micro‐politics of the classroom challenges binary debates on technology and learning and illuminates how educational practices reproduce societal hierarchies of autonomy, accountability, and collectivity.