Simona Bernotaite

• Bernotaite, Simona (2026). Exploring otherness: the contextualisation of digital instruments into teaching practices. Learning, Media and Technology. ISSN 1743-9884. doi: https:/doi-org.ezproxy.inn.no/10.1080/17439884.2026.2633255. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  The increasing digitalisation of education has directed scholarly focus towards technologies and how they become part of the teaching practice and govern education. This study contributes to the research on digital technologies by examining a Norwegian Curriculum Planning Tool (CPT), introduced with the Knowledge Promotion Reform 2020 to support local curriculum work. Through the lens of actor-network theory (ANT), the study analyses how this instrument is contextualised or decontextualised through actor relations across schools. Building on teachers’ feedback about the instrument and interview data, this study explored misalignments restricting teachers’ planning practices, breakdowns and absences of relations that could ensure the durable use of the CPT. The messy ordering of relations across schools revealed the otherness of the CPT as an instrument that becomes partially contextualised, transformed or disconnected from teachers’ planning practices. The findings point to the multiplicity of governance through digital instruments across schools and stress the importance of contexts as constructed through relations in understanding the governance of education.

• Bernotaite, Simona (2025). Teachers’ pedagogic knowledge in the digitalization of curriculum support. Journal of Curriculum Studies. ISSN 0022-0272. doi: 10.1080/00220272.2025.2460478. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  Digitalization in education and the continuously growing presence of digital curriculum instruments have been approached as networked governance with a focus on private commercial actors. By comparison, teachers have been perceived as mere users of the digital instruments provided to support them. This study explores the Norwegian Knowledge Promotion reform as a translation of the policy intention to support teachers’ local curriculum work into a digital Curriculum Planning Tool (CPT) with a particular focus on teachers’ pedagogic knowledge. The findings illustrate how the Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training emerges as a boundary actor by delegating to other actors the activities of research and evaluation, consultation and conducting collaborative service design and development of the CPT. Through collaborative practices, teachers’ experiential knowledge contributed to the problematization of the lack of curriculum support, consultation with private consultancy companies that developed the CPT and adjustments to the CPT rather than to the decision-making about digital curriculum support. The network of digital curriculum support making emerges through an entanglement between the programmatic discourse of national curriculum making and practical discourse consisting of local curriculum work, blurring their boundaries and shaping a new space of networked governance.

• Bernotaite, Simona & Karseth, Berit (2024). The OECD’s construction of future imaginaries for curriculum reform. Critical Studies in Education. ISSN 1750-8487. doi: 10.1080/17508487.2024.2419875. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Karseth, Berit; Bernotaite, Simona & Sundby, Anniken Hotvedt (2024). The OECD’s narrative on the future curriculum: issuing values. Nordic Journal of Studies in Educational Policy. 10(2). doi: 10.1080/20020317.2024.2361937. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Bernotaite, Simona & Ottesen, Eli (2023). Entanglement of support and governance in digital curriculum instruments: The case of educational reform in Norway. European Educational Research Journal. doi: 10.1177/14749041231213902. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  Digital instruments developed to support education practices add new dimensions to education governance. Among such developments is the digitisation of the national curriculum through instruments that govern teachers’ planning practices. In this article, a semiotics of configurations approach is applied to analyse a digital instrument, the Curriculum Planning Tool (CPT), developed with a renewal of the Norwegian curriculum to close the gap between the national curriculum and local enactment. The findings demonstrate how the CPT produces a structured vision of the teaching planning process through a template-like arrangement of planning components. Simultaneously, through enabled forms of action, the instrument controls the teaching planning process while leaving a place for pedagogic autonomy to determine teaching and assessment forms within the limits of the national curriculum. Finally, the CPT operationalises the intentions of curriculum renewal by creating expectations for teacher collaboration which can also contribute to increased process control where teachers control each others’ practice. This article contributes to the understanding of the potential of digital curriculum support instruments to shape relations between hard and soft modes of governance.

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• Sundby, Anniken Hotvedt & Bernotaite, Simona (2026). Linking Curriculum Content and Technology - Does it Matter? Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  The design of curriculum documents across countries is in a process of transformation, changing from printed books or pdf-files into completely digital versions. Having open access for all has a democratic perspective, since everyone can access it. However, such digital transformations can also shape teachers’ practices, as digital technology is not neutral but represents specific ways to work with the curriculum. Through inscribed modes of action, digital technology can govern teachers’ reading and understandings of the curriculum content and shape practices. How digital technologies operate as actors tend to get more and more focus within the broader field of education (Williamson, 2017); however, within curriculum theory the topic has not yet received much attention (Krause, 2022). In the present inquiry, we locate our study within curriculum theory and aim to explore the digital transformation of curricula.

• Karseth, Berit; Bernotaite, Simona & Sundby, Anniken Hotvedt (2023). The Nordic data and research as evidence in the OECD future curriculum narrative. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Karseth, Berit; Bernotaite, Simona & Sundby, Anniken Hotvedt (2022). Curriculum making for the 21st century:The paperwork of OECD. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Bernotaite, Simona (2025). Digital curriculum policy instruments: Curriculum support as governance of teachers’ practices. Universitetet i Oslo. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  Over the past few decades, teachers’ pedagogic practices have been increasingly digitalised through various instruments designed to support their work and pupils’ learning. Simultaneously, these digital instruments have come to govern teachers by transforming existing practices and creating new ones. This doctoral project investigates the governance of education through digital curriculum policy instruments, with a particular focus on a Norwegian Curriculum Planning Tool (CPT, Norwegian: Planleggingsverktøy for opplæring) developed as a part of the renewal of the Knowledge Promotion Reform. Through three empirical articles, this project aims to contribute to the understanding of how digital curriculum policy instruments shape the governance of education through entangled relations among teachers, the state, the curriculum and digital technology. The first article explores the interface of the CPT as a mediator with a potential to govern planning teaching through inscribed modes of action. The template that emerges within the CPT aligns with the licensing model of curriculum control and governs planning teaching while allowing for pedagogical autonomy. The findings demonstrate how digital curriculum policy instruments intertwine legally binding curricula as a form of hard governance with digital support as a soft mode of governance. The second article examines the design process of the CPT as a translation of policy intentions to support teachers’ curriculum work into a digital instrument. The findings highlight the role of the Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training as a boundary actor delegating research, evaluation and consultation to other actors. Although collaborative practices during the design phase opened space for teachers to contribute with pedagogical knowledge, they were not given decision-making power. This article illustrates how the design process blurred the boundaries between programmatic and practical curriculum discourses, thereby creating a new space of governance. The third article in this doctoral project was initially intended to study how teachers use the CPT to plan teaching. However, data collection revealed that the instrument was not widely adopted across schools. This raised new questions about the actor relations through which digital instruments become a part of school practices. Thus, the article explores the contextualisation of the CPT and focuses on the misalignments between the inscribed modes of action and teachers’ planning practices, as well as the breakdowns and absences of actor relations. The findings demonstrate how, through actor relations, the CPT transforms across schools from an actor governing collaborative teaching planning to a mere storage of old lesson plans or a hyperlink on a curriculum website. Across these studies, the project demonstrates how digital instruments such as the CPT transform through actor relations, producing different possibilities for governance. It shows that governance is continuously reconfigured through formed or dissolved actor relations. Despite these transformations, the empirical data suggest that actor relations are shaped by licensing approach to curriculum control which ensures teachers’ autonomy in curriculum work. Furthermore, the project offers nuanced insights into the construction of teachers’ autonomy. By analysing the interface, design, and contextualisation of the CPT, it reveals how teachers’ autonomy is relationally constituted and shaped by broader relations, rather than solely by the instrument’s interface. Finally, the research contributes to understanding the contextualisation of digital instruments, including those that fail to become a part of teachers’ practice. It highlights how digital instruments transform and dissolve through breaking or absent actor relations and offers valuable insights for educational research, policymaking and practice.

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