Reconfiguring the Classroom: Entanglements of In-service Early Childhood Educators and AI as a Subversive-feminist Force in the Postdigital Assemblage

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 11:45 am - Gold 2
  In Roundtable Session: AI in Early Childhood: Posthuman Perspectives on Digital Practices Across Children’s Geographies

Abstract

Purpose: This paper explores how a group of in-service early childhood teachers, entangled within the digital demands of their profession, engaged with AI as a co-constitutive force to subvert the exploitative structures of contemporary educational labor.

Theoretical Frameworks: Situated within a feminist postdigital framework (Hurley, 2023; Mikulan, 2024), I interrogate how more-than-digital technologies, particularly AI-teacher entanglements, can be reimagined as productions of resistance (Berry, 2014; Selwyn, 2016). These entanglements unfold through postdigital intimacies (Evans & Ringrose, 2025), where affective, embodied, and technological relations unsettle dominant narratives of efficiency and control.

Methods and Data Sources: Drawing on informal conversations with teachers who shared overwhelming exhaustion from the unrealistic demands of extensive digital documentation (i.e., 26-page lesson plans for 20-minute lessons, inputting weekly testing data/observational notes), this paper thinks-with (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) postdigital intimacies (Evans & Ringrose, 2025) to explore the entanglement of gender, labor, and technology in the contemporary teaching environment.

Findings and Discussion: The in-service teachers, each situated within the often invisible affective/embodied labor of early childhood education (Harding, 1991), encountered the intensification of digital tasks as part of broader gendered and neoliberal assemblages. Rather than remaining positioned as passive recipients of these technocratic impositions, their intra-actions (Barad, 2007) with AI-driven tools became acts of subtle subversion. These technologies were not simply adopted but entangled with teacher bodies, temporalities, and care practices. In engaging with AI, the educators reconfigured the postdigital landscape not only as a site of institutional demand, but also as a generative space for reimagining and resisting the dominant logics of productivity and control (Hurley & Al-Ali, 2021; Selwyn, 2016).

Scholarly Significance: This paper contends that, within this context, AI emerges as a co-constitutive, more-than-human/more-than-digital agent entangled in feminist praxis. Together with educators–particularly women negotiating the intensities of hyper-digitized, precarious labor–AI participates in reconfiguring the conditions of teaching and learning. Through these entanglements, the postdigital landscape is reworked, opening up space for more equitable, creative, and sustainable educational practices. This assemblage offers a potent counter-narrative to dominant framings of technological determinism, foregrounding situated, relational, and resistive possibilities within the everyday (Gibson-Graham, 2006; Bayne, 2015).

Author

• Jaye Johnson Thiel, University of Alabama