Original Research

Playing to become literate: Teachers’ evolving roles during digital game-based learning in a Malawian childcare centre

Lauri V.J. Pynnönen, Lasse Lipponen, Kristiina Kumpulainen

Received: 26 Sept. 2025; Accepted: 01 July 2026; Published: 17 Aug. 2026

Copyright: © 2026. The Authors. Licensee: AOSIS.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Abstract

Background: Integrating digital game-based learning in early childhood education poses challenges for teachers, particularly in resource-constrained settings where traditional methods predominate and educators often lack formal pedagogical training.

Aim: To explore how teachers adapt their roles and pedagogical practices in a multi-age classroom where children aged 3–6 years engage with digital learning games.

Setting: A community-based childcare centre in rural Malawi where volunteer teachers with limited formal education facilitate digital game-based learning.

Methods: Ethnographic participant observation was conducted over one month (34 h across 17 sessions), using a developmental research sequence and focused ethnographic analysis of teacher practices, classroom interactions and adaptation patterns.

Results: Four interconnected themes were identified: (1) teachers moved from restrictive control to selective intervention, developing ‘adaptive oversight’; (2) technical challenges persisted, with teachers continuing to rely on external support; (3) embodied practices such as physical guidance and native language instruction remained stable, providing essential scaffolding; and (4) teachers gradually recognised and facilitated productive peer learning in the multi-age setting.

Conclusion: Given the absence of mother-tongue content and culturally relevant materials, teachers’ adaptation involved essential yet institutionally invisible cultural mediation work, creating hybrid approaches that bridged global technologies with local pedagogical traditions and children’s lived experiences.

Contribution: The study shows how teachers navigate digital learning through simultaneous adaptations: developing selective intervention strategies, managing persistent technical dependencies, sustaining embodied pedagogical practices and facilitating emergent peer learning, all while performing institutionally invisible cultural mediation work.

Keywords: digital game-based learning; teacher adaptation; early childhood education; focused ethnography; Malawi; community-based childcare centres; cultural mediation; multi-age classroom.

Introduction

Digital game-based learning promises to revolutionise early childhood education in resource-constrained settings, yet its implementation reveals a fundamental paradox: the teachers tasked with facilitating these technological innovations often lack both digital literacy and formal pedagogical training (Brown et al. 2023; Owusu & Govender 2023). In rural Malawi, most early childhood educators use traditional rote methods and teach without having completed high school or received any early childhood training whatsoever (Chirwa et al. 2023). Faced with the use of digital game-based learning, these teachers must navigate unfamiliar technology while attempting to balance structured guidance with children’s autonomous exploration: a pedagogical shift for which they have neither preparation nor local models to follow (Altinyelken & Hoeksma 2021; Tecce DeCarlo et al. 2018). It is within this challenging context that our study investigates teachers’ evolving roles during a digital game-based learning intervention. Despite growing research on digital game-based learning, a significant gap remains in understanding teachers’ evolving pedagogical practices. This is especially the case in early childhood education and in resource-constrained settings (Alotaibi 2024). This study addresses this gap by exploring: ‘How do teachers navigate their roles and pedagogical practices in a multi-age classroom setting where children aged 3–6 years engage with digital learning games?’ Our research examines a community-led early childhood classroom in rural Malawi, offering unique insights into digital learning implementation in contexts where communities have developed innovative educational responses to local needs. Malawi’s educational landscape is characterised by active community-based initiatives that complement formal educational systems, representing conditions found across much of rural sub-Saharan Africa where communities demonstrate remarkable agency in addressing early childhood education needs (Shallwani, Abubakar & Kachama 2018). This context, where digital game-based learning has been introduced with expectations of fostering high levels of learner autonomy, allows us to investigate how teachers with diverse experiential knowledge adapt when encountering educational technology while respecting local pedagogical traditions and constraints. The significance of our study extends beyond rural Malawi. As digital technologies increasingly permeate educational settings globally, understanding teacher adaptation of their teaching strategies becomes essential for effective implementation (Johler et al. 2022). Our findings have implications for teacher training programmes, educational policy and the design of digital learning interventions, contributing to broader discourse on digital pedagogy and early childhood education in the 21st century.

Role of the teacher

Prensky (2001) famously emphasised that in digital game-based learning environments, teachers must transition from being the ‘sage on the stage’ to a ‘guide on the side’. This shift requires teachers to develop new competencies, including technological proficiency and the ability to scaffold learning experiences within digital contexts (Becker 2007; Kacmaz & Dubé 2025). Kajamaa, Kumpulainen and Olkinuora (2020) found that teacher interactions in technology-rich environments reveal a more complex spectrum of expected roles: authoritative, orchestrating and unleashing, which highlight the multidimensional demands on teachers in novel learning settings. Fleer (2020) combines the multiple roles by stating that in digital play-based learning, teachers must balance structured guidance with allowing children’s autonomous exploration. This is vital for fostering both directed and emergent learning opportunities. However, given that teachers in community-based childcare centres often rely heavily on rote teaching and learning practices (Shallwani et al. 2018), the new roles and the transition to facilitating autonomous digital exploration represent a fundamental pedagogical reorientation. The digital learning environment also transforms expectations around play facilitation and peer interaction management. Molin (2017) argues that in game-based learning environments, teachers need to guide discussions, encourage reflection, and help children make connections between game content and real-world experiences. In optimal settings, the teacher’s role becomes dynamic, shifting between guiding, supporting and stepping back to support children’s agency and self-directed learning (Lim & Nguyen 2023). Teachers are also expected to model positive digital citizenship practices, helping children develop important social-emotional skills alongside academic knowledge in technology-mediated environments (Axelsson, Andersson & Gulz 2016). In community-based childcare centres, the teachers are generally expected to include children from diverse backgrounds; however, the teachers often struggle to cater to children’s different learning needs through inclusive and active participation of children in classroom activities (Shallwani et al. 2018). The intersection of limited formal training, minimal digital literacy and the new pedagogical expectations of the digital game-based learning intervention creates a unique context in which teacher adaptation can be examined closely. Yet teachers are only one part of this picture: the productive use of digital games also depends on what children themselves bring to the screen, namely their actions, interactions and engagement, and on the cultural meanings the games make available to them.

Student actions, interaction, and engagement

Digital game-based learning has emerged as a significant area of interest in early childhood education research. This approach integrates technology with educational content, with the intent to complement play experiences and potentially support various aspects of development in ways that differ from more traditional approaches (Disney et al. 2019). The effectiveness of digital game-based learning is influenced by multiple factors, including the design and content of the games, the learning environment, and individual learners’ needs and interests (Gee 2013). Parental attitudes and cultural perceptions of technology also play a significant role in shaping how young children use and perceive these digital tools (Kucirkova & Flewitt 2022; Pynnönen, Kumpulainen & Lipponen 2025). Research suggests that when using well-designed educational games, digital game-based learning can potentially support early literacy and numeracy development through interactive, multimodal learning experiences that engage children through play (Chu et al. 2024; Patel et al. 2018). This potential has been empirically demonstrated, with children showing significant gains in phonemic awareness through digital gameplay, achieving outcomes often thought to require direct instruction (Pynnönen et al. 2022). Young learners can exhibit a range of activities while engaging in digital game-based learning, which often reflect their natural curiosity, creativity and problem-solving abilities (Hussein et al. 2022). Common actions include experimenting with different features and elements of the games, attempting multiple strategies to overcome challenges, and self-regulating their pacing to match their learning needs (Chen & Tu 2021; Eslami & Chowdhury 2021). By observing these activities, teachers can gain insight into individual learning preferences, enabling them to support their experiences accordingly. Besides teachers, the learning experience is affected by group dynamics. Peer and adult interactions play a central role in shaping children’s experiences with digital game-based learning, and they are often grouped together (Johnston 2021). These interactions involve collaboration, knowledge sharing and emotional support, which foster a sense of community and social-emotional growth, even when the play itself takes place between the child and the computer. Children tend to observe and learn from each other through imitation and modelling (Lawrence 2018). Interaction with adults, such as teachers, typically involves guidance, scaffolding and encouragement, which can contribute to a child’s cognitive development, self-confidence and motivation (Sulaymani, Fleer & Chapman 2018). The evidence on whether digital game-based learning supports early literacy is, however, mixed. Some studies find significant gains in phonemic awareness and letter knowledge through tablet-based play (Chu et al. 2024; Patel et al. 2018; Pynnönen et al. 2022). Others report no measurable advantage over conventional approaches (Rodriguez-Segura 2022) or gains that fail to persist once the intervention ends (Bailey et al. 2020). This seems to be particularly true in low-resource settings where infrastructure, teacher preparation and content cultural fit interact to dampen any single-factor effect (Rodriguez-Segura 2022). The unevenness of these findings is precisely what motivates an in-situ teacher-practice focus. What teachers actually do with the tablet in front of children with mixed prior exposure, in classrooms with intermittent power and patchy connectivity, is likely to do more to explain divergent learning outcomes than the games themselves. How these actions and interactions are taken up as learning depends, in turn, on the cultural meanings the games make available, and on the work done by teachers, peers and the games themselves to render those meanings usable in a particular setting.

Digital game-based learning as a cultural mediation tool

This study views digital game-based learning through a Vygotskian understanding of mediation, in which higher mental functions are constituted through the internalisation of culturally and historically derived tools (Vygotsky 1978). Through this view, learning is a matter of a child embracing cultural tools that are made available and meaningful through social activity. The significance of this framing for early childhood digital learning is that a tablet and its literacy content are considered cultural objects. The culture that dominates is Anglophone, largely American, and it carries the assumptions and conventions of those settings (Alaa, Hammouda & Abdennadher 2023; Kam et al. 2009). For such objects to function as tools for children’s literacy learning, they must be rendered usable within the children’s own cultural and linguistic world. Mediation is the process through which this rendering occurs. Vygotsky’s account of the more knowledgeable other is often reduced to scaffolding within the zone of proximal development, understood narrowly as a zone of help. Gillen (2000) attributes this misreading in part to the deficient English editions through which his work has been received. We draw instead on the fuller sense in which mediation makes a particular cultural tool available, shaping not only whether a child completes a task, but which tools enter the child’s developing repertoire. On this view, a more knowledgeable other who links an unfamiliar cultural tool to one the learner already commands is not simply offering generic support; they are making the unfamiliar tool available for learning. Mediation in this sense need not reside in a single participant: teachers, peers and the game itself may each hold authority over different cultural tools. To examine how mediation is accomplished in interaction, we draw on multimodal, social-semiotic theory (Kress 2010; The New London Group 1996). This perspective treats meaning-making as realised across multiple modes: linguistic, gestural, spatial, audio and visual, and treats participants’ contributions as design rather than as transmission of fixed content. It offers the analytic grain for examining mediation as it is actually performed, for instance, when a teacher combines spatial positioning, gesture, touch and speech in a single act of guidance. The social-semiotic lens thus provides the means of examining the Vygotskian cultural-tool mediation in action. Some of the frameworks we draw on, namely Vygotsky’s mediation, Prensky’s role-shift and embodied-cognition accounts of early learning, were developed in Anglophone, largely Northern settings whose institutional assumptions do not always travel. Vygotsky’s more knowledgeable other is usually theorised within a school whose teachers have formal pedagogical preparation; the volunteer teachers in our setting have neither that preparation nor access to a curriculum to anchor their mediation. Prensky’s binary presupposes a teacher with sufficient digital fluency to choose between being a sage and a guide; the teachers we observed often knew less about the tools than the children. Embodied-cognition work in early childhood is rarely staged in classrooms divided by a curtain made from rice bags or run by a coordinator whose phone hotspot is the centre’s only internet connection. We use these frameworks because they remain analytically productive, but we intend to read them through the constraints and resources available in this setting.

Research method and design

Participants and setting

The study was conducted at a community-based childcare centre in Blantyre, Malawi, providing a specific context for examining digital game-based learning implementation in a resource-constrained setting. The centre originated as a feeding programme and has expanded its services to include early childhood education, with digital learning tablets recently introduced through a partnership with an international non-governmental organisation. This centre’s trajectory reflected local community responses to educational needs rather than following any predetermined developmental pathway. The integration of digital tools into this community-based setting offered an opportunity to examine how global educational technologies intersect with local pedagogical practices and priorities. The learning space consisted of a single classroom divided by a makeshift curtain made from empty rice bags. One side accommodated the digital game-based learning intervention for 3–6-year-olds, while the other hosted activities for children under 3 years. The intervention space was equipped with tablets, tables and chairs arranged to accommodate 30 children simultaneously. Outside of the digital learning sessions, the furniture was moved aside to create an open play space for traditional early childhood activities using basic materials such as wooden geometric manipulatives and hand-drawn alphabet illustrations. Four volunteer teachers, two of whom were male and two were female, all in their late twenties or early thirties, facilitated the digital game-based learning, playing a key role in shaping children’s learning experiences despite lacking formal pedagogical training. These teachers, who were members of the local community, were expected to instil teaching practices indirectly, encouraging learners to take a more active role in their education. A technical coordinator with a vocational degree in information technology was present during approximately half of the observation days, providing essential technical support for the implementation. This coordinator had installed the learning applications on the tablets, trained the teachers in device management procedures, including charging and overnight storage in a secure space, and provided troubleshooting assistance during the initial phases of implementation. The children participating in the study, ranging from 3 to 6 years old, formed a multi-age classroom of 30 children, with daily attendance varying between 12 and 19 children. Children’s attendance was particularly influenced by an aid organisation’s food provision schedule, since many families primarily sent their children to benefit from the feeding programme. The non-formal nature of the learning environment, operating outside the framework of compulsory education, allowed for greater flexibility in focusing on learners’ individual needs and interests. This flexibility mattered in a multi-age classroom, where children’s varied digital competencies and learning paces required teachers to adapt their support continually, while also opening opportunities for peer learning. The alignment between this flexible, non-formal approach and the interactive nature of digital game-based learning created a unique opportunity to examine how technology could support individualised learning in early childhood education.

Research design

This study addresses the research question: How do teachers navigate their roles and pedagogical practices in a multi-age classroom setting in which children aged 3 to 6 years engage with digital learning games? To investigate this question, the study employed ethnographic participant observation within a naturalistic paradigm to examine the complex dynamics of digital game-based learning implementation. Following Spradley’s (1980) and Knoblauch’s (2005) focused ethnographic approaches, we conducted classroom observations to understand how teachers adapted their pedagogical practices within the cultural context of a rural Malawian Community-Based Childcare Centre. Focused ethnography was particularly suited to this study as it allowed us to examine a specific cultural phenomenon, digital learning integration, within a distinct subcultural group of teachers who shared common behaviours and experiences despite not all knowing each other personally (Stahlke Wall 2014). The method’s emphasis on data intensity through systematic observation, supplemented by photographs and video recordings, compensated for the relatively brief field period while maintaining analytical depth (Knoblauch 2005). This approach enabled us to capture both the immediate interactional dynamics between teachers, children and technology, and the broader cultural patterns that shaped how pedagogical traditions adapted to digital innovation within this specific educational context. The choice of focused ethnographic methodology was grounded in the need to understand teaching practices as culturally situated phenomena that emerge from the intersection of local values, community relationships and educational innovation. As Hammersley and Atkinson (2019) emphasise, ethnography provides the analytical framework necessary to examine how social practices develop within specific cultural contexts while avoiding the imposition of external theoretical assumptions about effective teaching. The naturalistic paradigm, as outlined by Lincoln and Guba (1985), guided our commitment to understanding phenomena within their natural contexts rather than under controlled conditions, which was particularly appropriate for examining digital learning implementation where multiple variables interact in complex, uncontrollable ways. Participant observation allowed the researcher to adopt what Spradley (1980) terms a ‘passive participant’ role: present in the classroom while maintaining the analytical distance necessary for systematic observation. This role enabled an understanding of classroom dynamics from both insider and outsider perspectives, essential for capturing the nuanced ways teachers adapted their practices over time. The month-long observation period provided sufficient duration to observe both immediate responses to digital learning implementation and evolving adaptation patterns, while daily sessions allowed for systematic documentation of temporal patterns, spatial arrangements, interaction dynamics and cultural practices. The research design addressed ecological validity through systematic attention to contextual factors that shaped pedagogical possibilities (Bronfenbrenner 1977). Beyond documenting classroom interactions, the researcher recorded material constraints, technological limitations and community dynamics that influenced teaching practices. This attention to context enabled an understanding of how teachers’ pedagogical choices emerged from the intersection of multiple pressures: technological challenges, community expectations, and the practical constraints inherent to volunteer-based educational provision in resource-limited settings (Shallwani et al. 2018). The researcher’s position as a European outsider, with prior involvement in the wider intervention, required careful methodological consideration, since it shaped both what was visible and what could be asked. To limit this influence, the researcher maintained a consistent daily presence to normalise his role, adopted unobtrusive positioning during observations, and triangulated formal observations with informal conversations and member-checking to distinguish typical practices from potential performative adjustments. These measures reduced novelty effects but could not neutralise them: teachers’ awareness of an outside observer may still have inflected what was performed in his presence. The analysis therefore treats the resulting account as one situated reading rather than a view from nowhere. Observations took place daily from 10:00 to 12:00, immediately before the children’s lunch, throughout the month-long field period, with the exception of public holidays and days when food was not provided at the centre. Photographs and short video clips were saved with the date and time of capture. To support identification across sessions, the researcher tagged each child with a code and mapped the children’s seating positions at the start of each class until familiar with their names; photographs and video clips were cross-referenced to these seating maps so that individual children could be tracked across the observation period.

Data analysis

Analysis followed a focused ethnographic approach (Knoblauch 2005; Stahlke Wall 2014), which relies on close, repeated reading of the field materials rather than the line-by-line coding associated with grounded theory. Rather than treating themes as surfacing inductively from the data alone, the corpus was read as theoretically informed from the outset: field notes were examined with attention to how the digital tablet and its English-language content became usable for children through the mediation of teachers and peers, each holding authority over different cultural tools (Vygotsky 1978). The 34 h of observation data, documented across 17 daily sessions, were organised chronologically and grouped into three periods: early (Days 1–5), middle (Days 6–11) and late (Days 12–17) to track changes over time. Field notes were read multiple times. Initial readings developed an overall sense of classroom dynamics; subsequent readings identified recurring patterns, notable incidents and changes across the observation period. Consistent with focused ethnography’s emphasis on data intensity over coding density (Knoblauch 2005), passages illustrating teacher practices, children’s responses, technological challenges and cultural mediation were marked, assigned to one of the three periods, and compared both within and across periods. Candidate patterns were then checked against the full corpus, including a search for instances that did not fit, before being consolidated into the four themes reported below. The analysis was organised around four main areas identified as significant for understanding teacher adaptation: how control and agency dynamics evolved over time; how teachers navigated technical and cultural challenges; which embodied pedagogical practices remained stable; and how peer learning developed in the multi-age setting. Temporal patterns were traced by comparing practices across the observation periods, examining what changed, what remained consistent and under what conditions. These four areas were not chosen inductively, but rather, they follow from the cultural-tool framing set out in the theoretical section, each corresponding to a distinct site at which mediation of the digital tool was negotiated: between teacher and child, between game and child, between body and screen, and between more- and less-experienced peers (Kress 2010; Vygotsky 1978). To strengthen the credibility of the analysis, field notes and emerging interpretations were discussed on an ongoing basis with one of the teachers and the head of the community childcare centre. These member-checking conversations served two purposes: verifying the accuracy of observed events and testing the researcher’s cultural interpretations against the understandings of those embedded in the setting. Informal exchanges with the technical coordinator provided additional context for understanding observed practices. Where their feedback diverged from the researcher’s initial reading, interpretations were revised accordingly. Mapped onto Lincoln and Guba’s (1985) trustworthiness criteria, these moves provide credibility through member-checking and triangulation across written notes, photographs and video clips; transferability through thick description of the centre, the four teachers and the technology configuration, so that readers can judge fit to comparable settings; dependability through a documented analytic trail of periodisation decisions, marked passages and interpretations revised following member-checking; and confirmability through a reflexive account of the foreign-observer position and how member feedback shaped the interpretation. Photographs and short video clips were not analysed as a separate visual corpus. They were used alongside the written notes and reviewed to verify spatial arrangements such as seating, sight-lines to the curtain and the position of the tablets, and embodied interactions such as eye-level positioning, hand-over-hand guidance and touch-based reassurance that the running notes named but could not describe in full.

Ethical considerations

Ethical research methods were implemented throughout the study, as a result of the sensitive nature of studies involving young children in vulnerable communities. We embraced the ‘ethics-in-action’ approach from Hilppö, Chimirri and Rajala (2019) to be more responsive and adaptive to participants’ needs and cultural contexts. Prior to data collection, informed consent was obtained from all adult participants, including teachers and staff members, with parent or guardian consent secured for the children involved. All participant names used in the text are pseudonyms. This rigorous consent process, which included explicit permission for photography and image use in research publications, aligns with the ethical standards outlined by the European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity (ALLEA – All European Academies 2023).

Results

The analysis revealed how teachers navigated the implementation of digital game-based learning through complex cultural adaptations. Through systematic analysis of daily observations across 17 sessions, four interconnected themes were identified that demonstrate how teachers adapted their pedagogical practices while maintaining cultural continuity.

Theme 1: Negotiating teacher control and student agency

The temporal analysis revealed changes in how teachers negotiated student agency within digital learning environments. During the initial sessions, teachers maintained tight control over technological interactions (Figure 1), consistently redirecting children from self-selected activities to teacher-chosen tasks. Field notes from the first day illustrate this control: although the teachers were not expected to select games for the children, they were observed circulating the room and choosing the same game for every child (Lauri V.J. Pynnönen, Field note, 17 October 2019). This restrictive approach appeared to reflect both technological uncertainty and established cultural patterns of adult-directed learning.

FIGURE 1: The agency was often fluctuating between the teacher and the child.

What made this control particularly striking was its persistence even when children demonstrated clear competence. Children who successfully navigated the complex login procedures matching four-symbol sequences from printed codes to on-screen icons would find themselves immediately logged out by teachers and redirected to different activities. As documented in early observations:

‘[C]urrently the children are not responsible for their own agency. If they move away from the game the teachers have deemed the game everyone should play right now, the teachers quickly switch the game.’ (Lauri V.J. Pynnönen, Field note, 17 October 2019)

By the second week, however, a fascinating dynamic began to emerge. Children developed sophisticated strategies for navigating between their preferences and teacher expectations. One child, for instance, learned to monitor teacher movements carefully, switching to higher-number exercises when unobserved and quickly returning to assigned basic content when a teacher approached. Rather than simply representing defiance, these actions demonstrated children’s growing technological competence and their ability to self-assess their learning needs. The teachers’ response to these strategic actions evolved significantly over the observation period. Initially interpreted as misbehaviour requiring immediate correction, these independent navigation attempts gradually became recognised as evidence of engagement and learning. A critical moment occurred during the second week when a child played DragonBox Numbers with his tablet incorrectly oriented in landscape mode yet demonstrated clear mastery of the game mechanics. Both the technical coordinator and teacher observed his play but chose not to intervene. When asked about this decision, the teacher explained, ‘because he’s playing the game so well’ (Lauri V.J. Pynnönen, Field note, 28 October 2019). This moment represented a fundamental shift from viewing independent navigation as problematic to recognising it as successful learning. By the third and fourth weeks, teachers had developed increasingly nuanced approaches to supporting student agency. Rather than maintaining blanket control or complete freedom, they began making contextual decisions about when intervention was necessary and when children’s exploration should be permitted. This selective intervention pattern suggested that teachers were developing what might be called ‘adaptive oversight’ by maintaining awareness of children’s activities while intervening only when genuine learning obstacles arose. We use ‘adaptive oversight’ to denote a stance in which the teacher intends to maintain continuous awareness of children’s on-screen activity but intervenes only when a learning obstacle, rather than a deviation from teacher choice, is detected. It is distinguished from uniform redirection on the one hand and complete withdrawal on the other: the teacher remains the arbiter of when intervention is needed, but the trigger shifts from non-compliance to learning friction. What changed over the 4 weeks was less the teachers’ authority than the conditions under which they exercised it, a pattern that became harder to sustain once challenges became more technical and cultural.

Theme 2: Navigating technical and cultural challenges

Throughout the observation period, teachers confronted two distinct but interrelated categories of challenges that required continuous navigation: technical difficulties and cultural content disconnections (Figure 2). These challenges represented ongoing obstacles that required external technical support, though teachers did develop some pedagogical innovations for managing cultural mismatches. Technical problems persisted throughout the intervention period, creating ongoing challenges for both teachers and children. Headphone malfunctions were a constant issue from the first day, with ‘many of the plugs break[ing] inside the tablets headphone jack’ as ‘children wanting to unplug and replug the headphones constantly’ (Lauri V.J. Pynnönen, Field note, 17 October 2019). These problems continued unresolved weeks later, as teachers ‘tried fixing them by moving the plug around in the headphone socket, but failed to make a difference’ (Lauri V.J. Pynnönen, Field note, 13 November 2019). Rather than developing independent technical competencies, teachers remained heavily dependent on technical support throughout the intervention. When the technical coordinator was absent, it became obvious that ‘the teachers have not been sufficiently skilled to run the interventions’ (Lauri V.J. Pynnönen, Field note, 8 November 2019), and the researcher noted having to break his role and serve as technical support, observing that ‘this shows how important it is to have a technical person in the room’ (Lauri V.J. Pynnönen, Field note, 13 November 2019). These technical difficulties were persistent, and teachers had limited ability to resolve them independently. The pattern highlights how difficult it is to implement digital learning initiatives without adequate technical infrastructure and ongoing support systems. The repeated mechanical failure of standard 3.5 mm jacks under routine plug-and-unplug also points to a device-design issue: consumer tablets with internal jacks were not specified for high-frequency repeated insertion by young children. Hardware procurement choices, not only user behaviour or maintenance capacity, structured what teachers had to manage. Internet connectivity issues presented another layer of complexity. The games frequently required internet access for content downloads, but connectivity was limited to the technical coordinator’s personal mobile hotspot. Teachers remained dependent on external technical support for resolving connectivity issues, though they did learn basic operational procedures such as which applications could function offline. The technical coordinator began organising off-site preparation sessions to download necessary content before children arrived, as teachers remained unable to manage these technical requirements independently.

FIGURE 2: Cultural disconnections were evident in digital content featuring unfamiliar Western content, requiring teachers to develop strategies for bridging global content with local experiences.

The cultural misalignment of the digital content required even more creative adaptation strategies. The applications, designed for Western contexts, featured extensive content with no relevance to rural Malawian children’s experiences. Winter weather and avalanches appeared in reading exercises, while food-related vocabulary centred on hamburgers and processed foods that children had never encountered. Housing representations showed suburban American homes with attached garages and manicured lawns, contrasting sharply with the traditional structures familiar to the children.

Teachers’ initial approach involved attempting to work through all content regardless of cultural relevance, but this quickly proved problematic. As teachers gained familiarity with the applications, they started to develop situated pedagogical practices for managing these cultural mismatches. They learned to navigate selectively through content, for example, by spending extended time on materials featuring familiar animals while moving quickly past stories about unfamiliar urban contexts. When coming across unavoidable cultural misalignments, teachers began providing verbal bridges between digital content and local experiences. They would explain unfamiliar concepts through analogies to familiar ones, helping children understand not just specific content but the game logic behind it. Technical and cultural challenges thus set the limits within which adaptive oversight could operate, even as other practices remained remarkably stable across the same period.

Theme 3: Maintaining embodied pedagogical practices

Despite the digital learning context, certain culturally grounded teaching practices remained remarkably consistent throughout the observation period. These stable practices seemed to serve as anchoring points that enabled other adaptations to occur while maintaining pedagogical continuity. Physical guidance emerged as a fundamental and unwavering aspect of teachers’ pedagogical approach. Throughout all 17 observation sessions, teachers consistently positioned themselves at children’s eye level (Figure 3), often kneeling beside children or sitting on child-sized chairs to create more intimate moments. When children struggled with tablet-based drawing activities requiring precise finger movements, teachers instinctively employed hand-over-hand guidance rather than relying solely on verbal instruction. One detailed observation captured this approach:

‘[S]he is patiently guiding him, drawing the letter B by holding on to his finger and then trying to make a connection by pointing at the requested letter B, then the one they drew together.’ (Lauri V.J. Pynnönen, Field note, 18 November 2019)

FIGURE 3: A teacher provides close physical guidance while a child engages with tablet-based learning.

This physical dimension of teaching extended beyond direct instruction to encompass emotional support and encouragement. When children became frustrated with challenging games or technical difficulties, teachers provided reassuring touches on shoulders or gentle pats of encouragement. This is embodied in the note:

‘[S]ome of the teachers, especially Memory and Angelina, maintain a very close physical contact with the children they are teaching. This seems to calm the children, and they respond to the physical contact by leaning towards the teachers, seeking comfort.’ (Lauri V.J. Pynnönen, Field note, 18 October 2019)

The constancy of these embodied practices throughout the digital intervention suggested they represented core cultural values about how learning occurs through relationship and physical presence rather than mere information transfer.

Language use patterns revealed another dimension of cultural continuity within digital innovation. While all games were operated in English (Figure 4), reflecting Malawi’s colonial educational legacy, teachers consistently provided instruction, explanation and encouragement in Chichewa. This created a complex linguistic environment where children engaged with English-language digital content while receiving support in their native language. Teachers would explain game objectives in Chichewa, translate unfamiliar vocabulary, and celebrate successes in the language that carried emotional resonance for the children. This bilingual approach served multiple functions beyond simple translation. It validated children’s home language and cultural identity within a technological environment that might otherwise feel foreign. It provided cognitive scaffolding that allowed children to connect new digital concepts to existing linguistic frameworks. Most importantly, it demonstrated teachers’ intuitive understanding that meaningful learning occurs when new information can be integrated with existing cultural and linguistic knowledge systems. The stability of these embodied and linguistic practices across very different technical conditions points to the cultural depth of the centre’s pedagogical repertoire, which extended into the peer-learning dynamics of the multi-age room.

FIGURE 4: The games included guidance in English, which often led the Chichewa-speaking children to improvise their own solutions to given tasks.

Theme 4: Facilitating multi-age peer learning

The multi-age classroom environment, with children ranging from 3 years old to 6 years old, presented unique challenges that required sophisticated differentiation strategies. Teachers’ approaches to managing this diversity evolved significantly over the observation period, revealing important insights about peer learning in digital contexts. Initially, teachers approached the multi-age setting with strategies that proved problematic for digital learning. They assigned identical activities to all children regardless of age or ability, resulting in situations such as the following:

‘[B]ased on how [the six-year-old child] shuffles through the numbers 1–10 she seems quite familiar with them, and therefore would like to move forward. [The teacher] forces her to study at the same pace as everyone else and prevents her from progressing at her own pace.’ (Lauri V.J. Pynnönen, Field note, 17 October 2019)

This uniformity left older children unchallenged while overwhelming the youngest children. When younger children naturally gravitated towards watching older students work, teachers would redirect them to their own tablets, viewing peer observation as a distraction rather than a learning opportunity. The shift in teachers’ attitudes towards peer learning emerged gradually through accumulated observations of productive peer interactions. By the second week, teachers began noticing that certain children naturally assumed teaching roles with their peers. One observation documented how:

‘[L]imbani has turned his tablet slightly so that Mphatso can also see. He’s playing the sliming game and getting full scores from it. He’s also narrating his actions out loud, mostly to himself but probably also because Mphatso is watching.’ (Lauri V.J. Pynnönen, Field note, 13 November 2019)

Rather than separating the children, teachers began allowing these organic teaching moments to unfold.

As teachers recognised the collaborative aspects of digital game-based learning, they began actively facilitating such opportunities. They started arranging seating to pair more capable children with those needing support. When tablets malfunctioned, rather than seeing device sharing as a problem, teachers recognised it as creating natural collaboration opportunities. Children began working together to solve problems, navigate games and celebrate successes collectively (Figure 5). The emergence of these peer learning dynamics reflected deep cultural values about communal knowledge transmission adapted to digital contexts. Older children took pride in demonstrating their competence to younger peers, while younger children gained both technical skills and confidence through peer support. Teachers learned to orchestrate these interactions, knowing when to allow peer teaching and when direct adult intervention was necessary. The orchestration of multi-age peer learning thus completes the four-theme picture, showing teachers, children and the games operating as a distributed mediation system across the conditions set out in the preceding themes.

FIGURE 5: Peer learning became more common as the intervention progressed.

Discussion

This ethnographic analysis describes how volunteer teachers in a community-based early childhood centre navigated the complex process of integrating digital game-based learning into daily classroom activities while maintaining cultural pedagogical integrity. Rather than simply adopting or resisting technology, the teachers developed sophisticated adaptation strategies that created hybrid educational spaces honouring both local values and global learning opportunities. Each of the four themes corresponds to a distinct aspect of how the teachers navigated their roles in this setting. Theme 1 addresses how they negotiated their authority over children’s on-screen activity. Theme 2 addresses how they navigated the technical and cultural conditions that shaped what intervention was possible. Theme 3 addresses what stayed the same in their pedagogical repertoire across these shifting conditions. Theme 4 addresses how they orchestrated the multi-age room as the cultural meanings of the games were negotiated between teachers, children and peers. Together, these themes answer the research question by showing teacher navigation as a sequence of contextual decisions. Rather than following a single developmental trajectory, the observed patterns suggest teachers were negotiating intersecting pressures: technological insecurity, institutional expectations, practical constraints and cultural dynamics. The initial restrictive control emerged from this convergence of challenges rather than from pedagogical philosophy. Teachers with limited digital literacy managed frequently malfunctioning devices while an external observer watched, creating a perfect storm of uncertainty. By initially ensuring all children played identical games simultaneously, teachers created manageable uniformity, which has been observed to be common practice for teachers operating in unfamiliar environments (Rubie-Davies 2007). This approach simplified troubleshooting, reduced cognitive load and maintained familiar authority structures in a domain where children often demonstrated superior operational knowledge. As the intervention progressed, multiple conditions shifted simultaneously. Teachers gained technological familiarity through daily repetition. Technical problems decreased as equipment was replaced, and children learned more careful handling. Routines stabilised as login procedures became familiar and almost automatic. Most significantly, teachers discovered that allowing variation did not result in chaos or criticism. Children’s strategic actions during week 2 appeared to give teachers concrete models of productive digital learning. The Day-8 episode in which the technical coordinator and teacher chose not to intervene when a child played DragonBox Numbers with the tablet held in landscape mode is one such moment: a child’s self-selected difficulty and independent navigation became visible to the teachers as competent play rather than as deviation from a teacher-chosen task. Fleer (2020) emphasised the need for teachers to allow children’s autonomous exploration in digital play-based learning environments, and Simon and Zeng (2024) found that when teachers started to observe the benefits gained from this, they would become more open to allowing further exploration in their class. This adaptation represents a response to the tension Molin (2017) identifies between teachers needing to guide discussions and encourage reflection while supporting children’s agency and self-directed learning. Rather than simply adopting models of student-centred learning, teachers created hybrid approaches that preserved cultural hierarchies while acknowledging practical realities about technological competence. This finding extends Lim and Nguyen’s (2023) work on supporting student agency, suggesting that effective digital learning implementation could benefit from culturally responsive adaptations of pedagogical authority. The selective intervention patterns that emerged represent neither transformation nor simple skill acquisition, but practical wisdom in creating sustainable compromises. This brings us back to Prensky’s (2001) ‘guide on the side’ metaphor by revealing that the transition requires more than philosophical adjustment. In this setting, teachers were navigating multiple competing pressures at the same time, and often learning alongside or from the children rather than guiding from expertise. Prensky’s ‘guide on the side’ formulation has been productively critiqued in the two decades since. Subsequent work has questioned the binary itself, the implicit assumption that the teacher is fluent enough in the tool to choose the latter role, and the ‘digital natives’ picture on which it originally rested (Kirschner & De Bruyckere 2017). Adaptive oversight sits in the space these critiques open. It neither restores the sage nor adopts a free-range guide, and it does not require the teacher to be digitally fluent before being able to scaffold. Theoretically, adaptive oversight can be located within a Vygotskian account of scaffolding, specifically the contingent withdrawal of support as the learner takes on more responsibility within the zone of proximal development. The contingency in this setting was triggered less by demonstrated competence within a known task than by the teacher’s reading of friction between the child and an unfamiliar cultural tool. Navarro and Tudge’s (2023) neo-ecological reworking of Bronfenbrenner (1977) helps locate this stance in its environment. The children’s microsystem now includes both face-to-face interactions with teachers and peers and the screen-mediated environment of the games, and adaptive oversight is one of the routine practices by which those two layers are kept in coherent relation. The centre’s volunteer-staffing arrangement and the technical coordinator’s intermittent presence sit one layer out, in the mesosystem, and structure what adaptive oversight can practically do. This view of teacher adaptation calls for support strategies that address the full ecosystem of challenges teachers face. These strategies include safe spaces for experimentation, cultural frameworks for reconceptualising authority in digital spaces, and recognition that sustainable implementation emerges through iterative compromise rather than immediate transformation. The critical role of technical support in educational technology implementation has been documented across decades of research (Ertmer 1999; Hew & Brush 2007; Inan & Lowther 2010): systematic reviews repeatedly identify inadequate technical support as a fundamental barrier to effective technology integration (Akram et al. 2022), and large-scale surveys show that most teachers cite a lack of it among their primary concerns (Burns 2010). Our findings align with this work but add nuance about how the dependency operates in practice in resource-constrained settings. Despite sustained daily exposure over 4 weeks, teachers’ technical competencies remained relatively static, and they continued to rely on external support for most troubleshooting tasks, including ones that recurred. This learning was also strikingly selective: teachers developed pedagogical adaptations for managing cultural content disconnections and facilitating peer learning, yet made little headway on technical problem-solving. They learned to prevent some hardware damage through modified handling and could recognise when a device needed external assistance, but showed little initiative towards independent troubleshooting. Recent research has shown that digital games can support literacy and language learning in both first and second language contexts (Hanghøj, Kabel & Jensen 2022; Pitarch 2018). However, we observed that the systematic cultural disconnections embedded in the digital content revealed a fundamental challenge that teachers faced when implementing globally designed educational technologies. Unlike locally produced print materials that typically align with national curricula and can be published in local languages, the commercial digital games used in our intervention presented teachers with content that bore little resemblance to children’s lived experiences. This cultural misalignment created substantial obstacles for teaching and learning that teachers had to navigate without preparation or support. The challenge was particularly acute because the games presented fixed sequences of content that could not be modified or adapted to local contexts. López-Barrios and De Debat (2014) note that with traditional, print-based approaches teachers can draw examples from children’s immediate environment, tell stories set in familiar places, or use locally available objects, so that the connection to local experience is built into the teaching material itself. The digital content offered no such purchase: it arrived as a finished cultural object carrying its original Western framework, so the work of connecting it to the children’s lived experiences did not reside in the artefact but fell instead to the teacher. The irony was that these mismatches potentially undermined the very advantages digital games supposedly offered. While the games featured engaging animations, interactive elements and adaptive learning pathways, children struggled to access their full benefits when the content itself was incomprehensible. This pattern has been reported in studies of digital learning content built for one cultural setting and deployed in another (Alaa et al. 2023; Kam et al. 2009). From a cultural-tool perspective, this is unsurprising: a digital game is not a neutral instrument but a cultural object, and the literacy content embedded in it carries the assumptions of the Anglophone, largely Western, setting in which it was made (Vygotsky 1978). For such an object to function as a tool for learning rather than an opaque artefact, its content must be made meaningful within the child’s own cultural world. Where that work of mediation fails or is left undone, the game’s technical sophistication offers little, since the child cannot connect what is on the screen to anything they already know. This helps explain why cultural relevance is not a cosmetic feature of educational games but a condition of their working at all: experimental evidence shows that learners using culturally adapted games achieve significantly greater learning gains and satisfaction than those using generic versions (Alaa et al. 2023), and design research has long argued that games built around children’s own cultural worlds engage them more readily than imported equivalents (Kam et al. 2009). Teachers’ attempts to bridge these cultural gaps showed commitment and creativity, but they often highlighted the limits of what such mediation could achieve on its own. The verbal bridging strategies the teachers developed, for example, by connecting hamburgers to local foods or explaining that houses can look different in other places, required sophisticated cultural-translation skills of the kind identified by García and Wei (2014). The teachers had never been trained to provide such skills. The children also engaged with multiple foreign concepts simultaneously, which further complicated the teachers’ responsibilities. The teachers’ selective navigation strategies of spending more time on content with games and digital stories featuring familiar contexts while guiding children through culturally irrelevant material represented practical survival tactics rather than sophisticated pedagogical choices. Teachers were essentially performing curricular triage, trying to salvage educational value from materials fundamentally misaligned with the children’s realities. This added significant cognitive load to their teaching responsibilities, forcing them to constantly evaluate content relevance while managing technology, supporting individual children and maintaining classroom order. Understood as mediation, this navigation was the point at which the cultural distance built into the content had to be absorbed by someone, and in this setting, that someone was the teacher. The game held the literacy content and its interaction logic; what it could not supply was any link between that content and the children’s lived experience. Teachers stepped into precisely that gap, holding authority over the local knowledge and the home language that the game lacked. Their selective navigation, then, was not merely classroom management but the work of making a foreign cultural tool usable, a form of mediation that the design of the games assumed would happen somewhere but provided no support for. The persistence of these challenges throughout the observation period suggests that cultural translation cannot be resolved through teacher adaptation alone. While teachers developed workarounds and coping strategies, they remained fundamentally constrained by content they couldn’t change. The burden of making globally designed materials locally meaningful was largely invisible, and yet it was necessary for whatever learning the games made possible. That such a load should fall, unsupported, on volunteer teachers with limited formal preparation points to a structural problem rather than an individual one. In our study, the cultural assumptions were fixed in content that the teachers could not alter, so the work of cultural relevance fell not to designers but to teachers, after the fact and without support. This finding aligns with earlier research on digital game-based learning that challenges assumptions about the universality of digital educational content (Kam et al. 2009). While technology platforms may be globally applicable, the content within them carries deep cultural assumptions that can create barriers rather than bridges to learning. These findings reveal that effective educational technology implementation requires fundamental reconsideration of content creation processes, knowledge validation frameworks and cultural relevance in learning design, extending far beyond interface translation or local language provision. The teachers in our study, despite limited formal training and technological experience, intuitively recognised that cultural irrelevance was impeding children’s learning. While their attempts to bridge these disconnections were often inadequate to overcome fundamental content misalignment, their efforts reveal both the substantial burden placed on educators and the critical importance of integrating cultural considerations into educational technology design from the outset. The remarkable stability of physical guidance practices and native language instruction throughout the digital intervention reveals how teachers intuitively maintained pedagogical approaches that supported young children’s learning needs. The consistent use of hand-over-hand guidance, eye-level positioning and gentle touch demonstrates teachers’ understanding of how physical support scaffolds digital skill development for early learners. This finding aligns with research on embodied cognition in early childhood, which emphasises that young children’s learning is fundamentally grounded in physical and sensory experiences (Kontra, Goldin-Meadow & Beilock 2012). The teachers’ maintenance of physical proximity and touch-based guidance provided scaffolding that enabled children aged 3–6 years to engage successfully with tablets, devices that require fine motor control and spatial understanding still developing at these ages.

These embodied practices reflect what Tomasello (2009) identifies as fundamental to human learning: joint attention and shared intentionality facilitated through physical co-presence. In the digital learning context, these embodied practices enabled teachers to direct children’s attention, demonstrate actions and provide immediate feedback in ways that purely verbal instruction could not achieve. The persistent use of Chichewa alongside English-language content served practical pedagogical functions. Teachers could explain game objectives, provide immediate feedback and maintain classroom management in a language children understood. When combined with physical guidance for tablet manipulation, these practices enabled young children to engage with digital content despite the dual challenges of unfamiliar technology and foreign language. The stability of these practices throughout the intervention suggests they were not merely familiar habits teachers could not abandon, but rather foundational elements that enabled successful technology integration. Without physical guidance, many children would have struggled with the motor demands of tablet interaction. Without native language support, the English-only games would have been incomprehensible. These embodied and linguistic practices represented the necessary infrastructure upon which digital learning could be built. This interpretation challenges assumptions about modern digital learning requiring a departure from traditional teaching methods. Instead, our observations suggest that effective technology integration for young children may depend on maintaining, rather than replacing, embodied pedagogical practices that support developmental needs. The teachers’ intuitive preservation of these approaches, despite no explicit training about their importance, demonstrates how pedagogical adaptation can occur through practical problem-solving rather than theoretical transformation. Several limitations shape what this study can claim. Firstly, the data come from a single observer. Some interactions were inevitably missed while others were being documented, and the cultural interpretations remain tentative given the researcher’s position as an outsider in the Malawian community context. Member-checking and triangulation with photographs and video clips partly offset this, but a second observer or a participant co-analyst would have strengthened the claims about the teacher’s reasoning behind the patterns we describe. Secondly, the data come from a single Community-Based Childcare Centre. We make no claim that the four themes generalise to other Malawian centres, let alone to other sub-Saharan settings, beyond what readers can judge from the description provided. Thirdly, the study captured teacher practice rather than child or parent experience. Children’s own accounts of the games and parents’ views on the intervention were outside the scope and would be needed to complete the picture. Fourthly, the 1-month observation window captured early dynamics of adoption rather than longer-term consolidation. Subsequent visits would be needed to test whether the adaptive-oversight pattern persists once external support and the researcher’s presence are withdrawn. These limitations informed a descriptive approach that emphasised observable patterns rather than definitive causal claims.

Conclusion

The ideal scenario for early childhood digital learning would involve applications in children’s mother tongues featuring culturally familiar content. However, given the economic realities of educational technology development, such localised content may remain unavailable for many minority language communities. Our findings suggest that in these situations, which represent the reality for many rural African educational settings, teachers’ cultural mediation work becomes essential rather than optional. The teachers in our study spent considerable effort translating not just language but entire cultural frameworks, work that was both pedagogically necessary and institutionally invisible. The study makes three contributions that take the field beyond Prensky’s binary ‘guide on the side’ formulation. Adaptive oversight characterises a stance of continuous awareness with intervention triggered by learning friction rather than non-compliance. Invisible cultural-mediation work names the cultural-translation labour that the design of globally produced games offloads, unsupported, onto local teachers. The third concerns native-language support: the persistent use of Chichewa to explain, encourage and celebrate alongside English-language content, which functioned not as simple translation but as part of the essential infrastructure on which children’s engagement with the games depended. Each of these extends rather than reproduces an established framework, and each is open to examination in other digital game-based learning settings. Teachers’ persistent reliance on external technical support, combined with their intuitive blending of embodied pedagogical practices with digital tools, suggests important directions for implementation support. Rather than training teachers in predetermined best practices, professional development might be structured around iterative teacher-led trialling of unfamiliar applications, with debrief sessions facilitated by the technical coordinator. The emergence of peer-learning dynamics among children indicates that implementation models could deliberately pair experienced and less experienced children at each tablet and protect time for unsupervised exploration in the daily schedule. Given teachers’ technical dependency, standing technical-support arrangements with named response times would serve such settings better than visiting-trainer models. Content-localisation workshops bringing teachers, the technical coordinator and content designers together before deployment would also reduce the cultural-mediation load that currently falls on teachers after the fact. These findings have methodological implications for how we study technology integration. The highly contextual nature of the adaptations we observed suggests that research designs should account for local meaning-making rather than apply external frameworks as universal templates. The value of sustained observation over time, attention to cultural mediation practices, and recognition of teachers’ adaptive expertise all point towards more culturally responsive research approaches. Ultimately, our findings suggest that sustainable educational technology implementation requires recognising teachers not as obstacles to technological progress but as essential mediators who make global technologies locally meaningful. This is particularly pressing in contexts where ideal conditions, such as mother-tongue content and cultural relevance, cannot be met. Success might be better understood not as teachers becoming ‘guides on the side’ but as their development of hybrid pedagogical strategies that blend digital tools with culturally grounded teaching practices. Such an approach values the pedagogical wisdom embedded in traditional practices while remaining open to technological possibilities. It centres the actual needs of children learning in specific cultural contexts rather than abstract notions of digital transformation.

Acknowledgements

This article is partially based on Lauri V.J. Pynnönen’s doctoral dissertation titled ‘Playing to be Literate: Harnessing Digital Games for Literacy Development in Vulnerable Contexts’ towards the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Educational Sciences, University of Helsinki, Finland, in 2026. The thesis was supervised by Professor Kristiina Kumpulainen and Professor Lasse Lipponen. The thesis was reworked, revised, and adapted into a journal article for publication. It can be found here: https://helda.helsinki.fi/handle/10138/632175.

Competing interests

The authors declare that they have no financial or personal relationships that may have inappropriately influenced them in writing this article.

CRediT authorship contribution

Lauri V.J. Pynnönen: Conceptualisation; Data curation; Formal analysis; Funding acquisition; Investigation; Methodology; Project administration; Resources; Software; Validation; Visualisation; Writing – original draft. Lasse Lipponen: Supervision; Writing – review & editing. Kristiina Kumpulainen: Supervision; Writing – review & editing. All authors reviewed the article, contributed to the discussion of results, approved the final version for submission and publication, and take responsibility for the integrity of its findings.

Funding information

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Data availability

The data supporting this study consist of ethnographic field notes, photographs and video recordings collected during classroom observations. Because of the ethical considerations regarding participant privacy and confidentiality, particularly given the involvement of minor children and the small, potentially identifiable community setting, these data cannot be made publicly available. The raw data contain identifying information about participants, their workplace and the specific community that cannot be fully anonymised without compromising the integrity of the ethnographic record. Researchers interested in further information about the study may contact the corresponding author, Lauri V. J. Pynnönen.

Disclaimer

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any affiliated agency of the authors, or that of the publisher. The authors are responsible for this article’s results, findings, and content.

References