Foregrounded by AI: What a sociomaterial account of literacy implies for postdigital design orientations

Synthesis: Schlauch inverts the usual question about AI and literacy. Instead of asking what new literacies GenAI demands, he asks what LLMs reveal about literacy itself — namely that it was never housed in the individual learner but constituted within more-than-human assemblages of people, texts, technologies, practices and infrastructures. That condition was easy to ignore while nonhuman contributors could be absorbed into the background; LLMs make the absorption untenable. Drawing on the sociomaterial tradition in science and technology studies, actor-network theory and postdigital literacy research, he argues that competence frameworks, by centring the individual, structurally cannot register the distributed, infrastructural and nonhuman dimensions of literacy this shift makes visible. The constructive payoff is three design orientations for postdigital literacy environments — making assemblages visible, sustaining fluid literacy spaces, and preserving conditions for critical reflexivity — each described as a disposition to cultivate rather than a technique to deliver, and each carrying political as well as pedagogical stakes.

This page summarizes a theoretical article. It reports no study, collects no data, and its three design orientations are proposals derived from theory rather than tested interventions.

Why the Individual Learner Is the Wrong Unit

The argument starts with a diagnostic observation about the field: each major shift in technology has called forth its own literacy terminology, and GenAI is no exception. Even contributions that explicitly reject individualist framings tend to resolve into competence models directed at the individual learner, so the tension gets named and never resolved. Schlauch's charge is that this is not an oversight but a consequence of the unit of analysis — if the learner is the unit, the distributed and infrastructural dimensions have nowhere to appear.

The theoretical move is the standard sociomaterial one, made sharply: a sociomaterial account is not the social turn with objects added. Beyond adding nonhumans to a social explanation, the social itself is treated as an effect of associations between humans and nonhumans rather than their precondition. Teaching–learning becomes translation — the active work of enrolling human and nonhuman actors into networks by redefining what each will do — and Learner Agency becomes an effect of networks rather than a property anyone holds. One consequence worth carrying into classroom design is that distribution is not a new condition created by AI; it is a condition AI made impossible to overlook.

Three Design Orientations

Making assemblages visible. If literacy is assembled, then a fundamental task is helping students perceive the assembly: tracing the actors, artifacts, norms and infrastructures that participate in producing and receiving any particular text. Schlauch imports three ethnographic strategies as pedagogical habits — symmetry (refusing to grant humans analytical priority over objects), emergence (attending to improvised situational use rather than fixed scripts), and the broken-hammer move of using malfunction to reveal relations that normally stay invisible. He then gives this a concrete classroom form: a role-based design in which a student acts as "AI whisperer," voicing the model's responses to peers, so the LLM enters as an attributed interpersonal presence rather than a backgrounded screen.

Sustaining fluid literacy spaces. Perception is not enough; students must be able to move within what they trace. Borrowing Sørensen's notion of fluidity — objects that maintain continuity through continuous adaptation, with no single obligatory point of passage whose removal collapses the whole — he argues that educational technology initiatives designed around one platform, workflow or approved use perform a regional configuration: a boundary around one permissible arrangement, with everything outside treated as deviation. Fluidity in practice means modular tasks that let students reconfigure their use, a teacher-authored system prompt that turns the model into a questioning partner rather than an answer machine, and assessment that treats the student's configuration of AI use as itself the object of scrutiny.

Preserving critical reflexivity. The third orientation is the condition the other two depend on: the capacity to step back, question the assemblage, notice what it makes possible and forecloses, and ask whether things could be arranged otherwise. Without it, tracing becomes mechanical and fluidity becomes openness without direction. Schlauch draws on Postma's sociomaterial critique — critique as a practice that enacts realities differently, since a dominant reality must be constantly re-enacted to keep its hegemony — to argue that literacy education should stage encounters between different epistemic configurations rather than socialize students into the dominant one.

The Difficulty Argument, and Its Equity Edge

The most consequential passage concerns difficulty. Asked whether learning happens when struggle, uncertainty and articulation of thought are delegated, Schlauch answers that the obstacle is structural rather than motivational: the assemblage offered no gap in which Reflection could occur, and the post-authorship condition may remove the traditional encounter with difficulty that fosters genuine reflection. His design response is not a ban — banning simply removes one participant from the assemblage — but activities that preserve the emotional and cognitive struggles of genuine expression, since on this account those struggles are the process through which an assemblage is reconfigured rather than reproduced.

He then turns it: because the conditions for reflexivity depend on lived experience and relations of power, they are unevenly distributed, and when core literacy processes are mediated by systems whose statistical logics encode dominant cultural norms, the students who bear the greatest cost are those whose writing practices, language backgrounds or learning profiles sit furthest from that norm. The same argument bears on Assessment: judging a student's configuration of tool use rather than the tool's presence is what makes an equity-relevant distinction visible.

What this means for practice

• Instructors. Make the AI an attributed classroom presence instead of a backgrounded screen. The AI-whisperer role and teacher-authored system prompts are low-cost moves that turn a private tool into something the group can see, question and redistribute.
• Instructional designers. Design modular tasks rather than permitted-use rules. A workflow built around one approved arrangement will be treated by students as a boundary to comply with, not a practice to reason about.
• Assessment designers. Grade the configuration, not the presence. Asking how and why a student set up their AI use gives you a defensible distinction that "did you use AI" cannot.
• Researchers. Stop treating competence frameworks as the natural instrument for this problem. On this account they are structurally unable to register infrastructure and distribution, which is why the field keeps naming the tension and then resolving it back onto the individual.

Limitations

• No data are collected. The three design orientations are derived from theory and cited adjacent work; none is implemented or evaluated, and no claim about their effect on learning is made.
• The account deliberately brackets what students actually do. Nothing here establishes whether learners can acquire the sociomaterial sensibility the first orientation depends on, or how long it takes.
• The argument's evidence is largely theoretical and citational, drawing on STS, ANT and postdigital scholarship; empirical sociomaterial studies of classroom writing with AI are referenced rather than synthesized, and contrary findings are not weighed.
• Treating the assemblage as the unit of analysis makes individual-level outcomes hard to state, which is coherent with the framework but leaves instructors without an individual measure of progress.
• The practical suggestions assume a teacher with the authority and time to reconfigure tasks and prompts; institutional constraints on assessment, platforms and curriculum are acknowledged as political but not analyzed in detail.

Citation

Schlauch, M. (2026). Foregrounded by AI: What a sociomaterial account of literacy implies for postdigital design orientations. Postdigital Science and Education.