This study sets out to explore pragmatist ways of understanding and conceptualizing the incorporation of digital video in teachers´ professional practice. Specifically, it studies action cameras and how they can be utilised in meaningful action and development of teachers´ practices of didactic development. Departing from the Deweyan concept trans-action, the aim is to investigate which properties of the digital technologies become crucial for teacher´s meaningful, professional use of digital video.

The study consists of a pragmatist re-analysis of a development project. The latter was performed in collaboration between three professional groups: educational researchers, primary school teachers, and technical staff. Although the researchers had a central role in designing the process, several of the crucial ideas in the technology and method development in the project came about through concrete experimentation by developers and teachers, in alignment with methodological pragmatism (Goldkuhl, 2012). The development process was performed in an iterative way, allowing all participants, to some extent also students, to have influence over it.A main finding in the re-analysis is that the material properties of the action cameras became central to the inquiry in the project. The GoPro-cameras as physical objects catalysed many of the transformations occurring throughout the course of the inquiry.

Framed by the concept trans-action, three types of changes in the systemic constellations of agents-environments are described, all dependent on the particular material properties of the action cameras: Context swapping, perceptual re-coordination and altered modes of participation. The term playful thinging, inspired by play theory of Sicart (2014), as well as the material engagement theory of Malafouris (2014), is suggested as a way of characterising the project participants involvement with the cameras.