WhatsApp as a mediational infrastructure:

As teachers, we’ve learned that even a few hours without a reply on WhatsApp can cause problems.” This reflection from a Jordanian primary school teacher captures the ambient expectations, emotional demands, and blurred boundaries increasingly shaping digital school-home communication. In under-resourced settings where institutional platforms are lacking, applications such as WhatsApp have become informal yet powerful infrastructures. This qualitative case study examines how WhatsApp mediates educational relationships, pedagogical decision-making, and parental involvement in one public primary school in northern Jordan. Drawing on sociocultural theory and Bronfenbrenner’s updated bioecological model, including the techno-subsystem, the study conceptualizes WhatsApp as a sociotechnical infrastructure embedded in overlapping ecological systems. Data from interviews with five teachers, five parents, and one principal, alongside one parent-teacher WhatsApp group chat and two three-member focus groups, were thematically and discursively analyzed. Four themes emerged: blurred boundaries and constant availability, instruction shaped by platform pressure, shifting authority in WhatsApp groups, and unequal voice and digital exclusion. WhatsApp was reported to foster accessibility but also intensify emotional labor, weaken pedagogical autonomy, and marginalize less digitally fluent parents. These dynamics reflect a broader trend towards platformized governance in education. The study concludes by calling for co-designed communication protocols, ethical training, and public alternatives that promote equity, care, and sustainability.