The Fluid Materiality of iPad Use: "Working" and "Playing" Around iPads in Elementary Classrooms

• In Event: 72.020 - Theorizing Meaning-Making Around iPads in Educational Settings: Directions From Literacy Studies

Abstract

Objectives: This presentation explores interactions between children and iPads in an elementary classroom. By focusing on iPads as artefacts rather than on use of specific apps, it highlights the ‘fluid materiality’ of iPads, which become different things as they operate within a mess of bodies, texts and other objects. It explores how interactions between bodies and devices are significant to the different ways children take up iPads.

Theoretical framework: Theories of material culture (Miller, 2010) and postphenomenology (Ihde, 1993; Verbeek, 2005) are used to explore the reflexive relationship between iPads and the social life of classrooms and, by implication, the official and unofficial meanings that get made around iPads in educational settings. Specifically, this paper draws on a set of distinctions outlined by Verbeek that indicate different ways of conceptualising materiality.

Methods: The methodology captured the entwined nature of on/off screen activity (Hine, 2000). iPad use was investigated through observation, group interviews, and informal interviews with children as they played and worked together. Video was used to record the fine-grained detail of children’s interactions, and field-notes to respond rapidly to changing patterns of interactions that cut across the classroom and beyond. Rhizomatic analysis (Leander and Rowe, 2011) was used to investigate multiple relationships between what happened on and off-screen.

Data Source:
Data are drawn from a 9-month study of 10-11 year-old children’s use of digital technologies in a classroom in a small primary (elementary) school in England. iPads were used in all lessons observed during this study.

Results: Some iPad uses were in line with functions intended by teachers and designers: iPads were used for example as display screens, to mediate texts, or as portals into other spaces. Other uses were more incidental: an impromptu plate during a picnic for example, or a surface on which to pile other objects. As uses shifted, the materiality was variously foregrounded or backgrounded, but always relevant as children hunched, gathered round, held, pointed at, slid fingers over and tapped the small smooth rectangular objects. Linked to this, meanings switched between the officially sanctioned and the playful as children easily navigated the devices, often drawing on expertise developed at home. The iPad ‘became’ different things as it was variously constituted as tool, source of information, plaything, etc. Again, its thingness invited these switches – the children passed it round, reached across to tap on each other’s screens, or held screens high so those far across the classroom could see. In these ways, the iPad mediated interactions that disrupted the individualised and ordered physicality more typically associated with meaning-making around printed texts in this classroom.

Significance: The focus on ‘fluid materiality’ builds on Ihde’s notion of the ‘multistability’ of objects (Ihde, 1993) , challenging the neutrality of iPads as devices and seeing them as helping to construct multiple and diverse relationships, activities and endeavours.

Author

• Cathy Burnett, Sheffield Hallam University