Individual Submission Summary
Share...

Direct link:

(Re)drawing Boundaries: Teachers and Students Contesting the Integration of Digital Technologies in the Classroom

Sun, August 12, 10:30 to 11:30am, Pennsylvania Convention Center, Floor: Level 100, 103B

Abstract

Scholars have been sharply divided on the question of how the presence of laptops, tablets, smartphones and new media is shaping everyday life in schools. This division between optimistic paradigms arguing for the transformative effects of digital technology and new media on student-teacher relationships and a critical approach arguing for the continuity of existing power dynamics has produced conceptual and empirical blindspots. This paper seeks to move beyond this divide by addressing a shared gap, specifically how the social consequences of digital technology integration influence teachers’ and students’ strategies managing and using smartphones and laptops in the classroom. In doing so, it adopts a sociocultural theoretical perspective, viewing the division between the educational and the social as actively produced through interactions between teachers and students. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with nineteen teachers and thirty-seven students at a high school that provided students with a laptop and integrated student’s personally-owned smartphones and tablets. As smartphones and social media allowed students’ peer interactions to occur fluidly across temporal and spatial boundaries, the integration of digital technologies threatened a cultural logic of separation which divided the school into educational and social times and spaces. This paper argues that teachers’ strategies for managing the use of digital technologies in the classroom and students’ tactics for resisting teacher’s management in pursuit of peer cultural projects served to mutually re-constitute the imperiled divide between the educational and the social. Teachers used strategies of separation and differentiation to reinforce the boundaries of the classroom while students sought to access mobile technologies during class time while limiting teacher knowledge. Moving beyond a transformation-continuity binary, this paper argues that digital technology’s challenge to the sociocultural, spatial, and temporal organization of schools is actively contained through teacher strategies and student tactics, maintaining traditional power dynamics.

Author