Chapter in a new book about human-smartphone-entanglements

Hohti, R., Paakkari, A. & Stenberg, K. (2019) Leaping and dancing with digitality: Exploring human-smartphone-entanglements in classrooms. In: Rautio, P. & Stenvall, E. (Eds.) Children and the Everyday: Arctic Childhoods Matter. Series Children: Global posthumanist perspectives and materialist theories. Springer.

Abstract

This chapter explores children’s and young people’s engagements and attachments with digitality in Finnish school context. School research (e.g. Simola 2015) has brought out how classroom practice and routine seems to be surprisingly resistant to change to the extent that to an observer’s eyes, much of it looks practically unchanged during decades. However, the fact that smartphones increasingly participate in people’s lives might be one factor that triggers profound changes even inside school walls. We suggest that the relations between humans and their constant digital companions, their smartphones, cannot be reduced to instrumental pedagogical relations, and that to examine them, one needs to attend to complexity and open-endedness. Thus, in the following, we are not so much focusing on pedagogies, in how smartphones should be used to enhance learning, rather, we are curious about the material, bodily, temporal and spatial dimensions at play in situations in which children and young people and their digital devices entangle in schools and beyond.

In talking about young people’s engagements with smartphones, we will particularly emphasise two aspects: firstly, the affective nature these engagements, or as we like to think about them following Haraway (2003), companionships. The processes in which phones become young people’s companions in everyday life are material, embodied, and deeply intimate. In our empirical examples we discuss for example boredom and addiction in relation to this. Secondly, we emphasise the ‘beyond’ perspective, as we see it crucial to take into account that smartphones are making schools less and less disconnected from everyday life outside schools. There is a multidirectional dynamic in the digital engagements, which means that not only students access their phones, and through their phones global flows and networks, but also the phones access their users. Events, ideas, and provocations from outside the traditional realm of education flow into classrooms via students’ phones. The local understandings of education, and of digitalization and technology as part of it, thus necessarily intersect with larger knowledge networks and affective flows as well as the material chains of production. We ask, what could be seen as distinctively Finnish or Nordic in this case? The hyperconnectedness created through the students’ smartphones necessarily disturbs the spatiality and temporality of schools.

 

Beyond Technology group meeting in Aalborg

 

Set in freshly fallen snow, the Beyond Technology group met in Aalborg, Denmark in January 2019 to discuss what we observed and worked with over the last 6 months and our plans for the next 6 months. One of the exciting news was that we were joined by Olli Rekonen a Finnish Master student (see also news from Finland). The teams will work together with their classes on the Children’s Manifesto on smartphones – watch this space.

 

 

Gender and sixth graders’ mobile phone use (thesis in the making)

I am a sociology student who is doing his master’s thesis on gender in the context of sixth graders’ relations to their mobile phones. Focus groups with a class of sixth graders and interviews with their current teacher as well as one of their past teachers will make up the main part of my data. Most of the focus groups have already been conducted, and they’ve produced some fruitful information on the complex ways that the mobile phone configures into the everyday lives of children.

It seems clear that data collected by a sociologist and an “outsider” who the students aren’t familiar with differs from that collected by a teacher or another authority figure who the students know. The children have let me in on some interesting information they maybe wouldn’t have disclosed to their teachers or parents.

At times, the students have also taken over the interviewing in the focus groups while I have just listened in. It’s become clear to me that the children have much more knowledge on many of the intricacies of the world of mobile and digital technology than I do. Many dimensions of the students’ “phone world” can only be illuminated by a slang and new vocabulary unknown to older generations. This is exactly why children and youth should be given the freedom to themselves take the lead in discussions on the digital technology of today. A central objective of my thesis is to mediate the voice of the students to those interested in the sociology of mobile phones.

More to come later…  

Year 2 meeting on Egholm by Aalborg, Denmark

On Egholm

For the second time in the Beyond Technology project, we have met now towards the end of the school year to exchange experiences, ideas and think about where to go.
We have discussed ideas to do with affect and digital technology, programming, media consumption, and when at the confluence of on-and offline technologies students can become navigators of their own learning.

Finland

Participants from Finland
During year 2016-2017 the participants were 26 students on the 6th class and their teacher Katariina Stenberg in Viikki University Training School

 

The project will continue with Kata and her new students who are on their 5th class.

Viikki Teacher Training School of the University of Helsinki
http://www.vink.helsinki.fi/index.php?del=0&id=911

Researchers

Dr Minna Ruckenstein, University of Helsinki, Department of Political and Economic Studies, Consumer Society Research Centre

Dr Katariina Stenberg, Viikki Teacher Training School of the University of Helsinki

Dr Riikka Hohti, University of Helsinki, University of Oulu

The importance of acknowledging students’ ownership

 The padlet task and the peer circle in Kata’s class, 6th grade.

In the padlet task, the students took photos and wrote texts under the title “Me and my mobile phone”. The aim was to provide the children a space to tell about their relationship with their smartphones. Before the task, there was a phase of warming up: the children were standing in two circles and talking face-to-face in pairs exchanging questions and answers. After discussing each other for two minutes, the students moved to talk with a new peer.

The instructions of the peer circle were:

  • Show your phone to your pair and tell about it: How did you get it? Are you satisfied with it? Why did you choose that type (Samsung/Iphone etc,). What technical problems have you faced with it and so on.
  • Show your applications to your pair: what are your favorite ones and why you use them? On what purposes you use your phone?
  • Are you addicted to your phone? What happens if you are not able to use your phone? Have you been without your phone? Do you find it easy? Why or why not?

In reflecting afterwards we noticed that this phase before the actual working using padlet was important. Why? The discussion flew freely and the atmosphere was lively. The kids could talk about their favorite applications. There was a boy who presented his pizza call app with great enthusiasm! The teacher joined the discussion. They had the phones as concrete items in their hands, but their discussion spread to cover their lives broadly when talking about how they use their phones. Without this phase the padlet task could have been understood by the kids just as another school task, as now the task went on with great engagement.

 

What did we learn? Whenever touching the subject of mobile technologies, teachers need to take into account that students have their own knowledge and in many cases much broader experiences about them than we assume.

 

 

 

Beyond Technology at the AVPC conference, 17.-18.6.2017, Aalborg

Our project was shared at the annual Association for Visual Pedagogies Conference (http://www.avpc2017.aau.dk/) in three research presentations.

The project leader Kathrin Otrel-Cass (Aalborg University, Denmark) presented with a student from Sofiendalskole, Monica Sun. The presentation was entitled: Primary school students as co-researchers. Kathrin and Monica were sharing stories about students producing video recordings to share their insights into technology use. The main idea was that videos allow students to select and identify things that are important to them.

Dorina Gnaur (Denmark) presented a paper on digital didactic designs. Here, digital media play a decisive role in connecting students accross various learning and action spaces making the learning process follow the learner. In the case of school children, this would mean connecting activities outside school with what is going on in class and taking the teaching out of the classroom, in real life. Videos are an excellent means of transporting rich data across these spaces.

 

Riikka Hohti (Finland) talked in her presentation about children and smartphones in class. She used the concept of entanglement to think about the relationality and interdependencies of children’s digital activity. She also talked about the affective dimensions of boredom, addiction and vulnerability with the help of photographs and narratives.

Startup in Finland

The 15th of November the students of sixth grade and their parents had a meeting related to the Nord plus project in Finland. Two weeks before the meeting, the researchers and students have had a two-hour discussion where they pondered a question: “What your parents should know about you and your phone”. The answers students produced created the starting point for parents’ and student’s joint conversation. From the pupils’ viewpoint, there were three main concerns connected to the issue. Firstly, the pupils emphasized that their phones are purely private matters and should be respect by the parents. Secondly, it is important to act immediately when something comes up on line, for example if a friend sends a message. Thus, if something essential is unfinished, it makes hard to follow parent’s command to put the mobile phone away. Thirdly, parents should know that it is not about playing games in online all the time. The most important things in adolescents’ life are in online-world. The phone is like a soulmate for them.
These themes raised fruitful conversation and the wondering will be continued.