IPads in Inclusive Classrooms: Ecologies of Learning

Abstract

This paper builds on data from a research project where iPads were used in a lower secondary school in Denmark to support school development and inclusive learning environments. The paper explores how iPads enter into and work as part of an ecology of learning resources in five classes in lower secondary school. I conceptualize the systems of related technologies observed in this school as ecologies of learning resources as they present themselves as carefully balanced systems in which educational resources circulate in different ways that make sense for learners’ needs. Inspired by Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and studies in the materiality of learning I use the term socio-material bricolage as an analytical framework to describe this ‘ecological’ entanglement of material and social aspects of teaching and learning. Based on an analysis of the processes of bricolage engaged in by pupils the paper argues that we should disengage approaches to the iPad in education from ideas of what the properties of these technologies are, and see the device as a more relational and situated actor, avoiding the definition of properties of technologies outside the contexts specific to their use.