Abstract
ABSTRACT According to adults who ban adolescent interactions with mobile phones in Chinese high schools, students ‘addicted’ to mobile phones lack will power and schools without a restrictive policy on mobile phone use among students on campus are ‘poor’ in quality. Upon analysis of data from 45 semi-structured interviews with second-year high school students from urban, rural, and Tibetan regions of China, this study finds that the consequences of mobile phone use are not always pre-determined. Teens do not merely use their phones to connect; they also treat them as ‘life’ and ‘thought’ companions, which they invest with feelings and thoughts that animate life experiences and catalyse healthy development. The wholesale ban on mobile phone use in school is destined to fail and risks blinding parents and educators to potential benefits the technology has to offer, for it overlooks the value of mobile phones as objects of ‘passion’ and ‘reason’, ignores the opportunity to engage with teens who make visible online the problems they struggle with offline, and disregards the need for empathic imagination.
Highlights
While mobile phones are increasingly integrated into adolescent lives in China, many high schools adopt a restrictive approach to students’ use of the technology on campus
To many parents in China, schools implementing strict policies regarding mobile phone use are of high quality (Liu 2011, 9)
The findings reported here draw on data from the qualitative strand of the project, which set out to understand how adolescent appropriation of and engagement with mobile phones and the cyberspace they proffer affected the students selected for the study, and the other way around, how their specific home and school structures shaped the ways in which they approached the technology in question
Summary
While mobile phones are increasingly integrated into adolescent lives in China, many high schools adopt a restrictive approach to students’ use of the technology on campus. They become something that can undermine school norms, disrupt ‘proper’ learning and teaching that are key to success in the life-transforming National College Entrance Exam, known as Gaokao in China, and at times leave students prey to risks, such as addiction and pornography (Buckingham 2008, 11; Selwyn et al 2017, 290) This negative deterministic view of technology contrasts with its positive deterministic cousin, which regards digital technologies as a driving force in the history of education. School policy to ban mobile phone use on campus largely reflects adult values and fears (Herring 2008, 75), youth perspectives born out of their lived experiences often contradict what adult commentators have to say or fear This is confirmed by a recent study that analysed large datasets collected from the UK and USA, as it detected very weak, if at all, correlation between digital technology use and wellbeing among young people (Orben and Przybylski 2019). Its use is socially constructed, meaning different stakeholders such as teachers, parents, carers, and students create, negotiate, and attach differing and even conflicting forms, meanings, and uses to the same technology in question (Oudshoorn and Pinch 2003, 24; Horst and Miller 2006)
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