Abstract
Drawing from a survey and focus group interviews, this study explores how Swedish upper secondary students reason about the usage of their personal mobile phones in school. As a contribution to the debate around the mobile phone’s role in school, we present the students’ own voices relative to the question of regulating mobile phone use. We use the notion of infrastructure for learning (Guribye and Lindström 2009) to analytically approach the social and technological dimensions of the students’ narratives on their use of mobile phones in school practice. The students’ narratives present an intricate account of students’ awareness and concern of the implications of mobile phone presence in school. The students describe that the mobile phone is both a tool that facilitates their school work and a distraction that the teachers pursue. In school, the students are balancing their mobile phone usage with the teachers’ arbitrary enforcement of policy. Despite this process, the mobile phone is becoming a resource in the students’ infrastructure for learning. The findings from this study add to the limited body of research on the use of mobile phone in upper secondary school from a student perspective.
Highlights
Digital technologies such as desktop computers, laptops and tablets are technologies that schools have continuously made investments in (Perselli 2014)
2013, 98,5% of the Swedish adolescents (Skolverket 2014) attended upper secondary education) we argue that it is important to study upper secondary school students’ perceptions regarding all aspects of their school practice, in their reasoning about the controversial issue of mobile phone use as a resource in the infrastructure for learning
There is research that has a more pragmatical approach to the mobile phone in formal education. This strand acknowledges the difficulties with the managing of mobile phones in school, and the need for stakeholders to actively engage in the integration of this technology so important for students in their everyday lives
Summary
Digital technologies such as desktop computers, laptops and tablets are technologies that schools have continuously made investments in (Perselli 2014). In the lower income groups, the mobile phone is even the most common technological platform to own (Katz et al 2014) This has had impact on school as well. There is research that has a more pragmatical approach to the mobile phone in formal education This strand acknowledges the difficulties with the managing of mobile phones in school, and the need for stakeholders to actively engage in the integration of this technology so important for students in their everyday lives. We present research on various aspects of the perils, prospects, and pragmatic reasoning around mobile phones in school
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