“Wow” and Then What? Tablets in a Conservative Polish School: Mapping Emergent Teaching and Learning Practices in the Classroom

Abstract

This chapter contributes knowledge and new insights into learning and teaching practices in two classrooms in a Polish primary school that were observed over a longer perspective of three school semesters. Although the research project was performed on a small scale, it can be defined as one that monitors the changes to learning and teaching practices happening in the traditional educational culture of the school under analysis. In particular, these changes were identified through the data collected by means of classroom video ethnography and interviews with classroom’s teachers. The chapter contributes a map of teaching and learning practices over the course of three semesters during the process of introducing tablet technology into a school and a series of conflicts and tensions teachers experience in their tablet-mediated teaching practices. The “wow” in the title of this chapter is tantamount to the teachers’ excitement, hope, and their expectation that the appearance of tablets at school will work “wonders.” The teachers perceived tablets as a magic wand about to cause radical changes to teaching and learning practices. However, nothing like that happened. Our video ethnographic and narrative research, trying to find optimum ways of tablet integration in the classroom, started at the moment when the teachers expressed their great disappointment and began to wonder “and then what?”