Contested affordances: teachers and students negotiating the classroom integration of mobile technology
This paper extends an emerging approach emphasizing contextual variation in the affordances of digital technologies and new media through an empirical application focused on relational dynamics of power and resistance. Specifically, I focus on the case of student and teacher negotiations
over smartphones and social media in the classroom ‐ a case where actors on either side of a power relationship assign conflicting meanings to the same technology. Interviews were conducted with 37 students and 19 teachers at a public high school with a technology policy designating
students’ personally-owned smartphones as educational devices. As the affordance of contextual mobility allowed students to access shared online social spaces within the classroom, smartphones threatened the cultural logic of separation bounding the social from the educational. With
their sense of control threatened, teachers sought to re-constitute separation through strategies of restriction and differentiation. Viewing online-offline integration as a taken-for-granted part of social life, students used strategies of adaptive resistance to combat school policies and
maximize technology use. However, students also worked to re-constitute separation through peer cultural norms limiting the in-school consequences of online peer social interactions. Underneath the contestation between restriction and resistance, both teachers and students worked to set conditions
on the affordance of contextual mobility.
Keywords: Affordances; education; mobile technology; youth
Document Type: Research Article
Affiliations: Sociology, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, USA
Publication date: 16 April 2019
- Information for Authors
- Subscribe to this Title
- Ingenta Connect is not responsible for the content or availability of external websites
- Access Key
- Free content
- Partial Free content
- New content
- Open access content
- Partial Open access content
- Subscribed content
- Partial Subscribed content
- Free trial content