Contested affordances: teachers and students negotiating the classroom integration of mobile technology

ABSTRACT

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
• mobile technology
• education
• youth

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Jenny Davis, Allison Pugh, Jennifer Bair, and Andrea Press for their guidance and insightful feedback at various stages of this paper's development. I'd like to thank Bailey Troia, Alex Sutton, and Colin Arnold for their support throughout but particularly in this paper's early days in our writing seminar. Thank you also to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback on earlier versions of this paper. Lastly, this paper would not have been possible without the participation of Central High's teachers and students; I thank them for their time and for their honesty.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Brooke Dinsmore is a PhD student in sociology at the University of Virginia. Broadly, her research addresses how shifting cultural discourses and digital technologies shape youth-adult relationships in schools and other settings, with a focus on how these transformations impact race, class and gender inequality.

Notes

1 To maintain confidentiality, the school name was changed, and pseudonyms are used for participants.