Taming unruly beings: students, discipline and educational technology

ABSTRACT

Digital distraction has become a prominent concern in the world of education, as evident in the growing trend of banning mobile phones. Since laptops are practically indispensable to contemporary schooling, however, banning these devices remains a rare and controversial response. Far more commonplace is the deployment of classroom rules and policies outlining appropriate uses of information and communication technology (ICT). By way of an empirical example, this article provides two contrasting theoretical analyses of such ICT rules: a critical story inspired by neo-Marxism and a posthumanist story inspired by actor-network theory. In the critical story, teachers use ICT rules to tame unruly students and make them compliant workers. In the posthumanist story, however, students and teachers jointly use ICT rules to tame unruly laptops and domesticate these entities. The article tells these two stories, unpacks their basic assumptions and discusses their implications for the field of educational technology.

KEYWORDS:

• Agency
• discipline
• education
• posthumanism
• technology

Acknowledgments

I sincerely thank Neil Selwyn and Carlo Perrotta from the Digital Education Research Group at Monash University for coffee, conversations and constructive criticisms. I also thank Maria Ovesen for her wonderful illustrations. All remaining errors are my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The place is actually called a gymnasium. In Denmark, a gymnasium is an upper secondary educational institution that provides a three-year course of general education to students aged around 16–19 years which qualifies them for admission to higher educational institutions like the university. This particular gymnasium employs the strategy of ‘bringing your own device’ in which students bring privately owned laptops and tablets to school and connect these devices to the school’s Wi-Fi and learning management system, two vital aspects of contemporary education. The material presented here stems from field notes, sketches and transcripts of student interviews generated at the gymnasium in the course of 2018–19.

2. While scholars grouped under the umbrella of critical theory in this section all belong to a ‘broad wave’ of neo-Marxian functionalism emerging in the 1960s and 1970s, there are also notable differences amongst them: Bowles and Gintis, for example, were much more optimistic about the possibilities of educational change than Althusser (Swartz, 2000).

3. As early as the beginning of the twentieth century, pragmatist philosopher John Dewey discussed notions similar to the hidden curriculum and coined the concept of collateral learning: ‘Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only the particular things he is studying at the time. Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes, of like and dislikes, may be and often is much more important than the spelling lesson or lesson in geography or history that is learned’ (Dewey, 1916/1966, p. 48).

4. I do not mean to imply that all students welcomed the ICT rules (they didn’t). I only wish to discuss why some students did. The purpose of this article, in other words, is not to discuss the statistical distribution of student attitudes towards the ICT rules on a 5-point Likert scale, but to discuss two theoretically informed interpretations, or ‘stories’ as we have called them here, that can be told about these ICT rules.

5. It is worth noting that our two stories are confined to the microcosm of the classroom, but both perspectives have a natural proclivity to branch out: The critical story would proceed to analyse the political economy in which educational technology is enveloped, while the posthumanist story would continue to unravel larger networks of relevant actors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jesper Aagaard

Jesper Aagaard is an Associate Professor at the Department of Psychology and Behavioural Sciences, Aarhus University, Denmark. His research focuses on the use of digital devices in the classroom with a specific interest in the contemporary phenomenon known as digital distraction.