Investigating digital doings through breakdowns: a sociomaterial ethnography of a Bring Your Own Device school

ABSTRACT

As personal digital devices have become increasingly embedded in schools, what they do tends to silently fall into the background and generally be taken for granted. In order to scrutinize the silent doings of digital devices, this paper explores how attending to breakdowns as a methodological heuristic device can be an insightful entry point to surface and analyze these doings. By conducting a sociomaterial ethnographic study in one Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) school, this paper disentangles four different breakdowns that occurred during the ethnographic study. The analysis reveals a particular mode of digital doings at school, coined as digital pedagogics, that characterizes the school space–time as plastic and poly-synchronous and curates lesson activities. Moreover, this mode is heavily conditioned by and through the school’s sociomaterial infrastructure. The paper concludes that in the wake of the breakdowns, the school’s infrastructure comes into being not merely as a bundle of cables and basic structures that make the school function, but more importantly as a complex configuration of clouds, software and interfaces, algorithms and patterns, standards, protocols and negotiations. This sets the condition for framing contemporary digitized schools within a particular techno-scholastic milieu.

KEYWORDS:

• Breakdowns
• sociomateriality
• infrasomatization
• milieu
• Bring Your Own Device schools

Disclosure statement

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

Notes on contributors

Samira Alirezabeigi is a doctoral student at the research groups of Methodology of Educational Sciences, and the laboratory of Education, Culture and Society, University of Leuven, Belgium. Her research interests include digitization and new media, qualitative research methodologies, sociomaterial approaches, and philosophy of education.

Jan Masschelein is professor of educational philosophy and theory. Primary focus of research is on the public role and meaning of schools and universities, on the design of emancipatory study gatherings and pedagogic forms, and on ‘mapping’ and ‘walking’ as exercises in educational thought.

Mathias Decuypere is an Assistant Professor at KU Leuven (Belgium). Primary research interests are directed at developing and using qualitative methodologies for researching the (role of the) digital in higher and regular education (policy), open education and education for sustainable development.

ORCID

Samira Alirezabeigi http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2783-4438

Jan Masschelein http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2850-1571

Mathias Decuypere http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0983-738X

Notes

1 In philosophical phenomenology breakdowns are essential in identifying the unique characteristics of a phenomenon. The well-known example of Heidegger’s broken hammer and his analysis on two modes of ready-to-hand where our relation with an object becomes primordial as the tool affords its expected functions, versus the mode of present-at-hand, in which the tool itself comes to light as ‘an object separate from us’ in moments of malfunction, absence or breakdown (see Harman 2002). Accordingly, the methods of imaginative variation or eidetic reduction in phenomenology benefit from analyzing the situations where a phenomenon is obliterated from its apparent everyday context.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by KU Leuven: [grant number STG/17/029].