Mobile media practices of young people in «safely digital», «enthusiastically digital», and «postdigital» schools

Wie gehen Schulen gegenwärtig mit mobilen Medien um? Ausgehend von ethnografisch orientierter Feldforschung an Deutschen Auslandsschulen, arbeitet der Beitrag drei Muster schulischer Praktiken im Umgang mit der Smartphone-Nutzung von Jugendlichen heraus: «geschützt-digitale», «enthusiastisch-digitale» und «post-digitale» Praktiken. Anhand von Feldforschungsvignetten aus drei Schulen beschreibt der Beitrag die jeweiligen Muster anschaulich, um nachvollziehbar zu zeigen, wie unterschiedlich Schülerinnen und Schüler durch die Praktiken kontrolliert, geregelt oder befähigt werden, ihre Welt im Bildungskontext zu gestalten. Der Beitrag zeigt, dass die beschriebenen Praktiken gleichzeitig existieren. Sie setzen unterschiedliche (nicht bessere oder schlechtere) institutionelle Prioritäten und unterschiedliche (nicht bessere oder schlechtere) Verständnisse der Mediennutzung von Jugendlichen um. Der Beitrag macht die Spannungen sichtbar, die entstehen, wenn Schulen die Nutzung mobiler Medien von Kindern und Jugendlichen kontrollieren wollen und argumentiert, dass jedes Muster schulischer Praktiken sich selbst untergräbt. Der Beitrag endet mit einer Reflexion der Implikationen der Studienergebnisse für zukünftige Forschung und schulische Praktiken: Die zunehmende Nutzung mobiler Medien in der Schule ist nicht zwingend als Ausdruck von «Fortschritt», «Verbesserung» oder «Modernisierung» zu sehen, sondern wird vielmehr durch die unterschiedlichen Verständnisse von Schule und jungen Menschen hervorgebracht.How do schools today engage with mobile media? Drawing on ethnographically oriented research at German Schools Abroad, this paper teases out three sets of practices regarding young people’s mobile media use: «safe», «enthusiastic», and «postdigital». Presenting vignettes from three schools to illustrate each set of practices, the paper demonstrates how students are differently controlled, guided, and given space to shape their worlds through the practices. The paper highlights that these practices exist simultaneously. They enact different (not better or worse) institutional priorities and different (not better or worse) understandings of young people’s mobile use. The paper also highlights the tensions when schools aim to control young people’s mobile use, arguing that each set of practices undermines itself. It ends by reflecting on the implications for future research and practice if we see increased mobile media use in schools not, as often assumed, as a mark of «progress», «improvement» or «modernity», but instead as emerging from different understandings of school and young people

Backstaging the teacher: On learner-driven, school-driven and data-driven change in educational technology discourse

As digital technologies become more prominent in schools, and a host of new media products appear in classrooms, critical questions are being asked about the erasure of power and politics in contemporary education. To explore the discourse on digital education, this paper draws on discourse analysis of ethnographic interviews with for-profit and non-profit organizations in the field. It asks (i) what industry insiders describe as driving change in contemporary educational technology (edtech), and (ii) whether new actors/technologies shaping a novel educational hegemony, and if so, what this hegemony looks like. Initial findings suggest that while the teacher was seen as key to driving change in printed educational materials, three different discourses appear when describing change in today’s educational technology. In the first, learners drive change; the focus lies on the individual dimension. In the second, schools drive change; the systemic dimension. In the third, data drive change; the analytics dimension. Linking these three discourses is a shift from “education” to “learning”. The accounts of educational technology simultaneously advocate for improving opportunities for all students, especially weaker or disadvantaged learners, and also strengthen the hegemonic shift across policy and practice towards an instrumental understanding of education. Overall, the paper suggests that power and politics are by no means erased from the edtech industry’s accounts of digital technologies and datafication. The socio-material affordances engineered into the technologies invite particular teaching practices and thus affect power relations in education

GLOBAL SUBJECTS: EXPLORING SUBJECTIVATION THROUGH ETHNOGRAPHY OF MEDIA PRODUCTION

Abstract What does it mean to represent events from the Holocaust in a graphic novel? And what if this is done not in the stark design of Art Spiegelman's Maus but in the light ligne claire (known from Tintin)? This paper explores the discursive practices surrounding The Search, a graphic novel produced specifically to teach children and young adults about the Holocaust. It asks how (novel) forms of subjectivation are articulated in the everyday, mundane practices of educational media workers. Drawing on poststructuralist theories of the subject and close micro-analysis of language (and semiotic) practices, the paper presents extracts from ethnographic observations of a team of authors designing teaching and learning materials to accompany The Search. These materials -and their practices of production -are participating in transforming memories of the Holocaust and thus (co)producing forms of globalisation. Findings suggest that while the Holocaust has traditionally been seen as a matter of 'national' responsibility, The Search and its teaching materials invite readers to see it as (global/universal) 'individualised' responsibility. Students are subjectivated as global subjects: Firstly, as universal-ethical subjects and, secondly, as contingency-tolerant subjects. These materials thus constitute a mundane, everyday element shaping new ways of being

Educational publishing: on economic rationality and textbook production

Durch Veränderungen in der Bildungsmedienproduktion (Verfahrenskontrolle, Unternehmenskonzentration, Dezentralisierung) verstärkt sich, so die These, die Rolle der Ökonomisierung in der Bereitstellung von Wissensangeboten für die Schule. Am Beispiel einer ethnographischen Untersuchung zur Produktion eines Schulbuchs wird herausgearbeitet, wie diese Wissensangebote jedoch hoch ambivalent sein können: Das Leitbild des unternehmerischen Selbst wird konstruiert, aber zugleich von einem gesellschaftskritischen Subjektbild "unterbrochen". (DIPF/Orig.)This article highlights central changes in the production of school-based educational media (procedural authorization, corporate consolidation, decentralization). It argues that these changes are strengthening the role of an economic rationality in mediating knowledge for schools. The production of one textbook illustrates how ambivalent this knowledge can be: The ideal of an entrepreneurial self is reproduced, yet simultaneously interrupted by a different, more socially critical subject. (DIPF/Orig.

Datafied Visibilities: From the Panopticon to the Panspectron in School Practices

Der Beitrag widmet sich den Ambivalenzen, von denen Datenpraktiken in der Schule durchzogen sind. Die Autorinnen nutzen hierfür die Metapher der Sichtbarkeit. Sie zeigen eine dreifache Verschiebung der Sichtbarkeit, wenn digitale Datentechnologien im Unterricht eingesetzt werden. Diese werden mit den Begriffen Panopticon, Panperspicon und Panspectron beschrieben. Dabei werden pädagogische und weitere schulische Praxisformen subtil und beiläufig, aber dennoch weitreichend transformiert. Aufgezeigt wird diese Verschiebung anhand der Analyse eines Interviews mit einer Lehrerin, die vom Einsatz digitaler Technologien in ihrem Schulalltag berichtet.The paper unfolds the ambivalences that permeate data practices in schools. By using the metaphor of visibility, a threefold shift is shown when digital data technologies are used in the classroom. These shifts are described with the terms panopticon, panperspicon and panspectron. In the process, pedagogical and other school practices are transformed in subtle yet far-reaching ways. The argument is demonstrated by analysing an interview with a teacher who reports on the use of digital technologies in her everyday school life

“The facts alone will not save us”: A workshop on speculative education future and history making

This workshop aims to explore speculative fiction as a form of educational enquiry and practice. In this pursuit it draws upon the provocative contention of Ruha Benjamin (2016) that “the facts, alone, will not save us.” Instead, she argues, “social change requires novel fictions that reimagine and rework all that is taken for granted about the current structure of society. Such narratives are not meant to convince others of what is, but to expand our own visions of what is possible” (Benjamin, 2016).The ethical implications of educational technologies (EdTech) from simple classroom tools to almighty platforms are raising increasing concerns. These are postdigital concerns insofar as they are inescapable yet also emergent and ongoing. They are amplified by the power and influence of AI (Bozkurt et al, 2023; Cox et al 2023) with its implications for fraud, scams, surveillance, privacy and more fundamentally encodings of privileged norms of race, gender, sexuality, religion and so on. In addition the material and carbon costs of digital learning may force us to reckon with EdTech as inherently ecologically destructive (Selwyn, 2021).Is this to say that all our futures are grim and that hope has been foreclosed? Or if not, how can we work together to plot our way out of these problems? Indeed, would trying to solve all of this too quickly be part of the problem and start another round of techno-solutionism? One approach that has seen increasing attention is the use of storytelling as a sense-making activity that may allow us to first “stay with the trouble” (Harraway, 2020) and describe it, before rushing to the fix. This recent speculative turn has seen educational researchers attempt to cast themselves as writers of fictions that can explore the multitude of interrelated socio-technical issues that are characteristic of complex contemporary networked learning environments (Houlden & Veletsianos, 2023; Hrastinski, 2023; Selwyn et al., 2020; Macgilchrist et al., 2020). It has seen teachers and educators developing or adopting speculative scenarios as tools for students to explore the types of socio-technical entanglements that our world now involves (Krutka et al., 2022).In this workshop participants will co-create speculative fictions that explore hopeful and dystopic possibilities of education. Participants will explore the development of educational fictions based on speculative futuring, of no-yet-ness (Ross, 2017), but also alternative histories that might allow us see the prospective tools of our work, including texts, as neither neutral nor ahistorical. The concept of anti-patterns and deliberately destructive design will be introduced to allow participants to pull on conceptual threads that help unravel education as a relentless and progressive assembly and instead see it as a story that may be unlearned and retold.In summary this workshop provides an invitation to participants to use their deep imaginative capabilities to dream new educational interfaces, via speculative fiction, that allow us to be more awake and alive to ourselves, our students and the communities we serve

The experience of participating: reflections on participatory research and design processes

In diesem Beitrag werden aktuelle sozialtheoretische Überlegungen zu Partizipation aufgegriffen, um anhand eines Verbundprojekts die Erfahrungen des Partizipierens zu reflektieren. Vier Aspekte - Perplexsein, Temporalitäten, Komplizenschaften und Aushalten – stützen die These, dass Partizipation sich als unordentliche, unsystematisierbare Erfahrung entfaltet, welche sowohl eine Formatierung von Partizipation als gezähmte und limitierte Konsensfindung als auch ihre Umformatierung als situiertes, konspiratives Perplexsein ermöglicht. (DIPF/Orig.)This article draws on theories of contemporary participation to reflect on an ongoing join participatory project. It identifies four aspects of the experience of participating: perplexity, temporality, complicity and endurance. The article argues that paticipation is a messy, unsytematic momentary experience, which enables both the formatting of participation as tamed consensus-building and the reformatting of participation as situated, conspiratorial perplexity. (DIPF/Orig.

Speculative Practicescapes of Learning Design and Dreaming

This article addresses a serious issue that besets learning design: its over-reliance on frameworks that promise particular outcomes for individual learners that accord with pre-defined metrics. This is partly a function of the nature of learning design and development itself which is commonly seen as outcome-oriented activity that should benefit individual learners in specific ways. An alternative approach is adopted here which calls attention to other happenings at the heart of education, including positive emotions we experience that are made known through less measurable and more fleeting points of reference. Hence, we draw on sources such as poems and personal reflections in order not just to design learning but to dream it. The concept of a practicescape is invoked which serves not just to situate learning but to remind the learner that their learning experience only happens within the context of their finite lifetime. Seven practicescapes are presented and reflected on by the authors as a conversation framework for interrogating ideas of learning that owe more to dreams, poems, and possibilities than aims, objectives, or outcomes. Drawing on early Buddhist philosophy, the practicescapes attempt to honour particular affective states and conjure a heart-centred framework on which to hang speculative questions and provocations for learning design that are focused on cultivating and sustaining the most positive forms of human experience. These practicescapes are offered as a speculative learning design climbing frame that could take us from dreams of possibility to enlivened and embodied presents