Powerful Participants: Smartphones and Videoconferencing in the Enactment of Student Participation in Classrooms

Abstract in English

This thesis examines emerging participation practices in both traditional and distance teaching classrooms, focusing on the active roles of smartphones and videoconferencing software in the enactment of student participation. It contributes to current discussions on the role of mobile technologies in classrooms by offering detailed descriptions and analyses of what these technologies do and how they shape participation in classrooms. In this study, classrooms are approached as assemblages in which a heterogeneous group of actors, both human and non-human, come together and, through forming relations, enact the practices within. The research focuses on the relations among various actors such as students, teachers, smartphones, laptops, webcams, microphones, and school equipment within the studied classrooms, and asks how participation practices are enacted through these relations. The analysis of classroom participation is guided by the idea that agency is relational and not reserved for humans alone; objects, too, possess agency. The research was conducted as part of two distinct projects, both focusing on upper secondary schools in Finland. Textmöten was an ethnographic project carried out from 2014 to 2017, examining the presence of students’ smartphones in upper secondary schools. HIPPO was a research project conducted in 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on emergency distance teaching and the role of videoconferencing software in these practices. In both projects, voluntary students and teachers participated in the study and produced video recordings from classrooms. This video data plays a central role in the present study, and the analysis relies primarily on it. This dissertation consists of three peer-reviewed articles and a summary. The first article examines how students’ smartphone use during plenary teaching affects the organization of participation in the classroom. It highlights how the presence of smartphones significantly alters participation patterns in whole-class interactions, and how these interactional consequences differ for teachers and students. The second article explores how smartphones and Snapchat participate in and adapt to the classroom during plenary teaching. It describes how students work to integrate the use of these devices into the participation norms of plenary teaching, and how the flexibility of both the device and the application plays a crucial role in enabling the presence of smartphones in classrooms. Furthermore, the article discusses how the boundaries between the local and global are negotiated and blurred through the relations of students and their smartphones. The third article examines synchronous distance teaching practices during the COVID-19 pandemic. It highlights how actors such as the Zoom interface, webcam, microphone, and internet play central roles in shaping how student participation is enacted in distance teaching. The analysis describes how in the videoconferencing classroom, a great deal of students’ actions, becomes concealed from both other students and the teacher, thereby losing their interactional meaning. 8 Furthermore, it brings forward how the videoconferencing assemblage amplifies the teacher’s dominant role in the participation framework of plenary teaching. Together, the three studies emphasize the central role of mobile technologies in the enactment of student participation in contemporary classrooms. These technologies shape the roles of students and teachers and influence their capacities to engage in social interaction. The findings emphasize the distributed nature of agency and highlight how both technologies and students gain agency through their relationships with other actors that come together to form the classroom assemblage.