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Publication

In between continuity and rupture: On taskified classroom practices

Book - Dissertation

Since the pandemic has put a halt on schools as physical gatherings of humans and non-humans over the past months, the question of digitization of classroom practices has become an ever more pressing issue. Even though the research for this dissertation was conducted before the current crisis, it was already guided by an interest in the configuration of classroom practices with personal digital devices. In this sense, digitization is mainly approached through following concrete classroom practices when personal devices become an active part of this arrangement. In order to investigate classroom practices, this research project adopts a sociomaterial approach as its overarching theoretical and methodological framework. As such, the dissertation revolves around a sociomaterial ethnography that was conducted in an international school. Each chapter uses a heuristic device to investigate the specificities of implementing a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy. These heuristics are conceptual vantage points that allow an aspect of schooling with personal devices to be scrutinized. The introductory chapter situates the case of study (i.e. a BYOD school) within a network of actors that play a role in the constitution of classroom practices, including International Baccalaureate (IB) organization, the school board, and learning platforms. By adopting the concept of fast policy as a heuristic device, the chapter shows how these actors enter the classroom and 'do' policy in situ. It further demonstrates the tensions between shorthand policies of 'e-Assessment' and 'BYOD' on the one hand, and local classroom practices on the other hand. As a result, it brings to the surface how these fast policies are adopted as a best practice, while they are also slowed down and resisted and at the local level. The next three chapters focus on the specific composition of classroom practices and their spatiotemporal features. The second chapter deploys the heuristic of agencement in order to scrutinize how common practices come into being regardless of the subject matter and they put forth a taskified form of schooling. The third and fourth chapters address the temporal and spatial configurations of classrooms by adopting heuristics of timescape and social topology. They identify different types of times and spaces produced in classrooms when tasks are being instructed and conducted. Here, personal devices are regarded both as material objects that occupy and reconfigure the physical space of the classroom and time of a lesson, and also as apparatuses on which the lesson time majorly passes. Both chapters challenge the rhetorical personalized space and time that is often associated with the use of personal devices in schooling and specify that the taskified time has specific characteristics; it is ritualized, standardized and follows algorhythmic patterns. After elaborating on the spatiotemporal features of classroom practices, the fifth chapter closely scrutinizes classroom practices through the lens of breakdowns. The breakdown acts as a heuristic device to surface different interruptions in the stabilized routine practices and thus, showcases more silent doings of actors. The chapter argues that digital interactions are so heavily entrenched in the classroom's daily functioning that a new techno-scholastic milieu is created. Lastly, the sixth chapter of the dissertation casts an insider gaze on methodologies of investigating BYOD policy performances and shows how our methods did not merely describe the world but they actively participated in generating new worlds.
Publication year:2021
Accessibility:Embargoed