‘Being stuck’. Analyzing text-planning activities in digitally rich upper secondary school classrooms

The aim of this article is to develop an understanding of how students use different interactional resources to manage problems that arise in their text-planning processes in digitally rich environments in Finnish and Swedish upper secondary schools. We explore both individual and collective teacher-initiated writing tasks in different subjects and during moments when text-planning seems to ‘get stuck’. Theoretically, we draw on a socio-cultural understanding of the text-planning process, and use multimodal conversation analysis to examine how students display ‘being stuck’ during their text-planning through their embodied and verbal performances, what role smartphones and laptops play in their process of becoming ‘stuck’ and ‘unstuck’, and how different interactional resources are coordinated during the students' text-planning processes. The data consist of video-recorded face-to-face interaction, students' activities on computers and/or with a pen and paper as well as simultaneous recordings of the focus students' smartphone screens. The results demonstrate that students often resort to smartphones as resources to display, negotiate and transform problems in their text-planning process. Our results challenge common claims within the contemporary debate both in relation to digital devices as the solution to pedagogical challenges and in relation to the debate on smartphones as devices that disrupt work.

"First, our analysis of both an individual and a collective writing process, has shown that the transition from the text-planning phase into actually producing text is not necessarily a step that is easy to take. There is not always a distinct and clear line between completion of the planning phase and being ready to proceed in the process. Second, it is during the text-planning phase that writers must come to terms with how to understand the purpose and organization of the text, where one reason for being stuck could be switching between local and global text levels as our analysis of collective writing has shown.... [O]ur result shows how the problems that arise as students become stuck during text-planning are very much about creating and mutually agreeing upon shared understandings about what kind of text that is to be written.... Our study suggests that in relation to the activities of text-planning in classroom assignments, smartphones and laptops are resources that neither cause ‘being stuck’, nor solve the problems associated with ‘being stuck’. Nevertheless, as the writer gets stuck and the writing process halts, students often resort to digital devices to seek solutions that could help their writing. In this case, the smartphone can be described as a resource in face-to-face-interactions and negotiations in both individual and collective writing processes." (Authors, 211)