“It must not disturb, it’s as simple as that”: Students’ voices on mobile phones in the infrastructure for learning in Swedish upper secondary school

Drawing from a survey and focus group interviews, this study explores how Swedish upper secondary students reason about the usage of their personal mobile phones in school. As a contribution to the debate around the mobile phone’s role in school, we present the students’ own voices relative to the question of regulating mobile phone use. We use the notion of infrastructure for learning (Guribye and Lindström 2009) to analytically approach the social and technological dimensions of the students’ narratives on their use of mobile phones in school practice. The students’ narratives present an intricate account of students’ awareness and concern of the implications of mobile phone presence in school. The students describe that the mobile phone is both a tool that facilitates their school work and a distraction that the teachers pursue. In school, the students are balancing their mobile phone usage with the teachers’ arbitrary enforcement of policy. Despite this process, the mobile phone is becoming a resource in the students’ infrastructure for learning. The findings from this study add to the limited body of research on the use of mobile phone in upper secondary school from a student perspective.

"The students’ narratives on their usage of mobile phones in school display that the students can reason around both potential benefits of mobile phone use in school and potential disadvantages of the same. The students acknowledge that out-side of school their mobile phones ubiquitously enable numerous of activities, and services in their day-to-day life. The students also describe how they in school use their mobile phones for school relevant work on many occasions, regardless of the current local policy in school. This means that students are actors in the boundary between the universal service infrastructure and the infrastructure for learning manifested through teachers, legislation and local policy." (Authors, 524)