Collective and individual use of smartphones: Embodied interaction in Swedish upper secondary Building and construction and Hairdresser educations
Publication details
| Year: | 2019 |
| Issued: | 2019 |
| Language: | English |
| Start Page: | 174 |
| End Page: | 216 |
| Editors: | Moreno Herrera L.; Teräs M.; Gougoulakis P. |
| Authors: | Kontio J.; Asplund S.-B. |
| Type: | Book chapter |
| Book title: | Emergent Issues in Research on Vocational Education and Training, Vol. 4 |
| Publisher: | Premiss |
| Place: | Stockholm, Sweden |
| Topics: | Learning; Internet usage, practices and engagement |
| Sample: | The students included in this article come from two mid-Sweden upper-secondary school classes of two different vocational education program, i.e. the Building and Construction program and the Hairdresser program. The students are aged 17–18, and the classes consist of 25 and 23 students respectively. |
| Implications For Educators About: | Other |
| Implications For Stakeholders About: | Researchers |
Abstract
This chapter has a special focus on the use of smartphones among students in two Swedish study programs in upper secondary school; one traditionally male education, the Building and construction program; and one traditionally female education, the Hairdresser program. The results derive from a larger video-ethnographic project with the aim to explore the role of smartphone usage in upper secondary classrooms in Sweden. In this project we have used new and innovative methods regarding how students’ digital activities in the classroom could be cap- tured and studied. While the smartphones were used individually to a notably higher extent by the students in the hairdressing classroom, there were significantly more collective features in the smartphone usage of the students in the building and construction class. In the latter, the students showed up what they did on their smartphones for several of their classmates at the same time, we also witnessed situations where the students used each other’s smartphones; interactional traits that we did not witness at all in the studied hairdressing classes. In this chapter, we study what these collective and individual features of mobile usage look like, and what their interactional purposes are. More precisely, the purpose is to study the embodied interactional processes the students engage in when using their smartphones and how these processes relate to their shaping of a professional identity.
Outcome
"The embodied interactional processes the VET students engage in when using their smartphones are seemingly related to their shaping of a professional identity, not least so when considering how the smartphone use among the students correlate to the wordings of the policy documents that govern the two different study programs. Catchwords like independence, personal responsibility and personal driving force are reflected in the very individual smartphone use among the hairdresser students (see examples 1–3, above), while workplace collaboration seem to be echoed in the vastly more common collective features when it comes to the building and construction students interactions (see examples 4–5, above; Asplund & Kontio, submitted)." (Authors, 209-210)