The tablet “revolution” and teachers’ practical reasoning: bricolage and emergent changes in schooling

A significant recent trend in the digitalization of K-12 schools is the massive investment in mobile devices such as tablets, which has been associated with the one-to-one “revolution” of schooling in the digital age (Islam & Andersson 2016, Ditzler et al 2016). One-to-one computing has thus become a pervasive strategy for developing schools and creating innovation in classroom teaching (Harper & Milman 2016, Pegrum et al 2013). Whereas tablets and one-to-one computing are assumed to support increased personalized and student-centered learning they also contribute to a reorganisation of educational spaces in which teachers are placed in classroom activities in new ways (Holm Sørensen et al 2017). An aspect of this reorganisation is a shift in agencies in which changing forms of materiality contribute to teachers’ reimagination of classroom practices (Mifsud 2014, Thumlert et al 2015). Tablets are for instance placed in the hands of learners, not teachers, which requires that teachers both redesign their pedagogical planning and adapt teaching to emergent practices of technologies-in-use. The paper draws on research in Danish K-12 classrooms (7th-9th grade) where tablet devices were distributed to students as part of municipal strategies to enhance digitalization in schools. Two research projects followed the implementation of these strategies into four schools to understand the practices that emerge from introducing mobile devices into classroom teaching. Based on ethnographic studies the paper focuses on ways in which teaching and teachers’ pedagogies can be informed by the emergent uses of digital technologies which students have at hand. The paper draws on the concept of bricolage (Lévi-Strauss 1966) to understand how mobile devices participate in teaching activities and contribute to teachers’ reimagination of educational spaces.