Fritjof Sahlström is professor and Dean at Åbo Akademi University. His research interests are focused on issues in education related to multi literacies, classroom studies and equality. Sahlström will give a guest lecture with the title: Connected classrooms: Screen-mediated sociality in teaching and learning
Abstract: In recent years, classrooms have become connected from within through the students’ own smartphones. The use of social media, through applications like Snapchat, Whatsapp, Instagram and Facebook, has become a common activity for most of today's students, also inside classrooms. Thus, the outside world and its communicational resources are today present in classrooms in new ways, with social networks extending outside classrooms, which leads to changes in the social interaction that has multifaceted consequences in relation to t participation frameworks in different social situations.
Recent research (Holm, Sahlström & Zilliacus, 2018; Sahlström, Tanner & Valasmo, 2019) shows that student phone use significantly alters student participation in the participation framework of whole-class interaction, since simultaneous use of smartphones during frontal teaching releases some of the participation constraints on student interaction without threatening the basic and fundamental classroom participation economy.
In his lecture, Sahlström will present a study that consists of compiled video recordings from multiple sources (face-to-face interaction, laptop screen recordings, mobile phone screen mirroring) of student interactions in Swedish and Finnish upper secondary classrooms. From this material, a collection of screen-mediated conversations have been selected where the students chat with others outside the classroom about a recurring topic during several occasions in one or more lessons. The analysis relies on established methods for studying coherence and change, such as practices for sequentiality, epistemic topicaliztion and other participant actions (cf. Tanner & Sahlström, 2017).