Developing spaces for technology-mediated inquiry in education

Interactive communication technologies enter our everyday activities at an impressive pace. The proliferation of mobile computing devices coupled to a ubiquitous connectivity initiates a “historical shift to digital” and profoundly changes the ways we organize our daily life, communicate, interact, learn or gather information. Digital media also shape the life contexts of our children, who keep on using interactive tools from game-playing to explicit learning activities. This issue creates a growing need to investigate the potential of mobile computing devices in educational contexts and analyse its impact on pedagogical, organisational and technological challenges, the school communities are dealing with.
The present paper is discussing findings from a research project that studies the use of tablet-cloud systems in fundamental schools. Luxembourg’s schools and homes are well equipped with computers and internet access. However, little is known about promising strategies and existing barriers to integrate mobile devices effectively into educational contexts. Our research supplies schools with tablet-cloud systems in order to study the impact on collaborative and student-centred learning activities. The project’s core research foci put attention on processes of a) student-led inquiries and creative productions and b) the empowerment of teachers. Prior research often reveals a reluctance of teachers to use IC technologies in classroom activities. Often, teachers experience a lack of digital literacy skills to support students in using interactive devices in classroom inquiries and hands-on activities.
This contribution analyses how ICT-enhanced learning practices challenge existing notions of educational achievement, learning, student engagement and participation among the involved teachers. Our transformative research approach puts specific emphasis on threads and opportunities that members of four fundamental school communities experience concerning technological, organisational and pedagogical innovation. We ground our developmental work on the concept of ‘expansive learning’, where “learners learn something that is not yet there. In other words, the learners construct a new object and concept for their collective activity, and implement this new object and concept in practice“ (Engeström & Sannino 2010, 2). Cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) offers a sound theoretical and methodological framework for implementing and investigating innovation in organisations and institutions, especially in order to interrelate individual and collective actions. CHAT considers both as dialectically interrelated, that is to say, they can be understood only historically and in interaction with each other.
The research data are gathered by a multi-method approach, which combines video-ethnographic data of students’ classroom tasks, multimodal analysis of students’ multimodal productions and self-recordings (on the cloud), video-taped stimulated recall sessions with students about their own learning. Excerpts from these data sets are discussed with teachers in developmental work sessions to identify current barriers and successful strategies to integrate technology in learning and teaching practices. The outcomes of our analysis allow to identify potential levers for increasing the use of mobile computing devices in educational contexts and expand the object of socio-digital activity systems in the field of education.