The project focuses on the presence of online activities in the school, where internet and digital tools are an obvious part. What does it mean that smart phones and tablets are everywhere, all the time; what happens to the language use in an increasingly multilingual text world and what are the relationships between the coming digitized student exams and the students' increasingly digitized everyday life? With these kinds of questions the project was initiated in 2014.
Project leader
Fritjof Sahsltröm, Åbo Akademi University
Researchers
Riitta Juvonen
Antti Paakkari
Anna Slotte
Liisa Tainio
The methodological approach is video-ethnographic. We have studied classroom activities in two upper secondary schools with a primary interest in occasions where students’ smartphones, laptops or other mobile devices are used. The data consist of video-recorded face-to-face interaction, interaction with paper printed text materials and simultaneous recordings of the focus students’ smartphones and laptops, where the smartphone screens have been mirrored and recorded.
Different aspects of the empirical material have been analyzed and results presented at conferences, seminars and publications.
Matilda Ståhl, Antti Paakkari and Verneri Valasmo write their PhD-thesis within the project.
Presentations
Textmöten presentation
Publications
Scientific article, Education Inquiry, Volume 9, 2018 - Issue 1
Justice through participation: student engagement in Nordic classrooms
Forthcoming
Sahlström & Tanner (Forthcoming) (Ed.). Smartphones in classrooms: reading, writing and talking in rapidly changing educational spaces. Special issue of Learning, Culture and Social Interaction.
For more publications, see this link
Funding
Svenska kulturfonden (The Swedish Cultural Foundation in Finland), 2014–2017
Cooperation
Textmöten is a collaboration between the University of Helsinki and Åbo Akademi University with the following researchers: Fritjof Sahlström (project leader), Michaela Pörn (researcher), Matilda Ståhl (Project assistant and PhD-student) and Verneri Valasmo (Project assistant and PhD-student).
Textmöten does also collaborate with a research team at the University of Karlstad that is conducting a similar study in Sweden, “Connected Classroom”. Researchers: Christina Olin-Scheller and Marie Tanner.
Other collaborating researchers are Øystein Gilje, University of Oslo and Fredrik Rusk, Nord University from Norway.
Anna Slotte, anna.slotte@helsinki.fi
Riitta Juvonen, riitta.juvonen@helsinki.fi
Antti Paakkari, antti.paakkari@helsinki.fi
Liisa Tainio, liisa.tainio@helsinki.fi
Fritjof Sahlström, fritjof.sahlstrom@abo.fi
Matilda Ståhl, matilda.stahl@abo.fi