Aim/Purpose: The aim of the study is to explore students’ encounters with digital tools and how they account for their experiences of using digital tools within formal education. Background: While computers have a long history in educational settings, research indicates that digital tools function both as affordances and constraints, and that the role of digital tools in schools continues to be debated. Taking into consideration student perspectives can broaden the understanding of knowledge formation practices. Methodology: The study is part of a larger ethnographic project, focusing on agency at all levels with respect to digitalization in schools. The present exploratory study is built primarily on interviews with 31 secondary school students at five different schools (15 girls and 16 boys). The analytical framework was a Nexus Analysis, focusing on discourses in place. Contribution: The paper shows how digital tools are conceptualized as being formed by and fitted into the traditions and habits of the institution, rather than acting as a transformative force to change knowledge formation practices in schools. Findings: From the students’ narrative accounts, the following key themes emerge: (1) Action in contexts, (2) Agency in contexts, and (3) Equality in contexts. The first deals with the use of digital tools in school and the interaction order as it is accounted for in the use of digital tools in schools. The second frames human agency with regards to usage of digital tools and how agency fluctuates in interaction. The third deals with the compensating role digital tools are supposed to play for students who are identified with special needs and for students with divergent backgrounds, especially socioeconomic standards. Recommendations for Practitioners: For teachers, the recommendation is to engage in dialogue with the stu-dents on how and when to use digital tools and the affordances and con-straints involved from a student’s point of view. For school leaders, the recommendation is to review how organizational structures, culture, and processes hinder or support the development of new practices in digitalization processes. Recommendation for Researchers: The three key themes that emerged in this study emphasize the need to reflect upon how a panopticon view of contemporary classrooms can be challenged. Involving students in this work is recommended as a means to anchor ideas and results. Impact on Society: This study is part of a larger project at Jönköping University, focusing on agency at all levels with respect to digitalization in schools. The overall goal is to increase our understanding of how to improve digitalization and implementation processes in schools. Future Research: Future studies that address digital technologies in schools need to pay special attention to the interaction between students, teachers, and various kinds of tools to map the nature of the education process, with the aim of challenging the panopticon view of the classroom. Future studies need to focus upon processes themselves, rather than accounts of processes.

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This study illuminates the political, ideological, moral and ethical driving forces behind the Swedish governmental initiative to digitalize the educational system—the Swedish Digitalization Initiative (SDI). Taking a sociocultural point of departure, policy documents are considered mediational means and have agency. Nexus analysis is the analytical lens that is deployed. Policies are analyzed according to the public consultative discourse analysis scheme. Three main findings are reported in this study: The policy documents are chained, that is, one document is linked to one or more others. There are three important discourses that circulate in the policy documents: digital competence, programming and an economical discourse. Different policy documents have different strengths of agency, expressed rhetorically in terms of both languaging and layout. The driving forces of SDI are politically and ideologically economical liberalism. Moral and ethical driving forces can be seen in terms of equality between women and men.

All education in Sweden, or the Swedish eduscape, is permeated by discourses of compensation and inclusion, conceptualized in this study as a one-school-for-all ethos or perspective. This ethos contributes to a social-ecological framing, wherein the intentions are a society where everyone can participate as active members. This study scrutinizes the governmental strategy of 2017 to digitalize the Swedish educational system based on a one-school-for-all perspective. The study is framed by SWaSP (Second Wave of Southern Perspective) theoretical ideas, with a special focus on positionings, languaging, timespaces, and epistemological-methodological dimensions, including ethics based on the entangled tenets of sociocultural, integrationist, and southern perspectives. Furthermore, this study is anchored in three research projects and one societal developmental project. Materials - e.g., video recordings, audio recordings, photos, artifacts, fieldnotes – from these projects have been generated through (n)ethnographic methods from different institutions in the Swedish educational landscape i.e., eduscape. These span across compulsory schools to Swedish for Immigrants (SFI), within Municipal Adult Education. Three themes have emerged in the multi-scalar data analysis from across settings: (i) intended inclusion, (ii) unintended exclusion, and (iii) intended exclusion. The first theme highlights how digital tools (DTs) create inclusion for students with special needs, or those who are new to the named-language Swedish, in the classroom community, thus contributing to social-ecological sustainability. The second theme illustrates how DTs intended for inclusion in classroom practices morph into tools of exclusion for individuals in mainstream classrooms. The third theme highlights how students in the Swedish eduscape are intentionally excluded from mainstream classrooms. We argue that a social-ecological sustainable stance troubles the division of eduscapes into “mainstream” and “other” settings in contemporary societies, calling for the inclusion of all students irrespective of their positionalities. Our findings highlight that multimodal use of DTs potentially can facilitate inclusion, by providing tools where individual students can participate in and contribute to teaching and learning—what we frame as a third position of classroom organization.

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