Didactical Dilemmas With Mobile Phones in Vocational Educational Classrooms

This paper presents ongoing research on vocational didactical dilemmas in Sweden, and examples from a study that focuses on didactical dilemmas with mobile phones in the vocational educational classroom. The paper is based on a tentative study of the risks identified in two different projects where young people in Swedish upper secondary schools' vocational programs have been video- and audio recorded, and interviewed. As the role of the mobile phone in the professional classroom has become more and more important, the fact that most young people in Sweden bring their mobile phones with them to school is nothing new in itself, everyone who has set foot in an upper secondary school knows that. What we know less about, however, is what the young people actually do with the mobile phones and what consequences this can have for the young people's everyday life in the actual classroom. The various examples that we present in this paper contains aspects of risks related to mobile phone use in the vocational classroom divided into two categories; first we present examples where we have identified risks related to safety and health; and then we focus on examples where it is primarily about social risks. The examples show that there is a difference in how the students orient themselves towards the mobile phone and risks as either: the mobile phone as a danger to the safety of the classroom or to the health of the individual student or her classmates, or that the mobile phone constitutes a risk for the students to be hung out in public. The fact that the use of the mobile phone can pose a health risk by stealing students' attention is an aspect of mobile phone that distinguishes the vocational programs from other educational classrooms; it can actually be dangerous to use the mobile phone even if it only in rare cases has consequences for the health of the studied participants. It also explains why the teachers in the studied vocational classrooms to a greater extent and more actively work to hinder the use of mobile phones among the students as it is included as part of the constant security thinking in the vocational classroom. The vocational teachers' normative view of the mobile phone as a risk factor also partly agrees with how the students orient themselves towards the use of the mobile phone. This paper shows that the students also orient themselves towards other risks than those the teacher’s pay attention to.In this paper, so forth, we show that there is a great need to study risk aspects of the presence of mobile phones in the classroom and the initial survey shows that mobile phones can pose risks in the form of security risks, as well as social vulnerability, and that we need new ways of attacking risk as a concept when we discuss students and their mobile phones in the vocational educational classroom. Based on the examples presented in the paper, there are also aspects of the difference between being at risk and risk-taking, for example when are the students in danger and when do they take risks by using the mobile phones in the classroom? Regardless, the mobile phone in the vocational classroom includes questions about risks that needs to be handled by as a didactic dilemma.