About this project

With departure in peoples’ everyday lives, the ethnographic project Digitalization Initiatives, and Practices (DIP), takes an interest in issues that go beyond digital technology per se in digitalization processes of educational settings. DIP focuses on issues of agency, participation, and inclusion at macro, meso and micro scales with respect to digitalization in educational settings. Central areas of interest are:

  • Ideological interests behind digitalization initiatives and implementation processes. Project DIP aims to elucidate the participants’ roles and agency in the digitalization of Swedish educational settings, but also the policy processes that lead to digitalization initiatives.
  • Practitioners’, both students’ and teachers’, experiences of, attitudes to, and actual use of digital tools in educational settings.
  • Issues of participation and inclusion in the wake of the digitalization of education. In the one-school-for-all discourse that infuses the Swedish school system, the compensatory and inclusive perspectives of a governmental digitalization initiative are emphasized. Project DIP problematizes these perspectives.

The ethnographic fieldwork is primarily being conducted in different school settings and is being complemented with netnographic documentary studies. The data material consists of video and audio recordings, digital photos, field notes, and (policy) documents. The analysis is inspired by a socio-cultural perspective on communication and learning. Project DIP aims to contribute with knowledge about structures of authority and practices concerning the policy process of, and peoples’ work with, digitalization in school settings. Project DIP was initiated in the 2017 and has resulted in one doctoral thesis 2021.

Project DIP peer-reviewed international publications

Almén, L. & Bagga-Gupta, S., chapter proposal accepted in July 2017 for the international volume Virtual Sites as Learning Spaces (ViLS). Critical issues on languaging research in changing eduscapes in the 21st century.

Almén L., Bagga-Gupta S. (2019) Inscriptions and Digitalization Initiatives Across Time in the Nation-State of Sweden: The Relevance of Shifts and Continuities in Policy Accounts for Teachers’ Work. In: Bagga-Gupta S., Messina Dahlberg G., & Lindberg Y. (eds) Virtual Sites as Learning Spaces. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26929-6_2

Open Access link: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-26929-6_2

Almén, L., Bagga-Gupta, S., & Bjursell, C. (2020). Access to and accounts of using digital tools in Swedish secondary grades: An exploratory study. Journal of Information Technology Education: Research, 19, 287-314. https://doi.org/10.28945/4550 Länk till annan webbplats, öppnas i nytt fönster.

Open access link: https://www.informingscience.org/Publications/4550

Bagga-Gupta, S., Messina Dahlberg, G., & Almén, L. (2021), Gatekeepers and gatekeeping: On participation and marginalisation in everyday life. In: Egard, H., Hansson, K., & Wästerfors, D. (eds) Accessibility Denied. Understanding Inaccessibility and Everyday Resistance to Inclusion for Persons with Disabilities.

Project DIP international peer-reviewed conferences presentations

Almén, L. & Bjursell, C., High school students access to digital tools in education. Word, 18.1 kB. Paper presented at the 9th annual International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies (Edulearn17) in Barcelona, Spain, 3 – 5 July 2017

Almén, L., & Bagga-Gupta, S., Digitalization Initiatives in Schools. Intersecting Chains across Time. Paper presented at the international conference Mediamorphosis: Identity and Participation in Mumbai, India, 16 – 17 February 2018

Almén, L., Identity-positioning, Technological Artefacts and Languaging in a Global-North Setting.
Headphones as Demarcations at the international conference LeaDMe: Learning Digitalization and Media in Mumbai, India, 12 – 15 February 2020

Project DIP doctoral theses

Almén, L. (2021). One-school-for-all As Practice: A Nexus Analysis of Everyday Digitalization Practices. [Doctoral thesis]. Jönköping University

Researchers

Lars Almén, doctoral candidate in Education, School of Education and Communication, Jönköping University

Sangeeta Bagga-Gupta, professor in Education, School of Education and Communication, Jönköping University

Cecilia Bjursell, professor in Education, School of Education and Communication, Jönköping University

Giulia Messina Dahlberg Länk till annan webbplats, öppnas i nytt fönster., researcher, Faculty of Education, Gothenburg University