Dr. Paulina Ruiz-Cabello

1. Doctoral research study: “I’d would die without it”: A study of Chilean teenagers’ mobile phone use in school

There has been an increasing interest in understanding children´s and young people´s digital lives within and across different time-space configurations. Yet, school has been rarely seen as a porous setting where students spend time interconnecting their educational, social and personal lives. Addressing such a perspective is becoming increasingly important in the current international educational context, where personal devices are part of students’ daily life, schools´ phone use regulations are discussed and implemented, and the covid-19 pandemic has brought new challenges and questions about the relationship between personal devices and schooling.

Drawing on sociocultural conceptions of space, practice and identities, and using an ethnographic approach, I conducted a study that aimed to explore 15-16-year-old teenagers´ phone use and negotiation process in two schools in Chile. One of the key findings was that the time participants spent on their phones cannot be considered as a total oppositional practice to school or an individual decision. Instead, although not totally free of tensions and challenges, it works as an orchestration of interests, needs and requirements grounded in who they want to be and who they significantly interact with as students, friends, and daughters/sons.

2. ESRC Postdoctoral project: Personal mobile technologies in secondary schools: developing international partnered efforts and participatory methods for debate and decision making

Building on my doctoral study, I am conducting a project -funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council- which aims to promote a “multi-relational” and participatory approach to understand, research, and define actions and regulations regarding use and presence of personal technologies in and for school. This entails incorporating the diverse, and sometimes contested, interests and needs coming from students, their families, teachers and authorities in debate and decision-making instances. To that aim, I am offering online participatory workshops to schools in the UK and Chile to co-create resources to support decisions around the presence and use of personal technologies in and for school.

I have also recently set up a website (www.mobilescuela.com) in Spanish and English. The website aims to go beyond the topic on mobile phones and school by capturing a wide range of aspects in which the digital -and increasingly mobile- lives and practices of school communities´ members intersects with their work and their school experiences in and out-of-school. Regarding this, the pandemic seems to have made more tangible this mobility supported by technologies and the diversity of those experiences that need further visibility and examination. At the moment, there is a Call open for Reflective Cases on the use of personal devices in and for school during the covid-19 pandemic.