Reading practices in transformation

Re-designing print-based literacy mindsets in the Swedish digital classroom

Abstract

Various reading projects aimed at stimulating pupils’ reading are carried out in Swedish schools on a regular basis. At the same time, education is under pressure to digitalise, which has resulted in major challenges in relation to the literary teaching and reading practices performed in connected classrooms where new and old practices merge. In this article we explore this tension by focusing on how pupils’ reading practices interact with the teacher’s staging of a reading project. The analysis is based on an ethnographic video material, where the pupils’ interactions and activities in the classroom are documented through the video recording and screen mirroring of their computers and mobile phones. The result shows that the teaching practice in the connected classrooms is characterised by a print-based mindset that the pupils resist to varying degrees. This leads to situations where the printed book is given contradictory roles in relation to the reading practices in school, and is used by students as a cover behind which they can engage in alternative reading practices on their digital devices on the other. Our results indicate that printed books are difficult to integrate into digitalised teaching and thus risk being treated as insignificant background.