This study is part of a larger Nordic research project, including a series of substudies with a common research objective of examining teachers’ didactical design in one-to-one computing classrooms in Denmark, Sweden and Finland (Jahnke et al., 2017). The findings presented in this paper is based on classroom observations and retrospective teacher interviews in grades 1-6 in Finland.
One-to-one computing in K–12 education has grown rapidly worldwide through initiatives based on one laptop or tablet for each student (Islam & Grönlund, 2016). In the Nordic countries, studies on teachers’ working in one-to-one computing classrooms have been performed in Sweden (Fleischer, 2013; Håkansson Lindqvist, 2015; Tallvid, 2015), in Norway (Blikstad-Balas, 2012), and in Denmark (Jahnke, Norqvist, & Olsson, 2014), while Finland still seems to be a blind spot on the map (Bocconi, Kampylis, & Punie, 2013). Important knowledge and understanding about Finnish teachers’ teaching in the one-to-one computing classroom is therefore missing.
This study focuses on 16 teachers in a Finnish municipality that was among the first to implement a large-scale one-to-one computing initiative in Finland. Finnish teachers are prized for their high academic standards (Sahlberg, 2011), but also criticised for maintaining power and control by organising students in straight lines lectured by one teacher (Carlgren et al., 2006, Simola, 2005). One-to-one computing, is considered to be an innovation in the strive for modernisation of teaching and learning through increased student emancipation (Bocconi et al., 2013). The analysis presented here considers how these teachers’ in a variety of lessons demonstrate similarities and variations regarding their organisation of the classroom space as well as decisions in practice about content, pacing, and assessment. This mix of teachers’ designs of the classroom space and their enacted decisions during teaching form their didactical designs (Bergström et al., 2017). Specifically, this article analysis how Finnish teachers use power and control across different subjects. This study aims to describe and understand how variations within, as well as, between teachers’ didactical design challenge and reproduce established teacher-student relationships. The following research question were asked: How can variations within, as well as between, different clusters of didactical design be understood in terms of power and control?
The concept of didactical design follows the European tradition of Didaktik (Klafki, 2000; Sensevy, 2012) where the teaching and learning process is problematized, for example, when considering imitative teaching in contrast to students’ active learning. Such dichotomies serve to illuminate how school environments, school subjects, teachers, students and ICTs are all relays of power and control, and how power and control is maintained, reproduced or challenged. For this study, Bernstein’s (2000, 1990) theory of material conditions of classrooms in relation to teachers’ communication in practice was found to be helpful for analysing teachers’ didactical design regarding the physical space and the enacted practice. In the material conditions of the classroom, Bernstein’s concept of classification was used to analyse power relations between objects for example, the arrangement of desks, ICTs, spaces and teacher-student relations. Depending on the degree of specialisation and insulation between objects, classification is either strong or weak. Strong classification indicates for example desks organised in lines, whereas with weak classification desks are in groups or similar. Bernstein’s concept of framing highlight teachers’ communication and describes the locus of control about selection and sequence of content, pacing, evaluation and communication. If framing over selection of content is strong, it is the teacher who control such decisions, whereas if framing is weak the control is distributed to the students. Different power and control relationships give raise to different didactical designs with regard to possibilities and regulations in students learning.
