Civics of Technology Announcements
Book Club: Hyperscale: The Ambition and Excess of Big Tech’s Data Empires by Paris Marx on Tuesday, December 15 at 8:00 PM Eastern. Register here.
By Tess Bernhard
Dr. Tess Bernhard is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education. She studies how the work of teaching unfolds in today's K–12 classrooms—public spaces that are increasingly governed by technology pushed from the private sector.
This past month I published a new article in the journal Science Education Reasoning Together or Clicking Through? Analyzing Patterns of Group Science Talk On and Off Individualized Computers, which can be read by anyone open access on Science Education’s website. While my article was born out of research I did in K-12 secondary science classrooms, I wanted to share it more broadly with the cross-disciplinary Civics of Tech community. I imagine the tensions I highlight around digital technology in public school classrooms today might resonate with many of you working in different disciplines and contexts.
In the piece, I grapple with the ways students struggle to engage in social interactions that are productive to learning when everyone has their own computer out in front of them. As I wrote, I found myself wanting to move past the overly simplistic “screens=bad” discourse that seems to describe any learning mediated by a screen as inherently low quality. I wanted to instead identify what kinds of social interactions students were having with computers in public school classrooms. In that process, I wanted to more precisely pinpoint when these interactions were helping versus harming students’ engagement in science learning.
This article is based on classroom observations I did for my dissertation project in the 2023-2024 school year, where I observed a group of secondary science teachers in a large, urban public school district. At this moment in time, the science teachers I was observing were trying to move on from the height of tech integration that happened during the remote instruction phase of the pandemic. Many were rolling back the amount of tech they used during instruction. One chemistry teacher invested in big physical whiteboards for his students to draw out their thinking together rather than using digital collaboration tools. A biology teacher had moved back to using analog lab notebooks rather than Google Docs. Yet, when it came to giving students models of scientific concepts to think with, there was no tech lash. The teachers I studied all came to really appreciate the affordances of using digital simulations in their instruction (often from PhET or Gizmos). As teachers with limited resources working in a severely underfunded district, they could use digital simulations to illustrate concepts that would otherwise require prohibitively expensive or time-consuming equipment to teach.
Far From a Neutral Tool: Students’ love/hate relationships with Chromebooks
To access these simulations, their students had to use their school-issued Chromebooks. As I sat in these classrooms and observed teachers and students that year, I noticed that students had complicated love/hate relationships with their Chromebooks. Some students affectionately put personalized stickers on them to give their device their own unique markings. Students’ often chose to engage with their Chromebooks instead of doing their assigned task or in lieu of socializing with their peers. Other students, however, were less fond of their Chromebook and found creative ways to hack and incapacitate their assigned machines. One of the more memorable quotes I overheard in that year of fieldwork came from a teacher responding to her student’s complaint that his screen would no longer turn on. She quipped, “Well buddy, that’s what happens when you repeatedly slam your head into your Chromebook.” After a while, I came to recognize that students’ complex relationships with Chromebooks were deeply shaping social interactions in the classroom. This was then having spillover effects on the ways students interacted with the science content they were supposed to be learning and engaging with on these devices.
I think this reality, that students harbor emotionally complex relationships with their Chromebooks, is underappreciated amongst those who research instructional technologies. We often broadly talk about school computers as neutral and static objects mediating education. We rarely pause to recognize school computers as evolving social and political objects. Without taking these pauses, we end up failing to acknowledge how the digital learning environments students are positioned to learn within have radically changed over the past thirty or so years.
Students used to only access computers for specialized lesson objectives when they were taken to a computer lab or when a laptop cart was reserved and wheeled into their classroom. Today’s Chromebooks are always present in all classrooms and mediate all manner of school functions. Students in secondary schools use Chromebooks to take part in many of the most basic school activities—accessing grades, communicating with teachers, reading announcements, and receiving feedback on assignments, to name a few. As students use Chromebooks, they experience many of the most emotionally loaded parts of schooling around grading and communicating with adults. Yet, students experience diminishing privacy on these same digital devices. Students experience near constant surveillance on their Chromebooks through platforms like GoGuardian and Securly, which track students’ every search and maneuver on the internet (ACLU, 2023; Anand & Bergen, 2021).
Students’ Learning Interactions On/Off Chromebooks
I came to wonder how comfortable students felt as they tinkered around on their Chromebooks and tried to learn science through various digital resources. This led me on a mission to video record groups of students as they worked together on science tasks both on and off their Chromebooks. In this process, I did a lot of close watching of these videos of group work with my attention on students’ interactions with both each other and their Chromebooks. I ultimately summarized the patterns I found from these close watches as two forms of individualizing interactions that were occurring when students were on their personal Chromebooks. I contrast this with what I call collective reasoning, a type of interaction that occurred when students shared materials or devices. Here’s the low down on what I found:
Individualizing Interaction #1: When students all had their own Chromebooks out, they tended to keep their screens private and only occasionally share what was on their screen with a single trusted peer. This made it hard for students to share their in-process thinking. Instead, this arrangement seemed to promote interchanges where students traded completed answers rather than engaging in any sort of reasoning together.
Individualizing Interaction #2: When students all had their Chromebooks out, they tended to move through work at their own pace and abandoned peers they were assigned to work with. This often led to hierarchical interactions between students, where they noted who was ‘ahead’ and who was ‘behind’—a positioning that tended to reinforce existing social inequities.
Collective reasoning: When students shared either analog materials or computers, the individualizing interactions described above were mitigated. Students shared more thinking aloud and built more reasoning together. I found the deepest conversations where students reasoned together were occurring when students were sharing analog materials that they were reasoning with, such as a whiteboard, or a deck of cards in one example. Students also broke the individualizing mold when asked to share Chromebooks as a group. This pushed against the default of everyone working on their own computer in their own time and space. Consequently, students’ interactions contained more instances of reasoning through ideas together.
Thinking Ahead: Neutralizing the Individualizing Forces of the Chromebook
One might read my article and conclude that the best course of action would be to lock the Chromebooks up and stop using them in science instruction. For the teachers I worked with, that was not an option. They came to rely on and deeply value what digital simulations and other digital curricular resources offered their students. They instead needed to find ways to deepen their students’ digital engagement. I found these teachers were most successful in cultivating deeper learning interactions amongst their students when they asked students to slow down and share time and space with one another. This meant actively coaching students to go against the default ways they had come to use their Chromebooks.
As people read and engage with what I wrote on this article, I hope we can all rethink the ways we have let Chromebooks, and the attendant edtech platforms we employ on them, implicitly shape the kinds of social interactions happening in classrooms. Chromebooks are not neutral conduits for the content we seek to teach in our courses. The social interactions the Chromebook ecosystem promotes bleed into students’ patterns of interaction, and these interactions ultimately shape the kind of learning environments we can foster. Given this reality, I am left asking:
How might we curb the unjust surveillance and monitoring we put students through on these devices (Nichols & Monea, 2022)?
How might we disrupt the individualizing ways students have come to use these technologies?
What might it look like to give students devices that allow more free exploration as they learn together rather than apart?
This is a conversation that spans far beyond the science classrooms I write about here—a dialogue I am excited to be in with you all.
References
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). (2023). Digital Dystopia: The Danger in Buying What the EdTech Surveillance Industry is Selling (pp. 1–61) [ACLU Research Report]. ACLU.
Anand, P., & Bergen, M. (2021). How GoGuardian AI Spyware Took Over Schools, Student Devices During Covid. Bloomberg. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-10-28/how-goguardian-ai-spyware-took-over-schools-student-devices-during-covid
Bernhard, T. (2026). Reasoning Together or Clicking Through? Analyzing Patterns of Group Science Talk On and Off Individualized Computers. Science Education, https://doi.org/10.1002/sce.70095
Nichols, T. P., & Monea, A. (2022). De-escalating ‘dataveillance’ in schools. Phi Delta Kappan, 104(4), 23–27. https://doi.org/10.1177/00317217221142978