The tension between control and trust is related to the previous discussion of helping students manage healthy boundaries in an “always on” connected world. Students’ social expectations also reveal the extent to which the boundaries between formal and informal learning are blurred, as are the boundaries between mediated and non-mediated interactions. As will be discussed, teens use media at school to socialize. At times the motivation is primarily friendship-driven; at other times, what at first appears social is actually motivated by interest-driven learning incentives. A consideration of the different social motivations and genres of participation sheds light on students’ expectations of media use and their negotiations of school rules.
Let’s consider two 14-year-old participants in the study; the identical twins Marcus and Miguel (undocumented Mexican immigrants). Certainly Marcus and Miguel should not have been messaging their friends during class time, which would obviously distract them from lesson plans and the teacher. However, between classes, at lunch, and during free periods, Marcus and Miguel reached out to their online friends, just as other students met up at lockers to chat or walked together to their next class. The brothers had friends at school, but at times they valued the online friendships they had forged via video games even more than the face-to-face relationships with peers at school. This is consistent with recent research out of Murdoch University that found online friendships and face-to-face friends to be “equally as potent” in providing emotional support to teens. There was little evidence in this preliminary study to suggest young people identified a difference between online and physical friendships when describing feelings of connectedness (Gartry 2016). For Marcus and Miguel, using mobile media at school was a way to stay digitally connected in a physical space in which they often felt alienated or disconnected from the social world of their peers. Allowing them to stay connected during appropriate times, and with appropriate boundaries, would create a space in which school rules would be more in line with students’ values and expectations. Mobile media allow students a way to maintain contact with their peers even within the regimented space of the schools, which hinders certain modes of sociality. These friendship-driven practices revealed the ways teens’ use of mobile media at school fits into their everyday expectations and social practices.
Because filters on the school’s browser blocked access to social media, some participants downloaded a different browser onto their mobile devices. The alternate browser allowed them to bypass the school’s filters and to connect to peers via social media. This tactic was particularly important for students with restrictive phone plans that limited the number of text messages they could send over mobile networks. Students with limited data plans relied on apps such as Facebook to send messages to their friends for free over Wi-Fi. Amina explained:
Some people don’t get text messages — I know some people who get stuff on Facebook faster than they get text message stuff so and, like, sometimes I’ll be, like, “Where is this person?” and I’ll go on their Facebook and be, like, “Where are you?” I’ll be in school at lunch or something and someone will talk about someone I’ll be, like, “Who’s that person?” And they’ll be, like, “Look it up. You know who it is.” I’ll look them up on Facebook. Honestly, Facebook is the new yearbook—you go and you find people through Facebook—that’s how I’ve got to know a lot of people in school—I’m still kind of new here [so it helps].
Amina’s point is that Facebook and other social media sites provide an alternate and more efficient way to contact peers with limited mobile data plans. Several students showed me how to work around school filters that blocked social media sites; they could access Facebook and YouTube from school using Opera and other browsers on their mobile phones and iPods (the school’s Wi-Fi filters were set to only block sites in certain browsers).
Jasmine (16 years old, multiracial) showed me an app on her iPod Touch that looked like Facebook but was an alternative app that was used to access Facebook and was not blocked at school. Interestingly, she had not installed the app on her iPod; her friend Bianca (16 years old, Mexican-American) had installed it. Jasmine did not check Facebook on a regular basis throughout the day, so it didn’t bother her that she couldn’t access it from school. However, Bianca borrowed Jasmine’s iPod Touch often, since she had a limited text message plan, and she downloaded the app to communicate with friends. Peers often relied on each other via economies of sharing to learn how to bypass filters and as a way to resist institutional limitations. Notably, students did not necessarily have to possess the technical prowess to bypass restrictions, instead they drew from resources available within their respective peer networks. Regardless of your view of rule-breaking, teens demonstrated great levels of ingenuity and resourcefulness in their attempts to work around school restrictions and stay connected with peers.
Since Bianca did not have a mobile data plan or home Internet service, free Wi-Fi was her sole point of access to the web. She relied on the school’s Wi-Fi not only for educational resources but also for maintaining her social life online. Blocking students’ access to social network sites might make sense within a framework of educational expectations (i.e., to minimize distractions); however, for low-income disconnected students this restriction was a further disadvantage. Research consistently demonstrates the importance for teens to maintain online identities and connections via social media platforms (boyd 2014; Watkins 2009), yet not all teens have equal access. As will be discussed in the next chapter, school could play a significant role in helping alleviate inequalities for marginalized teens by providing a way for them to create online identities and connections. Privileging adult expectations of educational value at the expense of teens’ expectations of sociality created rifts between administrators and students. But more importantly, the school’s policy had the unintended consequence of further marginalizing disadvantaged teens by hindering their already limited opportunities for participation in networked publics.
Coping with Restrictions
Students deliberately bypassed the school’s filters when they felt they had a right to access information. Here I am not merely focusing on social media as I did in the previous section, but rather I consider how students worked around barriers in order to access content they deemed educational and valuable. For this kind of material, the struggle was much more about a balance between control and trust. Time and again, students expressed frustrations that the school did not trust their discretion. Students believed they should have a right to access content they deemed valuable to their learning environments. This struggle revealed the extent to which students and adults valued different information and modes of learning.
Several participants were experts at finding proxy servers that enabled them to bypass the school’s Internet filter. Others, who didn’t know how to find a proxy, relied on friends to show them how to bypass filters. Michael (18 years old, black) explained his frustrations:
Oh God. The school’s Wi-Fi is so restricted, it’s like, you can’t go to YouTube, you can’t go to Facebook, you can’t go to most of the site that you would use that aren’t even bad. I’m not saying that you can only go to Google, and all that, but there’s some sites you can go to, and some sites that you can’t, that you need, it’s just annoying. …That’s what’s stupid. That’s why people use proxies, which is a way to get into the websites without being noticed by the school Wi-Fi.
Antonio (17 years old, Mexican-American) and Sergio (18 years old, Mexican-American) were close friends who were adept at finding proxies. They discussed their success with an element of pride; they knew they were skirting the system, and they enjoyed being able to deliberately bypass filters. They both mentioned that their primary motivation for bypassing the filters was to gain access to information that was interesting and useful. “It’s not bad or anything, like, I should have a right to access something that is for a project or whatever,” said Antonio, countering a discourse of control with his own expectations of rights.
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bsp; Some students even belonged to a Google Group called “Free Proxy A Day” as a way to stay one step ahead of the institutional restrictions that blocked access to websites. Despite their best efforts, though, the school eventually discovered each new proxy and blocked it. Antonio and Sergio enjoyed finding new proxies so they could gain access to online tutorials, videos, and other blocked content. Both students said that their preferred mode of learning was to watch online tutorials, which demonstrated techniques for software they were learning.
Sergio:
That’s another thing I didn’t like about Freeway’s computers. Like, a lot of the tutorials seemed really cool when I got the visual preview of it, but when I tried to open it, it would be blocked, because apparently it had some unknown content that the school didn’t want. And sometimes I would try to download images from file-sharing sites, and they wouldn’t let me, and I really needed those images to compose an art piece.
Q:
Huh? Yeah, that’s kind of a bummer, right?
Sergio:
Yeah. Like, YouTube is blocked, here, and at home YouTube is one of my main sources for tutorials, because then I get a spoken kind of tutorial rather than just going back and reading it. … Someone would just be speaking on what I need to do, and that way it would be more efficient.
Because videos were blocked at school, Sergio had to find ways around the filters. His resistive tactics were interest-driven, in that he was motivated to bypass filters in order to access content which he believed expanded his learning ecology. Sergio’s comments highlight the extent to which both his preferred mode of learning and his out-of-school mode of learning (video tutorials), were incompatible with the school’s preferred method of teaching: reading. Of course reading is a valuable tool for learning and has a place in the classroom. However, when students are learning to produce and edit videos, it stands to reason they should be able to learn via the very medium they are using to create. We can all agree that it would be difficult to teach someone how to read by using only audio content—learning how to read necessitates visual content. In the same way, video production is arguably best learned via video tutorials. Again, students receive mixed messages about media: on the one hand, videos are valuable enough that students learn video production; on the other hand, students are told that videos are not considered a valuable learning choice in the classroom. Often Sergio and Antonio wanted to access a video for the purpose of on-the-spot troubleshooting rather than in response to techniques they had already learned in class. They were experimenting with new editing techniques, and they wanted to learn more about them by viewing video examples. The school’s policy of blocking videos and YouTube tutorials was a disservice to students striving to learn the art and skill of video production.
Other students, such as Javier (18 years old, Mexican immigrant), found proxy servers more trouble than he thought they were worth. When I asked if he used them, he responded “No, it’s too much work. You go to one and then the next week it’s blocked so you try another, and then you ask someone, and that one is blocked too. Or it’s just too slow. It’s too much, I just quit trying.” Interestingly, like Sergio and Antonio, Javier also told me that the sites he was trying to access were usually tutorials, or sites that contained images and music he wanted to use in his films—not social network or video sites. But Javier stopped attempting to resist the school’s institutional constraints. This reminds us that we should be careful not to assume that all students want to bypass such constraints.
The well-intentioned policy of blocking inappropriate content had the unintended consequence of exacerbating inequalities for disadvantaged students. Some students were able to access blocked content via their data-enabled mobile devices or via the Internet at home, but these options were not available to all students. Selena, for example, did not have any Internet access at home, and her pay-as-you-go phone plan was limited and at times completely unavailable to her for financial reasons. School was her primary point of access to the Internet. Her interests included photography and writing creative fiction and screenplays. Although at home she had an outdated computer that she could use to write, the lack of Internet access prevented her from sharing her stories online. Additionally, her biggest source of inspiration for her photos was Tumblr, a site that wasn’t available to her at home or at school. As will be further discussed in chapters 5 and 7, Selena’s practices were restricted by school policies that barred access to valuable resources and content that would have expanded her personal and educational interests. Restrictive policies that block access to content not only miss opportunities to help students navigate online risks; equally as significant, they reflect a privileged understanding of access that presumes students can access resources outside of school. Rather than being an equalizer, schools intensify inequalities by creating barriers that hinder opportunities for already marginalized students.
Alleviating Boredom
A frequent response to why participants used media at school was that they were bored. As many students explained, it was a way to “kill time” in class. When asked if they used social media during class, the frequent answer was “Only if I’m bored.” “When I’m bored,” Gabriela said. “I try my hardest to get on Twitter from school.” When asked if she used social media at school or while doing homework, Amina quickly said “No” but then continued as follows: “Well, yeah, when I’m in school and I’m bored.” This was a common theme: social and mobile media were ways to alleviate boredom at school. Perhaps not surprisingly, “boring” was a word many participants used frequently to describe school. When Antonio was asked if school was interesting, he responded “For the most part no.” This was disappointingly a common response from many participants regardless of academic achievement and aspirations (i.e., this answer was consistent between high-achieving and low-achieving students).
Regardless of our opinions about media use at school, we should be concerned that students “compare school to a prison,” as Sergio said. (See the epigraph at the beginning of this chapter.) Comparing school to prison alludes to the control and boredom that students associate with—or rather expect—from school. It is also indicative of the “school-to-prison pipeline,” a term that “refers to the policies and practices that push our nation’s schoolchildren, especially our most at-risk children out of classrooms and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems” (Locating the School-to-Prison Pipeline, p. 1). The prison comparison can also be interpreted within a larger framework that criminalizes the practices of the young. There has been an increase in the policing of school hallways and harsh disciplinary policies that criminalize students instead of practicing the use of restorative justice (González 2012). “It has been consistently documented that punitive school discipline policies not only deprive students of educational opportunities, but fail to make schools safer places … and [increase] the likelihood of future disciplinary problems, and ultimately increasing contact with the juvenile justice system” (ibid., pp. 282–283). Understanding the school-to-prison pipeline adds to a more troubling interpretation of Sergio’s comparison of school to prison. Punitive tactics and restrictive practices lead to student disengagement and can have the unfortunate effect of increasing dropout rates, or even incarceration rates.
Boredom is a symptom of disengagement, and nearly all of the students in the current study used digital media to cope with boredom. “Young people’s use of the mobile phone in school,” O’Brien explains (2009, p. 34), “is indicative of the way in which they subvert the explicit order of the classroom and redirect their attention away from the specific content of the topic in progress.” Trivial as it may at first seem, the rhetoric of boredom actually highlights larger discourses and expectations about technology and learning that merit further exploration. On the surface, boredom may seem inconsequential—just as students have always been distracted in class, students have always found aspects of school boring (Azzam 2007; Nett, Goetz, and Daniels 2010; Prensky 2008; Yazzie-Mint
z 2007). Being bored is something young people must learn to cope with, both in school and out of school. Just about any parent can recall the irritation of hearing a son or a daughter whine about being bored. Parents strive to teach their children that boredom is to be expected and that life isn’t always fun. As an inevitable aspect of life, young people must learn to cope with boredom. Parenting magazines and blogs offer a lot of advice about how to address young people’s boredom, and an entire genre of Pinterest boards is dedicated to the topic.10 It might seem easy to write off complaints of boredom as juvenile or to dismiss them under the assumption that boredom is just part of life. But boredom plays a significant role in students’ lives at school, and that should be taken into consideration. Boredom is the number one reason students give for dropping out of high school (Azzam 2007; Vogel-Walcutt et al. 2012). There are other factors that may actually play more significant roles, such as financial constraints, instability at home, pregnancy, or delinquency, but when the perception is that boredom is to blame we ought to take a closer look at its relationship to expectations about school and learning.
Let’s consider some more research about the relationship between boredom and academic achievement. When asked to choose three words to describe their typical feelings about school, more than half of American teenagers chose “bored,” according to a Gallup poll; more than 40 percent also chose “tired” (Lyons 2004). These words may not be surprising, but they should be concerning—school may not always be exciting, but there is no reason why learning should be boring. In a survey of more than 81,000 students in 110 high schools in the United States, Ethan Yazzie-Mintz (2007, p. 5) found that nearly 75 percent of students characterized school as boring because “material wasn’t interesting.” Another 39 percent explained they were bored in class because “material wasn’t relevant to me,” and 32 percent reported that they were bored because “work wasn’t challenging enough” (ibid.). Research indicates that boredom, attitudes about learning, and school performance go hand in hand. The journalist Amanda Ripley spent time at high schools investigating and examining the day-to-day lives of American teens. What immediately struck her when she went back into a high school for the first time as an adult was the high degree of boredom. “It’s important, I think, to remember this boredom. Otherwise, adults can build fictional schools in their heads, places where time behaves normally, where one can go to the bathroom without asking permission. Then they can obsess over things that matter only in these make-believe schools, not in real students’ real lives. … Boredom, it turns out, is toxic. It is related to depression, poor grades, substance abuse, hopelessness, and loneliness” (Ripley 2013).
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