‘Being stuck’: Analyzing text-planning activities in digitally rich upper secondary school classrooms

The aim of this article is to develop an understanding of how students use different interactional resources to manage problems that arise in their text-planning processes in digitally rich environments in Finnish and Swedish upper secondary schools. We explore both individual and collective teacher-initiated writing tasks in different subjects and during moments when text-planning seems to ‘get stuck’. Theoretically, we draw on a socio-cultural understanding of the text-planning process, and use multimodal conversation analysis to examine how students display ‘being stuck’ during their text-planning through their embodied and verbal performances, what role smartphones and laptops play in their process of becoming ‘stuck’ and ‘unstuck’, and how different interactional resources are coordinated during the students' text-planning processes. The data consist of video-recorded face-to-face interaction, students' activities on computers and/or with a pen and paper as well as simultaneous recordings of the focus students' smartphone screens. The results demonstrate that students often resort to smartphones as resources to display, negotiate and transform problems in their text-planning process. Our results challenge common claims within the contemporary debate both in relation to digital devices as the solution to pedagogical challenges and in relation to the debate on smartphones as devices that disrupt work.