Chapter 8: Personalised Learning with Digital Technologies at Home and School: Where is Children’s Agency?

This chapter explores children’s agency in using mobile technologies at home and in school. Supporting children’s agency has been offered as a rationale for adopting personalised education worldwide. Children’s agency is also drawn upon as a justification for children’s use of personal mobile devices. This chapter considers children’s agency in light of the personalised education in one UK primary school and the children’s use of mobile technologies at school and at home. The findings are based on eight days of observations of classroom practice and interviews with six case study children in the Year 6 classroom. In sessions that were supported with mobile technologies, children’s learning was personalised to each child, but constrained by the amount of time that the activity lasted and that the technology was available for. Based on children’s accounts, their use of mobile technologies at home was constrained by their parents’ restrictions and monitoring practices. The chapter discusses the reality of children’s agency in light of adults’ mediation and children’s actual experiences of personalised learning.