Teachers’ Resistance to Mobile Learning in Turkey and Spain: What Similarities? What Differences?

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to present the data on secondary school teachers’ resistant attitudes towards integrating digital technologies and literacies into their classrooms. The data was gathered through qualitative interviews in the frame of two distinct one-to-one technology programs that took place in distant socio-cultural and educational contexts: the FATIH Project of Turkey and the Escuela 2.0/EduCAT1x1 of Catalonia/Spain. This comparative analysis shows that teachers mainly resist educational change and the government, although they slightly differ in the underlying assumptions supporting their resistance. Their discourses on technology in schools have settled into “discourses of uncertainty” where negative attitudes are compensated with slightly positive comments about digital artefacts and literacies as tools for learning. Findings also indicate that teachers, regardless of the educational context they work in, have assumed the “discourse of inevitability” that dominates viewpoints concerning technology and digital literacy in education.