Conceptualising and teaching discursive and performative reflection in higher education

The importance of reflection in higher education, and across disciplinary fields is widely recognised. It is generally embedded in university graduate attributes, professional standards and course objectives. Furthermore, reflection is commonly included in assessment requirements in higher education subjects, often without necessary scaffolding or clear expectations for students. It is essential that academic staff have substantive knowledge and clear expectations about the aims of reflective activities, the most effective mode of representation, and appropriate teaching strategies to support students in deep, critical reflection. The paper argues the case for reflection to be represented in different modes, using discursive (language) or performative (symbolic practice) forms of expression according to disciplinary context and individual communicative strengths. It introduces key discursive and expressive elements that constitute different modes of representation in reflective tasks. This functional analysis of textual elements provides explicit knowledge for teaching and assessing multiple modes of reflection in higher education.

Exploring new and emerging models for nonlinear performative works

This dissertation seeks to define and classify potential forms of Nonlinear structure and explore the possibilities they afford for the creation of new musical works. It provides the first comprehensive framework for the discussion of Nonlinear structure in musical works and provides a detailed overview of the rise of nonlinearity in music during the 20th century. Nonlinear events are shown to emerge through significant parametrical discontinuity at the boundaries between regions of relatively strong internal cohesion. The dissertation situates Nonlinear structures in relation to linear structures and unstructured sonic phenomena and provides a means of evaluating Nonlinearity in a musical structure through the consideration of the degree to which the structure is integrated, contingent, compressible and determinate as a whole. It is proposed that Nonlinearity can be classified as a three dimensional space described by three continuums: the temporal continuum, encompassing sequential and multilinear forms of organization, the narrative continuum encompassing processual, game structure and developmental narrative forms and the referential continuum encompassing stylistic allusion, adaptation and quotation. The use of spectrograms of recorded musical works is proposed as a means of evaluating Nonlinearity in a musical work through the visual representation of parametrical divergence in pitch, duration, timbre and dynamic over time. Spectral and structural analysis of repertoire works is undertaken as part of an exploration of musical nonlinearity and the compositional and performative features that characterize it. The contribution of cultural, ideological, scientific and technological shifts to the emergence of Nonlinearity in music is discussed and a range of compositional factors that contributed to the emergence of musical Nonlinearity is examined. The evolution of notational innovations from the mobile score to the screen score is plotted and a novel framework for the discussion of these forms of musical transmission is proposed. A computer coordinated performative model is discussed, in which a computer synchronises screening of notational information, provides temporal coordination of the performers through click-tracks or similar methods and synchronises the audio processing and synthesized elements of the work. It is proposed that such a model constitutes a highly effective means of realizing complex Nonlinear structures. A creative folio comprising 29 original works that explore nonlinearity is presented, discussed and categorised utilising the proposed classifications. Spectrograms of these works are employed where appropriate to illustrate the instantiation of parametrically divergent substructures and examples of structural openness through multiple versioning.

‘Redstone is like electricity’: Children's performative representations in and around Minecraft

In this article, we investigate eight and nine year old girls’ school and home use of the popular game Minecraft and the ways in which the girls ‘bring themselves into being’ through talk and digital production in the social spaces of the classroom and within the game’s multiplayer online world. This work was conducted as part of a broader digital games in education project involving primary and secondary school-aged students in Australia and focuses specifically on data collected from an all-girls primary school in Brisbane. We investigate the processes of identity construction that occur as the girls undertake practices of curatorship (Potter, 2012) to display their knowledge of Minecraft through discussion of the game, both ‘in world’ and in face-to-face interactions, and as they assemble resources within and around the game to design, build and display their creations and share stories about their game play. The article begins with a consideration of recent scholarship focussing on children, learning and digital culture and literacy practices before explaining how Minecraft is, in many ways, an exemplary instance of a digital game that promotes and enables complex practices of digital participation. We then introduce the concepts of performativity and recognition (Butler 1990, 2004, 2005) which, we argue, provide productive ways to theorise identity work within affinity groups. The article then outlines some background to the research project and our methodology before providing analysis of the data in the second half of the article. We conclude by outlining the implications of our investigation for the conceptualisation of learning spaces as affinity groups and for considering digital participation as curatorship.

The Ex/centric fixations project # 2 - Memory, language and polyvocal performative writing

In this paper, Bree Hadley discusses The Ex/centric Fixations Project, a practice-led research project which explores the inadequacy of language as a technology for expressing human experiences of difference, discrimination or marginalisation within mainstream cultures. The project asks questions about the way experience, memory and the public discourses available to express them are bound together, about the silences, failures and falsehoods embedded in any effort to convey human experience via public discourses, and about how these failures might form the basis of a performative writing method. It has, to date, focused on developing a method that expresses experience through improvised, intertextual and discontinous collages of language drawn from a variety of public discourses. Aesthetically, this method works with what Hans Theis Lehmann (Postdramatic Theatre p. 17) calls a “textual variant” of the postdramatic “in which language appears not as the speech of characters – if there are still definable characters at all – but as an autonomous theatricality” (Ibid. 18). It is defined by what Lehmann, following Julia Kristeva, calls a “polylogue”, which presents experience as a conflicted, discontinuous and circular phenomenon, akin to a musical fugue, to break away from “an order centred on one logos” (Ibid. 32). The texts function simultaneously as a series of parts, and as wholes, interwoven voices seeming almost to connect, almost to respond to each other, and almost to tell – or challenging each other’s telling – of a story. In this paper, Hadley offers a performative demonstration, together with descriptions of the way spectators respond, including the way their playful, polyvocal texture impacts on engagement, and the way the presence or non-presence of performing bodies to which the experiences depicted can be attached impacts on engagement. She suggests that the improvised, intertextual and experimental enactments of self embodied in the texts encourage spectators to engage at an emotional level, and make-meaning based primarily on memories they recall in the moment, and thus has the potential to counter the risk that people may read depictions of experiences radically different from their own in reductive, essentialised ways.

Performative digital asset management: To propose a framework and proof of concept model that effectively enables researchers to document, archive and curate their non-traditional research data

This cross disciplinary study was conducted as two research and development projects. The outcome is a multimodal and dynamic chronicle, which incorporates the tracking of spatial, temporal and visual elements of performative practice-led and design-led research journeys. The distilled model provides a strong new approach to demonstrate rigour in non-traditional research outputs including provenance and an 'augmented web of facticity'.

Access all

Access All was performance produced following a three-month mentorship in web-based performance that I was commissioned to conduct for the performance company Igneous. This live, triple-site performance event for three performers in three remote venues was specifically designed for presentation at Access Grid Nodes - conference rooms located around the globe equipped with a high end, open source computer teleconferencing technology that allowed multiple nodes to cross-connect with each other. Whilst each room was setup somewhat differently they all deployed the same basic infrastructre of multiple projectors, cameras, and sound as well as a reconfigurable floorspace. At that time these relatively formal setups imposed a clear series of limitations in terms of software capabilities and basic infrastructure and so there was much interest in understanding how far its capabilities might be pushed.----- Numerous performance experiments were undertaken between three Access Grid nodes in QUT Brisbane, VISLAB Sydney and Manchester Supercomputing Centre, England, culminating in the public performance staged simultaneously between the sites with local audiences at each venue and others online. Access All was devised in collaboration with interdisciplinary performance company Bonemap, Kelli Dipple (Interarts curator, Tate Modern London) and Mike Stubbs British curator and Director of FACT (Liverpool).----- This period of research and development was instigated and shaped by a public lecture I had earlier delivered in Sydney for the ‘Global Access Grid Network, Super Computing Global Conference’ entitled 'Performance Practice across Electronic Networks'. The findings of this work went on to inform numerous future networked and performative works produced from 2002 onwards.

Knowmore (House of Commons)

Knowmore (House of Commons) is a large scale generative interactive installation that incorporates embodied interaction, dynamic image creation, new furniture forms, touch sensitivity, innovative collaborative processes and multichannel generative sound creation. A large circular table spun by hand and a computer-controlled video projection falls on its top, creating an uncanny blend of physical object and virtual media. Participants’ presence around the table and how they touch it is registered, allowing up to five people to collaboratively ‘play’ this deeply immersive audiovisual work. Set within an ecological context, the work subtly asks what kind of resources and knowledges might be necessary to move us past simply knowing what needs to be changed to instead actually embodying that change, whilst hinting at other deeply relational ways of understanding and knowing the world. The work has successfully operated in two high traffic public environments, generating a subtle form of interactivity that allows different people to interact at different paces and speeds and with differing intentions, each contributing towards dramatic public outcomes. The research field involved developing new interaction and engagement strategies for eco-political media arts practice. The context was the creation of improved embodied, performative and improvisational experiences for participants; further informed by ‘Sustainment’ theory. The central question was, what ontological shifts may be necessary to better envision and align our everyday life choices in ways that respect that which is shared by all - 'The Commons'. The methodology was primarily practice-led and in concert with underlying theories. The work’s knowledge contribution was to question how new media interactive experience and embodied interaction might prompt participants to reflect upon the kind of resources and knowledges required to move past simply knowing what needs to be changed to instead actually embodying that change. This was achieved through focusing on the power of embodied learning implied by the works' strongly physical interface (i.e. the spinning of a full size table) in concert with the complex field of layered imagery and sound. The work was commissioned by the State Library of Queensland and Queensland Artworkers Alliance and significantly funded by The Australia Council for the Arts, Arts Queensland, QUT, RMIT Centre for Animation and Interactive Media and industry partners E2E Visuals. After premiering for 3 months at the State Library of Queensland it was curated into the significant ‘Mediations Biennial of Modern Art’ in Poznan, Poland. The work formed the basis of two papers, was reviewed in Realtime (90), was overviewed at Subtle Technologies (2010) in Toronto and shortlisted for ISEA 2011 Istanbul and included in the edited book/catalogue ‘Art in Spite of Economics’, a collaboration between Leonardo/ISAST (MIT Press); Goldsmiths, University of London; ISEA International; and Sabanci University, Istanbul.

Amphibian

Amphibian is an 10’00’’ musical work which explores new musical interfaces and approaches to hybridising performance practices from the popular music, electronic dance music and computer music traditions. The work is designed to be presented in a range of contexts associated with the electro-acoustic, popular and classical music traditions. The work is for two performers using two synchronised laptops, an electric guitar and a custom designed gestural interface for vocal performers - the e-Mic (Extended Mic-stand Interface Controller). This interface was developed by one of the co-authors, Donna Hewitt. The e-Mic allows a vocal performer to manipulate the voice in real time through the capture of physical gestures via an array of sensors - pressure, distance, tilt - along with ribbon controllers and an X-Y joystick microphone mount. Performance data are then sent to a computer, running audio-processing software, which is used to transform the audio signal from the microphone. In this work, data is also exchanged between performers via a local wireless network, allowing performers to work with shared data streams. The duo employs the gestural conventions of guitarist and singer (i.e. 'a band' in a popular music context), but transform these sounds and gestures into new digital music. The gestural language of popular music is deliberately subverted and taken into a new context. The piece thus explores the nexus between the sonic and performative practices of electro acoustic music and intelligent electronic dance music (‘idm’). This work was situated in the research fields of new musical interfacing, interaction design, experimental music composition and performance. The contexts in which the research was conducted were live musical performance and studio music production. The work investigated new methods for musical interfacing, performance data mapping, hybrid performance and compositional practices in electronic music. The research methodology was practice-led. New insights were gained from the iterative experimental workshopping of gestural inputs, musical data mapping, inter-performer data exchange, software patch design, data and audio processing chains. In respect of interfacing, there were innovations in the design and implementation of a novel sensor-based gestural interface for singers, the e-Mic, one of the only existing gestural controllers for singers. This work explored the compositional potential of sharing real time performance data between performers and deployed novel methods for inter-performer data exchange and mapping. As regards stylistic and performance innovation, the work explored and demonstrated an approach to the hybridisation of the gestural and sonic language of popular music with recent ‘post-digital’ approaches to laptop based experimental music The development of the work was supported by an Australia Council Grant. Research findings have been disseminated via a range of international conference publications, recordings, radio interviews (ABC Classic FM), broadcasts, and performances at international events and festivals. The work was curated into the major Australian international festival, Liquid Architecture, and was selected by an international music jury (through blind peer review) for presentation at the International Computer Music Conference in Belfast, N. Ireland.

Nodule

Nodule is 19'54" musical work for two electronic music performers, two laptop computers and a custom built, sensor-based microphone controller - the e-Mic (Extended Mic-stand Interface Controller). This interface was developed by one of the co-authors, Donna Hewitt. The e-Mic allows a vocal performer to manipulate their voice in real time by capturing physical gestures via an array of sensors - pressure, distance, tilt – in addition to ribbon controllers and an X-Y joystick microphone mount. Performance data are then sent to a computer, running audio-processing software, which is used to transform the audio signal from the microphone in real time. The work seeks to explore the liminal space between the electro-acoustic music tradition and more recent developments in the electronic dance music tradition. It does so on both a performative (gestural) and compositional (sonic) level. Visually, the performance consists of a singer and a laptop performer, hybridising the gestural context of these traditions. On a sonic level, the work explores hybridity at deeper levels of the musical structure than simple bricolage or collage approaches. Hybridity is explored at the level of the sonic gesture (source material), in production (audio processing gestures), in performance gesture, and in approaches to the use of the frequency spectrum, pulse and meter. The work was designed to be performed in a range of contexts from concert halls, to clubs, to rock festivals, across a range of staging and production platforms. As a consequence, the work has been tested in a range of audience contexts, and has allowed the transportation of compositional and performance practices across traditional audience demographic boundaries.

Boys 'doing' and 'undoing' media education : new possibilities for theory and practice

The purpose of this study is to investigate how secondary school media educators might best meet the needs of students who prefer practical production work to ‘theory’ work in media studies classrooms. This is a significant problem for a curriculum area that claims to develop students’ media literacies by providing them with critical frameworks and a metalanguage for thinking about the media. It is a problem that seems to have become more urgent with the availability of new media technologies and forms like video games. The study is located in the field of media education, which tends to draw on structuralist understandings of the relationships between young people and media and suggests that students can be empowered to resist media’s persuasive discourses. Recent theoretical developments suggest too little emphasis has been placed on the participatory aspects of young people playing with, creating and gaining pleasure from media. This study contributes to this ‘participatory’ approach by bringing post structuralist perspectives to the field, which have been absent from studies of secondary school media education. I suggest theories of media learning must take account of the ongoing formation of students’ subjectivities as they negotiate social, cultural and educational norms. Michel Foucault’s theory of ‘technologies of the self’ and Judith Butler’s theories of performativity and recognition are used to develop an argument that media learning occurs in the context of students negotiating various ‘ethical systems’ as they establish their social viability through achieving recognition within communities of practice. The concept of ‘ethical systems’ has been developed for this study by drawing on Foucault’s theories of discourse and ‘truth regimes’ and Butler’s updating of Althusser’s theory of interpellation. This post structuralist approach makes it possible to investigate the ways in which students productively repeat and vary norms to creatively ‘do’ and ‘undo’ the various media learning activities with which they are required to engage. The study focuses on a group of year ten students in an all boys’ Catholic urban school in Australia who undertook learning about video games in a three-week intensive ‘immersion’ program. The analysis examines the ethical systems operating in the classroom, including formal systems of schooling, informal systems of popular cultural practice and systems of masculinity. It also examines the students’ use of semiotic resources to repeat and/or vary norms while reflecting on, discussing, designing and producing video games. The key findings of the study are that students are motivated to learn technology skills and production processes rather than ‘theory’ work. This motivation stems from the students’ desire to become recognisable in communities of technological and masculine practice. However, student agency is not only possible through critical responses to media, but through performative variation of norms through creative ethical practices as students participate with new media technologies. Therefore, the opportunities exist for media educators to create the conditions for variation of norms through production activities. The study offers several implications for media education theory and practice including: the productive possibilities of post structuralism for informing ways of doing media education; the importance of media teachers having the autonomy to creatively plan curriculum; the advantages of media and technology teachers collaborating to draw on a broad range of resources to develop curriculum; the benefits of placing more emphasis on students’ creative uses of media; and the advantages of blending formal classroom approaches to media education with less formal out of school experiences.

The moment of exchange : risk, vulnerability, responsibility

Any cycle of production and exchange – be it economic, cultural or aesthetic – involves an element of risk. It involves uncertainty, unpredictability, and a potential for new insight and innovation (the boom) as well as blockages, crises and breakdown (the bust). In performance, the risks are plentiful – economic, political, social, physical and psychological. The risks people are willing to take depend on their position in the exchange (performer, producer, venue manager or spectator), and their aesthetic preferences. This paper considers the often uncertain, confronting or ‘risky’ moment of exchange between performer, spectator and culture in Live Art practices. Encompassing body art, autobiographical art, site-specific art and other sorts of performative intervention in the public sphere, Live Art eschews the artifice of theatre, breaking down barriers between art and life, artist and spectator, to speak back to the public sphere, and challenge assumptions about bodies, identities, memories, relationships and histories. In the process, Live Art frequently privileges an uncertain, confrontational or ‘risky’ mode of exchange between performer, spectator and culture, as a way of challenging power structures. This paper examines the moment of exchange in terms of risk, vulnerability, responsibility and ethics. Why the romance with ‘risky’ behaviours and exchanges? Who is really taking a risk? What risk? With whose permission (or lack thereof)? What potential does a ‘risky’ exchange hold to destabilise aesthetic, social or political norms? Where lies the fine line between subversive intervention in the public sphere and sheer self-indulgence? What are the social and ethical implications of a moment of exchange that puts bodies, beliefs or social boundaries at ‘risk’? In this paper, these questions are addressed with reference to historical and contemporary practices under the broadly defined banner of Live Art, from the early work of Abrovamic and Burden, through to contemporary Australian practitioners like Fiona McGregor.

Duplicity/complicity : misperforming the social drama of disability

In this paper, I investigate the (mis)performance of ‘passing’ in the context of bodies with disabilities. The desire to conceal, control or contain a body’s idiosyncrasies can be a deceitful act, complicit with dominant cultural assumptions about the benefits of fitting in. Passing, and the performative tricks, techniques and prostheses that support the ‘lie’ of passing, upholding a social contract in which a closeting-as-cure approach accommodates discomfort with difference. In this paper, I consider moments of non-passing, where people are caught out by mistakes or deliberate misperformances of the daily social drama of ability and disability. I reference the work of disabled artists Bill Shannon, Aaron Williamson and Katherine Araniello, who re-perform their daily personal interactions in the public sphere as a sort of guerilla theatre. Their work brings hidden assumptions about how disabled people should act and interact to the brink of visibility. It challenges passers-by to confront their complicity in these discourses by pressing them to re-perform their own spontaneous reactions to bodies that misperform the ‘lie’ of normalcy.

Asynchronicity and the ‘time envelope’ of online annotation : the case of the photosharing website, Flickr

This paper examines a sequence of asynchronous interaction on the photosharing website, Flickr. In responding to a call for a focus on the performative aspects of online annotation (Wolff & Neuwirth, 2001), we outline and apply an interaction order approach to identify temporal and cultural aspects of the setting that provide for commonality and sharing. In particular, we study the interaction as a feature of a synthetic situation (Knorr Cetina, 2009) focusing on the requirements of maintaining a sense of an ongoing discussion online. Our analysis suggests that the rhetorical system of the Flickr environment, its appropriation by participants as a context for bounded activities, and displays of commonality, affiliation, and shared access provide for a common sense of participation in a time envelope. This, in turn, is argued to be central to new processes of consociation (Schutz, 1967; Zhao, 2004) occurring in the life world of Web 2.0 environments.

The phenomenology of utopia : reimagining the political

This thesis argues that the end of Soviet Marxism and a bipolar global political imaginary at the dissolution of the short Twentieth Century poses an obstacle for anti-systemic political action. Such a blockage of alternate political imaginaries can be discerned by reading the work of Francis Fukuyama and "Endism" as performative invocations of the closure of political alternatives, and thus as an ideological proclamation which enables and constrains forms of social action. It is contended that the search through dialectical thought for a competing universal to posit against "liberal democracy" is a fruitless one, because it reinscribes the terms of teleological theories of history which work to effect closure. Rather, constructing a phenomenological analytic of the political conjuncture, the thesis suggests that the figure of messianism without a Messiah is central to a deconstructive reframing of the possibilities of political action - a reframing attentive to the rhetorical tone of texts. The project of recovering the political is viewed through a phenomenological lens. An agonistic political distinction must be made so as to memorialise the remainders and ghosts of progress, and thus to gesture towards an indeconstructible justice which would serve as a horizon for the articulation of an empty universal. This project is furthered by a return to a certain phenomenology inspired by Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Ernesto Laclau. The thesis provides a reading of Jacques Derrida and Walter Benjamin as thinkers of a minor universalism, a non-prescriptive utopia, and places their work in the context of new understandings of religion and the political as quasi-transcendentals which can be utilised to think through the aporias of political time in order to grasp shards of meaning. Derrida and Chantal Mouffe's deconstructive critique and supplement to Carl Schmitt's concept of the political is read as suggestive of a reframing of political thought which would leave the political question open and thus enable the articulation of social imaginary significations able to inscribe meaning in the field of political action. Thus, the thesis gestures towards a form of thought which enables rather than constrains action under the sign of justice.

Digital kids, analogue students : a mixed methods study of students' engagement with a school-based Web 2.0 learning innovation

The inquiry documented in this thesis is located at the nexus of technological innovation and traditional schooling. As we enter the second decade of a new century, few would argue against the increasingly urgent need to integrate digital literacies with traditional academic knowledge. Yet, despite substantial investments from governments and businesses, the adoption and diffusion of contemporary digital tools in formal schooling remain sluggish. To date, research on technology adoption in schools tends to take a deficit perspective of schools and teachers, with the lack of resources and teacher ‘technophobia’ most commonly cited as barriers to digital uptake. Corresponding interventions that focus on increasing funding and upskilling teachers, however, have made little difference to adoption trends in the last decade. Empirical evidence that explicates the cultural and pedagogical complexities of innovation diffusion within long-established conventions of mainstream schooling, particularly from the standpoint of students, is wanting. To address this knowledge gap, this thesis inquires into how students evaluate and account for the constraints and affordances of contemporary digital tools when they engage with them as part of their conventional schooling. It documents the attempted integration of a student-led Web 2.0 learning initiative, known as the Student Media Centre (SMC), into the schooling practices of a long-established, high-performing independent senior boys’ school in urban Australia. The study employed an ‘explanatory’ two-phase research design (Creswell, 2003) that combined complementary quantitative and qualitative methods to achieve both breadth of measurement and richness of characterisation. In the initial quantitative phase, a self-reported questionnaire was administered to the senior school student population to determine adoption trends and predictors of SMC usage (N=481). Measurement constructs included individual learning dispositions (learning and performance goals, cognitive playfulness and personal innovativeness), as well as social and technological variables (peer support, perceived usefulness and ease of use). Incremental predictive models of SMC usage were conducted using Classification and Regression Tree (CART) modelling: (i) individual-level predictors, (ii) individual and social predictors, and (iii) individual, social and technological predictors. Peer support emerged as the best predictor of SMC usage. Other salient predictors include perceived ease of use and usefulness, cognitive playfulness and learning goals. On the whole, an overwhelming proportion of students reported low usage levels, low perceived usefulness and a lack of peer support for engaging with the digital learning initiative. The small minority of frequent users reported having high levels of peer support and robust learning goal orientations, rather than being predominantly driven by performance goals. These findings indicate that tensions around social validation, digital learning and academic performance pressures influence students’ engagement with the Web 2.0 learning initiative. The qualitative phase that followed provided insights into these tensions by shifting the analytics from individual attitudes and behaviours to shared social and cultural reasoning practices that explain students’ engagement with the innovation. Six indepth focus groups, comprising 60 students with different levels of SMC usage, were conducted, audio-recorded and transcribed. Textual data were analysed using Membership Categorisation Analysis. Students’ accounts converged around a key proposition. The Web 2.0 learning initiative was useful-in-principle but useless-in-practice. While students endorsed the usefulness of the SMC for enhancing multimodal engagement, extending peer-topeer networks and acquiring real-world skills, they also called attention to a number of constraints that obfuscated the realisation of these design affordances in practice. These constraints were cast in terms of three binary formulations of social and cultural imperatives at play within the school: (i) ‘cool/uncool’, (ii) ‘dominant staff/compliant student’, and (iii) ‘digital learning/academic performance’. The first formulation foregrounds the social stigma of the SMC among peers and its resultant lack of positive network benefits. The second relates to students’ perception of the school culture as authoritarian and punitive with adverse effects on the very student agency required to drive the innovation. The third points to academic performance pressures in a crowded curriculum with tight timelines. Taken together, findings from both phases of the study provide the following key insights. First, students endorsed the learning affordances of contemporary digital tools such as the SMC for enhancing their current schooling practices. For the majority of students, however, these learning affordances were overshadowed by the performative demands of schooling, both social and academic. The student participants saw engagement with the SMC in-school as distinct from, even oppositional to, the conventional social and academic performance indicators of schooling, namely (i) being ‘cool’ (or at least ‘not uncool’), (ii) sufficiently ‘compliant’, and (iii) achieving good academic grades. Their reasoned response therefore, was simply to resist engagement with the digital learning innovation. Second, a small minority of students seemed dispositionally inclined to negotiate the learning affordances and performance constraints of digital learning and traditional schooling more effectively than others. These students were able to engage more frequently and meaningfully with the SMC in school. Their ability to adapt and traverse seemingly incommensurate social and institutional identities and norms is theorised as cultural agility – a dispositional construct that comprises personal innovativeness, cognitive playfulness and learning goals orientation. The logic then is ‘both and’ rather than ‘either or’ for these individuals with a capacity to accommodate both learning and performance in school, whether in terms of digital engagement and academic excellence, or successful brokerage across multiple social identities and institutional affiliations within the school. In sum, this study takes us beyond the familiar terrain of deficit discourses that tend to blame institutional conservatism, lack of resourcing and teacher resistance for low uptake of digital technologies in schools. It does so by providing an empirical base for the development of a ‘third way’ of theorising technological and pedagogical innovation in schools, one which is more informed by students as critical stakeholders and thus more relevant to the lived culture within the school, and its complex relationship to students’ lives outside of school. It is in this relationship that we find an explanation for how these individuals can, at the one time, be digital kids and analogue students.