Mundane or Magical? Discourses on Technology Adoption in Finnish Schools

Information and communication technologies (ICT) have truly entered our everyday life, both work and leisure. This applies especially to the lives of our children: the children of today have been surrounded by ICT from their birth – personal computers, the Internet, mobile phones, video games, and social media have been an integral part of their everyday life from the early childhood. School should be able to adapt to this change, but this seems to be challenging to achieve: schools are lagging behind the recent developments in ICT. We inquire the reasons for these challenges as regards ICT adoption in the Finnish schools from the perspective of the school principals, i.e. the ones expected to lead their schools to utilize ICT in its full potential. This is a nexus analytic inquiry that first examines these principals’ discourses on ICT and change, revealing several different discourses on them both, constructing the objects of talk in various ways. Afterwards, the study identifies influential participants helping or hindering in the process of change as well as broader societal themes or values that act as drivers of or barriers to change, as pictured in the principals’ talk. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.