In this article, we focus on smartphone use initiated by students during lessons, with the aim of deepening the knowledge of when and why this use happens. Our methodological approach is video-ethnographic. The empirical data consists of 20 focus students in 9 upper secondary school classes, comprising 70 h of video material. The results show that the use of smartphones most often occurs in what we call the in-between spaces during lessons. These spaces are individual and negotiated within the classroom interaction frames. We argue that turning to one’s phone during an in-between space may largely be seen as a social excursion that is generally smoothly and tactfully integrated into the social order of the classroom.

This article aims to fill a very specific and acute gap; in addition to the few studies on youth and digitalisation, smartphones and other mobile tools, it is very clear that the field of research concerning these issues in regards to vocational education and training is close to non-existent. By examining male Building and Construction programme students’ collective use of smartphones in interaction during classes, this study contributes to increased knowledge about some of the challenges and possibilities that arise with the digitalisation of vocational education and training. The study uses new and innovative methods regarding how students’ digital activities in the classroom could be captured and studied, and approaches video recorded data through the lens of Sara Ahmed’s ideas of happy objects (2010), and the concept of community of practice (Wenger, 1998). The analyses show how the identity constructing processes that take shape when the students orient towards the smartphone as a happy object intersect with the students’ future vocational identity as building and constructing workers, as well as explicating an anti-school culture.

This chapter has a special focus on the use of smartphones among students in two Swedish study programs in upper secondary school; one traditionally male education, the Building and construction program; and one traditionally female education, the Hairdresser program. The results derive from a larger video-ethnographic project with the aim to explore the role of smartphone usage in upper secondary classrooms in Sweden. In this project we have used new and innovative methods regarding how students’ digital activities in the classroom could be cap- tured and studied. While the smartphones were used individually to a notably higher extent by the students in the hairdressing classroom, there were significantly more collective features in the smartphone usage of the students in the building and construction class. In the latter, the students showed up what they did on their smartphones for several of their classmates at the same time, we also witnessed situations where the students used each other’s smartphones; interactional traits that we did not witness at all in the studied hairdressing classes. In this chapter, we study what these collective and individual features of mobile usage look like, and what their interactional purposes are. More precisely, the purpose is to study the embodied interactional processes the students engage in when using their smartphones and how these processes relate to their shaping of a professional identity.