iBecome: iPads as a tool for self-making

We adopt a reflexive microethnographic research approach to capture the identity work undertaken by iPad-using students in a high school where everyone in Year 11 and Year 12 had received iPads to assist with their learning. In this paper, we report our in-depth analysis of one student, Phoebe, whose self-making shifts in nuanced and subtle ways in relation to the device. We see Phoebe deploy the iPad to render a dialogical version of who she is and might become, comparing herself across time to her past and future selves as well as in relation to others in her social world. Our analysis makes visible how Phoebe negotiated and traversed the challenges of relational self-making, both in relation to iPads and to others-including the dynamic multiplicity of her own voices. In this way, we demonstrate how a Bakhtinian perspective can be theoretically and methodologically responsive to the fluidity and complexity of twenty-first century learning and learning contexts.