Anthropology of Students’ Lived Experience in Smart Schools

Abstract

This study aimed to anthropologically explain students’ lived experiences in smart schools and to understand the social, cognitive, emotional, and power-related consequences of educational digitalization within their everyday lives. This exploratory qualitative study adopted an interpretive ethnographic approach. The participants were 15 secondary school students enrolled in smart schools in Districts 4 and 6 of Tehran, selected through purposive maximum-variation sampling, with recruitment continuing until theoretical saturation was achieved. Data were collected through participant and semi-participant observation, in-depth semi-structured interviews, and field notes. Data collection and analysis proceeded concurrently using interpretive thematic analysis. Meaning units were identified, coded, compared, and organized into conceptual categories and overarching themes. To enhance the credibility and trustworthiness of the findings, data triangulation, repeated review of the dataset, systematic documentation of the analytical process, and continuous reconsideration of interpretations were employed. Interpretive analysis indicated that students’ experiences of smart schooling were organized around six interrelated themes: a hybrid lifeworld characterized by the erosion of home–school boundaries; reconfiguration of power relations and educational authority; cognitive overload and digital fatigue; panoptic surveillance and self-monitoring; student agency and creative appropriation of technological tools; and a secondary digital divide that reproduced structural inequalities. The findings further indicated that digital technologies simultaneously expanded access, flexibility, and opportunities for identity expression while fragmenting attention, weakening privacy, redistributing teachers’ epistemic authority, increasing cognitive pressure, and intensifying inequalities associated with digital capital and family support. At a higher interpretive level, the “paradox of emancipation and constraint in the smart school” emerged as the central category explaining the internal logic of students’ lived experiences. Smart schooling should not be conceptualized merely as a technological modernization project; rather, it constitutes a socio-cultural and power-laden ecosystem in which enhanced learning opportunities coexist with new forms of surveillance, cognitive pressure, and inequality. Accordingly, educational digitalization policies should adopt a human-centered and equity-oriented framework that is responsive to students’ actual lifeworlds, protects their autonomy and privacy, and addresses unequal access to digital resources and support.