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Teacher’s Discipline of Digital Play
Chapter 3 addresses the next logical question of how teachers develop their
disciplinary orientations. Rafalow explores the “racialized and classed stereotypes”
(p. 77) embraced by some educators and the culture of the particular school as the
two key factors in how teachers develop their mindsets toward digital play as a
pedagogical approach. He asks, “How do both workplace dynamics, like teacher
trust, and perceptions of student demographics, such as racialized and classed
stereotypes of students, shape teachers’ day-to-day instructional practices?” (p.
77) Again, Rafalow returns to specific examples from each school to explore this
question, readily admitting that the dynamics of stereotype and of school culture
are extremely complex. Although emphasizing that a school culture that reflected
a “family-like, ‘in it together’ norm” (p. 86) was more supportive of digital play,
he also notes that teachers in the study often had conflicting stereotypes about their
students, making generalizations more difficult.

Impacts and Implications
Following up on the complexities undergirding teachers’ perceptions of appropriate
disciplining of digital play as he develops Chapter 4, Rafalow explores how teachers’
perceptions and practices impact students and the ways schools act as socializing
agents for digital participation. Essentially, as educators use or discourage digital play,
students begin to develop “strategies for participating online that were patterned by
school” (p. 112). Rafalow notes that students from the varied schools shared many of
the same interests, “including video games, reading e-books, and using social media”
(p. 116)—but their development of skills and
personal direction was clearly shaped by their
The digital divide thus is no school’s approach to discipline as teachers
at each school “differently established a
longer one of differing access to boundary between play and school” (p. 119).
Concluding his ethnographic findings
technology “stuff” and support but and implications in Chapter 5, Rafalow

a gap created and supported by revisits his full argument, reinforcing the
linkages between and among his major
pedagogical decisions undergirded ideas: “Disciplining play is a teacher-driven
form of socialization, and the work that this
by school culture. socialization does is to create a symbolic
boundary between ‘school’ and ‘play’ that
affects how students see the relationship
between their own creative work and
educational institutions” (p. 149). He refutes again the notion of unequal childhoods
that puts the burden on families for unequal gains of children in school. In sum,
Rafalow suggests that the digital divide does not rest on equipment and support or
on social standing but on educators’ perceptions of what should or should not be
“allowed” in digital interaction.

Conclusion
Rafalow, who earned an MA in sociology and education from Columbia
University, Teachers College, and his PhD in sociology from University of
California, Irvine, is visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley’s
Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society as well as a social scientist

38 The Delta Kappa Gamma Bulletin: International Journal for Professional Educators