Students on Facebook: from observers to collaborative agents

The aim of this paper is to explore how secondary school students’ agency evolves over time across offline and online spaces. We focus on five Facebook groups of teachers and students interacting online in various ways over a period of eighteen months. Combining a variety of innovative analytical techniques and procedures (descriptive statistics, network analysis and discursive analysis) we analyze students’ online posts and interactions in a cultural-historical activity theoretical frame. The findings suggest that students’ agency can evolve from individual agency to collaborative agency by using Facebook groups under certain conditions, which teachers play a key role in establishing.