Networked Publics in Unofficial School Space Reijo Kupiainen School of Education University of Tampere Finland Department of Education Norwegian University of Science and Technology Norway reijo.kupiainen@uta.fi Abstract: Social networking sites (SNSs) have changed the everyday life of children and young people in media-rich countries. SNSs offer a range of possibilities for children to perform, express identity and communicate with peers. Social networking is networked publics (boyd, 2014) that make structurally enforced borders of intimacy and privacy almost impossible. At schools the use of SNSs makes school boundaries more permeable and school space more public, breaks traditional social order and creates new time-space for learning. The new space where digital media and SNSs are used in schools is called unofficial school space (Kupiainen, 2013), which means alternative social ordering with connections outside of the school. Unofficial school space is a challenge for teachers. In this paper I will discuss what this means for teachers as border intellectua ls, a term borrowed from critical pedagogy and which helps to study shifting borders of knowledge, power and culture at school. Introduction It has been argued that the school has changed little or not at all in the past 100 years (Pearlman, 2009). The classroom-based physical learning environment, in particular, has stayed stable with the same-look locked rooms—students sitting in rows and columns and watching frontal teaching. This is still a valid snap shot of a physical learning environment in most schools, for example, in Finland. This kind of classroom architecture has some advantages: a teacher is independently able to arrange learning in her own classroom, choose pedagogy and watch easily over what students are doing. A closed classroom is a private sphere without any harassment from outside. This kind of traditional school space is constructed by the “grammar” of schooling, which includes the regular structure and rules that organize standardized schooling practices that are divided into time sequences, separated school spaces and knowledge areas as school subjects (Tyack & Tobin, 1994; Selwyn, 2011; Kupiainen, 2013). This type of official school space has been challenged by virtual spaces that students carry with them to school within their mobile devices, which give them access to the global Internet and social networking sites (SNSs). School and classroom boundaries have become more permeable and intertwined with spaces outside the classroom. Permeable classroom boundaries make the school more public. Students and teachers are in a potential situation where every moment in the classroom may be shared on the Internet and SNSs. Usually teachers prevent this by banning, for example, mobile phones in the classroom. But at the same time, many schools have started to use BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) ideology in schooling and to enable mobile pedagogy for students and teachers. With SNSs, the school can be characterized as a semi-public space that creates new ways of learning as well as social structures and requires teachers to take notice of external classroom spaces and learning habits. From the perspective of critical pedagogy, teachers have been defined as border and public intellectuals whose role is to shift all borders that both undermine and re-territorialize different configurations of culture, learning, power and knowledge (Giroux, 1991). Among all other borders at school, the border in the case of pedagogy in the SNS era is a border between official and unofficial school space that opens up the access to the virtual environment and affinity spaces (Gee & Hayes, 2011). The teacher as a border intellectual bridges these spaces for a new extended learning environment. Teachers also need to create pedagogical conditions in which students become border crossers. Of course the meaning of “border intellectual” in the theory of Henry Giroux is more political than my approach in this paper, but the political perspective could also be linked to SNS era when the school space is opened worldwide. As Giroux says, “the terrain of learning