WhatsApp for pedagogy: initiatives, instructional practices and the nature of knowledge in Israel’s secondary education

In this study, the paradoxes and difficulties of using WhatsApp for meaningful education are highlighted. As a case study of technology implementation, the author employs virtual ethnography and interviews with supervisors, developers and teachers to examine all significant pedagogical initiatives in Israel’s high schools that utilise WhatsApp. These initiatives are analysed through the theoretical lens of sharing and its cultures of production and circulation. Sharing and circulating are fundamental epistemological aspects of knowledge in new media as they play a major part in how knowledge is created, perceived and learned. Indeed, the findings show that using WhatsApp broadens and diversifies classroom instructional practices, including shifts towards more dialogic teaching, but at the same time, traditional communicative assumptions, conservative school modalities, power structure and epistemologies are maintained. Sharing is now seen as a pedagogical practice, yet implementing WhatsApp in schools happens while its epistemological aspects are narrowed.