Although increasingly encouraged to incorporate new media into classrooms to prepare students for engaged participation in a digital world, teachers are often taken by surprise when paradigm clashes arise between traditional school expectations and the affordances of these new spaces. Students, at the same time, are faced with making sense of the old-new classroom spaces that emerge. Research on space, strategies, and tactics frame my exploration into this complex terrain: what actually happens when new media goes to school? More specifically, this work examines: How do one classroom teacher and a collaborating researcher use strategies when constructing new media spaces in the classroom? How do students make sense of space and self when using playful tactics on classroom-based social networking sites? How is the mismatch between teacher strategies and students' tactics negotiated in the process of one student's multimodal composition? Through data gathered from ethnographic methodologies during a rich teacher-researcher partnership, this research foregrounds the teacher's use of strategies to construct new media spaces for classroom purposes and students' use of tactics to reshape these spaces for their purposes. Collaborating closely with a high school teacher and two of her classes, I initiated a semester-long journey integrating new media into English class. Our work together highlights the practical realities and challenges that emerge when teachers work to integrate new media (and new paradigms) into traditional classrooms. An analysis of the teacher strategies employed in constructing new spaces reveals the challenges of wrestling with the sometimes conflicting expectations that the convergence of old and new spaces triggers, while an analysis of the students' tactical engagement affirms the playful ways that students made use of new spaces to accomplish deliberate social moves. By highlighting the resulting confluence of mismatched expectations, I argue for greater awareness of the difficulties in the maintenance of new classroom spaces, as well as the need to create more space for teachers to reflect on the implications of their pedagogical decisions. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com.bibliotheek.ehb.be/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]