Tweeting to Transgress: Teachers Using Social Media for Practices of Resistance

• In Event: 35.061 - Platforms of Resistance in the Lives of Teachers Past and Present

Abstract

Based on qualitative research on the tweets of teachers, this paper explores both the tweeting practices of teachers and the content of their tweets. Our study finds that Twitter provides a networked public space where teachers may resist current education reforms and signal moral discontent about educational policy. Twitter offers a platform where teachers may find that they have a stronger voice with more direct access to educational leaders and policymakers and many are making use of it. Additionally, Twitter provides researchers with a new venue to access the concerns and discourse of teachers.

We coded and analyzed thousands of tweets by teachers, using both human and digital methods. Our findings reveal that teachers use Twitter for many reasons: they shape their teacher identities, develop community, perform self-care, engage in lateral professional development and preserve the integrity of teaching (Santoro, 2013). Many teachers’ tweeting practices include questioning of, resistance to or activism challenging current education reforms. Through identifying relevant hashtags and monitoring periods of time where high volumes of relevant tweets were produced around significant events in the education policy world (i.e., protests against Common Core State Standards or other policy initiatives) we followed discourses of resistance that exist within Twitter that also lead to other online spaces and in some cases, to on-the-ground activities.

Much work has been done on Twitter as a site of resistance and organizing for collective action (see Segerberg & Bennett, 2011 and Papacharissi & Oliveira, 2012). Likewise, research is emerging on P-12 teachers’ use of social media in their classrooms (see Krutka, 2014, Meabon Bartow, 2014 and Nowell, 2014). However, little if any work has been done on the tweeting practices of teachers. Through our exploration of the tweets of teachers, we found that teachers’ tweeting practices were very much aligned with those of other activist groups (Thorson et al., 2013).

When looking at the content of tweets, we found a fluidity between teachers’ professional practices as teachers in the classroom and their political and moral concerns. By sharing professional development resources not sanctioned by a Common Core State Standards-compliant school board, for example, teachers are both engaging in professional practice and behaviors of resistance. Within such tweets, we argue that moral claims are being made about what good teaching is and how to achieve it. We argue that this is a powerful use of Twitter in contrast to those who claim Twitter is a space for “slacktivism” (Gladwell, 2010), and one that warrants further exploration within the larger body of work on Twitter as one node of the ecology of protest and collective action.

Examining the tweeting practices of teachers and the content of their tweets provides unprecedented insight into the lives of teachers. Our study demonstrates how tweeting provides an outlet of resistance that reveals the political and moral concerns of teachers. Our research similarly shows the positive resistance teachers pursue through the actions they take to improve their lives and retain the integrity of the profession.

Authors

• Jessica Hochman, Pratt Institute

• Doris A. Santoro, Bowdoin College