"Seeing" the Student: How Digital Representations of Students Shape Teachers' Work in Virtual Schools

• In Event: Facets of Equitable Policies and Programs

Abstract

School closures and parental concerns related to COVID-19 have contributed to spiking enrollments in fully online K-12 charter schools (‘virtual’ schools). In the absence of physical (and often even temporal) co-presence, teachers in these schools rely on digitally mediated interactions to gain information about students’ personal and academic needs, leading to questions both of how teachers make sense of their students at a distance and how they use this information to guide their work. Interviews with 40 virtual schoolteachers suggest that various institutional and algorithmic classificatory principles are used by teachers to organize their work and responsibilities to their students, with interventions concentrated most intensely on student attendance rather than academic matters.

Authors

• Julie Fitz, The Ohio State University

• Jan K. Nespor, The Ohio State University