Corporate Pedagogies and Teacher Job-Crafting in Full-Time Virtual Schools

• In Event: Pedagogy, Assessment, Strikes, and Leadership in Education

Abstract

Standard analyses of teachers’ work assume situations of physical co-presence: teachers working with pupils in walled classrooms and interacting with peers in shared school sites. When these assumptions dissolve, as in full-time virtual schools, where there are no physical classrooms or shared buildings, and teachers and pupils interact asynchronously at a distance, teaching becomes a site of tacit struggle between teachers trying to carve out areas of autonomy and corporate Education Management Organizations [EMOs] experimenting with new work regimes. Drawing on interviews with 40 teachers in full-time virtual schools run by the two largest national virtual charter school EMOs, we examine how teachers construct their work within the constraints and affordances of virtual schools’ technological infrastructures and administrative regimes.

Authors

• Jan K. Nespor, The Ohio State University

• Julie Fitz, The Ohio State University