I Wanna Go Where Nobody Knows My Name: Affinity and Anonymity in the r/Teachers Subreddit

• In Event: Teacher Use of Social Media for Teaching and Professional Development

Abstract

This study aims to understand how early career teachers—both pre-service and beginning in-service—use an anonymous online affinity space, the r/Teachers subreddit. We used the programming language Python to collect all r/Teachers posts tagged as “New Teacher” in 2021, resulting in a dataset of 2,445 posts. We conducted qualitative content analysis to explore what topics were shared. Results showed that early career teachers primarily use the subreddit to seek information and advice, although use varied across career stage, employment status, and school level. Reddit’s features allow users to easily gather by shared affinity (i.e., finding other early career teachers) yet remain unidentified and freely share personal stories and process specific questions because of the protection of anonymity.

Authors

• Hunhui Na, University of North Carolina - Charlotte
  Presenting Author

• Bret Staudt Willet, Florida State University
  Presenting Author