More Work for Teacher: Time-Saving Technologies and Classroom Labor

• In Event: Platformed Pedagogy: The Work of Teaching in the New Edtech Landscape

Abstract

Objectives:
Following rich literatures that examine the time- and labor-saving promises of educational technologies and their uneven impacts in the everyday life of schools (Cuban, 1986; Reich, 2020; Watters, 2021), this paper considers the material effects of educational ‘platformization’ (Perrotta, 2020; Poell et al., 2019) on teachers’ work and their implications for teacher education. To do so, we synthesize research on teacher labor and platform technologies and articulate a provisional framework for making their interrelations visible. We then use this framework to revisit three existing datasets to explore the potentials this orientation opens for research, policy, and practice.

Theoretical Framework:
Drawing on Ruth Schwartz Cowan’s More Work for Mother (1984) – a foundational work in feminist science studies that shows how time-saving technologies have historically compounded the demands of, and expectations for, gendered household labor – we attend to the “systems of technology” and “systems of labor” that converge in today’s classrooms. We do this by bringing together theorizations of platform technologies not as standalone teaching-tools, but as dynamic systems of social, technical, and political-economic relations (Author, 2021), and theorizations of teacher labor and its intensification under late capitalism (Apple & Jungck, 1990; Dunn, 2020). This allows us not only to locate the interplay of work and technology systems in schools, but also, like Cowan, to consider how it might reproduce social hierarchies and formations of difference.

Methods and Data:
We develop our framework by synthesizing literatures on platformization and teacher labor, identifying how platforms’ social, technical, and political-economic dimensions intersect with demands on teachers’ time, instructional practices, and professional learning. We then use this framework to revisit data from three previous projects: (1) a five-year study of standards implementation efforts in 18 districts across six states; (2) a longitudinal ethnography in an urban public “innovation” school; and (3) a practitioner inquiry study of preservice teachers’ field experiences during the covid-19 pandemic.

Results and Significance:
In revisiting these datasets, we find that the time- and labor-saving potential of platform technologies is refracted through contingencies in resourcing, school leadership, testing regimes, and local political pressures. Capacities for teachers to resist or evade unwelcome imperatives that platforms introduce into their work systems varied, often in ways that reinforced larger raced, classed, and gendered power asymmetries. We also find that even in classrooms where teachers appeared to have more autonomy, work systems were still impacted by their entanglements with platfomization (e.g., the infusion of data/learning analytics in PLCs and planning; PD and credentialling underwritten by platform providers like Apple, Google, and Clever). Moreover, the burden of reconciling the gaps and tensions that arose, across these contexts, between the promised and actual impacts of platforms emerged as another form of labor that teachers were made to shoulder. These findings are significant, not only for crystallizing the ways teachers’ work is changing in relation to new technologies, but also for spotlighting the need for teaching and teacher education to foreground this interplay. We conclude with recommendations for how this might be accomplished.

Authors

• T. Philip Nichols, Baylor University
  Presenting Author

• Earl Aguilera, California State University - East Bay
  Presenting Author