"Someone Else in the Universe Is Trying to Teach You": Teachers' Experiences With Platformized Instruction

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

Abstract

Objectives:
We examine how teachers at one school describe their attempts to lead discussions within classrooms that have been highly platformized (Van Dijck and Poell, 2018). We investigate how teachers experience conflicts with the logics of teaching and learning that Zearn, a personalized mathematics learning platform, brings to their classroom. Teachers’ conflicts center on how Zearn invites a host of new actors into the classroom to decide how instructional time is spent.

Theoretical framework:
We use Cohen et al.’s (20034) instructional triangle, which conceptualizes instruction as “interactions among teachers and students around content, in environments ” (p.122). Our investigation seeks to understand how this triad is altered when instructional interactions are mediated by a platform. Understanding platforms as digital environments that “enable multiple interactions between data, software code and a range of heterogenous actors” (Perrotta, 2020, p.54), we highlight how Zearn invites surveillance by additional actors into the classroom (Foucault, 1977) and how this reformulates Cohen et al.’s (2003) instructional triangle.

Methods and Data:
Data is drawn from a research-practice partnership between an elementary school and a university that focuses on teachers’ use of classroom discussions in mathematics (Kazemi et al., 2018). Analyzed data includes interviews (n=15) with participating teachers (n=8) as well as recordings of professional learning sessions (18 hours total) where Zearn was regularly discussed. We used a flexible coding approach (Deterding & Waters, 2021) to index all excerpts where teachers discussed Zearn, code for what interaction within the instructional triangle was being discussed, and then inductively coded for themes within each interaction type.

Results:
Repeatedly when teachers describe Zearn, they refer to unnamed, omnipresent actors making instructional decisions on their behalf. They refer to two groups of people exerting influence over classroom instruction: tech designers and district administrators. In the words of one of the teachers, “It's crazy to me that I'm sitting here trying to look at a lesson and figure out what someone else in the universe is trying to teach you. Not me.” Teachers describe their role as shifting from a teacher who crafts instruction to a tutor who supplements a far-away tech designer’s vision of teaching. This tension is exacerbated by increased administrative surveillance occurring through the platform’s data. This leads to teachers prioritizing instructional time on Zearn, despite their belief that students should not be working alone on computers, but should instead be sensemaking through discussion and collaborative problem solving.

Significance:
These findings give voice to how teachers experience conflict with the invisible root networks of platform interactions (Author, 2022; van Dijck, 2021). This raises questions about how platforms may, as Kerssens and van Dijck (2022) suggest, undermine teachers’ professional pedagogical autonomy by inviting distant actors to make instructional decisions on their behalf. Teachers experience this decreased autonomy as a worsening of the quality of instruction and a deprioritizing of teaching practices such as eliciting student thinking (Shaughnessy and Boerst, 2018) and leading discussions (Stein et al., 2008) that are upheld in the mathematics teaching literature.

Authors

• Tess Bernhard, University of Pennsylvania
  Presenting Author

• Sarah Schneider Kavanagh, University of Pennsylvania
  Presenting Author

• Lynsey K. Gibbons, University of Delaware
  Presenting Author