More Than Just a Tweet: The Labor of Being an EdTech Teacher Ambassador

• In Event: Sheraton Roundtable Session Twelve
  In Roundtable Session: The Work of Teachers: Unionization, Labor, and Retention (Table 16)

Abstract

In this project, I work to describe the exploitation (Marx, 1990; Weeks, 2011) of teacher labor in online spaces in relation to teacher ambassador programs for educational technology (EdTech) companies. This study is grounded in a theoretical understanding of the relationship between hyper-capitalism (Braidotti, 2019), neoliberal education policy (Author, 2021; Crawford-Garrett et al., 2017), and education as a woman dominated field (Grumet, 1988). Overall, the purpose of this study is to use new materialist qualitative research methods (Kuntz, 2018) to explore how educators are affectively experiencing EdTech teacher ambassador programs while also gaining a deeper understanding of the material-discursive apparatuses around these programs that produce and exploit teachers’ labor.

Author

• Kali Thompson, University of Georgia
  Presenting Author