Digital Technologies and the (Un)Changing Nature of Teachers' Work

• In Event: International Perspectives on the Lives of Teachers

Abstract

This paper explores the ways in which digital technologies are now implicated in teachers’ work and labor. Drawing upon in-depth ethnographic studies of three Australian high schools, the paper details the ways in which teachers’ work is now enacted along digital lines – often in notably intensified, standardized and evidenced ways. However, the paper questions the extent to which these digitizations can be said to constitute wholly ‘new’ labor conditions – pointing to continuities and disjunctures between teachers’ work with and without digital technology. The paper also considers the differentiated experiences of these conditions across groups of teachers. The paper concludes by considering how more equitable and/or empowering working conditions might be achievable through alternate uses of digital technology.

Author

• Neil Selwyn, Monash University