Capitalists in the classroom: On teacher-to-teacher marketplace platforms in Danish public education

• In Event: Capitalism, Corporations, and Education Technology: Feminist and Critical Perspectives

Proposal

Over the course of the last two decades, digital platforms for identifying, labeling, downloading, and discussing teaching resources have become an important part of many teachers’ everyday practices within and outside schools. Rather than apply textbook content and standards imposed from above, educators and tech-pioneers have welcomed the emerging ecosystems of teacher-to-teacher platforms as vehicles to expand teacher professionalism and build communities of practitioners, including platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Teachers Pay Teachers (Alirezabeigi et al., 2020; Kerssens & Dijck, 2021; Shelton & Archambault, 2019). Drawing on interviews conducted with five Danish K-12 teachers engaged in sharing and selling teaching resources online, this paper explores how dominant enactments of resource sharing on commercially driven platforms affect teachers’ pedagogical orientations and relations. Lodged in data infrastructures operating through the production of of teaching objects as scalable commodities and teachers as deterritorialized influencers, the paper draws on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1983, 2004) to examine the extent to which teachers’ practices of sharing are shaped by commercially invested platforms and applications that re-constitute what it means to think of and practice teacher subjectivities. By showing how teachers’ practices of sharing today are enacted through platformized assemblages of exchange value, branding, and ownership, I highlight the difficulties of navigating between and across teaching as a generous, non-commercial practice and a production of teaching commodities you can “own” and sell.
In a neoliberal political-economic atmosphere promoting institutional disaffiliation and de-collectivization, there is little doubt that platforms can play a role in re-establishing suppressed teacher dialogues, reducing workloads, combatting teacher isolation, and promoting professional generosity. Yet as I draw forth in this piece, it matters which infrastructures enable the enactment of teacher-to-teacher relations (Haraway, 2010; Orland-Barak, 2016). Imbricated in platform infrastructures that diminish rather than further generosity in the name of profit, many teachers are currently left on their own in navigating the grey zones between teaching as a common good and teaching as something you can produce, own, and sell regardless of context. Ignoring the affective investments of the dominant sharing platforms risks sidelining the continued importance of unions, collective dialogue, and the value of situated knowledge in establishing conditions for educator community building that are not bound to commercial infrastructures.

Author

• Lucas Cone, Danish School of Education