| 9. |
- Bergviken Rensfeldt, Annika, 1969, et al.
(författare)
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Pressed for Time? : How Platform Infrastructures and Professional Demands condition Teachers’ Digital Work
- 2021
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Ingår i: European Conference on Educational Research.
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- What had often been praised by techno-enthusiasts as “disruption” and “innovation” became more of a harsh reality during 2020 with the fast reorganization to online learning due to the pandemic. With a short timeframe, schools were forced to prepare for distance education and teachers had to adapt, creating online teaching activities while at the same time making sure students were well-cared for educationally, socially, emotionally, and technologically. With the fast reorganization to online learning during the pandemic, the global platform market received more influence and further reached into the core of schools’ everyday work (Williamson & Hogan, 2020). In this sense, fast digitalization has not only made the political economy of school digitalization more apparent, but also highlights how digital work is conditioned by time and the socio-technical coordination of people and technologies (Wajcman, 2015). This paper focus on how teachers regulate and are regulated by digital platform work and in particular, how digital work is regulated by time in different ways. Our interest is both the kind of work done by teachers on digital platforms and how platform infrastructures condition and challenge teachers’ work and work time. The purpose is to explore and problematize the temporal governance of digital work, inscribed in the uses and logics of digital platforms, and forms of governing powers where productivity is considered core value. Analytically, instances where there are pronounced tensions in terms of temporal issues, between the demands of digital infrastructures or professional performance, and school teachers’ everyday work priorities and regulated work hours is of particular interest. The study builds on analyses of already identified tensions in relation to school reforms more generally as existing between the regulating principles of market efficiency governance and the teaching profession’s work conditions (Anderson & Cohen, 2015; Ball, 2003; Lundström & Parding, 2011). The political economy that pushes for school digitization was already strong in Europe and many other parts of the world before the pandemic began. Platform infrastructures, commonly provided by global platform businesses like Google and Microsoft and through Learning Management Systems are not exotic anymore, but are instead everyday technologies in workplaces like schools. Even so, platform technology provided by for example Google increasingly has taken the role of an infrastructure, sociotechnically connecting clouds, software, people, data (Plantin et al., 2018). This “platformization” comes with the business logic of platform capitalism (Srnicek, 2017), profiting on the individuals’ data production with the arguments of making public sector workplaces more efficient and streamlined, and of facilitating teachers’ pedagogical and administrative work. Questions around workload and the intensification of teachers’ work have once again risen up the political agenda (c.f. Fitzgerald et al., 2019). However, research on how school teachers’ work and work situations are changing in relation to digitalization still is relatively scarce (Bergviken Rensfeldt, Hillman, Selwyn, 2018; Selwyn, 2020; Selwyn, Nemorin & Johnson, 2017; Shulte, 2019). We draw on a Swedish project case, in collaboration with and extending an Australian project (e.g. Selwyn, Nemorin & Johnson, 2017). Empirical material was collected in and connected to the digital work of teachers in two upper secondary school forms, two school forms that characterize the Swedish marketized education system, namely, one public school and one independent for-profit school. Methodologically, the ethnographical approach used is policy and infrastructure ethnography, combined with trace ethnography of teachers’ online and offline work. Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources Used For conducting the policy ethnography, we firstly examined the policies and infrastructures implicated in teachers’ work, combining analyses of policies and platform technologies (Kitchen & Laurialt, 2014). Policy material from the regional municipality or school consortia organizations of the two schools, including extensions to national and European or international levels, e.g. strategies, guidelines, agreements on work time, digital work and platform infrastructure implementation, maintenance and support, was combined with analyses of the digital platforms and applications used in the school organizations of the participating teachers in the study. Further information from stakeholders like IT management or external platform provider companies on decisions, regulations and functionality on these different levels of platform use or data platform infrastructures, e.g. classifications of work activities in data platform standards was also collected via policy documents and interviews. Starting from the schools in the selection of policies and moving out from them, have resulted in a variety of policies that can be considered influencing digital work. In line with this, rather than regarding policies as archival documents, we aimed at selecting policies that were in use, “at work” and perhaps contested in the school workplaces in different ways. The trace ethnography started with four teachers (one man and one woman from each school) self-reporting their own activity logs on digital work based on three selected work days, followed up by a form of online focus group interview which was based on the logs and questions raised from the researchers and focus of the study. The teachers were then also involved in identifying and documenting their own data production and the traces they leave on different digital platforms via a digital self-tracking application capturing time-based screen activity. Conducting digital trace ethnography raise ethical concerns around private integrity which we have tried to counteract by involving the teacher participants themselves in self-tracking of their digital activities of work and by providing tools (self-reported activity logs included) allowing self-reflection of when and where their digital work takes place. The integrative trace ethnography approach (Geiger & Ribes, 2011) used, hence include both ethnographic and computational social science methods. These methods are themselves characterized by temporal categories, timelines, etc. but invites for making visible different temporalities in the ethnographic material. Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or Findings Digital work was analyzed based on tensions between temporalities that could be both static and dynamic but nonetheless were shaping teachers’ work (c.f. Thompson & Cook, 2017). The temporalities were understood as constructs and intertwined with spatialities of school teachers’ digital work. A preliminary finding is that digital work of online learning follows the assigned task and rhythms of schooling, but also extends more widely with the global time of digital platforms and the different temporalities produced in such environments, expanding, fragmentarizing and interrupting work in different ways. In line with Alirezabeigi, Masschelein & Decuypere (2020, p. 203), the digital work activities “not only follow the school time-table and the script of the teacher, but it equally follows the global time”. For example, the analyses included the teacher’s officially-regulated working hours in terms of classroom and workplace time, their self-regulated work time (“förtroendearbetstid”) as well as non-regularized time, all governed by certain ideals of performativity (c.f. Ball, 2003). Similarly, such entities were also translated into platforms datafication classifications of standard school activities (mainly teaching, examining and “other activities”). Hence, digital work temporalities were co-created with the operating tasks prompted by commercial platforms and activities inscribed in the systems, and the overall life cycles of platform infrastructures (updates, procurements, etc). Furthermore, the pandemic situation from March 2020 made certain temporalities around digital work visible, describing a “before-during-after Corona”, with transformed digital work experiences around attending to students and fulfilling new work tasks, implicating work intensification, strategies for work-life balance and coping with presence bleed. In sum, different temporalities and concerns in teachers’ digital work are at work, co-shaped by professional concerns, and the political economy and governance of platform infrastructures, which further add to the aforementioned research which identified tensions of market governance and teachers’ work conditions and professional concerns. References Alhadeff-Jones, M. (2018). Time and the Rhythms of Emancipatory Education Rethinking the temporal complexity of self and society. Routledge. Alirezabeigi, S., Masschelein, J., & Decuypere, M. (2020). Investigating digital doings through breakdowns: a sociomaterial ethnography of a Bring Your Own Device school, Learning, Media and Technology, 45(2), 193-207. Anderson, G., & Cohen, M I. (2015). Redesigning for identities of teachers and leader: A framework for studying new professionalism and educator resistance. Education Policy Archives, 23(85), 1-25. Ball, S. J. (2003) “The Teacher’s Soul and the Terrors of Performativity.” Journal of Education Policy 18(2), 215-228. Bergviken Rensfeldt, A., Hillman, T., & Selwyn, N. (2018). Teachers ‘liking’ their work? Exploring the realities of teacher Facebook groups. British Journal of Education Research, 44(2), 230-250. Decuypere, M. & Vanden Broeck, P. (2020). Time and educational (re-)forms: Inquiring the temporal dimension of education, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 52(6), 602-612. Fitzgerald, S., McGrath-Champ, S., Stacey, M., Wilson, R. & Gavin, M. (2019). Intensification of teachers’ work under devolution:
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| 10. |
- Bergviken Rensfeldt, Annika, 1969, et al.
(författare)
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School data markets under formation : How platform infrastructure policies regulate public education and teachers’ work
- 2020
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Ingår i: Paper for Network 21. Politics of Education and Education Policy Studies at the NERA 2020 congress in Turku, Finland on 4-6 March 2020.
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Digital platform technologies such as learning management systems and social media are nowadays an integrated part of schools and teachers’ everyday work. This suggest that the digital work and daily data-generating digital activities of teachers (and students) not only shift their forms of work, but also make public education connected to the private sector and globally operating technological platform providers in new ways. Commonly, these technology enterprises can provide with what looks as a full infrastructure of low-cost hardware and “free”, openly accessible software to an underfunded public sector education, however, it comes with a price, of teachers’ work time and work tools adapted for business rather than schools, etc. This paper aims to investigate the policies of emerging school platform infrastructure and how they regulate public education and teachers’ work. School platform digitization is a part of a wider societal transformation where the generation and processing of ‘big data’ through digital platform technology have been reflected in debates over internet data privacy, monitoring performance, that also relate to larger policy reforms of marketization and new private-public sector collaborations. With digital platforms integrated into public education, the politics of “platform capitalism” also has been introduced, and where the main market principle is to profit on the data generated by mass user activity and to profile and predict user behavior across different digital platforms. We suggest “school data markets” as a way of conceptualizing these policy phenomena. The overall question is, what work digital platform technologies are suggested to do in schools and how platforms are regulating teachers’ digital work. Discussions we wish to raise is whether global commercial platforms incorporated in public education risk challenging education as a public good by introducing new market logics which also make teachers’ work shaped by commercial reuse and vulnerable exposure. Teachers’ opportunity to exert influence and control over forms of digital platform work and purchase is also raised, including constraints and opportunities of ‘datafication’ where teachers’ and schools’ digital activities is broken down in data pieces for reuse and inspection. This paper will present findings from an ongoing trace and policy ethnographic project funded by Forte in Sweden on teachers’ digital work. Findings from a pilot study where two upper secondary school teachers have been ‘shadowed’ by participants observations at work constitute the main part. The focus has been to explore teachers’ digital work, in particular how digital platform structures regulate and constrain their work and what strategies teachers use to cope with this in their work. In addition, their schools’ local infrastructure, including dominant school platforms, will be mapped and analyzed, followed up by a 'data infrastructure audit’, i.e. policies from regional municipality organizations and their extension to national, Nordic and international levels (e.g. public procurement recommendations and guidelines, legal contracts and agreements). The aim of this pilot study is to further develop our methodological toolbox and understanding in relation to our bigger project and to gain insight on the current digital platform work of school teachers as well as emerging school data issues.
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