‘Someone else in the universe is trying to teach you’: teachers’ experiences with platformized instruction

ABSTRACT

This article examines how teachers at one elementary school made sense of their instructional practice after their school adopted a personalized learning platform for teaching mathematics. Data includes interviews (n = 21) with 12 teachers and administrators as well as recordings of 18 hours of professional learning sessions. The study investigates how teachers’ perceptions of their instructional practice shifted as their interactions with students became increasingly mediated by platforms. Findings illuminate how platformization invited digitally mediated surveillance into the classroom and how this surveillance impacted teachers’ perceptions of their relationships with students and with content. The authors offer a framework of platformized instruction to guide research on teaching the digital era.

KEYWORDS:

• Platform technologies
• teaching practice
• educational technology
• datafication

Acknowledgement

Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funders.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We hypothesize that the absence of student-other codes is due to the fact that our data consisted only of teacher perception data. Obviously, platforms do connect students to others, but this connection was not something that our participating teachers frequently discussed. Because our research question focused us on teacher perception, we did not conduct interviews with IT coordinators, school leaders, parents, or district personnel. If we had, we likely would have examples of student-other codes in our dataset.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the James S. McDonnell Foundation, Grant number 220020522. For more information, visit https://grants.jsmf.org/220020522/.