‘Answer your names please’: a small-scale exploration of teachers technologically mediated ‘new lives’

Abstract

Conducted over a three-year period in an English secondary school, this study employs a distributional analysis across three scales to explore Real-Time Attendance Registration (RTAR). Ethnographic data, Day and Gu’s teachers’ new lives, and Foucault’s normalisation, are mobilised to investigate how RTAR mediated the key informant’s work. I argue that the teacher in this study faced complex, demanding and normalised conditions emanating from register taking becoming a technology mediated and performativity-led activity. I suggest that from examining RTAR, those interested in teachers’ new lives might gain an understanding of how, in the case in point, technology mediated the normalisation of the attendance registration process.

Keywords:

• new lives
• normalisation
• technology
• attendance registration
• scale

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Bettina Grant and Gill Murray for reading an earlier draft of the paper. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for Teachers’ and Teaching. Their critiques were both encouraging and thought provoking.

Notes

1. Mediation is the interaction between human beings, tools and historical, social and cultural environments (Kaptelinin & Nardi, 2006).

2. RTAR was later configured to mediate parents’ real-time access to their child’s attendance records.

3. During the duration of this project, Nortport High’s head teacher, and a number of teaching and support staff, were replaced during a restructuring process triggered by the result of an OfSTED inspection.