Teachers on the market: Professional relations, desires, and ambiguities in digital teacher-to-teacher economies

ABSTRACT

In recent years, digital technologies for creating, curating, selling, and buying teaching materials have become a valuable part of many teachers’ lives within and outside schools. Rather than apply textbook contents imposed from above, researchers and tech-pioneers have promoted digital teacher-to-teacher services as pathways to increase teacher empowerment and build communities of practitioners. Building on interviews with five Danish schoolteachers engaged in sharing and selling teaching materials online, this article explores the performative effects of imbricating teacher practices in commercial assemblages based on circulating teaching materials to other teachers as commodities. Drawing on posthuman and new materialist approaches to technologies in education, the analysis illustrates how teachers’ involvements in digital economies slide into and reconfigure professional aspirations and formal institutional relations. More than merely an informal tool to gain professional recognition, these technological reconfigurations have significant pedagogical and political implications for the teaching profession as a public responsibility in Denmark and beyond.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital technologies
• teacher-to-teacher economies
• teaching materials
• desire
• relations

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the two reviewers for their comments and suggestions. The paper would not have been the same without the careful readings and helpful comments from colleagues at the Danish School of Education and New York University: Dorthe Staunæs, Jette Kofoed, Katja Brøgger, Carol Anne Spreen, Dana Burde, and Amy Mitchell.

Disclosure statement

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

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. The differences between the platforms used for sharing teaching materials are complex and oftentimes unclear. as most Facebook groups for schoolteachers do not allow users to sell materials, teachers will often share free samples of their materials and provide a link to a commercial intermediary. In Denmark, the most used commercial intermediary is BubbleMinds, launched in 2016 by a Danish primary schoolteacher.

2. While the actual percentage of teachers who either sell or buy materials through teacher-to-teacher marketplaces remain unclear, figures provided by the technology providers suggest that the number is growing steadily. This tendency mirrors the increase of users registered on global teacher-to-teacher marketplaces such as Teachers Pay Teachers and Amazon Ignite during the recent decade (; Koehler et al., 2020).

3. Participants were found via a Facebook post made by Patricia in a closed networking group for schoolteachers involved in producing and marketing teaching materials to other teachers online. Interviews lasted for about an hour and a half and were conducted either at the teachers’ institutional workplace and, in two cases, online. Prior to participation in the interviews, all participants were presented with an informed consent form describing the research project’s purpose, data storage, and the possibility to opt out of the study at any time; in Patricia’s case, the form had been signed before my fieldwork at the school. All names are pseudonyms.

4. Marx intuited this gradual enfolding in his discussions on capitalist subsumption (Marx, 1978; Read, 2003). In the discarded draft of the sixth section of Capital, ‘Results of the Immediate Process of Production’, Marx describes how ‘the relations of production themselves create a new relation of supremacy and subordination (and this also produces its own political expression)” (quoted in Read, 2003, p. 106). Marx is pointing here to the qualitative transformation of production that occurs as capitalist relations encompass ever-more aspects of social activity, leading to a continuous ‘reshaping of all social relationships according to the dictates of capital’ (Read, 2003, p. 113).

Additional information

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes on contributors

Lucas Cone

Lucas Cone is a PhD fellow at the Danish School of Education, Aarhus University. His research focuses on the intersections between commercial technologies and public education and explores how digital platforms and other technologies affect pedagogical practices and relations.