Digital platform work reinforcing performativity: teacher responses to work intensification explored through trace ethnography

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper critically explores how teachers’ everyday work is reconfigured through work on and around different digital platforms. In particular, it demonstrates teacher experiences of workload and work intensification and the different workarounds and adaptions to platforms done by teachers, conditioned by demands of performativity, e.g. discourses of optimising work, making visible and caring for school performances as part of a market-competitive and increasingly digitalised school system. By ethnographically tracing the digital work of six teachers in public and private upper-secondary schools through logs, follow-up interviews, observations and digital ‘go-alongs’, we show how central tasks, administration, communication and teaching are reconfigured through the distribution of work onto local-domestic and global platforms and relatively local school and national regulations. Our contribution to the discussion on platforms in education is how platforms and aligning devices and procedures reinforce performativity demands in teacher work. This reconfiguration produces tensions, interruptions and intensity peaks, often seen as work-time conflicts, but which nonetheless relate to wider, critical issues of the changing nature of teacher digital work being established in relation to the marketised and highly digitalised school.