'Not Just a Computer Screen:' Distributed Attunement in Virtual School Environments

Abstract

Many digital platforms pit consumers or customers and service workers against one another or render human work invisible, concealing human labor for profit and the charismatic allure of automation. When schooling is digitized, what transformations occur to the relationships between teachers, parents, and students, and with what consequences? In pre-pandemic virtual and hybrid schooling, I find that teachers developed alternative strategies to practice caring responsiveness in online environments of low visibility through a process I call "distributed attunement.'' These strategies entailed building holistic relationships, collaborating with student families and fellow teachers, and interpreting student experiences using a combination of platform data and social information. Rather than giving in to digitization as a vehicle for removing or obscuring care work, this study illustrates that teachers centered relationships as core to the virtual schooling experience. The distributed attunement teachers in virtual schools created indicates the impossibility of separating technical and affective labor in a pedagogical context and provide promising sites to develop supports for high-quality online education. Further, teachers' navigation of limited visibility suggests tactics for CSCW researchers concerned with documenting invisible labor in the development of digital systems. Nevertheless, these strategies can be appropriated or undermined by employers in ways that threaten to diminish their efficacy, requiring ongoing advocacy to push for flourishing online schooling options.