‘Out of time’: Constructing teacher professionality as a perpetual project on the eTwinning digital platform

Abstract

This paper seeks to understand what digital schooling platforms do to teacher professionality; that is, the combination of professional knowledge, discretion and responsibility that enables a teacher to be professional. Specifically, we explore how the European Commission’s (EC) teacher professional learning platform eTwinning promotes a projectified (i.e., project-focused) and platformed (i.e., largely occurring on digital platforms) version of teacher professionality. Informed by recent thinking around ‘projectification’; that is, the ability of the project form to shape work practices, as well as the topological nature of timespace within a project, we argue that projectified teacher learning and professionality are now constituted through platform dynamics as a perpetual project-initself. As such, the projectified teacher is left simultaneously in-time (i.e., within the bounds of the project timespace) and out-of-time (i.e., out of possibilities of progress that can exist outside of the project), and thus faces the insuperable task of never-ending self-improvement through and as the project form (teacher-as-project).