Platformized Teacher Work – Obstacles and Diffractions in Assessment Work Practices

This study critically examines how the ongoing platformization of education materializes in teachers’ work. The issues raised are how teachers’ work is affected by the socio-material arrangements of assessment work practices in which digital platforms are entangled and, in particular, how obstacles and breakdowns produce patterns of diffraction that effect teachers’ work. Based on ethnographic material produced in four different schools, teachers’ work was traced through observations, logs, interviews, and digital walkthroughs. Here, we use diffractive analysis to explore how teachers’ work is interrupted, repaired, maintained and coordinated through different events, discourses, human and non-human labor, platforms, and devices. The analysis contributes to identifying three interrelated diffraction patterns that are important for understanding platformized teacher work: how new space-time orderings occur through socio-material entanglements that distribute, intensify and individualize work; how work is extended and maintained through a new regularity of assessing and surveilling students; and how calendar devices and time management discourses coordinate assessment work practices in schools.