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

DOI

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 - a domain traditionally enmeshed in tension between standardization and care - is digitized, what transformations occur to the relationships between teachers, parents, and students, and with what consequences? Despite platform mediation obscuring pre-existing avenues of connection, teachers develop alternative strategies to practice caring responsiveness with students in online environments of low visibility through a process I call ``distributed attunement.'' These strategies entail proactively working to build holistic relationships with students, collaborating with family members and fellow teachers, and making use of passively collected platform data and actively stitched together social information to interpret student experiences. Rather than giving in to digitization as a vehicle for removing or obscuring care work, teachers persist in centering relationships as core to the virtual school experience. The forms of distributed attunement teachers in virtual schools create illustrate the impossibility of separating technical and affective labor in a pedagogical context and provide promising sites for advocates of high-quality educational experiences to develop supports. 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.