If you work in education research, digital labour, sociology of work or related fields, this section is for you. The project sits where practice theory, critical studies of educational technology and school-based ethnography meet. The focus is on teachers’ digitally mediated work, the informal exchange of digital practices, and the organisational and industrial conditions that shape both.
The framework of Digitally Mediated Work of Teachers (DMWT) was generated from an in-depth case study in a Victorian secondary school. The study used a blended ethnographic approach, combining classroom observation, participation in staff digital spaces, interviews and artefacts such as policy documents and platform traces. Analysis was informed by the Theory of Practice Architectures, treating teachers’ sayings, doings and relatings around digital work as socially and materially configured, rather than as isolated individual choices.
What you will find here
Posts in this section engage more directly with theory and method. They explore:
• DMWT as an empirically grounded way of naming teachers’ digital labour, reaching beyond narrow ideas of “ICT integration” or “digital skills”.
• Informal exchange of digital practices as a specific form of work that sits underneath policy talk of collaboration, often asymmetric, time pressured and load bearing.
• How organisational and industrial arrangements, such as timetables, duty structures, enterprise agreements and platform policies, configure the digital day.
• The arrival of generative AI into already dense digital workplaces, linked to debates about automation, creativity ceilings and platform capitalism.
• Methodological questions about insider research, working across online and offline sites, and handling messy multi source data in practice-theoretical analysis.
Some pieces translate these ideas for practitioner readers, others speak more directly to academic debates. All are grounded in the same empirical case.
How this might be useful
You may be:
• looking for a language that captures teachers’ digital labour beyond existing “competency” or “integration” frameworks
• interested in how practice architectures can be operationalised in a contemporary school study
• working on informal learning or collegiality and wanting a finer distinction between collaboration and the informal maintenance work that keeps systems viable
• tracing the implications of generative AI in education and wanting to locate it within existing digital workload rather than treat it as a standalone disruption
The posts here do not present DMWT or the informal exchange findings as final models. They are working tools and provocations, open to adaptation, extension and critique in other sites.
How this section connects to the rest of the site
This academic and researcher lens looks across the three core pillars:
• DMWT describes the strands of teachers’ digitally mediated work as they appear in the data.
• Informal exchange of digital practices foregrounds the micro interactions that sustain and repair that work, often beyond formal collaborative structures.
• How schools shape digital practice attends to cultural discursive, material economic and social political arrangements that enable or constrain both.
Taken together, they offer a way to talk about digital schooling as organised work, rather than as a story of individual innovators and laggards.
Where to start
If you are new here, a possible path is:
• Begin with a conceptual overview, for example “What is Digitally Mediated Work in a School”.
• Move to a methods or framework piece on using practice architectures to study digital work.
• Then read a findings oriented post on informal peer exchange or on how school policies shape teachers’ digital days.
From there you can follow thematic clusters that intersect with your interests, such as AI and creativity, teacher workload and industrial settings, or informal learning among professionals.
If you see points of connection with your own projects, or you are interested in comparative work or seminars, you are welcome to get in touch through the contact page.
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Dominic Brash 