Session Information
19 SES 13, The Development of the Postmodern Professional (Part 2)
Symposium
Contribution
Using organizational theory (Barley, 1998; Czarniawska, 2004) and actor network theory (e.g., Latour, 2005), this paper examines how professors in different cede control of teaching to non-faculty technicians as their university, dependent on revenue from enrolments and intent on reducing faculty costs, pushes instructional digitization as a budgetary strategy. The paper is based on fieldwork from 1999-2005 (with 1999-2001 the most intensive period), involving participation and observation of faculty training workshops and public presentations related on technologization of instruction; analysis of documents; interviews with professors becoming content providers at different career points, and observations of instructional designers at work. The analysis is an extended case study of one university’s efforts to digitize instruction, splitting teaching into a technical activity of “design,” claimed by a new group of managerial professionals – instructional designers – while professors are redefined as ‘content experts’ whose contribution can be ‘downloaded,’ digitized, and deployed in various formats. I show how the organizational contexts of instruction influence professors’ participation, and trace the effects of participation on their work and professional identifications. I identify historical continuities in these processes, and show how they are anchored in digital infrastructures that congeal unacknowledged assumptions about teaching.
Method
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.