Navigating open-source platforms in schools: an inquiry into changing teacher professionality
Toon Tierens, Mathias Decuypere, Sigrid Hartong
Abstract
The platformization of education is incrementally redefining the roles of teachers in schools by (re-)structuring professional practices. While most research has focused on how this occurs in the context of proprietary platforms, this article investigates how professionality is configured through open-source platforms, offering increased possibilities for platform customizability. Despite its claims for openness, this paper elaborates how Moodle imagines specific types of ‘open teachers’ and how professionality can be conceptualized as active navigations through its platform environments. By analyzing teachers’ practices in Moodle environments in two Belgian schools, we identify three enactments of professionality, grounded in different navigational logics: proceduralizing, patchworking, and co-evolving. This article concludes by arguing how professionality ultimately emerges at the crossroads of platforms’ habituation (i.e., accustoming teachers to open-source models) and teachers’ habitation (i.e., attempts to balance requirements of platform environments with one's pedagogical desires), and what this implies for the cultivation of platform literacies.