Mirror, mirror on the wall: email as an object of practitioner inquiry
As new communication technologies enter the classroom, teachers must attend to how digital platforms impact the interpersonal practices of teaching and learning. In this article, I study email exchanges with three of my students Jorge, Adriana, and Jason over the course of one year in an 11th grade English class at River High School, a struggling American school subject to intervention for failing to meet the federal No Child Left Behind requirements. I ask several questions: what role does email play in my relationships with students; what does email reveal about the ideological content of my communication with students; and how could I use email transformatively? When I studied these email exchanges, I found that while email has the potential to transform literacy instruction, it can also perpetuate a poor student/teacher relationship and reproduce neoliberal narratives that narrowly imagine students as test takers, workers, and consumers.