Tears from stone: relational being and doing in instructional coaching work

Instructional coaching in schools has historically operated as both a professional role and as a strategy used to support teachers. While the work of instructional coaching was already shifting in response to educational trends and political pressures, the conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic brought additional challenges and opportunities. The purpose of this self-study of teacher education practice (S-STEP) was to learn about the relational work of two instructional coaches and a university supervisor of those coaches' graduate work. The findings of this study emerged from our collaborative learning where we used the Greek myth of Niobe to think about the relational work of serving individual teachers during the COVID-19 pandemic. We end this paper with implications for preparing instructional coaches to support teachers and suggestions for future research.

Heroes from above but not (always) from within? Gig workers’ reactions to the sudden public moralization of their work

How do individuals react to the sudden public moralization of their work and with what consequences? Extant research has documented how public narratives can gradually moralize societal perceptions of select occupations. Yet, the implications of how workers individually respond and form self-narratives in light of—or in spite of—a sudden moralizing event remain less understood. Such an understanding is even more critical when workers are weakly socialized by their organization, a situation increasingly common today. During the COVID-19 pandemic, radically shifting public narratives suddenly transformed grocery delivery work, previously uncelebrated, into highly moralized “heroic” pursuits. Drawing on interviews (n = 75), participant artifacts (n = 85), and archival data (e.g., newspaper articles), we find that these workers (here, shoppers on the platform organization Instacart), left mainly to themselves, exhibited varying responses to this moralizing and that their perceived relations to the organization, customers, and tasks shaped these responses. Surprisingly, those who facilely adopted the hero label felt morally credentialled, and they were thus likely to minimize their extra-role helping of customers and show low commitment to the organization;in contrast, those who wrestled with the hero narrative sought to earn those moral credentials, and they were more likely to embrace extra-role helping and remain committed to moralized aspects of the work. Our study contributes to literatures on the moralization of work and narratives by explaining why some workers accept a moralized narrative and others reject or wrestle with it, documenting consequences of workers’ reactions to such narratives, and suggesting how a moralized public narrative can backfire. © 2022 Elsevier Inc.

“I took physical lessons for granted”: A case study exploring students’ interpersonal interactions in online synchronous lessons during the outbreak of COVID-19

The coronavirus pandemic presented a unique opportunity to observe how students interact and relate to each other in a new learning environment. This exploratory case study examines students' interpersonal interactions which occurred in online synchronous lessons during the initial stages of the outbreak. The language-focused content analysis of text-based chat data and thematic analysis of reflection answers collected from 40 students enrolled on an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) university course in Belgium is guided by the concept of social presence (SP) from the Community of Inquiry (CoI) theoretical framework and further complemented by a qualitative interpersonal pragmatics approach drawing on relational work. While all of the SP indicators were observed across the eight lessons, explicit acknowledgement of others in the learning environment was the most prevalent and seemed to boost affective and cohesive effects. Furthermore, the findings illustrated the importance students placed on having in-class opportunities to express their frustrations. A linguistic analysis of one such “venting” episode illuminated how a relational chain of events unfolded through students' use of a variety of SP indicators. Despite exuding a negative quality at first glance, the indicators generated immediate, positive relational effects such as enhancing students’ feelings of belongingness.