Teachers on facebook: explorations on distance and proximity management faced by school audience

Abstract

The presence of social medias in teacher- student interactions raises questions on the collective work of managing proximity and distance. From teachers’ testimonies extracted from a video documentary we sought to understand practices of management of school interactions on Facebook. The reports are analyzed in the light of two categories of analysis that, organized to apprehend everyday situations, gather the impressions teachers have when discussing Facebook use. The first one points to what we have called the “gathering of differentiated social circles”, allowing us to recognize the uniqueness of a space such as Facebook in relation to the management of proximity and the distance of the teacher from the school public. The second is distinguished by the “technical conditions of discretion,” signaling margins of maneuvers teachers can use on the online social network, establishing an ideal form of interaction with their students. These categories result in a reality in which teachers manage both their relationships with the school audience (and technology) as well as their personal images and the possible educational (dis)credits associated with them.