Email and Its Involvements in the Lives of K-12 Teachers: Phenomenological, Postphenomenological, and Posthumanistic Explorations

• Author / Creator

  McBeth Turville, Joni A.

• Web-connected devices are everywhere and can be used to send electronic messages, no matter the time or place. They are not merely tools or a means to an end; they also shape our everyday lives. In kindergarten to grade 12 (K-12) schools, teachers are increasingly contacted by parents, students, colleagues, and others. They have reported that digital communication can be overwhelming when added to what teachers typically do outside regular work hours, such as planning, grading, and writing student reports. Using email as a critical example of a digital communications tool, this study examines the experiences of K-12 teachers in receiving email outside their regular work hours.
  Inspired by Max van Manen’s phenomenological approach entitled “Phenomenology of Practice”, this research explores experiences situated in this professional context. Interviews were conducted with 24 teachers in Alberta, Canada from grades K to 12 to collect lived experience descriptions or examples of receiving email outside regular work hours as they were lived through. This research also uses postphenomenology in order to gain insight into the past, present, and future of email and proposes a model to describe the evolution of digital communications tools. The final chapter explores a posthumanistic approach related to both phenomenology and postphenomenology called “interviewing objects” to uncover what email may be producing.
  As caring professionals, receiving email outside regular work hours can pose a dilemma for teachers. Opening a message that describes a difficult situation can mean that a teacher spends their evening, weekend, or holiday emailing back-and-forth or ruminating over an issue for a prolonged period of time. Email also has contradictory effects—it can bring students,
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  parents, and colleagues closer but at the same time, may make a teacher unavailable to loved ones or friends. It provides a freedom from having to answer email in only the school but may create a feeling of being shackled to email. Being aware of experiences may help teachers and others to be more thoughtful about their use of digital communications use.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • digital communication
  • interviewing objects
  • phenomenology
  • postphenomenology
  • phenomenology of practice
  • electronic mail
  • work/life balance
  • communication
  • technology
  • teachers
  • media ecology
  • K-12
  • email
  • e-mail

• Graduation date

  Fall 2018

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Doctor of Philosophy

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R3474771J

• License

  Permission is hereby granted to the University of Alberta Libraries to reproduce single copies of this thesis and to lend or sell such copies for private, scholarly or scientific research purposes only. Where the thesis is converted to, or otherwise made available in digital form, the University of Alberta will advise potential users of the thesis of these terms. The author reserves all other publication and other rights in association with the copyright in the thesis and, except as herein before provided, neither the thesis nor any substantial portion thereof may be printed or otherwise reproduced in any material form whatsoever without the author's prior written permission.