Promises of enhanced ‘productivity’ via the automation of teaching have been with us since the early days of digital education, sometimes embraced by teachers and institutions, and sometimes resisted as a set of moves which are damaging to teacher professionalism and to the humanistic values of education itself. Debate on this issue has historically been polarised between instrumental approaches advocating for the enhanced ‘efficiency’ enabled by automation, and those which resist such approaches in the interests of the primacy of human-to-human contact in education.
This talk will try to shift the debate on from these positions by exploring the critical spaces between them. I will propose an understanding of teacher automation based in a sociomaterial perspective which understands the new and generative capacity of computation and algorithm within education, but which also maintains a critical perspective on the influence of technology on our practice.