Abstract
The transition to emergency remote teaching (ERT) through the use of video conferencing software during the COVID-19 lockdowns posed significant challenges to privacy management for both pupils and teachers across the world. One question became pivotal: Must I turn my camera on? While the question of turning on one’s camera has pedagogical consequences, our study sets out to examine the implications for pupils’ and teachers’ privacy. Focusing on a comparative approach, and drawing on communication privacy management and contextual integrity theories, we examine the negotiations over privacy during ERT in high schools in two distinct privacy cultures (Israel and Germany). Based on semi-structured interviews with pupils and teachers (n = 35) we found that despite substantively different cultural predispositions, legal environments, and rhetorical rationales, the established norms and privacy management strategies related to camera use were strikingly similar among both teachers and students in the two countries.
Introduction
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the educational sector in 2020, and schools across the world had to face the transition from classroom teaching to remote learning, mostly through the use of video conferencing tools, one question became crucial for both pupils and teachers: Do I (have to) turn my camera on? While the question of turning one’s camera on unquestionably has pedagogical consequences (Bailey et al., 2022), our research focuses on the implications of camera presence for pupils’ and teachers’ privacy. As video conferencing for school teaching mostly happened from pupils’ and teachers’ homes, all parties ran the risk of inadvertently sharing information about their lives (living space, family) that under normal circumstances would be hidden from the gaze of outsiders (Steeves, 2021).
This shift to emergency remote teaching (henceforth ERT; Rannastu-Avalos & Siiman, 2020)—term describing various forms of online teaching at times of unexpected crises (Hodges et al., 2020)— happened on a worldwide scale. That is, privacy challenges arose simultaneously in distinct privacy cultures and in countries that differed politically and economically, as well as in their technological readiness. This gave privacy scholars the opportunity to study the implications of these privacy challenges in a comparative fashion. Focusing on Germany and Israel as two cases with distinct privacy cultures (Dogruel & Joeckel, 2019; Zimmermann, 2019), but with important structural similarities, the shift to ERT enabled us to further investigate universal as well as culturally distinct aspects of privacy management within the school context.
Conceptually our comparison relies on two main theoretical concepts: communication privacy management theory (henceforth CPM; see Petronio, 2002) and contextual integrity (Nissenbaum, 2010, 2019) We use these to analyze pupils’ and teachers’ practices of coping with this extreme, and potentially new, type of context collapse (Marwick & boyd, 2011), when pupils’ and teachers’ homes became part of the everyday schooling experience (John et al., 2023).
Privacy Management From a Comparative Perspective
According to the framework for comparative privacy research provided by Masur et al. (2021), culture offers a meaningful category when comparing privacy-related outcomes. They argue that comparative privacy research should investigate the interplay of cultural as well as social, political, economic, and technological units of comparison in relation to privacy so as to indicate which elements are kept constant or similar and where individual cases differ.
In this study of the shift to ERT in Germany and Israel, we are able to precisely do this, namely, to keep certain structural elements relatively constant while focusing on the specific aspects in which our cases differ. First, Germany and Israel are both economically-developed countries (The World Bank, 2023) with free liberal democracies (Gorokhovskaia et al., 2023; V-Dem Institute, 2023) and high technological capacities (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development [UNCTAD], 2021). As such, they share certain fundamental units in political, economic, and technological categories. Second, by focusing on the context of secondary schools, we keep crucial elements of the social structure comparable as well. Both countries have compulsory education systems, targeting the same age groups, and at least in the mainstream education systems, the curriculum is focused on the core academic subjects such as maths, science, and language (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD], 2018; Resh & Dalbert, 2007).
With that, there are notable structural differences that had the potential to impact privacy management during the shift to ERT. These relate to aspects of technology adoption and relevant regulation, but most importantly to privacy culture. As outlined by Sommerlad and David (2022), at the beginning of 2020, digital technologies were not well integrated into teaching in either country. In terms of technological development, the pandemic showed that Germany was lagging behind other Western countries, including Israel, in terms of school digitization (John et al., 2023; Züchner & Jäkel, 2021). Furthermore, the two countries differ in their legal approaches to privacy. Zimmermann (2019) argues that data-protection regimes in Israel and the European Union (EU) “are based on different legal and real-life starting positions but result in very similar legal mechanisms and practices” (p. 246). As a self-branded “start-up nation” with a strong commitment to new digital technologies, data-protection regimes in Israel have to locate the sweet spot (if such exists) between the protection of user’s privacy and tech companies’ business opportunities. In contrast, EU policy in general and German privacy policy in particular are influenced by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which came into effect in 2018 and is much more focused on protecting consumer rights (Nauwelaerts, 2017)—a perspective that is also normalized through media discourse (Sanford & Yasseri, 2021).
Even more substantively, Israel and Germany differ in their privacy cultures (John et al., 2023; Zimmermann, 2019). Prince and Wallsten (2022), for example, show that Germans place a higher value on privacy than other Europeans. This is especially true for vertical privacy relationships relating to privacy concerns between individuals and state and/or commercial entities (Dogruel & Joeckel, 2019). Israelis, on the other hand, are less sensitive to vertical privacy infringements, for reasons to do with the collectivist ethos behind the country’s establishment, and the central place occupied by the military in civil society (Marciano, 2021; Ribak, 2019).
This study thus aligns with comparative privacy research that looks at cases from within the EU (such as Germany, Dogruel & Joeckel, 2019, or the Netherlands, Vitak et al., 2022) and contrasts them with comparable non-EU cases, mostly from the United States. As highlighted by Vitak et al. (2022) in their study of the privacy attitudes of Dutch and US citizens, such comparisons focus on social norms as well as differences in legal landscape. By comparing the shift to ERT in Germany and Israel, we are building on and contributing to such comparative research. Our research setup holds crucial structural elements relatively constant, while allowing us to investigate the implications of specific structural differences in the two cases, namely differences in privacy culture and regulation.
Emergency Remote Teaching as a Challenge to Privacy Norms
Information flows in traditional (offline) school settings are typically subjected to rather strict privacy regimes (Tudor, 2015), which protect information about pupils’ behavior and performance (Zeide & Nissenbaum, 2018). This approach was challenged when schools had to rapidly pivot to ERT (Rannastu-Avalos & Siiman, 2020; Wagman et al., 2023). First, in online settings, information flows rely on intermediaries, such as learning management systems or online tools (John et al., 2023; Zeide & Nissenbaum, 2018). Second, remote learning foregrounds the context collapse (Marwick & boyd, 2011) between teachers’ and pupils’ private settings at home and classroom norms that belong to the semi-public, educational setting of schools. The challenges arising from this kind of context collapse have been studied within the domain of the workplace (Hilgefort et al., 2021). The COVID-19 lockdowns highlight schools as a new important domain warranting research scrutiny.
During the rapid shift to ERT in schools, the use of video conferencing was most critical in its potential to provide significant intrusions on privacy. It provided a window into other people’s homes, showing not only participants but potentially family members as well, in addition to possibly exposing pupils’ socio-economic backgrounds, disabilities, or family dynamics (Steeves, 2021). The ability to record and distribute footage also posed the risk of increased cyberbullying (Choi et al., 2022).
Consequently, we argue that the transition to ERT, and the associated shifting and collision of contexts, both exposed and realigned established norms for privacy management between and among pupils and teachers. This (re-)establishment of privacy norms between individuals in this case can be best understood through a combination of the frameworks of CPM theory (see Petronio, 2002) and contextual integrity (Nissenbaum, 2010, 2019). Pivotal to CPM is the metaphor of the boundary, which distinguishes between privately- and collectively-owned information, with associated norms, rules, and practices of information protection, linkage, and ownership. As such, CPM suggests that people manage their privacy by controlling and continuously coordinating individual and collective privacy boundaries via implicit or explicit rules of what private information to share, with whom, and under what conditions—unless, there is a clash of expectations or assumptions about said rules and norms among the actors involved in private information exchange. In that case, when the coordination mechanism of privacy boundaries breaks down, or is entirely lacking (such as when new technologies are introduced; Petronio & Child, 2020), boundary turbulence occurs, leading to the re-examination of previously established rules and norms, or the creation of new ones.
CPM has already been proved useful in understanding privacy practices in education settings, including both higher education (e.g., Hosek & Thompson, 2009; McKenna-Buchanan et al., 2015) and schools (e.g., Kaufmann & Lane, 2014; Lehmuskallio & Lampinen, 2019; McBride & Wahl, 2005). This body of research, typically situated in a single national context, focuses on the uniqueness of schools with an eye to the institutionalized protection of the privacy of minors and the sensitive position of teachers when trying to connect emotionally with their pupils, particularly when thinking about the sharing of private information that does not necessarily belong in the classroom. Such studies typically leverage CPM’s focus on individual behaviors to demonstrate how individual decisions reify or challenge the established educational context as rendering certain flows of information more appropriate than others.
The rapid shift to ERT during the pandemic arguably added another layer of complexity to these boundary negotiation processes (John et al., 2023). The educational setting is often viewed as providing a relatively established and stable context for information flows, particularly between pupils, parents, teachers, and administration (e.g., Birnhack & Perry-Hazan, 2020; Kumar et al., 2020). The notion of context is at the core of Nissenbaum’s concept of contextual integrity (2010, 2019), according to which privacy norms vary across different social situations; that is, they are context-dependent. This means that users’ perceptions about the appropriateness of personal information flows depend on the data subject, the sender and receiver of the data, the type of information transmitted, and the established transmission principles. Violations of contextual integrity, such as the implementation of new practices or the use of new technology, might therefore lead to a potential violation of contextual integrity, thus requiring a re-adjustment of privacy behaviors. As such, the shift to ERT during the pandemic represented not only the individual decisions of users that challenged established norms and practices but also the institutionally-enforced realignment of the context of communication altogether. This was particularly vivid when cameras allowed distant others to gaze into the formerly hidden private lives of both teachers and pupils, thus adding a physical dimension to the idea of context collapse (Marwick & boyd, 2011).
Focusing on contextual integrity also allows for a critical assessment of changes to personal information flows (Vitak & Zimmer, 2020). The challenge of maintaining distinct boundaries across settings was exacerbated by the pandemic as people were forced to appropriate domestic spaces for work while negotiating child care and dress codes, all of which could potentially compromise their professional persona (Taber et al., 2021). As such, a combination of CPM and contextual integrity provides a useful framework for understanding the (potential) boundary turbulence created in the transition to ERT and the associated re-negotiation of privacy management between teachers and pupils, for which the handling of camera use in online teaching is one particularly crucial example (Rannastu-Avalos & Siiman, 2020).
Research Focus
We see the rapid introduction to video conferencing in what can be described as prolonged ERT as a potential shock to the contextual integrity of information flows, resulting—in Petronio’s (2002) terms—in an extreme case of (potential) boundary turbulence. In routine times, pupils and teachers continuously negotiate and maintain norms around personal information ownership and control, such as revealing details about their personal and family lives (Kaufmann & Lane, 2014). The rapid introduction of huge-scale video conferencing in the school context during the COVID-19 lockdowns triggered the re-negotiation of those norms. However, such negotiations are mediated through distinct cultural attitudes toward privacy, as these are manifested in institutional settings and predispositions to treat privacy as a significant factor in decision-making (John et al., 2023; Masur et al., 2021). Therefore, we employ a comparative framework to investigate the shift to ERT in two countries that share crucial structural features but differ with respect to privacy regulation and prevalent privacy attitudes. In doing so, we wonder to what extent privacy negotiations during the shift to ERT were culturally specific or exhibited more universal aspects. As a consequence, we ask: How did Israeli and German teachers and pupils differ in their negotiations of privacy boundaries in relation to camera use during the shift to ERT?
We answer this by investigating four specific research questions (RQs), each taking on an important aspect of privacy management. Specifically:
RQ1: What norms for camera use were established between teachers and pupils during the shift to ERT?
RQ2: How did pupils and teachers negotiate their individual and collective privacy during the shift to ERT?
RQ3: How did pupils and teachers manage their own visibility and thus co-ownership of (visual) personal information in ERT?
RQ4: How were potential boundary turbulences dealt with?
Method
Data Collection and Procedure
The data collection was part of a larger project that investigated teachers’ and pupils’ negotiation of privacy during ERT. For this article, we focus on how pupils and teachers related to their camera use. Pupils can be considered the most vulnerable group with respect to privacy infringements in the context of ERT. They are also the group with the least amount of (institutional) power to alter norms. Teachers, on the other hand, are frontline implementers of remote learning technologies and policies.
We conducted semi-structured interviews with pupils and teachers in Germany and Israel between May and August 2021. Interviews took place after the general lockdowns in both countries but at a time when ERT measures were still in place at schools, so that participants could both argue from a retrospective perspective as well as include current experiences. We focused on secondary schools in middle-class urban settings and excluded schools with a special focus that do not have an equivalent in the other country, such as strictly religious schools (in Israel) or schools for children with special needs (in Germany and Israel). Schools with a special focus might not only have different privacy sensitivities but also an overall distinct approach to the use of technology in education. Our focus on mainstream educational institutions was aimed at increasing the robustness of comparison between the two countries. In both cases, teachers and pupils were recruited using snowball sampling, seeded through existing collaborations and personal contacts. When necessary, school boards and/or principles were informed about the participation of teachers and pupils. We made sure that teachers did not learn who had taken part in our interviews and that teachers did not have access to any data from pupils. Teachers’ and pupils’ informed consent was obtained, and parental consent for pupils was gathered as well. Where required, institutional review board (IRB) approval was attained.
In Germany, we interviewed seven teachers and 15 pupils from eight schools in five different federal states. In Israel, we interviewed seven pupils and six teachers from four secular, state-run high schools in the center of the country. Pupils’ ages ranged from 14 to 18 years (for an overview, see Table 1). Interviews were conducted by the principal investigators of the study in the interviewees’ native language. Interviews lasted between 20 and 60 minutes. All participants were assigned pseudonyms to preserve confidentiality.
List of Interviewees.
Interview Protocol and Analysis
The authors jointly developed a semi-structured interview guide in English, which was then translated into German and Hebrew. The guide was organized around five blocks, which later also served as a basis for coding. Interviews started with (a) open questions regarding interviewees’ current situation in relation to the pandemic and their personal use of digital technologies before and during lockdowns. The interview then moved to recalling (b) the moment of “crisis” during the first lockdown in March 2020. The third part of the interview examined (c) the negotiations of privacy rules in ERT and (d) perceptions of privacy and privacy breaches during distance learning, before concluding with (e) a summary section. In this article, our data analysis focuses mainly on blocks (c) and (d) of the interviews.
The interviews were transcribed and initially coded separately by each research team in Germany and Israel using standard techniques for thematic analysis (Nowell et al., 2017). The team held regular meetings for exchanging codes and memos, resulting in an iterative joint coding procedure. In the analysis, we focused on the main themes of context and rules of camera use, shared ownership of personal information, and potential privacy turbulences, including privacy breaches. Inductively, we identified the categories of impression management and feelings of being under surveillance. For each case, we then grouped participants’ accounts based on these thematic categories together and selected illustrative quotes (Dogruel & Joeckel, 2019; Hargittai & Marwick, 2016; John et al., 2023). Each local team wrote a comprehensive interpretation of their country’s interviews which were reviewed and discussed by the entire team and served as the basis for the results presented in this article.
Findings
Norms for Turning the Camera on (or Not)
Negotiations over camera use emerged as a major topic in both Germany and Israel. The eventual norms, while ultimately somewhat similar, were rooted in different discursive justifications and emphasized different perspectives on privacy in the two countries. In the German case, negotiations over norms for camera use were focused primarily on the teachers’ right (or lack thereof) to impose rules to turn the cameras on. The German interviewees overwhelmingly stressed people’s right to decide for themselves whether or not to turn on their camera. For instance, Peter said “[teachers] do not want to infringe our rights.”
The idea that pupils turning their cameras on could constitute a threat to their privacy was explicitly mentioned by several teachers and pupils in Germany. German teachers such as Paula or Martin explicitly said that they should refrain from enforcing pupils’ use of the camera due to privacy reasons. Another teacher, Christian, even stated that forcing students to turn on their camera would be an unjustified invasion of their privacy given that other available ways of enabling participation (such as the microphone) were less infringing on their privacy. German pupils such as August, Maite, and Lara were all aware that turning on their camera exposed them, or even their family members, to the risk of being filmed by others.
Despite this, Kasper noted that some German teachers asked him and his classmates to turn on their cameras, and Juliana referenced a teacher who beseeched her pupils to turn on their cameras, pleading “Come on, turn your cameras on.” Another German pupil, Diana, mentioned that her principal sent around a message asking pupils to turn their cameras on, but that “teachers were not strict in enforcing it.” Indeed, all the German teachers interviewed for this study allowed pupils to make their own decisions. This position derived from their view of the pupils as having rights in this area, and especially a right to privacy.
In Israel, while the tension around forcing the use of cameras was also a central theme, it was not wrapped in a discourse about pupils’ rights. Notably, Eran was the only teacher to reference pupils’ rights in any way. He told us that the Ministry of Education forbade teachers from forcing pupils to turn on their cameras in order “to protect the rights of the pupils.” To the best of our knowledge, however, no such instruction was issued, and other teachers seemed not to know about it. 1 And even had there been such a rule, not all teachers were inclined to adhere to it: Dekel and Michal told us that their schools’ management teams instructed teachers to make the pupils turn their cameras on, although they both refused to adhere to this directive. Michal even called it “ridiculous” and “stupid” and said that she herself “wouldn’t have turned [my webcam] on either at eight o’clock in the morning.” However, she also told us about colleagues of hers who gave lower grades to pupils who did not turn their cameras on, or who even refused to grade those pupils’ work at all.
The Israeli pupils also reported such steps on the part of teachers: Alma and Alon described incidents where teachers would mark pupils as absent or would outright remove them from a Zoom meeting if their camera was off. Having said that, Israeli teachers did have a fair degree of discretion in this regard. Reinforcing the idea that there was no meaningful privacy discourse in the Israeli context, we also note that Israeli teachers did not consider teaching without their own cameras on—a practice that was not universal in the German context.
Negotiations Over Camera Use: Pupils’ Resistance and Visibility Strategies
Some of the pupils we spoke with said that they turned on their cameras as a matter of course; others did so for some classes and not for others, yet others tried to keep their cameras off as much as possible. For all of them, though, there were occasions when they felt they had no choice but to turn their cameras on. In these situations, in addition to verbal negotiations about rules of camera use, pupils developed situation-related strategies to manage their camera visibility.
Pupils’ Strategies of Resistance
One resistance strategy in both countries was to turn the camera on briefly and then unobtrusively switch it off again, hoping that the teachers, who were sharing their screen, would not notice. Another strategy was to aim the camera somewhere other than at one’s face, perhaps pointing it at the computer keyboard, as German pupil August did, or at such an angle that it would only capture the pupil’s forehead and hair, as Shani in Israel did. Israeli teacher Ilana told us that her own teenage daughters would sit with a bright light behind them, making their faces impossible to discern. Israeli pupil Yonatan described a whole arsenal of strategies: There was one person who would just tell the teacher every class that his camera wasn’t working and he couldn’t connect it to his computer. And then he got permission to never have his camera on. But I know he had a camera. And there was someone else who put the camera upside down so that it would show the wall and then he would say that he had some problem with it and it was stuck like that [. . .] There’s those backgrounds that you can put up? He put up a background that also blocked him out.
Pupils in Germany would also feign technical problems, but they realized that this was not something that a whole class could credibly do at once.
Choosing to be Visible
Some of the pupils we interviewed in both Germany and Israel chose to turn their cameras on, not because they were forced or cajoled into doing so, but because they wanted to. These decisions were based on a range of subjective criteria, at both the individual and collective levels.
The first, which we describe as “webcam visibility as social currency,” refers to pupils turning on their cameras as a reward for specific teachers whom they particularly liked. As Israeli pupil Alma put it: “It also depended on how much we liked the teacher. If it was a teacher who was popular, more kids would have their cameras on.” A variant of this approach included pupils who decided to turn on their cameras because they empathized with their teachers. For instance, in Germany, Miguel said that he was the only pupil in his class with their camera on because his teacher had said it made her feel better, and he empathized with that. Likewise, Nick’s father was a teacher in Germany, so he had sympathy for other teachers. Alma’s mother was a university lecturer in Israel, so she too had insights into the frustrations of teaching without seeing the pupils. This led her to attend online classes with her camera on, being one of only three pupils in her class to do so.
Other pupils spoke of similar motivations: German pupils Vera and Odile both said that they “pitied the teacher,” while Nadine said she turned on her camera out of “respect.” In Israel, Yonatan would routinely turn on his camera in literature lessons. He said: “I felt like the teacher was really considerate and she was a really good teacher [. . .] I felt more comfortable with her so it was easier for me to be good, to be nice in return because she was nice to us.” Amit, in Israel, also had a favorite teacher for whom she—and all her classmates—turned on their cameras. She said: “There was one teacher that the whole class loved, we really liked her. And she didn’t make us turn on our cameras but everyone did.” Lionel, a German pupil, also turned his camera on voluntarily at times, although by his own admission this was to “gain popularity points” with his teachers. We do not know whether the teachers appreciated these motivations among their pupils, but it is clear that having the camera on was a kind of social currency.
The subject being taught also played a role. Here, the rule of thumb was that the more important the pupils perceived the subject to be, the more likely they were to turn on their cameras for those lessons. Here too we found very strong similarities in the ways that German and Israeli pupils talked about this. For instance, pupils would leave their cameras off for subjects that were perceived as less important, such as religious studies (as mentioned by Sarah and Nick in Germany), history, or physical education (as mentioned by Noya and Alma in Israel). As Israeli pupil Noya said, “no one wants to pay attention in a class when they don’t actually need to.”
In Israel, maths is considered the most important subject. Accordingly, in Alma’s class, “ninety percent of the kids had their cameras on. [. . .] It was really to do with how important the subject was.” It is noteworthy that Noya in Israel was quite clear about why she turned on her camera in biology, “a class that’s harder and more intense than literature,” saying that “it’s also a class that I chose to be in so I want to pay attention.” Noya is displaying her understanding of the disciplining role of the camera: when her camera was on, she paid closer attention. The camera is not a disciplining force imposed on her from the outside; rather it is a tool in helping her discipline herself.
We note that these views were not universally shared. In Germany, Nick pointed out that in harder subjects, there was a greater chance of embarrassment in front of the class, leading some to turn off their cameras. Relatedly, Peter said that one’s confidence in a certain subject could influence the decision as to whether or not to turn on one’s camera. Also from Germany, Vera said that in subjects where teachers were sharing their screen to display formulae, it actually made little sense to turn on the camera.
Pupils’ decisions to turn their cameras on were largely circumstantial, with social aspects playing a particularly important role. Pupils were aware that having a camera on made the teaching situation more personal but also created more pressure for them. In this regard, German pupil Nadine highlighted that “particularly at a time of full digital [teaching],” having the camera off gave you some “relief” from the stress of “active listening [and] engagement” that was required when cameras were on. What she highlights is an aspect, seemingly forgotten by teachers, that pupils were under a lot of emotional stress, particularly with all the new requirements at the lockdown situation. The right, or the ability, to turn their cameras off was a way to reduce this stress.
Managing One’s Own Visibility
Once cameras were on, privacy boundary management occurred largely through considerations of impression management. This was observed in both countries and for pupils and teachers alike.
Interestingly, and as already hinted by the excerpt from Nadine above, controlling one’s emotions in front of the camera played an important role for pupils’ impression management. German pupil Kasper said: “First of all, it was important to me not to look stupid, not to show emotions.” Mostly, though, pupils from both countries simply did not want to be seen looking bad. For some, this was related to their new routine around learning from home, and particularly the fact that they could wake up 2 or 3 minutes before classes started. As Yonatan in Israel explained: It would bother me that let’s say I’ve just woken up and then I’d have to turn on my camera, and my hair would look like this and I’m still half asleep [. . .] I’d feel uncomfortable to be seen like that.
To this, we can add the fact that for the pupils we interviewed, having their cameras on not only meant that others could see them in their private surroundings but also that they can see themselves all the time, which was discomfiting. Israeli pupil Alma said that this sentiment was common among her friends: They couldn’t concentrate on the class. They were always looking at themselves, [. . .] how their hair looked [. . .]. It was really hard for them to see themselves all the time. And to know that the whole class can see you, so you’re only focused on that.
Amit in Israel made a similar point: It also kind of made teenagers crazy because you see yourself all the time. [. . .] That’s what my friends would say, I can’t look at myself anymore, I have to clean up or change how I look. You would see yourself 24/7, in a kind of unflattering light.
German teacher Hannah underlined this from a teacher’s perspective: “So you talk, and what you see are five pupils constantly fiddling with their hair.” Yet, overall this was less of an issue in Germany, potentially because pupils were freer to decide whether or not to show their faces; if they did not feel that they looked presentable, they could simply turn their camera off.
As for the teachers, they adopted one dominant impression-management strategy: sitting in front of a bookshelf. As German pupil Nadine put it: “What was typical for teachers were bookshelves in the background [. . .] most of the teachers sat in front of bookshelves.” Sarah, also from Germany, speculated that her teachers read a lot but also suspected that their self-presentation was a kind of “alibi,” intended to give pupils the impression that they were well-read. An Israeli teacher, Eran, told us that when he taught, “there’s a bookshelf behind me,” adding that “it’s very impressive.”
In terms of what was visible of the space in which they were joining online classes, the pupils we interviewed had little to say. They did not pay too much attention to what was behind them, unless they were still in bed, in which case they tried to hide that fact. Israeli pupil Amit explained: “I’d take two pillows and arrange them like I was sitting but I’d actually still be lying down.” It comes as no surprise, then, that few pupils said that they learned anything new about their classmates from seeing them in online classes. What this implies is that remote teaching produced very little co-ownership of personal data. Pupils did not learn much about their classmates—or at least not much that they did not know already.
Potential Boundary Turbulence
Some of the incidents of shared personal information brought about by ERT imposed clashing contexts that had the potential to create boundary turbulence. For instance, German teacher Hannah, who had two small kids with her while teaching from home, tried hard to shield her kids from the camera. Also in Germany, Christian made efforts to hide his personal life from his pupils by turning his camera off when his girlfriend walked into the room. Having their private life in front of the camera had the potential to create boundary turbulence creating positive as well as occasionally discomforting outcomes. In Israel, Yael witnessed a disturbing interaction between one of her teachers and his kids: “We heard him yelling at his kids in the middle of lessons and them crying. It wasn’t the most pleasant thing to hear.” German teacher Paula said that she was quite shocked when a pupil intentionally turned on his camera when the police were raiding his family home, which he did to garner support from his teacher and classmates. In both cases, our interviewees witnessed private incidents that they would rather not have.
On the other hand, interruptions by teachers’ children allowed pupils to experience their teachers from a new, personal perspective. For instance, in Germany, August learnt about his teacher’s “rather cute” small kid, while Vera enjoyed seeing her teacher, Paula, interact with her kids. Paula herself said that she was fine with having her kids on camera as they left for kindergarten, for example. Similarly, Alma in Israel was exposed to a number of interactions between her teachers and their children: There was a history teacher who had little kids who also had to be on Zoom, so they would interrupt her lessons all the time to ask her for cereal or chocolate milk or to play with them. They would drive her crazy the whole lesson, which was funny but it was hard for her. A lot of times our homeroom teacher’s baby would throw toys at him. The baby would cry and then he would have to pick him up. He also did a class with the baby on his lap one time because there was no one there else to watch the baby.
These situations, though, did not embarrass the pupils; if anything, it gave them a better appreciation of the teachers’ situations. Danielle said quite explicitly that “it felt like I was seeing a more personal side of the teachers,” while Alma said that it made her “see a different side of them” and that “it helped me identify with them.”
However, there were also accidental occasions of boundary turbulence caused by unintended collapses of school and home contexts. For instance, pupils sometimes turned their camera off but forgot to mute their microphone, exposing teachers to private conversations (perhaps about them). Israeli pupil Michal told us about a boy in her class whose camera was off. He said that he was taking notes, but when he accidentally turned on the camera on his phone, the teacher could see that he was outside playing soccer. There were also incidents of unwanted exposure of teachers’ personal lives. German pupil Diana mentioned the time that a pornographic website popped up on her teacher’s computer during an online class. She said that she found this “very, very funny,” but this may not have been the case for all of her classmates, or indeed the teacher. An episode that was equally disconcerting, though for different reasons, was related by pupil Shani in Israel: There was a meeting with the school counselor and she didn’t notice that she screen-shared her WhatsApp and she was chatting with [. . .] our teacher about a certain student in my class. And the girl saw it and she was really furious and offended.
Discussion and Conclusion
This study captures a unique moment for digital privacy. The rapid shift to ERT created a situation where pupils and teachers were forced into merging their school, work, home, and computer-mediated communication contexts, each with their associated privacy norms and practices. On the one hand, this situation yielded conditions that revealed typically invisible and taken-for-granted norms and practices of boundary management and forced participants to be more explicit in reflecting on their choices and behaviors during remote learning. Using the terminology of the theory of contextual integrity (Nissenbaum, 2010), the clashing contexts of school and home, with the addition of a digital layer, forced both teachers and pupils to consider the appropriateness of information flows they encountered during their remote interactions. On the other hand, the collapse of distinct communication contexts created conditions for a range of privacy boundary turbulences (Petronio, 2002): participants observed norms from one context being imported to or emphasized in another, potentially leading to the negotiation of new norms and practices. Furthermore, the comparative design of this study helped us to identify exogenous factors that might have impacted the negotiation of said norms and practices. Particularly, we were able to isolate cultural aspects where our two cases differed, which came across in participants’ (re)negotiation of their privacy boundaries in this materially new situation.
In our investigation of the norms established for camera use among teachers and pupils (RQ1), we observed a sort of path dependency on the dominant privacy culture and policy climate, which guide both the discourse and the decisions of teachers when it comes to camera use in their classes. First, we saw differences in the language used to justify the norms adopted during the shift to ERT, which were reflective of the German cultural sensitivity toward, and Israeli disregard for, privacy infringements. When German teachers and pupils explicitly mentioned privacy as a consideration, used the language of rights to describe it, and stressed the right to be left alone, this can be seen as a consequence of their embeddedness in a public privacy culture already sensitized toward privacy. It is worth noting that the shift to ERT in Germany took place in the context of increased privacy concerns regarding the introduction of a COVID tracing app (Häring et al., 2023). In contrast, we observed a much more pragmatic approach toward technology in Israel, where COVID tracking tasks were allocated to Israel’s domestic security agency (Amit et al., 2020). In such a privacy culture, it is not surprising that Israeli teachers and pupils saw privacy as a largely irrelevant consideration during the emergence of ERT in relation to both vertical and horizontal relations.
Second, when it came to establishing and enforcing camera use in virtual classrooms, there was an issue of clarity in institutional approach. While the German teachers and pupils seemed to be clear about the formal policies for camera use and communicated awareness of their rights, their Israeli counterparts conducted themselves more ambiguously, sometimes relying on “imagined law” (Perry-Hazan & Birnhack, 2016) to justify their demand for camera use. We see this as reflecting both the existence and awareness of broader privacy policy (e.g., GDPR) in Germany and the lack of them in Israel. That being said, while the process of establishing privacy norms, the eventual rules, and their justifications differed in two countries, the resulting practices, norms around disclosure, information co-ownership, and tensions around privacy boundaries shared substantive similarities across the two cases.
When we examine how pupils and teachers negotiated their individual and collective privacy (RQ2), our two cases share a lot of communality. Pupils in both Germany and Israel appeared well aware of the power hierarchy between them and the school staff, the role of surveillance in sustaining that hierarchy, and the power, however curtailed, privacy gives them in this arrangement. Pupils in both countries generally preferred to decide for themselves when to turn their camera on, leaning on a similar array of social or instrumental reasons. They understood teachers’ social need to see their pupils’ faces on camera and used their cameras as a kind of social reward or support for particular teachers. At the same time, they were aware of the instrumental nature of the camera and sometimes turned it on, either when there was less risk of embarrassing themselves or when it was important to follow a subject. In a way, our findings complement an earlier study of privacy boundary management using CPM, one that focused on teachers’ considerations for disclosure (Kaufmann & Lane, 2014). There, they suggest that pupils may similarly view privacy as a form of social currency that they can use to improve shared classroom experiences, just as the norms around strategies to avoid camera use among pupils were also similar, such as distorting angles, backgrounds, lighting, or deploying strategies to turn off their cameras again.
Likewise, when it comes to the management of visibility (RQ3), we found similarities between the German and the Israeli cases. Here, teachers and pupils in both countries relied primarily on strategies of impression management. The pupils in our sample were first and foremost teenagers—an identity that at the end seemed to transcend the cultural differences described above. As teenagers, our participants struggled with similar problems. Their developmental tasks (Havighurst, 1953) are similar, and for them looking good in front of others was an essential aspect of their social life, meaning that intrusions into their personal lives were to be actively managed. What video conferencing added for them was that being present on camera put a lot of additional emotional stress on pupils, and leaving the camera off became a way of coping with this stress. Having the camera on creates a situation comparable to constantly seeing oneself in the mirror. We have already seen negative effects of video conferencing tools in other contexts as these tools provide people with constant feedback from their own camera (Riedl, 2022), resulting in mirror anxiety or “Zoom fatigue,” particularly for women (Bailenson, 2021; Fauville et al., 2021).
Our findings regarding teachers align with Kaufmann and Lane’s (2014) observations about privacy boundary management in the offline context of education. Similarly to teachers in physical classrooms, our participants relied on strategies of information disclosure and privacy management, wavering between presenting themselves as detached professionals and—at the same time—as rounded human beings with personal lives. They explicitly, even if sometimes jokingly, employed impression-management strategies that showed them to be cultured and well read—an effort that was continuously challenged by pupils who had suddenly become part of their personal and family life. Indeed, interactions with their children or partners at home were the predominant source of information co-ownership between teachers and pupils. Beyond that, entering students’ domestic spaces placed additional stress on some of the teachers in their broader role as educators. Miller (2021) highlighted this tension for teachers during COVID-19 in the US context, arguing that even when teaching remotely, teachers are not only meant to teach but also to care about their pupils' well-being. In our sample, this aspect of online teaching did not seem to differ between cultures and placed comparable strains on both German and Israeli teachers.
When it came to boundary turbulence (RQ4), we observed great heterogeneity, but not necessarily systematic differences between the two countries. The aforementioned collapse of domestic and professional environments, while generating a sense of co-ownership of private information, was also a source of boundary turbulence as could be observed in the wide range of teachers' reactions when their domestic lives were exposed to their students. In our view, such variance can be better explained by personal rather than cultural differences: some teachers had no problem in sharing this personal side, while others went to some lengths to prevent intrusions. This points to issues of context collapse and ensuing boundary turbulence: even though most of our participants only reported a few anecdotal examples, the abovementioned examples in both countries stand out as challenges to established privacy norms in educational settings.
Our observations are aimed at capturing an extraordinary moment and as such highlight how the rapid introduction of video conferencing during the pandemic posed new privacy-related challenges for the school context. Some of these challenges were already present during traditional teaching and became vividly pronounced during this crisis. Capturing and unpacking norms such as reciprocity in the use of privacy as social currency by both students and teachers or the role of privacy in impression management by teachers, and even more so by pupils (who also needed to deal with enhanced self-criticism during the constitutive years of adolescence), are important. With the pandemic formally passed, and educational systems around the globe largely reverting back to in-person teaching, the analysis of privacy management between pupils and teachers remains a research domain worth exploring. Furthermore, as schools continue to experiment and adopt new media technologies, new challenges for privacy management among teachers and pupils will be posed. Much of the video conferencing software and many of the e-learning technologies that entered schools during the pandemic are likely to stay, even if used less intensively, and with them the newly established contexts and associated norms of privacy boundary management. Thus, our research is not only a look back into what happened during the COVID-19 lockdown but, hopefully, also offers a glimpse into the future of privacy in (remote) learning.
It is important to acknowledge and reflect on a number of limitations of the current study. First, as with numerous others, our study was confined to the Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) context. As such, the transferability of this study is limited, as both the context collapse that we describe as well as the associated boundary turbulence might have looked different had we included non-WEIRD countries (Wu et al., 2020). Second, our comparison was largely based on a similar case design, which allowed us to focus on distinct differences between Germany and Israel, particularly with respect to privacy culture and policy climate. However, by keeping crucial comparative aspects—such as the technological or political—constant, we were able to largely rule them out as explanatory factors. Other aspects, such as socio-economic status, gender, or the choice of digital tools used by each school, may shed a different light on both the perception of contexts and their collapse and privacy norms. Third, in this study, we relied on a limited sample. We focused on mainstream, middle-class schools in both countries and did not account for the specific problems of particular vulnerable groups, such as pupils requiring special assistance, or pupils from lower socio-economic backgrounds. We also note that our focus on teachers and pupils possibly flattens the complexities of the environment in which privacy negotiations took place. We have already noted the potential roles played by principals, school boards, and the Ministries of Education, but we could not explore these meso- and macro-level aspects of privacy management.
Summarizing our findings, we shed light on a seemingly small domain of privacy research: the question of whether to turn on one’s camera in a video conference at school. However, we have shown that the answer to this question encompasses fundamental aspects of privacy boundary management, socially- and technologically-imposed context collapse, adolescents’ developmental tasks, and teachers’ understanding of their professional role, as well the cultural underpinnings of privacy. Furthermore, we hope this work contributes to the development of systematic comparative qualitative privacy research as a way to better understand privacy dynamics as they interact with local cultures, as well as transcending local identities.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to all the teachers and pupils who participated in this study. We are also thankful to the anonymous reviewers for helping us improve the article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by a grant from the Faculty of Social Sciences, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
