Abstract
Although students increasingly attend school online, virtual classroom interactions are understudied. This article addresses how decisions about online visibility—when and in what way teachers and students see each other—shape relationships. Our multi-case ethnography includes observations and interviews from virtual and hybrid schools prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and from two high schools that moved online in 2020. We argue that visibility varies across three dimensions (form, autonomy and purpose) and identify dominant configurations: mandatory bodily visibility and mandatory data visibility, both employed for surveillance, and teacher-innovated negotiated visibility, utilized for connection. While requiring cameras-on at all times alienates students and degrades relationships, having their engagement measured only by automatically-collected data can isolate students as well. Subverting top-down practices, teacher-innovators forged connections by working out with students how and when they would be visible. Race and class shaped how students experienced the configurations their schools and teachers chose to enforce.
Keywords
A
Despite their increasingly common occurrence, the everyday interactions between teachers and students in online classrooms are often a “black box” (Molnar et al., 2019; Witherspoon et al., 2024). Research on a wide variety of social relations has shown that the different structures of online spaces can reconfigure interactions, with the potential to shift power dynamics and disrupt established patterns (Crooks, 2019; Kumar et al., 2019; Star & Strauss, 1999). Consequently, it is important that we directly study how teachers and students interact in the online classroom and not assume that research on offline dynamics translates neatly to online contexts. It is also equally important to not assume that online dynamics are entirely different from in-person ones, as existing institutional structures often shape patterns of technology adoption, use, and understanding (Rafalow, 2021; Rafalow &Puckett, 2022; Reich, 2020). Rather, in studying teachers and students online we need to be attentive to both continuities and disruptions.
When it comes to online schooling, one particularly significant difference is visibility: when and how teachers and students see each other. The in-person school environment allows teachers to easily and consistently monitor students’ physical bodies and behavior (which can be mobilized to various purposes) while at the same time, maintaining a distinct separation between school and home. As many have noted, online schooling collapses the boundaries between school and home. But at the same time, teachers no longer have the same taken for granted vantage point on students’ bodies and behaviors (Jonas, 2024). Online, students’ bodies may still be visible via camera but teachers often may be reliant on, at most, students’ audio or chat contributions to gauge engagement.
This reconfiguration of visibility is particularly consequential for teachers’ relationships with students. Visibility is foundational to relationships: to feel that someone cares, we need to feel seen by them, recognized and understood as the individual we are (Pugh, 2024). Online schooling poses a challenge for teachers: how can they establish trust and make students feel seen without being physically present with those students? The question of what relationships between teachers and students look like in online classrooms is a highly consequential one. Students with strong trusting connections with teachers learn more, score higher on standardized tests, and are more likely to graduate (Cornelius-White, 2007; Quin, 2017; Sabol & Pianta, 2012). Moreover, (offline) teacher-student relationships are a key contributor to unequal outcomes in schools. Black, Latinx, and working-class students are less likely to experience caring and trusting relationships than their white and middle-class counterparts (Cherng, 2017; Sabol & Pianta, 2012). Some have argued that online schooling may be protective for marginalized students, as it could shield them from disproportionate in-school surveillance and discipline (Anderson, 2020). But the question remains of whether this protection also allows for strong relationships with teachers. Thus in this article, we address two main research questions: How do different configurations of visibility in online schooling prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic shape students’ relationships with teachers? How are experiences of these configurations of visibility (and their consequences) shaped by race and class?
To answer these research questions, we utilize a comparative ethnographic approach, drawing on two case studies of online schooling. The first is an ethnography conducted with virtual and hybrid school participants in the U.S. before the COVID-19 pandemic, and the second is a deep-dive at two geographically close schools distinct in their demographic makeup throughout the year following the emergency declaration in March 2020. Pandemic-era online schooling arose out of exceptional circumstances, ones without a parallel before (or likely to be repeated again). But were teachers’ everyday practices and interactions with students during pandemic era online-schooling similarly unique? Or were there dynamics, negative and positive, that were similar to online schooling prior to the pandemic? These are the questions that arose while informally discussing the findings of our projects and uncovering striking similarities. To explore, we decided to engage in a comparative analysis of our two cases.
Students’ experiences during pandemic-era remote schooling continue to shape their approach to school and learning. Indeed, the decision to move school online continues to be hotly debated (Zweig, 2025). Through utilizing the comparison case of virtual schools, we are able to identify dynamics during online schooling that remained constant before and during the pandemic and in doing so begin to disentangle emergency remote learning during a global crisis from more common virtual learning experiences.
In doing so, we also seek to move beyond a dominant binary approach to visibility. This binary approach is best encapsulated by the conversation over whether cameras should be “off” or “on” during online teaching (Castelli & Sarvary, 2021; Cobo & Rivera Vargas, 2022; Cupchik et al., 2024). Synthesizing existing literature and theory, we propose a new spectrums of visibility approach. We argue that schools vary their approach to visibility across three dimensions: form, autonomy, and purpose. Students can be bodily visible via cameras or audio but can also be visible via data such as commenting or logging on (or some combination therein). Visibility can be completely mandatory or involve some degree of student choice. Lastly, teachers can utilize visibility for purposes of control or for connection, with student perceptions also playing a role.
Utilizing these continuums, we identify three dominant configurations across online learning environments and show how each shapes the connections between teachers and students. Figure 1 illustrates where each school falls along the following continuums. The first is mandated bodily visibility utilized for purposes of surveillance, present at one pre-pandemic virtual school and at one school during pandemic-era schooling. The next configuration we observed was an (over)reliance on mandated data visibility to track student behavior and performance, present at 11 pre-pandemic virtual schools and at the second school during pandemic-era schooling. While the first configuration of mandatory bodily visibility alienates students by framing them as “risky” or “at risk” and degrades relationships, teacher reliance on data visibility can also lead students to feel disconnected and anonymous, particularly when not supplemented with personal outreach. In contrast to the first two configurations, which were top down approaches adopted by school administrators, we also observed teachers across both pre-pandemic virtual schools and pandemic-era schools innovate a third configuration: negotiated visibility for the intended purpose of connection. When teachers worked directly with their students on how and when they would be visible, they created a new pathway to forge trust in online settings. We also consider how these configurations could contribute to inequalities, showing how race and class shaped students’ experiences of the configurations their schools and teachers chose to enforce.
Field-Sites Configured on the Spectrums of Visibility.
Literature Review
In many ways, the foundation of teacher-student relationships is visibility. To feel connected, we need to feel “seen” by the other person, understood as an individual (Pugh, 2024). The strongest relationships are grounded in a sense of recognition beyond institutional roles, those where a student feels perceived, accepted, and cared for as their whole self, not just as a student (Noddings, 2012). Building relationships in online classroom settings can consequently pose a particular challenge for teachers. They must establish a social presence with students when they are not occupying the same physical space and may only have limited forms of visibility available to them (Jonas, 2024). It is perhaps because of this challenge that relationships act as a lynchpin for online schooling, shown to be more impactful on a student’s overall experience than even the features of the learning technology itself (du Mérac et al., 2022).
Yet despite the growing body of research showing the importance of relationships in online learning, teacher-student interactions in these spaces are often “black boxes” (Witherspoon et al., 2024). We know the outcomes matter but the social dynamics themselves have often gone unobserved. Existing research does often highlight, as Miller (2021) puts it, that “remote learning revealed relationships in need of repair” as teachers and students work to adapt to connecting under new technological conditions (Jonas, 2024; Miller, 2021; Rice & Carter, 2015; Velasquez et al., 2013; Walter et al., 2024). This research suggests that developing caring relationships in a teacher-student context is possible, but requires consistent proactive engagement by teachers.
Most research on teacher-student relationships during pandemic-era online schooling in American K–12 schools has foregrounded the perceptions of parents or teachers (Carrión-Martínez et al., 2021), with far less insight into student experiences (but see Literat, 2021 and Cockerham et al., 2021 for exceptions). As far as we know, no research has considered the perspectives of teachers and students in the same school context. As learning moved into the home, parents took on a greater responsibility for their children’s day-to-day schooling but often felt a greater disconnect with their children’s teachers (Carrión-Martínez et al., 2021). Students similarly felt alienated from teachers, particularly during the 2020–21 school year when teachers continued to express concern but also resumed assigning “normal” amounts of work (Literat, 2021). These studies suggest that relationships were damaged during pandemic-era online schooling but leave the classroom dynamics eroding ties as an open question.
Understanding student experiences and classroom dynamics is particularly important for addressing how visibility during online schooling may be reproducing inequalities. Existing education research suggests that in physical schooling, visibility has two faces, one negative, augmenting disadvantage for marginalized students, and one positive, amplifying advantage for privileged students. For girls, Black, Latinx, LGBTQ, and working-class students, the visibility of the body during in-person school makes them vulnerable to surveillance and regulation that culminates in disproportionate discipline (Bettie, 2014; Golann, 2020; Lewis & Diamond, 2015; Willis, 1981). Previous research shows that the surveillance and regulation of students’ bodies is often part of a cycle of alienation, disengagement, and resistance (Ferguson, 2000; Morris, 2015; Shedd, 2015; Willis, 1981). When bodily discipline relates to race, class, and gender, it can reproduce inequalities by generating students who feel out of place in schools. Considered from this perspective, online schooling could be protective for marginalized students, shielding them from this bodily regulation and discipline (Anderson, 2020). Yet more broadly, research has shown that the introduction of new technologies often embeds dominant cultural norms and patterns of data extraction that disadvantage minoritized students and communities (Crooks, 2024; Heath & Segal, 2021; Rafalow, 2021).
At the same time, for white and middle-class students, being visible to teachers is part of how advantage is cemented, as these students and their parents use strategies to secure the (disproportionate) attention and focus of teachers. White and middle-class students are disproportionately tracked into higher level classes where smaller ratios and more informal class structures means that they receive more one-on-one time with teachers (Oakes, 2005; Tyson, 2013). Moreover, middle-class students engage in interactional advocacy that allows them to receive teachers’ attention, assistance, and accommodation beyond what is extended to their working-class peers (Calarco, 2018). This body of research suggests that inequality in experiences during online schooling may accrue not just through the disadvantage of marginalized students but through how middle-class students and their families gain access to advantages.
Existing work suggests multiple possibilities for how online schooling could replicate—or challenge—offline inequalities that accrue through how teachers and students experience visibility and build connections. But to fully explore these possibilities requires moving beyond a binary approach to visibility. This binary approach is best encapsulated by the conversation over whether cameras should be “off” or “on” during online teaching (Castelli & Sarvary, 2021; Cobo & Rivera Vargas, 2022; Cupchik et al., 2024). Focusing on cameras alone obscures the variety of visibility options available to teachers and the policies shaping how teachers utilize these options. In the section below, we outline a new theoretical framework based on synthesis of existing work on digital spaces, one that allows us to more fully conceptualize the dynamics of the online classroom.
Theoretical Framework: Spectrums of Visibility in the Online Classroom
Visibility in online and hybrid classroom settings cannot be encompassed by the simple dichotomy of an on/off switch. As Pearce et al. (2018, p. 1313) argue in the context of social media, “visibility leads to a wide variety of outcomes . . . visibility should be contextualized relative to the power structures in which one is operating.” We argue that schools vary their approach to student visibility across three dimensions, each of which shapes patterns of social reproduction: form, autonomy, and purpose. Figure 1 illustrates this theoretical framework visually and locates each of our cases on the three dimensions.
When discussing the form of visibility in an online classroom context, many primarily default to a binary choice of one platform possibility—camera on or camera off. In online and hybrid classroom environments, we instead conceptualize student visibility as taking a continuum of forms that ranges from bodily to data visibility. Bodily visibility occurs through the representation of participants’ physical body and/or voice in the online space via sharing video and/or audio. But visibility can also be assessed through data (Lupton & Williamson, 2017), with instructors utilizing various online platforms to monitor students’ actions in relation to the platform interface (or lack thereof). Students’ participation can be clearly apparent to teachers through chat messages, clicks on curriculum web pages, and completed assessments. Students can even be visible to teachers while not otherwise engaging (e.g., by responding to questions or turning in assignments) through the digital trace of having signed in to the platform for a certain period of time (Geiger & Ribes, 2011). Both body and data visibility can take synchronous and asynchronous forms. A student having their camera on while on Zoom is one form of bodily visibility, but so is a student submitting a video of themselves giving a presentation. Similarly, a teacher can chat with a student in real time or could instead read over their comments on a classmate’s blog post from the night before.
Visibility in online schooling also varies on a continuum of autonomy, ranging from mandatory to chosen. At one end of the continuum, forms of visibility or invisibility are required by policy or imposed by platform. For instance, students may be required by teachers to turn on their cameras to avoid punishment or schools may utilize a platform without video capacity. In both instances, students’ decisions around visibility are constrained. At the other end, visibility management is completely determined by student preference, with options to make oneself more or less visible without explicit negative consequences in either case—a form of self-disclosure (Vitak & Kim, 2014). A teacher may allow students a free choice about whether or not they turn on their cameras or a platform could allow students to choose whether to send a message visible to their peers or just visible to their teachers. But most of the time, visibility is a mixture of voluntary and required. For example, participating in a synchronous Zoom class requires mandatory data visibility (in that the teacher and other classmates can see whether you are logged in or not) but also enables teachers to choose whether students are required to be bodily visible (i.e., have their cameras on).
Finally, the intended and perceived role of visibility management is important to understanding possibilities for the extension or disruption of social relationships and hierarchies. Here, visibility can be used by teachers—and perceived by students—as facilitating care or enacting control. Visibility in some form is foundational to the building of connections: we cannot connect if we cannot perceive. Self-disclosure builds relationships and facilitates opportunities for support and complete secrecy is rarely desirable or possible (Palen & Dourish, 2003; Pinter et al., 2021; Pugh, 2021; Vitak & Kim, 2014). Looking at a student can help teachers determine their emotional state and better hypothesize the kind of response they need in the moment to help them learn (Jonas, 2024). Yet visibility also enables control, allowing teachers to evaluate student alignment with rules and norms and punish those who deviate. As in the traditional in-person classroom, purposes of control and care are tightly intertwined in educator practices via online platforms (Crooks, 2019; Lu, Dillahunt, et al., 2021; Lu, Marcu, et al., 2021) and both are subject to student interpretation. Teachers’ attempts to communicate care can be experienced by students as manipulative, condescending, and boundary-crossing (Liboiron, 2021; Phillippo, 2012). There is real interpretive flexibility in these acts of visibility management. Yet despite the blurred distinction between these categories, the intended purpose for visibility management is a salient factor in how these policies and actions function to replicate or challenge existing power hierarchies.
In the findings section, we look across both ethnographic cases to show how configurations of visibility along these continuums shaped students’ classroom interactions and relationships with teachers, showing where these configurations facilitated disparate experiences in terms of race and class.
Data and Methods
This paper utilizes a comparative qualitative approach, combining two separate studies of online schooling. Specifically, we compare online schooling directly before the pandemic to online schooling during the pandemic. In doing so, we empirically address how pandemic-era schooling was unique in its dynamics due to the crisis setting, using comparison to identify continuities and discontinuities.
Case 1: Online and Hybrid Schools Prior to the COVID Pandemic 1
The first case (conducted by Anne Jonas) focuses on 12 virtual and hybrid schools in 8 states across the U.S., drawing on in-depth interviews with teachers (n = 23), staff (n = 12), parents (n = 11), students (n = 4), and community members (n = 2) and ~50 hours of observations of classes and school meetings at the hybrid “Lake School,” and relevant industry conferences and events (collected 2018–20) (see Table 1). The researcher was introduced to all Lake School staff and board members, who were informed of the research observations and given the opportunity to opt out of being observed. When the researcher observed teachers in their homes, she would look at their screens as they worked and taught class. One teacher also shared recordings from his classes after the fact. Otherwise, Anne was a passive observer in staff and board meetings, professional development activities, and in the (in-person) teacher’s lounge and front office. Participants were all involved in schools where the majority of instruction is computer-mediated, although the particular configurations varied. Observations included informal conversations documented in field notes. Interviews ranged from approximately 30 minutes to over two hours, over a mix of video, audio, and in-person meetings. Families were often interviewed together, with children and their parents in joint sessions.
Anne Jonas’ Field-Sites
Participants were recruited through a combination of purposive and snowball sampling (Ravitch & Mittenfelner, 2016), seeking out teachers, students, parents, administrators, policymakers, and community advocates with diverse perspectives, positions, and backgrounds at different “kinds” of schools—neighborhood public, charter, private, and homeschools, in different geographic locations, with varying demographics, pedagogical approaches, organizational structures, and missions. This strategy was “aimed toward theory construction, not for population representativeness” (Charmaz, 2006, p. 6). Anne sought out extreme or unusual cases as much as those that might represent a “typical” experience. This focus on sampling for range or diversity was complemented by snowball sampling, which allowed for a deeper understanding of the relationships and circumstances within particular school communities.
The goal in this process was to understand the landscape of experiences at virtual schools in the U.S., identify significant elements that influence community member experiences, and trace the processes of engagement with virtual schools that produce different sets of risks and rewards. Interviews were supplemented with observations of people engaged in the practices of virtual schooling. Participants were not generally asked for demographic information directly, although certain self-descriptors sometimes came up. Although as of 2019, on the whole, “virtual schools enrolled substantially fewer minority students and fewer low-income students compared to national public school enrollment” (Molnar et al., 2019), subsets of blended and online schools have substantially more low-income and “minority” students and many scholars see these communities as primary targets for the expansion of virtual schooling models (Burch & Good, 2014; Jones & Figueiredo-Brown, 2018; Rooks, 2017; Schneider & Berkshire, 2020).
Case 2: Emergency Remote Instruction During the COVID Pandemic 2
The second ethnographic case (conducted by Brooke Dinsmore) focuses on two high schools located near a major city in the American Southeast, drawing on over 800 hours of observation of in-person and online classes, extracurricular activities and faculty meetings, and in-depth interviews with teachers (n = 43) and students (n = 68) at both schools (collected 2019-2021) (see Table 2).
Brooke Dinsmore’s Field-Sites
Both schools are located within forty minutes of the same city and are the sole high school in their district. Rustville High School (RHS) and Sprawlville High School (SHS) are relatively similar in size (≈1100 students) and teacher-student ratio (≈15:1). Class demographics are similar (avg. 46% lower SES) but racial demographics differ: RHS’s student body is 27% white, 61% Black, 9.5% Latinx/Hispanic and 2% Asian while SHS’s student body is 50% white, 30% Black, 10% two or more races and 9% Latinx/Hispanic. Rustville High School is located in a densely populated suburb experiencing a long-term economic decline that school administrators consider “urban” while Sprawlville High School is located in a more sprawling rural county undergoing a surge in residential development due to an influx of commuters.
Between October 2019 and March 2020, Brooke conducted in-person observations, with her time split relatively equally between the two sites. Generally, she spent a full day at each school (six to eight hours) and observed for at least four days a week. At both schools, she began by observing widely (n = 65 classes at Rustville, n = 41 classes at Sprawlville) before narrowing down to 13 or 14 teachers per school for regular observations. In spring 2020, Brooke was required to rapidly shift her study methodology due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In March 2020, both schools moved instruction online for the remainder of the school year (as ordered by the Governor).
Both schools began the 2020–21 school year with remote instruction for the majority of students, dividing students’ time between scheduled “synchronous” classes and time to work on pre-assigned asynchronous work. Brooke was able to begin virtual ethnographic observations within two weeks of schools transitioning online. During Spring 2020, she observed online with most of the observation sample (N = 22 teachers), joining synchronous video meetings and watching interactions on online learning platforms (i.e., Google Classroom and Schoology). As of April 2020, she began observing virtual faculty meetings at both sites. She continued virtual observations in fall 2020 and spring 2021 in the online classrooms of the full teacher observations sample (N = 27), as well as observing online faculty meetings and online extracurricular activities. During virtual observations, Brooke attended classes and meetings with her camera on and was introduced as a researcher. She generally participated in any introductory or warm-up activities that weren’t about class content but was otherwise a passive observer.
Lastly, Brooke also conducted in-depth semi-structured interviews with both teachers and students. Interviews were conducted over Zoom between May 2020 and July 2021. Interviews lasted around an hour and a half on average. Students were recruited through email and in online classes; the resulting sample was race and class diverse. The first third of the interview focused on participants’ experiences during online learning, with a particular focus on how the shift to online had impacted teacher-student interactions.
In each case, analysis was an ongoing process, with both authors regularly reviewing their field notes and interview transcripts and writing analytic memos (Emerson et al., 2011). Analysis was conducted on each case separately before the beginning of our collaboration. In bringing the two cases together, we used memoing to identify common patterns which were then validated through returning to our data. Brooke engaged in new coding and analysis in order to enable a clearer comparison with Anne’s findings. Analysis and writing were also an integrated process as we repeatedly returned to our data to test the conclusions we reached, and shifted our claims based on what we found.
Findings
Across our field-sites, we observed three dominant configurations of visibility: mandatory bodily visibility for purposes of surveillance, mandatory data visibility for purposes of surveillance, and voluntary data and bodily visibility for purposes of connection. Although the first two configurations utilized differing forms of visibility (bodily versus data), they were similar in their consequences: mandatory visibility for purposes of surveillance degraded student trust and relationships with teachers. The third configuration stood in stark contrast to the first two. By negotiating visibility with students, teachers were able to build and maintain connections with students online. Table 3 previews this argument in more detail, summarizing how each configuration impacted student relationships. Below we discuss each configuration separately, first addressing how the configuration worked, and then showing how it impacted students’ day-to-day experiences with their teachers, shaping their overall connections and engagement. We end the discussion of each configuration by considering how the race and class of students shaped their experience of the configuration.
Impact of Configurations on Student Relationships and Engagement
Mandatory Bodily Visibility and Student Distrust
Mandatory bodily visibility was adopted at two schools we observed: Rustville High School during pandemic era online schooling, and Ivy Virtual Academy, a selective online charter. In this section, we mainly focus on Rustville, using Ivy Virtual Academy as a contrasting case. At Rustville, mandatory bodily visibility, utilized for purposes of surveillance, led to growing distrust between teachers and students. At Ivy Virtual Academy, mandatory bodily visibility was utilized for intellectual connection rather than surveillance, showing how purpose shapes the way the same technology is used and experienced.
During Fall 2020, Rustville High School adopted a strict policy of mandatory bodily visibility: students attended classes over Zoom and were required to turn their cameras on or be ejected from the class. With this change came a new routine at the beginning of most classes: teachers reminding students to turn their cameras on. For instance, during the second week the new policy was in place, Brooke attended Ms. Aaron’s third block ecology class. As students joined the Zoom class one by one, Ms. Aaron greeted them by name and reminded them to get started on the “warm-up” exercise for the day. Faith was the third student to join; as she came into the Zoom meeting her camera was not on. Ms. Aaron said, “Good morning Faith! You can get started on the warm-up.” Ms. Aaron greeted another student who joined and then noticed Faith still didn’t have her camera on. She cleared her throat, “Faith, honey, can you put your camera on?” When Faith didn’t respond, Ms. Aaron repeated herself. Faith turned her camera on but most of her face wasn’t visible. Sitting in a dark room, Faith’s camera was tilted up at the ceiling so only her forehead was visible. Ms. Aaron had a similar exchange with four more students before beginning instruction ten minutes into the class.
Over the course of the fall semester, Rustville teachers began settling into routine adaptations of the policy in their classroom. In about a third of the classes Brooke attended, teachers consistently enforced the cameras-on policy, requiring students to be bodily visible on Zoom at all times. But the remaining two thirds of teachers observed developed their own version of the policy. For instance, one common variant was only requiring cameras-on during active instruction or discussion and allowing students to turn their cameras off while doing individual work.
Perhaps responding to this inconsistent adoption among teachers, Rustville High School administrators continued to push the policy throughout the 2021–22 school year. As Mr. Munson, the art and carpentry teacher, explained halfway through the spring semester, I got a little more lenient, where I said okay, let’s have the cameras on. But once we get into the lesson, I’ll let you know when to shut them off. I was doing that, an administrator popped up, maybe we were 25–30 minutes into the lesson. “Mr. Munson, [imitating strict administrator voice], how come they don’t have their cameras on?” I said well, we had attendance, we started the lesson, and I told them they could shut them off. [Imitating voice again], “Oh, they need to be on all the time.”
To appease administrators, most teachers Brooke talked to (or observed) required students to be visible on camera for at least part of the lesson, regardless of whether or not they actually supported the policy. In order to be marked “present” in most classes at Rustville during virtual schooling, a teacher needed to physically see a student over Zoom.
At Rustville, mandatory bodily visibility during pandemic-era online schooling hurt students’ engagement and relationships with teachers. Most students interviewed at Rustville disliked having to turn their cameras on during class. For instance, when Brooke asked Mariah, a Black working-class sophomore, how she felt about having her camera on, she said, “It’s uncomfortable. I get a little anxiety for sure.” Mariah explained that she had a new and large burn scar that she couldn’t cover up and having her peers see it made her feel self-conscious. Within two weeks of the new policy, many students at Rustville began using workarounds that allowed them to comply with the policy but not actually be seen on camera. Students would point their cameras up towards the ceiling of their rooms, with only their forehead visible. Throughout the year, only two or three students would actually have their faces visible on camera in the majority of classes Brooke attended.
Notably, students also felt that the policy decreased their peers’ overall engagement in classes. When Brooke asked Mariah about Rustville’s policy, she huffed and said definitively, “It decreased the number of students that actually came to Zoom. Because either they didn’t come in the first place or they got kicked out of Zoom because they didn’t want to.” When Brooke followed up, asking, “How many times have you seen someone kicked out of Zoom?,” Mariah replied, “Almost every day.” Teachers removing students from class for not having their cameras on had a downstream effect on peers who witnessed these incidents, leading to a perception of lessened engagement in school.
At Rustville, mandatory bodily visibility was utilized for purposes of surveillance, which deepened students’ sense of alienation. For instance, administrators pushed teachers to apply dress code standards from the school building to students working from home. The following vignette illustrates how the intersection of the cameras-on and dress code policies felt to students and the negative influence this had on relationships with teachers.
Vanessa, a black working-class junior, was having a tough year in 2020–21. She shared a room with her sister, who had a preexisting condition that made her vulnerable to COVID-19. Scared for her sister, Vanessa would put her clothes right in the washer and head straight to the shower when she got home from her night shifts at Arby’s, where she worked up to thirty hours a week. Attending school online, Vanessa often felt like she was not getting enough help from teachers, especially in Geometry, which was her hardest subject. Vanessa’s experience of online school only became worse in the fall of 2020 when her school adopted a policy that students were required to have their cameras on at all times. During the summer of 2021, she reflected, I was like, huh? My camera on? And then they made another rule that you couldn’t just come up here looking any kind of way. Because I would have like a hoodie, or like an explicit shirt on. Being in my home, I’m not really focused on it. And it was like, “Oh you can’t have that.” What? . . . That’s all I wear. At home, I’m comfortable. So they were like, “Well, you have to have something school appropriate on. No spaghetti straps, no shoulder out clothes.” . . . Well, I’m just going to wear a hoodie. And sometimes I wore my hoodie on my eyes. I still could see, but I would just wear my hoodie on my eyes sometimes. And he [Geometry teacher] was like, “Vanessa, take your hoodie off.”. . .I looked at him like, what? . . . I’m not taking my hoodie off, so I’m just going to leave. So I left the class for the day.
When Vanessa left class feeling singled out and exposed, a relationship she had already been concerned about went from bad to worse. Vanessa’s experience illustrates how experiences of mandatory bodily visibility—especially when perceived by students as being utilized for control—deepened distrust in teachers.
Mandatory bodily visibility is not intrinsically tied to surveillance. But at Rustville, the adoption of this configuration was driven by perceptions of risk on behalf of students and administrators. Without visibility, teachers perceived students as both being at greater risk of danger, but also at higher risk of engaging in undesirable behaviors. Multiple teachers reported worrying about the physical safety and well-being of their students during online classes, particularly when their cameras were off. Mrs. George, a special education teacher at Rustville, expressed, “Anything could be happening behind those black squares! They could run out in the road and be hit by a car and I’d never know.” Mrs. George’s fears reflected her genuine care for students, a care shared by many of the teachers at Rustville.
But at Rustville, students were also perceived as risks to the safety and success of the school, who needed to be surveilled and controlled. In the second month of the 2020–21 school year at Rustville High School, a teacher reported that they had been threatened by a student who had their camera off. Mr. Lincoln, a social studies teacher, explained, “A teacher had a black screen turn on their mic and say ‘Hello so and so, I’m going to come to Rustville High School and kill everyone.’” Mr. Collins, a math teacher, confirmed: “Some student threatened one of the teachers in the darkness, so then she was very upset about that.” This incident initiated a conversation in a faculty meeting where multiple teachers expressed they felt unsafe not being able to verify students’ identities with their cameras off. Teachers were also worried that students’ accounts could be hacked.
In a more mundane sense, teachers also felt that students were a risk to their own learning during online schooling. Teachers worried that without the accountability of in-person schooling, students were less engaged in their classes and possibly less invested in their learning. Mrs. Mulberry, a science teacher, summed up a common response when asked how teaching online changed interactions with students, “Harder, much harder to have more student engagement. That was a challenge.” Mr. Donley, a government teacher, went further, saying, The ones that disappeared [during online schooling], it was always something. “I’m having a lot of trouble.” [Puts air quotes up while he talks]. But they never told you what the trouble was, you know, blah blah blah. And, what, all I could really ascertain was that these were kids who really didn’t care if they graduated or they were kids that were just plain lazy.
Mr. Donley’s response illustrates the view of a vocal minority of teachers: that what was driving students’ lack of engagement during online schooling was a lack of investment in their learning. The cameras-on policy was also seen as a solution to this lack of engagement.
These narratives positioning Rustville students as threats to safety and as lazy were implicitly racialized, mobilizing common stereotypes of Black and Latinx students. Prior to the pandemic, white teachers at Rustville similarly framed students as a threat but with a focus on in-person fights as opposed to online threats. Miss Anderson, a white Business teacher in her early twenties, said of her first year teaching at Rustville, “I had two kids in OSS [out of school suspension] for fighting. I’m from the suburbs—I’m not used to this! I was really scared at first to be honest.” Other white teachers had referred to their students as “thugs” in class and called Rustville “the ghetto.” In navigating the new context of the online classroom, some teachers at Rustville drew on these pre-existing racialized framings of students.
Students were aware of teachers’ concerns about decreased safety and engagement during online schooling and at times even shared these concerns; however, they saw the mandatory cameras-on policy as unnecessarily harsh. For instance, Joseph, a working-class Puerto Rican sophomore, reflected, There’s a lot of people not actually paying attention. But the reasoning they gave for turning on the cameras was kind of stupid. Because I feel like they said there were many disruptions and disrespectful comments in, like, the chat. And I was like, well a teacher can kick a kid out of class already. So if you’re having problems and you don’t know who this kid is and he’s saying bad things, kick them off the call. There’s other resources you could have done before skipping to this whole step. I just felt like they went zero to a hundred real quick for no reason.
Joseph’s quote illustrates how the negative consequences of the visibility configuration present at Rustville weren’t solely about bodily visibility but rather also about that bodily visibility being mandatory. Students experienced having their camera on as a form of vulnerability and when that vulnerability was mandated, it felt like they were being collectively punished for actions taken by their peers. Although this policy was driven in part by teachers’ care and concern, it was nonetheless experienced by students as punitive.
Bodily visibility was experienced as particularly vulnerable by working-class students.
When Brooke asked Joseph about having to turn his camera on during schooling, he exhaled loudly, “It was stressful!” Joseph went on to explain, “Yes, this is school time, but hey if . . . my little sister needs something, just because I’m in school, my responsibilities don’t go away.” Joseph’s responsibilities at home were shared by many of his working-class peers, who were also more likely to work in a shared space than middle-class peers. Mandatory visibility was consequently often more exposing of their home environment for working-class students. Teachers also noted how asking students to turn their cameras on could lead to their families and homes being exposed to peers. Mr. Munson, who did not enforce the cameras-on policy in his class, cited this over-exposure as a reason, explaining, “The students were embarrassed to have the class be brought into their homes.”
Although operating in a very different context than Rustville, Ivy Virtual School also had a policy of mandatory bodily visibility. However, the exact same technology, with alternate framing around purpose, functioned differently. Indeed, in this pre-pandemic setting, bodily visibility was a premium, available disproportionately to white middle-class students. At Ivy, synchronous display of the body through auditory or visual means constituted attendance. High-school English teacher Alyssa emphasized that this was a means to empower and connect, not to punish. For Alyssa, this was what set Ivy aside from other online learning institutions and allowed deep engagement with students. She explained, “I see my role as teacher as really to empower students. My job is to ask the right question and to draw the students into the conversation. When that happens, that’s so electric. . . . I understood immediately that I would still have that experience [at Ivy]. That thing that I like about teaching would still be available to me.” Dawn, an admissions officer at the school, noted that “connecting with people,” was a core tenet of the school, unusual among virtual school options. She explained, “ our classes are held synchronously and online through streaming video. A lot of people don’t expect that and that really is a distinguishing factor.” She pitched this visibility as part of the value proposition for students: I think a lot of people don’t realize, everyone’s face-to-face in the classroom, which is a unique roundtable opportunity compared to how many students [in person] sit in a class where you see the backs of everyone’s heads, and the teacher is far away. [In their online environment] it’s equidistant to everyone, which is really nice, and that you get a chance to really see people’s reactions. . . . You don’t really get that opportunity in a brick-and-mortar classroom.
Dawn framed increased visibility as a benefit of their form of online learning because of its potential to stimulate community, in line with the school mission. Bodily visibility here was part of facilitating active knowledge construction. Alyssa would seamlessly use bodily metaphors to describe her role, noting she still felt the “thrill of being in front of a group of people” in class, or at other moments noting, “I just step back and let the kids talk to each other, as long as the comments are good, as long as they’re on topic and they’re helping us to understand something about the text that was assigned.” With this focus, Ivy set itself apart from other virtual schools. The case of Ivy Virtual Academy thus illustrates the assumed (and often proven) centrality of bodily visibility to building relationships.
Mandatory Data Visibility and Student Alienation
Mandatory data visibility for purposes of surveillance was present at 11 out of the 12 pre-pandemic online schools and at Sprawlville High School during pandemic-era schooling. While Rustville High shows the dangers of mandatory bodily visibility, lacking access to bodily visibility can also degrade students’ relationships with teachers and serve as a driver of inequality. In this section, we show that in both pre- and during pandemic online classrooms, students experienced alienation in school settings where teachers primarily relied on data for monitoring student engagement. Consequently, although the dynamics of classrooms that utilized data visibility instead of bodily visibility differed, there were similar negative influences on teacher-student relationships that were compounded by race and class.
Before 2020, when online schooling was a niche choice, few virtual options included mandatory video as part of their daily classroom experience. Video was not only rarely utilized in the classroom but often inaccessible. This limited visibility matches the pitch these schools make to potential students and families of greater flexibility and autonomy (Jones & Figueiredo-Brown, 2018). Instead of bodily visibility, online schools largely relied on dataveillance (Clarke, 1988), with extensive automatic monitoring systems letting administrators and teachers know when students logged in, how long they spent interacting with content, grades on their individual assessments, percent of assignments turned in, and more. Some schools utilized algorithmic prioritization to flag students who reach a certain threshold of concerning behavior, raising the visibility of that individual’s performance. But these methods had their pitfalls. Abigail, a middle-school teacher at the Lake School, explained that a student’s “idle time” “can indicate that they’re not working, or that they are going back and watching [lesson] videos. . .could be taking notes.” Data interpretation remained ambiguous, open to being filtered through a teacher’s preexisting perceptions about a particular student.
Many teachers expressed the difficulty they faced in migrating to data visibility. Rebecca, a counselor at Eagle Academy, explained, “I think becoming really data-focused was a struggle for me at first because that’s not something I’m naturally inclined to be focused on . . . looking at activity, the student’s activity, trying really hard to keep up with that. I think if you aren’t constantly tracking your students, you miss a lot.” Although Rebecca had learned how to make use of this data, both teachers and students remained acutely aware of its limitations when it came to forging connections. At the hybrid Lake School, one teacher came into the teacher’s lounge discussing how burnt out she felt. She explained to Anne, “I became a teacher to see kids, I’m not even seeing anyone this morning. It’s weird, I don’t like it.” During one recorded class session, Sam, a middle school math teacher, desperately tried to share his own video to excitedly congratulate a student on getting the correct answer on a problem. For several minutes, he worked to show his face as students attempted to help him troubleshoot, before wistfully giving up, his enthusiasm deflated. Losing bodily visibility interrupted affective connections.
Brittany, a Black mother of three who took care of her pre-teen sister who attended a hybrid school, said of the online sessions, “I think if they did more of [sharing video] to draw the kids in, I think it would help, so maybe more face-to-face on the computer. Show your video. Let’s see your face at least so it’s not just a voice going ‘wah wah wah wah.’” When Anne asked, “They never see the faces?” for clarification, Brittany replied, “Never. It’s just a voice.” Students and families expressed concern that when educators did not see children’s faces, or vice versa, they sometimes ceased to perceive them as individuals. Visibility here was something many participants desperately wanted—not having it felt like a major disappointment.
Sprawlville High School (the second school in Brooke’s case) relied primarily on mandatory data visibility and made bodily visibility entirely chosen for students. Most teachers at Sprawlville counted a student as present through data visibility, either by students entering something in the chat or turning in assignments through the portal. Moreover, students at Sprawlville attended classes over Schoology, an online platform that deemphasizes bodily visibility. Figure 2 is a screenshot from an AP US History Class at Sprawlville during the fall of 2020. Brooke was given access to the class with a teacher account; consequently, this view shows what teachers saw while they were teaching. The majority of their view is taken up by their slides. Students are mainly visible through the chat and a list of names of students present in the class. Student video is minimal, visible only as a small square at the top of the screen. In the student view on Schoology, only teacher videos were visible, not the videos from their other classmates. In the majority of classes observed by Brooke, instruction proceeded as seen in this class. Students were most often asked to respond to prompts or answer questions in the chat as opposed to turning on their video or answering over audio. The Schoology platform stands in stark contrast to Zoom or Google Meetings where the center of the screen is taken up by student video feeds. Although students who did choose to turn their cameras on were viewed as more engaged, none of the teachers interviewed at Sprawlville had adopted formal consequences for students who did not.
Screenshot of AP US History Class at Sprawlville High School.
On one hand, this use of data visibility was protective for Sprawlville students, who did not report the same feelings of overexposure and intrusion as students at Rustville High School. However, at Sprawlville students felt alienated from classes where teachers only used technology to track their participation and assignments and didn’t make an additional effort to reach out personally. Sarah, a Black working-class sophomore at Sprawlville, explained how going to school online had changed her relationships with teachers: It made them less personal. It just made it like—my teacher’s on a computer. I didn’t feel connected with them in any type of way. I just felt like I was just turning in work, and I wasn’t seeing anyone. I was just kind of like, my teacher didn’t exist. Like, it was just me and my computer.
Brooke asked Sarah if she felt this way with all her teachers and Sarah clarified, “A couple of teachers—my humanities teacher and my math teacher—they both email very frequently and get in contact with us, which I did like. But the rest, it was kind of, like, just turning in work.” Sarah drew a distinction between classes where the only contact was through turning in work and those where teachers made additional efforts to reach out; in the first kind of class, it felt like the teacher did not even exist.
In interviews, Sprawlville and Rustville students both reported more distant relationships with teachers that they had only met online; but Sprawlville students were far more likely than those at Rustville to report losing relationships with teachers they had been close to prior to the pandemic. Zach, a biracial non-binary junior, explained the impact of virtual schooling on their relationships with teachers this way, “I didn’t have like any personal connections to any of them. Even with my art teacher who I was like really close to before. We didn’t really talk much at all. It’s just hard to have like small talk when you’re in the chat.” Students at Sprawlville felt cut off from their teachers, even those teachers they had been close to before.
Working-class students at Sprawlville were more likely than middle-class peers to experience this loss of relationships during online schooling. Sprawlville working-class students more often reported in their interviews that their relationships with teachers had worsened as compared to middle-class peers. Five middle-class students reported that their relationships with teachers had actually improved during online schooling (as compared to only one working-class student).
Middle-class students whose relationships with teachers had stayed the same or improved often noted that attending school online made it easier to ask teachers for help or accommodation. Middle-class students at Sprawlville (and Rustville) put a high priority on receiving individualized help from teachers, engaging in frequent and proactive advocacy. This approach deeply shaped their adaptation to online schooling. As Chris, a Black middle-class senior at Rustville, put it, “Moving online, I really had to communicate with my teachers more. I had to ask more questions to make sure I’m doing it right.” Some middle-class students expressed that going to school online made this advocacy easier. Melody, a white middle-class junior at Sprawlville, who said her relationships with teachers had improved, explained, I used to dread having to email a teacher and then like see them in person the next day, cause if I asked for something and they say like, no, you can’t have an extension and then I see them the next day, I feel like it’s like so awkward, but being that I don’t have to see them, I’m unaffected by it.
Melody also noted that asking for help in class was easier as well because teachers would put you in a breakout room where “no one else could hear us and like no else was there. It was a lot less stressful.” The focus on data visibility at Sprawlville felt protective to Melody, giving her the sense she wouldn’t have to “see” her teachers after asking for accommodation and that she would also be unseen receiving help by classmates. School being more impersonal made it easier for Melody to ask for and get what she perceived herself as needing. An additional protective factor for some middle-class students was the strong relationships that they already had with teachers and other school staff. They were able to leverage these existing relationships to find solutions to problems that arose online. For example, when Melody was struggling to get answers over email from one of her teachers, she was able to turn to her counselor for help, who was also her track and field coach. Melody used this close personal relationship to overcome the distance she felt in other relationships with teachers.
In contrast, the group of students who felt most deeply disappointed by online schooling at Sprawlville were Black and Latinx working-class students who had few positive relationships with teachers to begin with. When students already felt isolated prior to remote learning, mandatory data visibility had a more corrosive effect. This can be seen in the experience of Steven, a Black working-class student. The COVID-19 pandemic had struck during his junior year making the 2020–21 school year his senior year and a crucial one for him. During virtual schooling, Steven felt like he had no relationships with any of his teachers and reported losing his friendships as well. As of the spring semester, he was failing most of his classes. Steven decided to return to school in-person during the spring where he was able to reconnect with his art teacher, who began allowing him to complete work for his other classes during his art class. Steven scraped through, managed to pass his classes and graduate. But as of our interview two weeks after graduation, he had no concrete plans for what he’d be doing next. When I asked him what his plans were, he answered, “Um, just working.” “Cool,” Brooke replied, “Do you know where you might want to work?” Steven shook his head, “No. Just whoever will accept me.” It was through a reestablished relationship with his art teacher that Steven was able to make it to graduation. But the question remains what Steven’s long-term prospects would have been if had been able to maintain his relationships throughout virtual schooling.
Making It Work in the Middle: Teacher-Innovators’ Creative Solutions for Building Connection
The two sections above paint a fairly dark picture of online schooling (both before and during the pandemic). But what was notable in both studies is that teachers found ways to build connections with students, including the most marginalized and vulnerable. The third configuration we observed was negotiated visibility, both bodily and data, utilized for the purpose of connection. In contrast to the first two configurations which were top-down approaches pushed by administrators, this configuration was driven by the innovation of individual teachers rather than by policy. We refer to this group of teachers as “teacher-innovators” and they were present at Rustville High School, Sprawlville High School, and many of the 12 pre-pandemic virtual schools.
One way that these “teacher-innovators” demonstrated respect for students was by working with them on forms of engagement rather than insisting on continuous visibility. For example, Krista, a working-class Black young woman who attended Rustville High School, explained that during online school, one of her favorite teachers, Mr. Caldwell, provided an alternative to being on camera despite school policy. She said, “I told him I wasn’t really comfortable with . . . turning my camera on. So, he was like, I could just text him to chat. And stuff like that. But he was really understanding. He didn’t ask any questions about it after I had told him.” She said this made her like the class and not want it to end.
Teachers also found ways to require limited visibility while expressing understanding of students’ feelings and preferences. Alyssa, at Ivy, the elite online school, would tell students they had to read aloud once in class, but could otherwise keep their cameras and microphones off. She described how this built-up trust with her “shy” students as they found they could perform the task without repercussions and became more comfortable sharing. She estimated that this “way to get them to acclimate. . . in a really low-stakes way” had a “95 percent success rate” in getting students to eventually volunteer more substantial visibility and participation. This kind of negotiation strengthened the bonds between teachers and students and diminished the alienation students felt as teachers responded to their needs.
Teachers also built connections with their students by making themselves visible and framing visibility as a component of mutual relation rather than unidirectional policing. Jaclyn, a student services staff member at Cardinal Pacific, noted that for students who “don’t really like video chatting” because “it makes them nervous,” I tell them, “You don’t have to turn your camera on, but I want to share my screen with you so I can show you this is how you get through the classroom. Let me show you how to do this so it’s less confusing. If that’s a barrier in your way, let’s remove it.”
In doing so, she explains the purpose of visibility as a path to better understanding instead of a means of surveillance. Similarly, Cindy, an elementary school teacher at Eagle Academy, explained, We don’t use webcams unless it’s one-on-one just for student privacy. If I do have a one-on-one, I will have my webcam up, and I most often ask the students to also have their webcam up just to create even more of a connection . . . I always had mine up because I wanted them to see me live and connecting.
In contexts where video was optional, teachers sharing their video could create a sense of safety for students.
Teachers also used video to humanize themselves and express vulnerability with students, for example, by showing they were holding a baby while teaching. Simply requesting visibility from a place of vulnerability could be effective. Zach, a biracial non-binary student at Sprawlville described the following dynamic in one of their classes, I keep my camera off for all my classes except for culinary. Because . . . he’s in the kitchen cooking and he’s like, “I feel so alone. Can you all please turn your cameras on?” [chuckles] So, we just turn our cameras on.
Teachers making themselves visible and expressing the desire to see students as a basic human need, rather than a disciplinary mechanism, made visibility a process of crafting shared trust that need not be constant in order to be effective.
Teachers reaching out to students one-on-one was key to building relationships with students and their parents. Students generally experienced these acts as supportive rather than intrusive. Alexa, a Black working-class student at Rustville, explained that she saw teachers who “constantly” reached out as those who “do really care about their students . . . because they’re actively trying to make sure that their students are okay.” A key point is that these inquiries were framed as about student welfare rather than performance assessment.
In many virtual and hybrid schools, outreach to students and/or families was a monitored requirement (Jonas, 2024). However, within both cases, connective efforts which relied specifically on visibility negotiation with students were not institutionalized as policy or normalized as practice. Rather, teachers undertook these efforts on their own initiative. As a consequence, these efforts were unevenly experienced by students. For instance, Brooke found that the teachers most likely to rely on negotiated visibility at Sprawlville High School were elective teachers rather than those who taught academic subjects, in part because teaching a course like theater or woodshop online required greater levels of creativity and student buy-in.
Teachers who took on these connective efforts were often swimming upstream against the culture of their schools. Like Mr. Munson described above, teachers who adopted voluntary visibility policies at Rustville High School often experienced direct pushback from administrators. But beyond administrator pushback, teachers who put in the effort to innovate often reported higher levels of burnout than their peers. For example, Mr. Caldwell, a math teacher at Rustville who predominantly taught freshmen, was identified by multiple students (including Krista above), as a teacher with whom they had a strong relationship during the year of online schooling. Mr. Caldwell chose not to enforce the mandatory cameras-on policy and instead developed engaging activities and projects that built community in his classes by getting students involved. For instance, he had all the students in his class take turns doing a “favorite things” presentation where they shared slides about themselves at the beginning of class, ending with their learning style and their Meyers Briggs personality. This activity allowed him to make inroads with a student who had previously been disengaged in the class. Mr. Caldwell explained, “I asked him about what makes him a feeler, and he jumped in on that conversation and it was a turning point. He was open, like, well sometimes I feel more emotional [in] situations that affect my mom.” Despite his successes, Mr. Caldwell was considering quitting teaching by the end of the year. He reflected, “Virtual teaching killed my motivation. I started looking into other things. To be totally honest, I was like, do I have other options? It made me not love teaching anymore.” Teacher-innovators often went above and beyond their normal responsibilities to build connections and make virtual teaching work for their students. But often their efforts to swim upstream against the culture of their schools were unsustainable in the long-term.
Discussion
In this paper, we used a new theoretical framework to identify three dominant configurations of visibility online: mandated bodily visibility that attempts to extend in-person methods of surveillance through remote means, an (over)reliance on mandated data visibility to track student behavior and performance, and teacher-led negotiation of visibility for an intended purpose of connection. Although pandemic-era conversations about the form of online schooling were dominated by the binary of cameras-on versus cameras-off, by looking at continuities with pre-pandemic online schooling, we found that mandated bodily visibility and mandated data visibility were similarly harmful to student relationships with teachers. Students at Rustville High School were required to turn their cameras on or be ejected from class. This policy sowed distrust among students and strained relationships with teachers, particularly when bodily visibility was also used to enforce the in-person dress code. But a lack of bodily visibility also felt alienating to students. At Sprawlville High School during the pandemic and at many virtual schools pre-pandemic, bodily visibility was deemphasized, and at times inaccessible, and teachers instead relied on data such as active time on platform to track student engagement. Students felt unseen by teachers in these environments and mourned the loss of a personal connection with their teachers, particularly those who didn’t make additional efforts to reach out one-on-one.
Our findings also suggest that both overexposure and diminished visibility during online schooling intersect with preexisting patterns of social inequality to produce differential experiences. At Rustville High School, a majority Black and Latinx school, racialized risk narratives justified the adoption of the mandatory cameras-on policy, echoing previous research on offline schooling (Lewis & Diamond, 2015; Payne & Welch, 2023; Shedd, 2015). This visibility policy also disproportionately burdened working-class students, who were more likely to work in shared spaces or have family responsibilities than their middle-class counterparts. As Fong (2019) has shown in her study of low-income mothers, targets of state surveillance and punishment will often engage in “selective or constrained visibility” in relation to public institutions as a form of self-protection against state intervention. Students in families similarly positioned have reasons to be wary of additional “eyes in the home” (Fong, 2020). Even teachers’ (well-meaning) discussions about using mandatory visibility to protect students they saw as “at risk” points to increased dangers of bodily visibility for those whose bodies, homes, and families are typically policed by state actors.
The unusual case of elite private school Ivy Virtual Academy mandating bodily visibility suggests how the same technology use can have varied meanings depending on the class context. For Ivy, their video requirement conferred legitimacy to the school in concert with its focus on classroom dialogue, selective admissions policies, and extensive student support, establishing itself as a “real school” with strong pedagogical credentials in a way that matched the expectations of privileged families who made up their clientele. By requiring bodily visibility, Ivy distinguished themselves from most other virtual schools pre-pandemic, which had come under fire in recent years with researchers and policymakers questioning their academic credentials. This pattern is similar to Rafalow’s (2021) finding that schools instill in youth differential understandings about their digital play. “Students of color and working-class youth were told their digital play was either irrelevant or threatening to schooling, whereas privileged youth were encouraged, if not required, to play at school for success.” In both Ivy and Rustville, schools positioned mandatory bodily visibility as essential to student success. However, while privileged Ivy youth were presented with mandatory visibility as an opportunity to practice public speaking and in-depth discussion, for Rustville students, mandatory visibility was understood as a matter of continuously imposing surveillance.
Experiences of mandatory data visibility were also shaped by race and class. Sprawlville High School, which served more white and middle-class students than Rustville, deemphasized bodily visibility with teachers relying on data instead. Although removing mandatory bodily visibility could be a shield against racism in the classroom (Anderson, 2020), Black and Latinx working-class students experienced a deeper alienation in this environment than middle-class peers, who were more likely to have strong preexisting relationships with teachers. Another protective factor was middle-class students’ active pursuit of their teacher’s help during online schooling. This emphasis placed on individualized accommodation reflects a middle-class approach to school, one in which students are socialized to seek accommodation, attention, and assistance from teachers (Calarco, 2018).
Our findings also reveal that distrust and alienation are not necessarily the consequences of online schooling in itself. Across all of our cases, teacher-innovators found ways to connect with their students during online learning. The key was to make use of whatever forms of visibility were accessible to demonstrate personalized caring and to provide students even a modicum of autonomy regarding what they chose to share. Teachers enacted these practices by being open with their students about the dynamics at play and encouraging collaboration. Previous research has also illuminated teacher-innovator’s practices as key to online relationship-building, in particular individualized check-ins and expressions of understanding (Jonas, 2024; Pugh, 2024; Rice & Barbour, 2021; Rice & Carter, 2015; Tackie, 2022).
But our findings also suggest that there is a reason these efforts aren’t being more widely carried out. Teachers who were making these efforts were often swimming upstream against school culture, choosing to adapt or even outright reject administrators’ vision for online learning (Golann, 2018). In addition to pushback from administrators, they experienced a higher level of burnout than their peers who complied with default school policy because the burden fell on them to conduct the additional labor of engaging students. Elective teachers often had more leeway to engage in negotiation because their subject wasn’t tested on state exams whereas academic teachers who rejected mandatory visibility encountered stronger pushback (Golann, 2018). Given these conditions, teachers were structurally incentivized to restrict negotiation except in exceptional cases. Under resource constraints, teachers were put in the position of rationing out their time and energy toward students they considered deserving. As prior research indicates (Lewis & Diamond, 2015), this is a recipe for deepening inequality, because teachers often carry societal biases against marginalized students, meaning that they may be more likely to write those students off as not worthy of their limited ability to be flexible and supportive. This dynamic was evident at Rustville High School, where strict enforcement of the cameras-on policy was justified by narratives of students’ laziness and danger. Moreover, minoritized students may be less responsive to teachers’ individual attempts to reach out. Students who have experienced firsthand harms of school systems throughout their lives are more likely to be wary of teachers and hesitant about opening up in ways that might earn them sympathy (Phillippo, 2012).
The utility of our new theoretical framework is particularly evident when considering the case of teacher-innovators. A binary cameras-on/cameras-off approach would not have captured the distinction between the practices these teachers engaged in and the mandatory data visibility approach used by Sprawlville and many public online charters. Rather, both would have been collapsed into the same category of “cameras off.” Our paper illustrates that when considering visibility in online learning spaces, it is crucial to not just ask whether students are visible but how that visibility is achieved, to what purpose it is being mobilized and within what existing social conditions. Our spectrums of visibility approach provides researchers with a tool to better understand the consequences of the nuanced configurations that visibility in online classrooms can take. One limitation of this paper is that our field-sites were selected for studies addressing different research questions and consequently do not capture all possible configurations of visibility. Future research could build on our spectrums of visibility approach by purposefully selecting and comparing schools (or other organizations) of varying configurations. Furthermore, although our findings suggest that configurations of visibility interact with social positioning, future work could systematically design studies that formally compare configurations along lines of class and race through use of strategic sampling.
Conclusion
Although emergency remote learning has ended, lessons drawn from these comparative case studies can be applied toward producing better virtual and hybrid schooling experiences under a range of conditions that are likely not disappearing any time soon. For administrators and policymakers, our findings suggest several key insights for the path forward. Relationships should be seen as a lynchpin, key to making online learning work. As Pugh (2024) argues, the kind of “connective labor” we describe teacher innovators as undertaking needs to be recognized as crucial to teaching and similar professions, rather than secondary. Understanding relationships as primary means investing time and resources into these connections, such as giving teachers more paid prep time in which to communicate one-on-one with students outside of class. Doing so would help reduce the burnout experienced by teacher-innovators in our study. Centering relationships also means moving away from mandated one-size-fits-all policies such as “cameras on” at all times. Instead, policies should be flexible and allow teachers room to negotiate with students. Above all, our findings suggest that student autonomy is foundational to building connections. Relationships are forged through appreciating and respecting the vulnerability that visibility requires.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We’d like to thank Isha Bhallamudi, Michael Miner, Sarah Outland and Cassidy Puckett for their input and contributions to an earlier version of this project! Thank you to Matt Rafalow for bringing us together as collaborators and for his feedback on multiple versions of the paper. Thank you as well to Karlyn Gorski for insightful comments at a key moment in this paper’s development!
Author Note
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of our funders.
Author Contributions
Authorship is listed alphabetically with both authors making equal contributions.
Research Ethics
All research on human subjects has been approved by the relevant institutional review board. All human subjects gave their informed consent prior to their participation in the research, and adequate steps were taken to protect participants’ confidentiality.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Brooke gratefully acknowledges the support of the National Science Foundation. Her contributions to this article are based upon data collection and analysis supported under Awards 2001906 and 2028331. Anne is thankful for grant support of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment and the Center for Longterm Cybersecurity at University of California, Berkeley.
Notes
Authors
BROOKE DINSMORE is an assistant professor at Christopher Newport University, 1 Avenue of the Arts, Newport News, VA 23606; email:
ANNE JONAS is an assistant professor at University of Michigan-Flint, 303 E Kearsley Street, Flint, MI 48502; email: