Cameras On: How Schools Reify Unequal Relationships Through Decisions About Online Visibility

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Pentious

An ethnographic study examines how decisions about online visibility—when and how teachers and students can see each other—shape relationships in virtual and hybrid schooling. Using observations and interviews across multi-case settings and high schools that moved online in 2020, the research identifies visibility as varying by form, autonomy, and purpose. It compares surveillance-driven mandatory bodily and data visibility with teacher-innovated negotiated visibility for connection, showing that constant cameras-on can alienate while purely data-measured engagement can isolate, with race and class influencing experiences.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages18

Reading Time45 min

AccessFree to download

Background: Online schooling and the visibility problem

Teacher-student interaction as a “black box”

Visibility in online classrooms

Study approach and cases

Multi-case ethnography and interviews

Contexts before and after 2020 remote shifts

Findings: three visibility dimensions and dominant configurations

Form, autonomy, and purpose

Mandatory bodily visibility and mandatory data visibility

Teacher-innovated negotiated visibility

Impacts on relationships and student experience

Alienation and isolation effects

Role of race and class

AERA Open January-December 2025, Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 1–18 DOI: 10. 1177/23328584251375046 Article reuse guidelines: [sagepub.com/journals-permissions](sagepub.com/journals-permissions)[ ](sagepub.com/journals-permissions)© The Author(s) 2025. [https://journals.sagepub.com/home/ero](https://journals.sagepub.com/home/ero) Cameras On: How Schools Reify Unequal Relationships Through Decisions About Online Visibility Brooke Dinsmore Christopher Newport University Anne Jonas University of Michigan – Flint 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: Ethnography, in-depth interviewing, instructional practices, instructional technologies, race, social class, technology Attending school online is an increasingly common experience for American students. Enrollment in full-time online schools nearly doubled during the pandemic, increasing from 332,379 students in 2019–20 to 643,930 students in 2020–21 (Molnar et al., 2023) . Although enrollment dropped during the 2021–22 school year, the 2022–23 school year nonetheless began with 170% more students enrolled in full-time online schooling than prior to the pandemic. Moreover, a traditional “in-person” public school education increasingly involves online experiences. Some American students attend online classes part-time, whether as an option for snow days (Peetz, 2023) or as a means of accessing AP or other advanced courses not offered by their own school. Meanwhile in-person teaching increasingly incorporates the use of online learning platforms such as Google Classroom or Schoology, accessed on laptops, tablets or even students’ own smartphones, resulting in school spaces where interactions span the online and offline (Dinsmore, 2019; Greene, 2021) . 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 inperson 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 tobe attentive to both continuities and disruptions. When it comes to online schooling, one particularly significant difference is visibility: when and how teac

FAQs

What does the study focus on regarding online schooling?

It focuses on how decisions about online visibility determine when and how teachers and students can see each other, and how that shapes their relationships.

How does the article categorize online visibility in classrooms?

Visibility varies across three dimensions—form, autonomy, and purpose—and leads to dominant configurations such as surveillance-based mandatory bodily/data visibility and connection-based negotiated visibility.

Why does the paper argue that cameras-on policies may harm student relationships?

It argues that requiring cameras on at all times alienates students and degrades relationships, while engagement measured only through automatically collected data can isolate students.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Pentious