Teachers on the market: Professional relations, desires, and ambiguities in digital teacher-to-teacher economies

In recent years, digital technologies for creating, curating, selling, and buying teaching materials have become a valuable part of many teachers’ lives within and outside schools. Rather than apply textbook contents imposed from above, researchers and tech-pioneers have promoted digital teacher-to-teacher services as pathways to increase teacher empowerment and build communities of practitioners. Building on interviews with five Danish schoolteachers engaged in sharing and selling teaching materials online, this article explores the performative effects of imbricating teacher practices in commercial assemblages based on circulating teaching materials to other teachers as commodities. Drawing on posthuman and new materialist approaches to technologies in education, the analysis illustrates how teachers’ involvements in digital economies slide into and reconfigure professional aspirations and formal institutional relations. More than merely an informal tool to gain professional recognition, these technological reconfigurations have significant pedagogical and political implications for the teaching profession as a public responsibility in Denmark and beyond.