Date on Master's Thesis/Doctoral Dissertation

5-2025

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph. D.

Department

English

Degree Program

English Rhetoric and Composition, PhD

Committee Chair

Williams, Bronwyn

Committee Member

Sheridan, Mary P.

Committee Member

Rabin, Andrew

Committee Member

Chisholm, James

Author's Keywords

literacy practices; social media; sociomateriality; affect theory; education

Abstract

Mass media often depicts teachers in oversimplified terms, as heroic saviors or dangerous agents of indoctrination, flattening the complex realities of their daily work and lived experiences. This polarization contributes to the ongoing deprofessionalization of teaching, where educators’ expertise is increasingly questioned and politicized. In response to these reductive portrayals and the everyday pressures of the profession, some teachers have turned to short-form social media videos as a creative outlet to share personal and professional insights. To explore how teachers reclaim agency through their digital literacy practices, this study employs mixed-methods research to investigate how educators use networked microvideos to counter reductive cultural narratives about their personal and professional lives. Through analysis of 12 semi-structured interviews with teacher creators who have achieved virality, more than 400 multimodal texts, and engagement metrics from TikTok’s Application Programming Interface (API), I examine the motivations behind teachers’ emotional and digital labor online and put them in conversation with the responses from various audiences using the theoretical frames of sociomateriality and affect. The opening analysis reveals that teachers successfully navigate the attention economy of TikTok by cultivating a sense of authenticity, strategically aligning their digital self-presentation with the affordances of the platform. Their efforts yield both material and immaterial rewards, including opportunities for emotional expression, professional validation, monetary compensation, and even the launching of new careers. Furthermore, teachers expand their rhetorical repertoires in response to the platform’s algorithmic dynamics, particularly the possibility of being featured on TikTok’s For You Page (FYP), and through ongoing engagement and feedback loops with various users. The circulation of content, coupled with the impact of teachers’ counter-narratives, fosters affective attunement, aligning diverse audiences through small moments of emotional resonance. However, this visibility also provokes backlash, as some audiences seek to reassert expectations of teachers as moral authorities meant to uphold dominant cultural values, often targeting gender-nonconforming educators and teachers of color. Hostile responses take shape through angry online comments, seemingly neutral school policies, and broader political actions such as nationwide bans, measures that participants interpret as efforts to silence dissenting narratives in education and beyond.

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