Smartphones play an increasingly large role in the professional lives of teachers in low-income contexts, creating an urgent need to better understand the role of technology-related stress (technostress) in teachers' smartphone use for work. We contribute a mixed methods study analyzing the impact of smartphone use on teachers' work lives in low-income Indian schools. Findings from 70 interviews and 1,361 survey responses suggest that although smartphones aid teaching and administrative functions, smartphone use also significantly predicts burnout among teachers, with technostress providing a major explanation for this relationship. We reveal how teachers' work is constantly surveilled and monitored via technology and how teachers' personal smartphones were controlled and repurposed through socio-technical structures by the higher management to serve management's goals, substantially increasing the work teachers were required to perform outside of work hours. Our work extends technostress research to HCI4D contexts and highlights the need to develop better support structures for teachers and rethink how smartphones are used in their work.
The proliferation of mobile devices around the world, combined with falling costs of hardware and Internet connectivity, have resulted in an increasing number of organizations that work to introduce educational technology interventions into low-income schools in the Global South. However, to date, most prior HCI research examining such interventions has focused on interventions that target students. In this paper, we expand prior literature by examining an intervention, called Meghshala, that targets teachers in low-income schools as its primary users. Through interviews and observations with 39 participants from 12 government schools in India, we show how the introduction of a teacher-focused technology intervention causes teachers to reconfigure their work practices, including lesson preparation, in-classroom teaching practices, bureaucratic work processes, and post-teaching feedback mechanisms. We use the concept of material agency to analyze our findings with respect to teacher agency and reconfiguration, and use theories of teacher knowledge to highlight the kinds of knowledge production that teachers in our research context tend to focus on (e.g., content knowledge). Finally, we offer design opportunities for future teacher-focused technology interventions.
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