Teacher Roles in the Blended Classroom-Swedish Lower Secondary School Teachers’ Boundary Management between Physical and Virtual Learning Spaces

Abstract

The purpose of the study is to explore how Swedish lowersecondary school teachers manage blended learningenvironments, established through using a specific learningmanagement system (LMS) application. In the study, fourteachers were followed during a four-month (n)ethnographicfieldwork. Based on analyses of data from video-recordings andobservations in physical and virtual classrooms, the studyexamines teachers’ practices of integrating and segmenting thetwo classroom domains. In order to unpack the realms of thesepractices, the study employs affordance and boundary theories.Through the analysis of participants’ boundary practices andtheir use of communicative affordances in and across space andtime, four teacher roles, enacted and emerging through teachingpractices, are presented. The paper concludes with a discussionof how participants’ engagement with virtual and physicallearning environment compels teachers to reflect upon theirpreferred teacher role in the new multidimensional classrooms.