‘Answer your names please’: a small-scale exploration of teachers technologically mediated ‘new lives’

Conducted over a three-year period in an English secondary school, this study employs a distributional analysis across three scales to explore Real-Time Attendance Registration (RTAR). Ethnographic data, Day and Gu’s teachers’ new lives, and Foucault’s normalisation, are mobilised to investigate how RTAR mediated the key informant’s work. I argue that the teacher in this study faced complex, demanding and normalised conditions emanating from register taking becoming a technology mediated and performativity-led activity. I suggest that from examining RTAR, those interested in teachers’ new lives might gain an understanding of how, in the case in point, technology mediated the normalisation of the attendance registration process.