Tess Bernhard

I've long been enjoying reading and lurking on bluesky, and am going to transition to sharing my research and thinking there instead of here. I'm tessbern.bsky.social over there. I hope more educators and ed researchers consider making the same move :)

#PubDay for my first book, Access Is Capture: How Edtech Reproduces Racial Inequality, where I argue the push to ameliorate racial inequality via data-intensive #edtech extracts resources from working-class communities of color here in California. ucpress.edu/books/access-i…

LA schools invested millions in an AI chatbot for students, overlooking the volatility of edtech startups reselling generative AI. Now the company's collapse raises questions about giving children access to chatbots in edu. NYT👇 Alt text.

@cbebby Thank you, Caroline!!

@tessbern Congratulations Tess!!! So exciting and well deserved!

Breaking the news that I've been selected as a 2024 NAEd/Spencer Dissertation fellow! The fellowship will support my project examining how teachers' work life and instructional practice are shaped by the data demands of edtech platforms. Read more here: naeducation.org/awardee/tess-b…

@sskavanagh @PennGSE @NAEduc @Spencer_Fdn I am lucky to have such a wonderful thought partner as an advisor!! wouldn't have accomplished this with you!

@AllieThrall thanks, Allie!! I likewise hope to catch up on where your work is headed soon :)

@tessbern Amazing- congrats! Your research sounds incredible- can't wait to read more!

@Lightning__Jay thanks, Lightning! def gonna be a minute til this thing cooks

@tessbern Congratulations Tess! Very excited to read this work (no rush though)!

Graduate student worker-organizer at UPenn: “Building a union changes the way that we relate to each other fundamentally, and building collective power broadens the horizon for what's possible.” jacobin.com/2024/05/gradua…

WE WON! This week, over 2000 Penn grad workers cast ballots. After eligible votes were tallied, the final count was 1807 to 97. It's official. The majority of eligible voters turned out to the polls. Penn graduate workers have resoundingly declared: WE WANT A UNION AT PENN!

"AI’s voracious need for computing power is threatening to overwhelm energy sources... by 2030, the world’s data centers are on course to use more electricity than India" bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

.@CenDemTech's Kristin Woelfel said she's started to think of school's web filters as a “digital book ban." “You can see whether a book is on a shelf,” she said. By contrast, decisions about which websites or categories to block happen under the radar. themarkup.org/digital-book-b…

We are graduate student workers from over 100 departments and programs across Penn. On April 16 & 17, we vote YES to form a union in order to negotiate improvements to our working conditions and have a stronger voice for graduate workers at Penn. Join us! tinyurl.com/GETUPvoteYES

@charleswlogan thank you!! likewise hoping to learn from your work at AERA—thurs AM critical platform symposium looks great

Thrilled to have this piece out in @LMT_Journal, in which @sskavanagh, @lynseymathed and I describe the ways elementary teachers found their math instruction to be contorted and surveilled through platform data when returning to in-person instruction doi.org/10.1080/174398…

@sheasmith so excited to hear you're also tackling these issues—would love to chat sometime to compare notes on what we're seeing in our diss projects :)

collecting this data and witnessing these teachers' experiences radically shifted what I thought I was interested in studying, and started me on an obsessive path of documenting how platforms are shaping teaching in my dissertation. more to come :)

@LMT_Journal @sskavanagh @lynseymathed above all, I'm thrilled to be able to put our teacher participants' voices in print, who made it clear to us that they felt silenced by the power platform data was given in instructional decision-making. See the eponymous quote excerpted below.

We're having an election! On April 16 & 17, graduate student workers have the opportunity to tell that Penn administration that we want a say in our working conditions. Pledge to vote YES today: tinyurl.com/GETUPvoteYES pic.twitter.com/rXJqMLG4mm