Teachers in Social Media: A Gender-aware Behavior Analysis

Online social media platforms have become a crucial part of teachers’ professional life. They utilize these platforms for various purposes, e.g., creating professional communities, curating pedagogical resources, and interacting with their students. Hence, recent years have witnessed many studies attempting to inform us about opportunities and challenges of social media usage by PK-12 teachers. Nevertheless, how male and female teachers leverage online social media, particularly P interest, is still being determined. Given the importance of online social media in shaping teaching careers and that teachers’ gender arguably affects educational achievements and learning environments, it is essential to delineate teachers’ online (professional) behavior on social media while considering their genders. To this end, first, we build a large dataset of teachers on P interest with fine-grained information about their online activities. T hen, we perform a thorough data analysis of the online behavior of male and female teachers. In particular, we shed light on similarities and differences in the resource curation process of both gender groups, e.g., the topics and sources of their resources. The novel findings of this paper serve as a valuable reference for many entities concerned with gender-aware teaching practices, such as educational scholars, policymakers, and state-level and national-level government agencies.