Online Mathematics Classrooms as Performative Spaces: A Goffman-Garfinkel Framework

Abstract

This article explores how undergraduate online mathematics classrooms at South African universities function as performative spaces shaped by visibility, role expectations, and social accountability. The sudden shift to digital learning platforms during the COVID-19 pandemic revealed logistical and infrastructural gaps, raising important questions about identity, participation, and maintaining classroom order. Although the transition to remote teaching was often seen as a technological or pedagogical challenge, this research approaches it from a sociological perspective by analysing the subtle ways in which order is preserved in digitally mediated environments. Using the frameworks of Erving Goffman's dramaturgical sociology and Harold Garfinkel's ethnomethodology, the study examines how lecturers and students in online mathematics classrooms perform, manage, and interpret social interactions through platforms such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and institutional learning management systems. Based on data from three South African universities—including video recordings, chat logs, WhatsApp group conversations, interviews, and fieldnotes—the research identifies key interaction patterns: self-presentation strategies, repair routines following breaches of background expectancies, and backstage cooperation among students to sustain participation. The findings indicate that these classrooms are more than simple channels for delivering content; they are socially dynamic environments where meaning, legitimacy, and accountability are co-constructed in real-time. The study also highlights the complex emotional labour and identity negotiations involved in engagement by students and lecturers, especially under pressures such as exposure, technological surveillance, and asynchronous misunderstandings. Viewing online mathematics classrooms as performatively and interactionally structured, the article calls for a broader re-evaluation of digital pedagogy that extends beyond mere access and assessment to focus on the everyday micro-practices that uphold educational meaning and order.