Reconfiguring Education Through Data: How Data Practices Reconfigure Teacher Professionalism and Curriculum

Abstract

AbstractData practices are acknowledged as an important mode of governing education (Ozga, Trust in numbers? Digital Education Governance and the inspection process. European Educational Research Journal, 15(1), 69–81. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474904115616629, 2016) with education becoming increasingly ‘datafied and digitised’ (Jarke and Breiter, Datafying education: How digital assessment practices reconfigure the organisation of learning (Research Network “Communicative Figurations” No. 11). https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.1.2866.5686, 2016; Williamson, Big data in education: The digital future of learning, policy and practice. Sage, 2017). Within schools, there has been an intensification in practices of generating, analysing, visualising and intervening with educational data (Selwyn, “There’s so much data”: Exploring the realities of data-based school governance. European Educational Research Journal, 15(1), 54–68. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474904115602909, 2016). There has, however, so far been less attention paid to exploring how data practices work ‘on the ground’. Drawing from an ethnographic study in an English secondary school, this paper shows how data practices—people, policies, discourses, digital and material tools—became part of a wide-ranging data apparatus that reconfigured the possibilities for education.This chapter considers how the curriculum was reconfigured through algorithmic triage devices that created unequal access to a broad curriculum for different groups of students. It also explores how teachers’ roles were orientated away from more ‘holistic’, personal or relational understandings of pupils’ learning, instead engaging with data as a more legitimate form of knowledge and professionalism.