Governing teachers through datafication: Physical–virtual hybridity and language interoperability in teacher accountability

Abstract

In this paper, we draw on Foucault's and Deleuze's theorisations of discipline and control, respectively, to understand a teacher accountability system in the US state of Texas: the Texas Teacher Evaluation and Support System (hereafter, T-TESS). Specifically, we focus on the interplay of physical and virtual modes of governance – which we develop here as physical– virtual hybridity – and the techniques that make these physical and virtual domains compatible via language interoperability, with T-TESS deployed as a representative empirical case to show how such technologies work to govern teacher subjectivity. First, in-person appraiser meetings and observations re-code teachers’ linguistic behaviours, so their physical bodies and practices can become legible to and interoperable with the hybrid T-TESS system. This avoids any possible syntax errors between the linguistic expression of physical teacher speech and the digital coding language of T-TESS. Second, these digital bodies of data can now be viewed as proxies for the physical teacher body in the classroom, allowing the constant modulation in physical space (teacher bodies) and digital space (bodies of data). This is the physical–virtual hybridity of T-TESS, whereby discipline and control work symbiotically to govern both the physical and the digital expressions of teachers and their teaching. In this way, the disciplining of teachers’ language has profound effects on teachers’ bodies, both corporeal and digital.