The Sanctity of Software

• In Event: 35.082 - Roundtable Session 14
  In Roundtable Session: 35.082-9 - A Rubric Nation: Critical Inquiries Into the Impact of Rubrics on Education

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to examine how rubrics act as an extension of software-powered technologies and information systems in education. When rubrics are used to quantify the complexity of pedagogy, it is necessary to examine how they function not only in the human world but as instruments of the computational world as well. This paper maps how rubrics are used to transform lived experience into qualitative language and eventually into quantitative and categorical language necessary for processing in information systems. Unpacking this transformation makes it possible to more deeply understand and research what is lost and what is gained as education increasingly becomes dictated what the author calls a software space.

The author borrows a common method of analysis from both software studies (Kitchin and Dodge, 2011) and critical educational studies (Taubman, 2009) that is referred to broadly as mapping. Whereas critical educational studies scholars refer to mapping as a technique to trace discursive moves and more macro-elements of policy and practice, software theorists trace the way the ontology of software--including the structure of information systems and programming languages--enable and inhibit different social ends. The author applies an amalgamation of these methods, which he refers to as critical software analysis (Author), to trace the function of rubrics through educational and software spaces in order to capture data related to the ways software itself functions as an extension of neoliberal ideologies.

Data collected for this paper includes artifacts that comprise the discourse and implementation of teacher evaluation reform in a large urban school district, including: public statements by district and state officials about teacher evaluation reform, public-facing promotional materials created by the district to inform schools and the public about teacher evaluation reform, the rubric schools are required to use by the district, and software development documents provided by a third-party organization with whom the state partnered to aggregate student and teacher data and to make the aggregated available to for-profit companies.


The results of the data collection and analysis surfaces new insights about how the ontology of software space forces school administrators to prioritize the demands of software over the needs of pedagogy. Rather than helping to facilitate a shared professional conversation to support teacher development, rubrics can have the opposite effect when implemented in the district’s teacher evaluation reform. When it comes to the study of the role of technology in education, few researchers approach their sites of study with thorough theoretical and methodological tools that critically account for the ontology of software. Instead, much research emphasizes the perceived empirical effects of the use of technology in educational settings, which is too often accompanied with an overly optimistic air and assumes that software-powered technologies are purely functional and neutral. The current study frames new theoretical structures researchers can use while modeling a method of analyzing the role software plays in perpetuating unjust distributions of power.

Author

• Tom Liam Lynch, Pace University