The "Promising" Future Constructed by Big Data in Chinese Education

• In Event: Roundtable Session 57
  In Roundtable Session: Systems Governing the Teacher and Child: Fabricating School Communities in the Era of Education Reform

Abstract

As a time concept, big data is used in fields like political geography for national security, based on the anticipatory logic to construct a “future.” This article explores how big data, as an agent, constructs certain kinds of futures in education based on anticipatory logics. That anticipatory logic is how curriculum reforms and politics are bounded by principles that entail predicting or constructing the “future” as a means of preemption, preparedness, and precaution about the present. The focus is how big data embodies an anticipatory logic in Chinese education by answering three questions: how big data developed from traditional data; how different relations of future and present are constructed in Chinese education; and how big data was being used in constructing future in Chinese education contexts.

Big data denotes “the volume of information that has grown so large that the quantity being examined no longer fits into the memory that computers use for processing, so engineers needed to revamp the tools they used for analyzing it all” (Mayer-Schönberger, 2013, p. 17). As a travelling notion, recently in China big data becomes a strongly debated issue in education research. First, by doing genealogy research this article traces the use of big data in western evidence-based traditions and statistical reasoning to the Chinese education field. Although big data in China now is mostly used from the technological perspective by assuming is it an advanced tool from which “education will become more efficient” (Xie, 2014, p. 34). The definition of big data has three dimensions in this article by taking big data as “a matter of technologic practices; epistemologies; and ontologies” (Cramption, 2014, p. 5).

This article analyzes discursively the use of big data in educational policy to inquire into how the knowledge of children and teaching is constructed, what is defined as learning, and who has the qualification to teach by problematizing whether big data could promise a bright future to education. Then, it analyzes the anticipatory logic that using data not just as a way to evaluate who students are, but instead more about what will happen, what they will be interested in and who they will be. For example, big data strives to identify a problem in education before it really happens or to provide individualized education by using the information data presented in order to design individualized curriculum, study plans and evaluation.

It is explored as embodying an epistemology that orders the “present” and “future.” Several “truths” about the present and future are being told in Chinese education. For example, from an ethics perspective when talking about happiness, the future was described or promised to students as happiness to justify the miserable, boring and tough present school life. The other “truth” constructed in education is to make the future be the present, which could be found easily both in nationally perspectives and individual perspectives like “education for the future” or “students as the future of the country.”

Author

• Xue Yin, The University of Wisconsin-Madison