Hacking Toward a Public Education

• In Event: 58.083 - Roundtable Session 26
  In Roundtable Session: 58.083-8 - Curricular Hacking and Other Suspensions as a (re)Turn to the Commons

Abstract

Objectives: In a recent exhibit at the Whitney Museum, Laura Poitras reclaimed government documents used to privately discipline her by placing them in a public artistic display. This paper draws on Poitras’ exhibit to hack (Lewis & Friedrich, 2016) artifacts of teacher surveillance. While the paper does not directly oppose notions of observation or assessment in education, it aims to subvert the power relations on which many of these documents are constructed. By hacking these documents, the paper presents two objectives: First, to return to the commons that which was meant to be private; second, to disrupt the very idea of assessments having a predetermined and fixed meaning.

Theoretical Framework: A concept of a democratic public sphere drives this paper. Rancière (2006) explores the public as a space that is both a commons and commonplace; a place in which anyone, without any particular qualification, can participate. That is not to say the framework is one of agreement or of dialogue. The paper does not simply aim to make these practices or documents more transparent in the quest for a one best system. Instead, the paper challenges the very authority on which these documents rest. Understanding meaning as nomadic and nontranscendent (Deleuze, 1995), the surveillance documents are unfixed from what may be their intended purpose, their significance and meanings becoming open to subversive re-inscriptions.

Methods: The paper uses hacking to rewrite the content and meaning of a set of informal observations of a secondary school teacher. This instance of hacking used the observation form’s grammar, considered the observation form as a genre and tinkered with generic elements, and generally altered the uses and purposes of the documents themselves.

Results: Many of the hacks are theoretical propositions. For example, one proposal considers the informal observation document, which had been intended for an administrator to deliver to a teacher and hide away in a file, as a document of universal application. Within classrooms, teachers could assess assessors using the form. Assessors could assess students. Students could assess teachers. Outside of the classroom, the observation form could be used to evaluate an experience at a restaurant.
Other hacks rewrote the tone and style of the narrative feedback. Here, rote recitations about standards became dramatic civil war letters to families about the mastery of classroom management expectations. Or, considering the second person address of the original form, another hack rewrote the qualitative section as a bickering couple pointing out flaws.
Scholarly Significance
Through acts of hacking, the paper presents possibilities for educators to resist the logics that dominate educational systems where surveillance and set, predetermined authority is prevalent. Hacking in this way alters the role of agency so that participants can engage these practices from within the system. Furthermore, this work fights for education as a common good. The call for making education or specific practices within it public is nothing new. Through hacking, however, a particularly jarring interaction with familiar documents allows a rethinking of how to make public.

Authors

• Jordan Corson, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Daniel Friedrich, Teachers College, Columbia University