Algorithmic Governmentality in Contemporary Education Reforms: The Politics of Datafication, Digitalization, and Visualization of Teaching

• In Event: 43.080 - Sheraton Roundtable Six - Osgoode Ballroom
  In Roundtable Session: 43.080-7 - Knowledge in Tension: Dissident Experiences in Relation

Abstract

This paper explores how the data of teaching generates the future possibility – how effectively the teacher could teach in the future classroom. The study highlights that the datafication and digitalization of teaching transforms and mobilizes the temporal moments of teacher actions into a dispersed-yet-spatially-located array of visual data. Drawing on the interviews and documents related to edTPA, the paper addresses how teachers are made through the assemblages of pre-emptive logic of edTPA, digitalization and datafication of teaching, haunted relation between the observer and the teacher, and digitized archival fever. It suggests the double gesture of algorithmic reasoning, that pre-empts and prevents the future, arguing what is seen as the evidence of teaching becomes a device to manage the future anticipated.

Author

• Sun Young Lee, Wichita State University