"Data" as a New Realm of Teacher Professionalism

• In Event: The New Sciences of Teaching: Theorizing Their Differences and Exclusions

Abstract

Objectives
Growing interests in big data and digital technologies focus on data as an emerging realm of teacher professionalism (Wyatt-Smith et al., 2019). As educational practices become ‘datafied’ and ‘digitized’ (Jarke & Breiter, 2019), there is a rapid reconstruction of teacher professionalism toward the production and management of pupil data as a core professional practice (Grant, 2022). The purpose of this paper is investigating how recent education policy discourses of teacher professionalism envision the teacher as “data-professional.” By examining this discourse in South Korea, the paper sharpens attention to the culturally peculiar norms embedded in universalizing discourses of data science that make unintelligible cultural and historical understanding of teachers (Zhao et al., 2022).

Theoretical Perspectives
This study draws upon Foucault’s (1980) analytic of power/knowledge to consider how discourses about educational technology produce teachers as data-professionals requiring new forms of knowledge through acts of making, managing, and becoming data. In the analysis, educational technology is explored as a dispositif that subjectifies teachers as producers and executors of power/knowledge by making and managing multiple student performances (Foucault, 1977, 1980). In that process of subjectification, not only students but also teachers are quantified, objectified, and anticipated in the quality control system (Williamson, 2016).

Methods and Sources
This paper engages in Foucauldian discourse analysis (Ball, 1993) to investigate changing policy discourses about teacher professionalism concerning digital technologies and datafication. The study analyzes policy documents produced by South Korea’s Ministry of Education between 2017–2022. The documents include policy reports, press releases, and government-funded research. The analysis focuses on the distinctions, categories, and classifications concerning the teacher to examine how changing discourses re-orient teacher professionalism toward exercising power by the data-managing of self and other as a core professional practice.

Warrants for Argument
Earlier policy discourse on teacher professionalism had reinforced the importance of the teacher as the core site of curricular knowledge and teaching practice, positioning digital technologies as objects of teachers’ mastery (Thomas, 2016). Emerging discourse shows that teacher professionalism is undergoing a reorganization from teaching to management of learning by producing and monitoring students’ data. Through expanding infrastructure of artificial intelligence (AI) and learning management systems (LMS), teachers’ professional decision-making is first replaced by the evidence-based analysis of students’ learning and second by big data and algorithms perceived as more scientific, visible, and value-neutral. In remaking the school as a ‘data platform,’ school knowledge exists in an external data space to be mastered. In this discourse, teachers as data-professionals become subjectified as components of education technology; their mode of existence and ethical decision-making become possible and validated as a form of data. In this scientized discourse on teacher professionalism, Confucian understandings of teachers and teachings become invisible.

Significance
Datafication of teacher professionalism is both a governing technology and an emerging mode of existence for teachers. This study reveals how global teacher education discourses abject anything outside their systems of data management as either unscientific or insignificant. This new form of epistemic colonialism reinforces the pathologizing of cultural and historical understandings of teachers.

Author

• Ji-Hye Kim, Korean Educational Development Institute
  Presenting Author