Platforming the Global Teacher

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

Abstract

Objectives
The rising influence of the OECD and digital technologies on global education reforms is remaking teaching as a profession and refashioning the teacher as a global professional who transcends national borders and cultural boundaries. This paper addresses the conditions (i.e., discourses, technologies, reform networks) that enable the emergence of the global teacher as a particularly alluring figure in the global education space. To scrutinize this phenomenon, the guiding question is how educational online platforms—Global Teaching InSights and PISA4U—are fashioning the governance practices of the global teacher who is to see and act on diversity and cultural differences.

Theoretical Perspectives
Our approach is a history of the present (Foucault, 1977), which attends to the social, political, economic, and cultural practices that make the global teacher intelligible (Popkewitz & Rizvi, 2009) as an object of international educational policies. Theoretically we approach these platforms as centers of calculation (Latour, 1987; Popewitz, 2022) that produce new spaces of professionalization by assembling observational practices, user design interfaces, and new conceptions of communication and learning. Resulting principles of the global teacher seek to improve teaching and student learning by making visible “quality practices from around the globe” (OECD, 2020, p. 1).

Methods and Sources
The paper analyzes two OECD educational online platforms (i.e., Global Teaching InSights, PISA4U), including their websites, instructional materials, videos, and supporting research and media. Our focus is on the epistemic principles and social technologies that establish the norms and values of the global teacher, including classifications of teaching, observation practices, and user design. The analysis examines: (a) how digital platformization processes are linked to spaces of professionalization that have grown exponentially in recent years; (b) how they shape what is seen as diverse or culturally different; and (c) how the teacher should see and rescue the child deemed at risk of being left behind.

Warrants for Argument
The aspiration of making the global teacher is to deliver scientific improvement within a democratic atmosphere that promises transparency and openness while interrupting previous ways of governing education, teacher education, and professional development. The creation of online educational platforms promises to assemble a transparent and democratic space for educational reform and improvement by bringing together observational practices, user design interfaces, and principles of communication and learning in fashioning the global teacher. By approaching the global teacher as a center of calculation, the analysis makes visible how digital platformization practices (e.g., data points, indices, categories, and classifications) embody norms and values that shape how differences are to be seen in the hopes of taming risky futures.

Significance
The efforts to create the global teacher through educational digital platforms have far-reaching implications for the future trajectories of education. They embody norms and values that globally shape how diversity and cultural differences are to be seen and managed. The globalizing of teacher knowledge through the codification, dissemination, and digitization of best teaching practices risks flattening how diversity and cultural differences are seen and understood, thereby impeding ethical reflexivity on the differences and exclusions they naturalize.

Authors

• Christopher M. Kirchgasler, University of Wisconsin - Madison
  Presenting Author

• Ezequiel Gomez Caride, Universidad de San Andrés
  Presenting Author