Redistributing the Sensible: A Framework for Using Creative Data Representations with Preservice Teachers Across Disciplines

• In Event: Supporting Teachers to Engage in Meaningful Data Literacy and Data Science Practices Across Disciplines

Abstract

Objectives. The arts and humanities play an important role in examining and designing for students’ sociopolitical, affective, and relational entanglements with data (e.g., Author, 2022; Lee et al., 2020; Wilkerson & Polman, 2020). I seek to further this topic by asking: how can attending to the arts and humanities serve as a context and lens for encouraging teachers across disciplines to attune to the nature and purposes of data practices and data literacy education?

Literature. This work relies on Rancière’s (1991) concept of aesthetics, which is the partitioning of the social fabric wherein members are taught to see and unsee certain realities of life (Rancière, 1991). Politics and, in turn, education are linked to aesthetics because both involve a continuous re-partitioning of what is visible and who can be seen and heard (Lewis, 2012). Such redistributing of the sensible is closely linked to sensuous intuition (Lewis, 2012). Critical visual literacy, as a practice of the senses enabled through engagement with the arts, enables a “right to look” at how data visualizations—and eventually, official school curricula—produce certain subjectivities and normalized ways of knowing (Woods et al., 2024).

Context. My consideration of the arts and humanities emerged while leading a series of data literacy activities in a session on interdisciplinary teaching and learning with prospective preservice teachers across disciplines, as well as in a course on statistics for preservice mathematics teachers. Curricular materials drew on Lupi and Posavec’s (2016, 2018) Dear Data Project, alongside other creative data representations (e.g., Rusert & Battle-Baptiste, 2018).

Discussion and Significance. Curricular materials drawing on Dear Data and other creative data representations act on the senses to redistribute what is considered sensible for teachers and teacher educators within data literacy education. Sensibility refers to questions such as what counts as data literacy, what role do the arts and humanities play in data literacy education, and how does data literacy interact with the knowledge production practices of other disciplines. Understanding visual data literacy as an aesthetic practice contextualized within and understood through the arts and humanities produces three areas of analysis. First, engagement with the arts generates among teachers a right to resist dominant scripts (Van Wart et al., 2020) that tacitly frame the nature and purposes of data in terms of future-oriented concerns of workforce preparation, risk management, and surface-level calls for access and opportunity. Second, the arts and humanities create an invitation to attune, akin to Woods et al.’s (2024) “right to look”. Here, teachers are encouraged to attune to data’s material and relational nature, in opposition to the aestheticization of education that frames the world as knowable through a refinement of the disembodied mind. Third, teachers can explore speculative possibilities through data, which include abductive, breakdown-driven orientations toward data (Brinkman, 2014). This work contributes to teacher professional development by foregrounding the arts and humanities in data literacy education and providing a theoretical framework for researchers and designers interested in furthering the integration of the arts with data literacy.

Author

• Lee Melvin M. Peralta, Michigan State University