Spatializing intelligence: Tracing the Curricular Logic of Smartness in Data-driven Educational Infrastructures

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 1:45 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Curriculum in the Age of AI: Digital Mythopoetics, Media Literacies, and Futurisms

Abstract

This paper explores the epistemology of smartness as a curricular logic and spatial infrastructure emerging from historical formations of intelligence, cybernetics, and urban design. Taking a genealogical approach, it traces how smart schools and campuses reconfigure educational space through data-driven governance, predictive feedback, and affective computation. As AI-powered learning environments proliferate—from private “AI tutor” schools in Texas to virtual charter networks in Arizona—this paper interrogates how smartness is discursively formed and materially embedded in contemporary education. Drawing from curriculum studies, critical data theory, and cultural geography, it argues that smartness operates as an environmentally extended form of intelligence, governing spaces of curriculum through sensory measurement, infrastructural aesthetics, and the production of value within techno-capitalist ecologies.

Author

• Lucy Zhang, Teachers College, Columbia University