To standardize or contextualize? Affective atmospheres of anxiety and pleasure in life skills measurement

• In Event: Interrogating the politics of data and measurement regimes in international education

Proposal

In recent years, global development discourses have frequently championed the need for new skills interventions to prepare young people to thrive in spite of increasingly precarious life circumstances. Amid the rapid expansion of skilling projects, many educational organizations have turned to focus their interventions on a broad range of psychosocial skills—including grit, resilience, perseverance, empathy, communication, self-management, and decision making. As psychosocial skills interventions ascend to prominence, noticeable demand has grown for the development of innovative new tools to quantitatively measure their impact and effectiveness. The measurement of psychosocial skills interventions is widely lauded as vitally important in order to demonstrate their supposedly transformative potential to prepare youth for future employment under challenging economic and social conditions. Moreover, measurement efforts also aim to prove the positive affective changes which youth are presumed to experience in such skilling programs —such as cultivating hopeful and aspirational dispositions across many domains of everyday life (Author, 2020).

This paper traces the early development of measurement projects connected to skilling programs marketed under an array of banners—ranging from life skills, 21st century skills, soft skills, transferable skills, and social-emotional skills—as they rapidly unfold and gain momentum across a variety of international development NGOs. This work is informed by over 20 ethnographic interviews with measurement, monitoring, and evaluation experts who are in the process of developing, testing, and iterating on measurement tools. Moreover, this paper draws on participant observation of life skills measurement convenings–such as knowledge-sharing workshops, conferences, and collaborations between multiple organizations, as well as measurement researchers and practitioners. In addition, we analyze life skills assessment tools, reports, and enumerator and contextualization guides.

This research is inspired by critical scholarship that interrogates the role of affect in increasing trends for data- and measurement-centered governance in education (Sellar, 2015; Sellar & Lingard, 2018). Furthermore, we draw on feminist science and technology studies (STS) and anthropologies of data and quantification (Biruk, 2018; Merry, 2016; Murphy, 2017). We trace the affective atmospheres which circulate around and cohere within developing infrastructures of life skills and SEL measurement infrastructures. In particular, we argue that competing demands to both “standardize” and “contextualize” psychosocial assessment tools generate unruly anxieties and pleasures which permeate throughout shifting measurement processes. Measurement experts situated within international development NGOs based in the global North often express anxiety surrounding the difficulties of balancing between pressures to design universalized, cost-effective, scalable tools while also ensuring tools are adequately adapted and “translated” across the multiple contexts in which they work. At the same time, however, many of our interlocutors working on measurement projects—particularly across the global South—often express excitement over the possibilities of placing contextualization at the heart of measurement tool design—conceptualizing a new emphasis on contextualized measurement as a potential space of empowerment and critical resistance. With an attention to the affective atmospheres of measurement, this paper examines the growing impetus within measurement communities to “contextualize” measurement tools and the uneven and contested power dynamics that influence measurement practices.

Authors

• Karishma Desai, Rutgers University

• Olivia M Casey, Rutgers University Graduate School of Education