Unground the Attention Surveillance: Critiques of Learning Science’s lines of business in China

• In Event: Education and Activism Redux II

Proposal

A space is opening up as Western technology and theory of learning sciences is massively introduced and localized in China. In recent years, controversy about the efficacy and ethics of smart classroom technology, as attention surveillance devices and design have entered classrooms and school life, start to surface. This paper will briefly analyze the main two modes of attention surveillance being developed and applied to schools in China and discuss the critiques of learning sciences and technology imported as lines of business from the West, in the name of “evidence-based practices (EBP)”.

In 2019, news showed that in a classroom at an elementary school in Zhejiang, Chinese students were wearing headsets to collect their brainwave signals so as to monitor their attentive levels. The algorithm built in these headsets will create real time feedback to the instructor as reference, it can also generate reports sent to the parents about how attentive their kids are at school. This paper focuses on analyzing two main modes of attention surveillance: body-classroom spatialization with computer vision and the thresholdization of educational ecology into cybernetic feedback loops.

The first mode of attention surveillance uses mainly behavior detection techniques widely used in smart classrooms. The operation of this model needs to spatialize both the body and the educational space through computer vision so to build up a comparison between the student's body language such as face positions with the three-dimensional space of the classroom; the operation is aiming at detecting "abnormal" events of learning behavior in camera footages. Moreover, this kind of surveillance devices is often associated with the infrastructures and context of free and autonomous learning, by replacing the absolute authority of teachers in the classroom with an invisible "soft gaze" and allowing students to learn under this mode of "being watched". In the second mode of attention surveillance, attention thresholds are not only numerical values and parameters of concentration, but more importantly, it is used to refer to a critical response prediction and to capture populational thresholds under behavioral configuration and pre-trained language mode built in the algorithms. In other words, not only it monitors and collects data, but also predicts in real time and waits to capture a change in thresholds. Muscle movement, blood flow rate, brain wave time-frequency, heart rate, etc. are indicators of focused behavior, as well as indexes and judgments provided by machines and algorithms for classroom ecology. The discussions of this presentation can be roughly organized into the following points:

First, Chinese educators and theorists, and this paper, consider the computer vision, not as what it claims to have replaced the authoritative gaze, rather as what still operates its gaze as effects of power. This comparison of the body and the classroom is to embed "what is a disciplined body" and "what is an appropriate gesture of attention" and other visual benchmarks into the algorithm. By using Foucault’s analyzes of panopticons, researchers pointed out that the use of computer vision re-enforces Chinese classroom into a space being surveilled, institutionalized and disciplined. On the one hand, the intervention of the surveillance installation has added to the meticulous and rigorous exhibitions of power and to the already ubiquitous sense of terror of being surveilled in China. On the other hand, this watching gaze of computer reproduces a particular subjectivation that the learners consciously become their own monitors; it is a gaze curating the acquisition of an intentional, autonomous, and inward-looking gaze, and yet the autonomous gaze is actually tightly connected with the fierce meritocracy in Chinese education and society.

Second, the attention monitoring and visual assembly in the smart classroom reflect the larger background of modern knowledge formation and the paradox of technological governance: technology seems to be for "uncovering" problems, but in fact, it is to select, stimulate, and reveal the orientation and state of things. Western modern knowledge formation reproduces attention as a placeless, cognitive map of a spatialized body. The parameters of abstraction are also the benchmarks and traces of “bureaucracy”, easy to be combined and absorbed in the dilemma of technological governance with a “traceism”. The mission of technology is to presuppose the clear face of the world facing us, and to draw things out by simplifying possibilities, and reproduce and recreate the complexity of this simplified social image.

Third, the threshold monitoring and ecological intervention mode refers to the important intergenerational transition of attention in the field of education: as the physiological activities and perceptual experiences of vision are continuously captured and reproduced by science, the problem of hyperattention is gradually emerging on the horizon. In this mode of attention monitoring and reproduction, the distinction between focus and distraction is less important than how visual perceptual devices open up impersonal, holistic population thresholds for more effective ecological intervention and control. In the United States, this kind of "autonomy" of super-attention has become a fiction in the intertwined context of post-war education and cybernetics. One of the revelations left is: attention, as the core ability category of autonomous learning, may irreversibly move towards the quagmire of automation and cybernetics, and may become a new opportunity for future teaching.

Attention, as an important field of capacity and potentiality in education, is simultaneously a space of resistance and a field where life is being governed, managed, and reproduced. Thus, the questioning and challenging of smart technology in classroom should not be conducted solely about their objectivity and accuracy, and instead, one should also trace the modes of power and rationality and limits of its empiricism legitimized as the “evidence-based practices” imported from Europe and the United States, so as to critically reflect on the actual effects of power in shaping classroom and school life in the global South. In this paper, the evidence-based practices, when translated and traveling to non-Western countries, combined with the local structures of power, might be leading to complicated and problematic effects of power.

Author

• Junzi Huang