Data, Power, and Governance: Digitalizing Teacher Evaluation in Kenya

• In Event: Visual Technologies as Narrativizing Making Kinds of People in Education

Proposal

Objectives
Digitalizing teacher evaluation in Kenya through the Teacher Performance Appraisal and Development (TPAD) system represents not only a shift in methodology but also an entrenchment of surveillance and control within the educational sector. TPAD was introduced in 2016 as part of a collaboration between the World Bank and the Kenya Primary Education Development Project to modernize teacher evaluation through a data-driven online platform. However, this paper argues that far from advancing teacher professionalism, TPAD reinscribes relations of power by embedding teachers within a regime of surveillance in the name of professional development. While the system purports to promote teacher agency through self-appraisals and departmental evaluations, it conserves the same hierarchies of evaluator and teacher that characterized the earlier observational models. TPAD obscures its role as a governance mechanism by presenting itself as a modern solution for improving teaching standards through Big Data. This paper conducts a comparative analysis of historical and contemporary evaluation practices to highlight how TPAD reinscribes power relations that regulate teachers under the rubrics of development.

Theoretical framework
The paper analyzes TPAD from the lens of ‘governmentality’ to show how the ensemble of rules, practices, and procedures that constitute it create a particular kind of teacher (see Foucault, 1991). I use the term governmentality in the case to refer to what Foucault (2003) describes as “conduct of conduct.” Here, techniques of governance involve disciplinary power, which cultivates self-regulatory subjects through outlined rules and standards that define a ‘good’ teacher.

Data and Methods
To advance my argument, I employ the “history of the present” approach, which enables a “critical engagement with the present” (Garland, 2014, p. 337). This approach allows us to interrogate the conditions that made certain concepts and subjects of research possible in the first place (Foucault, 1972). The paper analyzes TPAD documents alongside colonial archives, which include colonial teacher training documents. By doing so, I aim to understand the concerns of colonial governance regarding teacher professionalism, the power relations that defined the colonial period, and how they have transformed over time.

Findings and Scholarly Significance
The findings challenge the view that the shift to data-driven teacher evaluation and professional development fosters agency. Instead, the analysis shows that the practices constrain autonomy through prescribed rules and standards defining an ‘effective’ teacher. The presentation prompts a rethinking of teacher education and professional development by exploring how efforts to create responsive teachers may inadvertently reinforce inequalities.

Author

• Cecilia Kyalo, The University of Wisconsin-Madison