Quality teacher and digital student in the age of platform capitalism.

• In Event: Race, class, capital and edtechnology

Proposal

Platform capitalism has emerged from the mist as a spectre on the horizon of late capitalism. There is growing hype around artificial intelligence, manipulation of data and the growth of platforms in defining life and work in the twenty first century. As Srnicek points out in his book Platform Capitalism (2017) this new spectre is historically grounded in economic movements in operation since the second world war. It has not appeared from nowhere and is not merely a digital mirage. It is a conscious attempt by private companies to increase profit margins and to chase the run of capital, whilst adopting the most recent technological innovations for on-line use. Public sector bodies and transnational organisations, like OECD, are also chasing platform technologies to increase their visibility. Into this environment universities, which are being constructed more and more by government policy in Britain as private companies, are thrust and expected to survive and thrive.

In a recent paper presented at CIES (Henry, 2018), I provided a critique of the construction of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ teacher by the OECD. I developed an argument around the heroic Taylorist model of quality teaching that is so iniquitous to so many teachers. This paper will go further and look at how the economic model of platform capitalism has further developed the move towards enclosure for pecuniary gain and away from quality education as a basic right. In particular, I will examine the transition from school to university, the OECD construction of Quality Teacher TM (Sorensen and Robertson, 2017) and the conditions platform capitalism provide for universities to construct ‘digital’ students as a source of capital. Students and teachers thus become treated as capital rather than as participants in education, teaching and learning.

This reductionism is further exacerbated by OECD’s GPS which provides comparative data across OECD countries. The tertiary education reviews completed within this platform focus specifically on social and economic outcomes. This limited view of education further feeds the capitalist construction that uses data as a resource to be mined. This data set will be critiqued in terms of the relevant theories of platform capitalism. As I pointed out in the CIES paper I am not arguing that data is bad, but that approaches that reify economic models limit education’s potential. Methodologically, as Srineck (2017) points out, platform capitalism has significant internal fissures that inevitably lead to a disembodying of student and teacher and a tendency for the university to move away from their role as nurturers of student learning and growth and guardians of knowledge, and towards a position where students and teachers are seen within the data gathered around them as crops to be harvested.

Author

• Martin Henry, Education International