The global teacher: Transforming teaching practices into scientific data

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

Proposal

Global education organizations have advocated for increased accountability and transparency in education. The rising influence of the OECD and digital technologies on global education reforms is remaking teaching as a global profession by transforming teaching practices into scientific data that purport to transcend national borders and cultural boundaries. This paper addresses how these data compose “the global teacher” as a particularly alluring figure in global education reforms. Specifically, we explore the conditions (i.e., discourses, technologies, reform networks) that are transforming teaching into practices that can be classified, measured, and compared.

Our approach is a history of the present (Foucault, 1977), which attends to the social, political, economic, and cultural practices that make the global teacher intelligible (Popkewitz & Rizvi, 2009) as an object of international educational policy and reform. Theoretically we approach the global teacher as a center of calculation (Latour, 1987; Popkewitz, 2022), examining how the assembly observational practices, user design interfaces, and new conceptions of communication and learning produce new spaces of professionalization (Lewis, 2019). We argue that educational online platforms, in particular, have become a space to articulate principles of the global teacher who improves teaching and student outcomes by integrating quality teaching practices that can be taken up and deployed anywhere around the globe.

To study how the global teacher is made through data, the paper analyzes the OECD educational online platform, Global Teaching InSights (OECD, 2020), including their website, technical reports, instructional materials, videos, and supporting research and media. Our focus is on the epistemic principles that establish the norms and values of what constitutes global quality teaching. The analysis examines the platform’s classificatory practices that organize and order the data of objective teaching practices found in video-recorded lessons, teaching materials, student achievement pre- and post-tests, and teaching log; and, how the platform refashions governance through principles of user design and implementation to disseminate these data as the model of the global teacher and effective teaching.

The aspiration of making the global teacher is to deliver scientific improvement within a democratic atmosphere that promises transparency and openness while interrupting previous ways of governing education, teacher education, and professional development. The creation of online educational platforms promises to assemble an accountable and democratic space for educational reform and improvement. By approaching the global teacher as a center of calculation, the analysis makes visible how digital platformization practices (e.g., data points, indices, categories, and classifications) shape how teaching practices become objects to measure and compare within educational spaces.

The efforts to create the global teacher through educational digital platforms have far-reaching implications for the future trajectories of education beyond measurement itself. The globalizing of teacher knowledge through the codification, dissemination, and digitization of best teaching practices risks flattening how diversity and cultural differences are seen and understood, thereby impeding ethical reflexivity on the differences and exclusions they naturalize.

Authors

• Christopher M Kirchgasler, University of Wisconsin Madison

• Ezequiel Gomez Caride, Universidad De San Andrés