Abstract:
The great accomplishments that have altered our world can be traced back to those infrastructures that connect: roads, telegraph poles, submarine cables bridges and more. Such infrastructures connect people not only physically but also economically, politically and socially. Infrastructures have their own stories, their own dispositions and agency, their own power, and their own matter. This paper focuses on such characteristic within infrastructures that are prefixed by data and digital.
In particular I focus on OneSchool, a school management system, and its governance of educational practices in Queensland’s state schools. I argue that data infrastructures while governing educational practices globally, do so in ways that constitute, maintain and challenge inequity. While the technical governance of data is often viewed as the panacea to all problems, the role of infrastructures to provide equitable and socially just governance is contested. Unquestioned governance has problematic silencing and constitutive effects, and these effects are explicitly recognized and discussed.
This research is unique, for rather than a purchased system; the very department that has used it for more than a decade built OneSchool. Additionally my insider status facilitated access to the 60+ interview participants from across all hierarchical areas of the government’s educational department. It also provided a lived-experience perspective to the previously unreported genealogically-inspired history of the development and nature of this data infrastructure.
Two OneSchool stories are presented to illustrate the ways in which infrastructures both govern practices and reflect the disposition of infrastructure builders and users. Firstly, I discuss how broken code in the Student Protection Module in OneSchool in 2015, created ruptures in the data and highlighted the political and social disposition toward child safety data rather than child safety. Secondly, I discuss the compliant activist disposition of teachers as they recorded reading data into OneSchool - up to the set target for the year level. As a school leader explained: ‘It was like this is where we have to be, so now we can stop’ as data showed ‘that the main cohort had level nine but no further’.These stories are shared to highlight the dispositions and agency of the human and non-human components of the Datafied Policy Space; a topological space constituted by the intersection of data, policy and digital infrastructures.
In particular I focus on OneSchool, a school management system, and its governance of educational practices in Queensland’s state schools. I argue that data infrastructures while governing educational practices globally, do so in ways that constitute, maintain and challenge inequity. While the technical governance of data is often viewed as the panacea to all problems, the role of infrastructures to provide equitable and socially just governance is contested. Unquestioned governance has problematic silencing and constitutive effects, and these effects are explicitly recognized and discussed.
This research is unique, for rather than a purchased system; the very department that has used it for more than a decade built OneSchool. Additionally my insider status facilitated access to the 60+ interview participants from across all hierarchical areas of the government’s educational department. It also provided a lived-experience perspective to the previously unreported genealogically-inspired history of the development and nature of this data infrastructure.
Two OneSchool stories are presented to illustrate the ways in which infrastructures both govern practices and reflect the disposition of infrastructure builders and users. Firstly, I discuss how broken code in the Student Protection Module in OneSchool in 2015, created ruptures in the data and highlighted the political and social disposition toward child safety data rather than child safety. Secondly, I discuss the compliant activist disposition of teachers as they recorded reading data into OneSchool - up to the set target for the year level. As a school leader explained: ‘It was like this is where we have to be, so now we can stop’ as data showed ‘that the main cohort had level nine but no further’.These stories are shared to highlight the dispositions and agency of the human and non-human components of the Datafied Policy Space; a topological space constituted by the intersection of data, policy and digital infrastructures.