Abstract:
The datafication and ‘platformization’ of students, using standardised assessment data visualisations, claim to offer teachers objective stimuli to inform pedagogical decision-making. Yet, the quantifiable assumptions that data regimes rely on render schooling as metricised and performative, founded on the logics of intelligibility. Data is not neutral – it regulates, reforms, and reconfigures how teachers see, know, and understand students and how they enact their teaching responsibilities. Data is changing the day-to-day work of teachers and there are affective effects.
This paper draws attention to the presence, capacity, and potential of affect with/in teacher data relations. Affect theory offers a way to experiment with the tensions, ambiguity, and density of teacher data relations with/in school-data-events while problematising the nuances of data mechanisms and governance. By questioning ‘what does data do?’ in an educational datascape that is perpetually changing, understanding how teachers are affected and affecting with/in school-data-events affirms the force and potential of affect.
As an outcome of a PhD research project, practice provocations offer micro-political thinking-feeling prompts for stakeholders (teachers, leaders, schools) to consider the affective-ness of teacher data relations, and therefore, potential lines of flight for (re)imagining school-data-events otherwise. It is argued that affective ways of knowledge-ing and (re)imaging school-data-events are necessary in an educational era dominated by the representational logics of data.
This paper draws attention to the presence, capacity, and potential of affect with/in teacher data relations. Affect theory offers a way to experiment with the tensions, ambiguity, and density of teacher data relations with/in school-data-events while problematising the nuances of data mechanisms and governance. By questioning ‘what does data do?’ in an educational datascape that is perpetually changing, understanding how teachers are affected and affecting with/in school-data-events affirms the force and potential of affect.
As an outcome of a PhD research project, practice provocations offer micro-political thinking-feeling prompts for stakeholders (teachers, leaders, schools) to consider the affective-ness of teacher data relations, and therefore, potential lines of flight for (re)imagining school-data-events otherwise. It is argued that affective ways of knowledge-ing and (re)imaging school-data-events are necessary in an educational era dominated by the representational logics of data.