Conference Agenda

Educational data, including test data and other types of performance data, as well as accounting data, register data, and survey data, have for a long time been used to compare students, schools, and countries (Grek, 2009; Sellar & Lingard, 2018). Contemporarily, the use of educational data and data technologies in the governance of public education is changing, if not rising. These data are now subject to algorithmic processing and modelling, such as clustering and forecasting. Measurements of progression over time, prolongations or projections of the past into the future (Adams, Murphy, & Clarke, 2009), and the identification of future risks all seek to control the future via timely policy or management responses in the present. Data are furthermore used to create institutional aspirations (Lewis, 2018) or policymaking rooted in fear of the future (Webb & Gulson, 2012), and to constitute imagined communities and common pasts (Piattoeva & Tröhler, 2019). In other words, the public governance of education via data is permeated by temporalities such as progression and potentiality in relation to the formation of societies, populations, and individuals.

This double symposium explores the temporal dimensions of the use and impact of educational data in the governance of education theoretically, conceptually, and methodologically (Lingard, 2021). The symposium theorizes time and temporality in relation to the use of data in educational governance by drawing on post-structuralist, socio-material, and new materialist concepts of time as enacted in policy and data practices and as productive of educational realities (Adam, 1998; Decuypere, Hartong, & van de Oudeweetering, 2022; Ratner, 2020). The symposium problematizes conventional understandings of time and temporality by discussing both embedded policy conceptions of time, power struggles over and in time, shifting temporalities of educational governance, the production of futures and pasts through various knowledge practices, temporal practices of control and optimization with reference to the future, and time as a mechanism of governance.

By presenting historical and contemporary case studies spanning across education policy, educational organization and management, and teacher practices, the symposium unpacks various aspects of the temporality of educational governance with data. These include for example the promissory futures of datafication and digitalization; the role of data displaying risky futures as a mobilizer for urgent and/or cautious policy and management decisions; the politics of time aided by the datafication of time; and the temporalities of performance measurement and teacher practices, encompassing both simultaneity, acceleration, immediacy, and hesitation. Through these case studies, time in educational governance with data emerges as both an object or asset that can be possessed and managed in the everyday practices of education, a structuring mechanism that education can be managed and govern through, and an analytical lenses for the study of temporalized modalities of educational governance.

Methodologically, the case studies include historical and ethnographic methodologies as well as policy studies and discourse analysis, and the methods used encompass interviews, observations, platform walkthroughs, and document studies. The case studies span across Denmark, Norway, Finland, Estonia, and transnational policy contexts. Through this polyvalent approach, the symposium aims at exploring the temporal dimensions of governing education with data from a variety of contexts and perspectives, with the aim of generating synthesizing conceptualizations that may push the research field forward. These include ‘datafied temporalities’, indicating how data are used to create temporalities with governing effects in education, and ‘temporal modalities of data practices’, indicating how data practices in educational governance affect temporalities of governance and teacher practices. With these conceptualizations, the double symposium unpacks an emerging research agenda in educational governance research.

Datafication discourses in education regularly present themselves as radical game changers in education policy and research arenas. Fueled by advances in digital technologies, a more differentiated, personalized and widespread acquisition of data, its accumulation, storage, analysis and distribution seems imminent. As datafication is widely understood as a topical phenomenon (see for example Jarke & Breiter, 2019: 1), studies of datafication mostly focus on developments since the turn of the millennium, rarely covering the history of datafication. Using Finnish educational research and governance as a case example, I explore the under-studied data futures past in educational research and governance. I ask how educational research and governance in the 20th century have become organized around notion of quantitative, statistical data and future promises of increasing personalization, prediction and control of learning. As methodology, the paper employs Foucauldian archaeology of knowledge. It involves studying research and policy texts as discourses; series of statements organizing objects, subjects, and modes of reasoning (Foucault, 2002). The data consists of a) Finnish academic texts (articles, monographs) characterizing the nature and future development of educational research and its practicality; and b) policy texts characterizing the nature and governmental uses of scientific, statistical knowledge. The timeline for data is 1900–1980 which covers the early emergence of Finnish educational research and its subsequent stabilization and key role in the government of the national education system. The analysis focuses on three interrelated discursive strategies (Foucault 2002), i.e., continuing ways of assigning and legitimating the future role of educational research and scientific data in education policy: a) For the first time in history capturing the true reality of education, which enables b) treating pupils according to their developmental stage and individual traits, which then c) makes teaching and governing education effective. As an outcome, the paper argues that the shared history of educational research and data driven education policy involves repetitive gestures of promissory futures. Time and time again, detaches from the past of and promises future personalization and prediction, which is also prominent in contemporary datafication discourses. However, the prevailing focus on developments from the current millennium inhibits from seeing such repetition.

Foucault, M. (2002). Archaeology of knowledge. London: Routledge. Jarke, J., & Breiter, A. (2019). Editorial: the datafication of education. Learning, Media and Technology, 44(1), 1-6. doi:10.1080/17439884.2019.1573833

Policy texts construct imaginaries of the future by explicitly or implicitly criticising past policies and promoting the movement beyond the present to a more hopeful future (Lingard, 2021). Williamson (2013) claims that curriculum reforms as solutions for a different and better future are promoted through the fabrication of educational crises, disinformation, myths and half-truths. Policymakers utilize governance instruments based on past data to tame the future associated with “affectivities of risk and urgency” (Madsen, 2022). The OECD project Future of Education and Skills 2030 (hereafter Education 2030) places such affectivities under the future challenges characterised as volatile, uncertain, ambiguous and complex (VUCA) and proposes curriculum (re)design for a better future (OECD, 2020). Policymakers negotiate the meaning and legitimacy of future imaginaries, engage stakeholders and create trust through techniques of futuring (Oomen et al., 2022). Among these techniques, a presentation of “a particular storyline about the future” is utilised to identify, construct and circulate imaginaries of the future (p. 261). Such imaginaries contribute to an illusion that even an uncertain future is predictable and manageable through provided policy instruments or solutions (Nespor, 2016). The OECD is an essential actor contributing to educational transformation by composing future-oriented policies. In this paper, we focus on the OECD project Education 2030 and specifically thematic reports concerning curriculum (re)design and aim to explore storytelling about the future based on past data, country examples and comparisons. We pose the following questions: - What stories of the futures do the OECD thematic reports on curriculum (re)design issue? - How do the OECD thematic reports construct curriculum as a tool for taming these futures? To answer these questions we take inspiration from Asdal’s (2015) discussion about the modifying work of documents. We approach the OECD thematic reports as transforming rather than describing futures. Preliminary findings demonstrate that the thematic reports construct the imaginary of the future through storytelling about contemporary issues that are transformed into the imaginary of a volatile, uncertain, ambiguous and complex future. The future of the thematic reports is an entanglement of digital, social and sustainable futures. In this manner, the imaginary of an unknown and complex future is broken down into manageable stories and advice to reach prosperity in the future. Such construction of reachable, tangible goals is an important factor of governance through future imaginaries (Lewis, 2018). Moreover, through curriculum (re)design the thematic reports transform crises and challenges into opportunities of the future.

Asdal, K. (2015). What is the issue? The transformative capacity of documents. Distinktion (Aarhus), 16(1), 74–90. https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910X.2015.1022194 Lewis, S. (2018). PISA ‘Yet To Come’: Governing schooling through time, difference and potential. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 39(5), 683–697. https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2017.1406338 Lingard, B. (2021). Multiple temporalities in critical policy sociology in education. Critical Studies in Education, 62(3), 338–353. https://doi.org/10.1080/17508487.2021.1895856 Madsen, M. (2022). Competitive/comparative governance mechanisms beyond marketization: A refined concept of competition in education governance research. European Educational Research Journal EERJ, 21(1), 182–199. Nespor, J. (2016). Future imaginaries of urban school reform. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 24(2), 2. https://doi.org/10.14507/epaa.24.2179 OECD. (2020). What Students Learn Matters: Towards a 21st century curriculum. OECD Publishing. https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/content/publication/d86d4d9a-en Oomen, J. J., Hoffman, J. G., & Hajer, M. A. (2022). Techniques of futuring: On how imagined futures become socially performative. European Journal of Social Theory, 25(2), 252–270. https://doi.org/10.1177/1368431020988826 Williamson, B. (2013). The future of the curriculum: School knowledge in the digital age. MIT Press.

The “governance by numbers” logic has become the dominant mode of governance in the education sector (Neumann, 2021), turning it into “one of the most noticeable domains affected by datafication” (Jarke & Breiter, 2019: 1). In the recent years, many scholars have further argued for the need to adopt a precision education approach (Luan & Tsai, 2021) that would allow to remedy obsolete and dysfunctional education systems (Davies, Eynon, & Salveson, 2021). In 2020, Estonia announced that it has started building AI-driven personalised learning path infrastructure in an effort to become the first country, where personalised education is enabled as a public system. The Estonian Education Strategy for 2021-2035 envisions that the personalised learning infrastructure would provide teachers with detailed diagnostics about their students, and provide students with an active role in crafting their futures by allowing them to choose what, when and with whom they learn. Considering that news media outlets act as governing actants of meaning, and play a prominent role in setting the agenda of any public discourse, the present study systematically maps dominant media discourses surrounding the national personalised learning pathways initiative. Our goal was to explore how different agents involved in the process – teachers, students, school officials, policy makers, representatives of the educational technology industry and governance of education – promote, justify or problematise this infrastructure initiative. In our analysis, we applied the critical discursive psychology approach (Locke & Budds, 2020) to news articles (N= 127) published in national media from 2019 to 2022. Our preliminary findings raise three main points of consideration. Firstly, the attitudinal shift towards what we call datatime reflects a speeding up of communication within the school ecosystem. This often discursively relegates central school agents – students and teachers – to secondary roles in comparison with their datafied representations. Secondly, whilst promoting a shift towards datatime, inadequate consideration is given to consequences from relevant school agents’ rapidly expanding dataspaces, i.e., the information about individuals to become available for mass-scale processing. Thirdly, the combination of promoting a shift towards datatime and the ensuing expansion of indviduals’ dataspaces, personal learning paths increase the extent to which the meta-agentic ‘school’ follows students around both outside and beyond the school itself. With this purview extension in mind, we conclude that, with respect to personalised learning paths, ‘the school goes to you’.

Davies, H. C., Eynon, R., & Salveson, C. (2021). The Mobilisation of AI in Education: A Bourdieusean Field Analysis. Sociology (Oxford), 55(3), 539-560. doi:10.1177/0038038520967888 Jarke, J., & Breiter, A. (2019). Editorial: the datafication of education. Learning, Media and Technology, 44(1), 1-6. doi:10.1080/17439884.2019.1573833 Locke, A., & Budds, K. (2020). Applying critical discursive psychology to health psychology research: a practical guide. Health psychology & behavioral medicine, 8(1), 234-247. doi:10.1080/21642850.2020.1792307 Luan, H., & Tsai, C.-C. (2021). A Review of Using Machine Learning Approaches for Precision Education. Educational technology & society, 24(1), 250-266. Neumann, E. (2021). Setting by numbers: datafication processes and ability grouping in an English secondary school. Journal of Education Policy, 36(1), 1-23. doi:10.1080/02680939.2019.1646322

There are ranges of natural timescales in education settings, such as semesters, school days, and lessons (Lemke, 2001). In the process of establishing a suitable rhythm of time in institutions, temporal patterns for participation emerge and become known to managers, teachers, and students. Such patterns are utilized by politicians and local authorities to bolster efficiency and standardization (Ball, 2013; Gilbert, 2021). Recent research has demonstrated that digital tools are used to enhance students’ learning through ‘learnification’ programs (Ball & Grimaldi, 2022). Using such programs may involve data surveillance and data use to accelerate the individual students learning progress (Ball & Grimaldi, 2022; Manolev et al., 2019). In the present study, we aim to conceptualize how time management and data use through a learning management system (LMS) play out in the situated practices of teachers, school managers, and administrators. The analysis is inspired by the original Foucauldian concepts of discipline, power, surveillance and governmentality and recent development related to education (Ball, 2013; Ball & Grimaldi, 2022; Foucault, 1979, 2010; Manolev et al., 2019; Peters, 2007). Thus, we analyze how the LMS is enacted in managers’ and teachers’ practices and how the LMS discipline and shapes managers’ and teachers’ time management and data use through its design. Denmark is an exciting context for analysis because using an LMS was made mandatory enactment for all primary and secondary public schools since the school year 2016/17 (KL, 2015). Furthermore, the case is interesting, because policy analysis (Laursen, 2022) has revealed a political vision of data use and time efficiency. The empirical case for the present study draws on 31 interviews with teachers, school managers and administrators. The managers, administrators and teachers were employed at four schools situated in three municipalities. Our main argument is that the combination of the specific enactment and the architecture of surveillance disciplines managers’ and teachers’ practices to be in accordance with the political vision related to the benefits of using the platform. Furthermore, the collection of data offers enhancements of the optimization of individual students’ schooling. The process also automates the teachers’ work in time structures. In that respect, our analysis demonstrates that the discipline of practice underpins standardization, leaving little room for professional judgment. The paper seeks to contribute to the critical educational literature by showing how to think with Foucauldian concepts in relation to empirical data to go beyond the immediate reality in a given data set.

Ball, S. J. (2013). Foucault, power, and education. New York: Routledge. Ball, S. J., & Grimaldi, E. (2022). Neoliberal education and the neoliberal digital classroom. Learning, Media and Technology, 47(2), 288-302. doi:10.1080/17439884.2021.1963980 Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline and punish : the birth of the prison. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Foucault, M. (2010). The government of self and others : lectures at the Collège de France 1982-1983. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Gilbert, C. (2021). Punching the clock: a Foucauldian analysis of teacher time clock use. Critical Studies in Education, 62(4), 439-454. doi:10.1080/17508487.2019.1570531 KL. (2015). Notat: Brugerportalsinitiativet. Retrieved from https://www.kl.dk/media/7122/yvsxdbbzb2wyghupyxvr.pdf Laursen, R. (2022). Struggle as a precondition for changes in educational policy: A Bourdieusian text analysis of a conflict between legislators and the Danish teachers’ union. Journal of educational change. doi:10.1007/s10833-022-09474-2 Lemke, J. L. (2001). The Long and the Short of It: Comments on Multiple Timescale Studies of Human Activity. The Journal of the learning sciences, 10(1-2), 17-26. doi:10.1207/S15327809JLS10-1-2_3 Manolev, J., Sullivan, A., & Slee, R. (2019). The datafication of discipline: ClassDojo, surveillance and a performative classroom culture. Learning, Media and Technology, 44(1), 36-51. doi:10.1080/17439884.2018.1558237 Peters, M. A. (2007). Foucault, biopolitics and the birth of neoliberalism. Critical Studies in Education, 48(2), 165-178. doi:10.1080/17508480701494218