Today, teachers have been increasingly relying on data-driven technologies to track and monitor student behavior data for classroom management. Drawing insights from interviews with 20 K--8 teachers, in this paper we unpack how teachers enacted both care and control through their data work in collecting, interpreting, and using student behavior data. In this process, teachers found themselves subject to surveilling gazes from parents, school administrators, and students. As a result, teachers had to manipulate the student behavior data to navigate the balance between presenting a professional image to surveillants and enacting care/control that they deemed appropriate. In this paper we locate two nuanced forms of teachers' data work that have been under-studied in CSCW: (1) data work as recontextualizing meanings and (2) data work as resisting surveillance. We discuss teachers' struggle over (in)visibility and their negotiation of autonomy and subjectivity in these two forms of data work. We highlight the importance of foregrounding and making space for informal data workers' (in our case, teachers') resistance and negotiation of autonomy in light of datafication.
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This content will become publicly available on June 12, 2024
Finding Life in Data: Datafication and Enlivening Data towards Justice-oriented ends.
We investigate the process of “enlivening” data and what it entails for youth vis-à-vis its relations, mechanisms, and purposes. Using vignettes, we explore enlivening data and datafication as nested concepts. While enlivening data gives learners agency to take action, datafication affords new ways to collect, analyze and present data about oneself. Educators must be attuned to the socio-political historical aspects of learners’ experiences and as informed, be willing to make changes to their shared environments.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2055166
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10431694
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- International Conferences of the Learning Sciences
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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