Harvard Educational Review
  1. Summer 2022 Issue »

    Datafication Meets Platformization

    Materializing Data Processes in Teaching and Learning

    Luci Pangrazio, Amy Stornaiuolo, T. Philip Nichols, Antero Garcia, and Thomas M. Philip
    In this contribution to the Platform Studies in Education symposium, Luci Pangrazio, Amy Stornaiuolo, T. Philip Nichols, Antero Garcia, and Thomas M. Philip explore how digital platforms can be used to build knowledge and understanding of datafication processes among teachers and students. The essay responds to the turn toward data-driven teaching and learning in education and argues that digital data is not only generated through national-, state-, and classroom-level assessments but also produced through the platform technologies that increasingly support all kinds of school operations. While much has been written about the promise of such technologies for schools, less is known about the role digital platforms play in constituting this data and how the platforms can be critically engaged to build knowledge and understanding of datafication processes in classrooms. This article explores these dynamics through three vignettes that investigate platforms as an interface for teaching and learning about data. In doing so, the essay speaks back to three interrelated properties of datafication—reduction, abstraction, and individualization— in ways that can be made visible for analysis, critique, and resistance in schools.

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    Luci Pangrazio (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7346-1313) is a senior lecturer and an Alfred Deakin Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Deakin University, Australia. Her research focuses on digital literacies and the changing nature of digital texts and studies personal data and privacy, the politics of digital platforms, and young people’s critical understandings of digital media. Publishing in well-regarded journals in the fields of media and communication, literacies, and education, Pangrazio has established a reputation for developing and promoting critical approaches to digital literacies. She is a coauthor (with Julian Sefton-Green) of Learning to Live with Datafication: Educational Case Studies and Initiatives from Across the World (Routledge, 2022) and the author of Young People’s Literacies in the Digital Age: Continuities, Conflicts and Contradictions in Practice (Routledge, 2019).

    Amy Stornaiuolo (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0633-7117) is an associate professor of literacy education at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research examines people’s digital literacy practices, especially new forms of networked writing and crosscultural collaboration, and involves developing collaborative, long-term partnerships to study how digital technologies are shaping teaching and learning and can be leveraged for educational justice. Her work has appeared in education, media, and literacy journals, including Teachers College Record, Teaching and Teacher Education, Educational Researcher, Journal of Literacy Research, and Learning, Media & Technology.

    T. Philip Nichols (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8648-1276) is an assistant professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at Baylor University. He studies how science and technology condition the ways we practice, teach, and talk about literacy and the wider implications of such relationships for equitable public education. His work appears in academic and practitioner journals, including Teachers College Record, Learning, Media, and Technology, and Phi Delta Kappan, as well as magazines like The Atlantic and Logic. He is the author of Building the Innovation School: Infrastructures for Equity in Today’s Classrooms (Teachers College Press, 2022).

    Antero Garcia (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8417-4723) is an associate professor in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University, where he is also the faculty codirector of the Stanford Teacher Education Program. Prior to completing his PhD, Antero was an English teacher at a public high school in South Central Los Angeles. Based on his research, which explores the possibilities of speculative imagination and healing in education research, Antero codesigned the Critical Design and Gaming School, a public high school in Los Angeles. He has authored or edited more than a dozen books about the possibilities of literacies, play, and civics in transforming schooling in America.

    Thomas M. Philip is a professor in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley, where he also serves as the faculty director of teacher education. His research focuses on how teachers make sense of power and hierarchy in classrooms, schools, and society. He is interested in how teachers act on their sense of agency as they navigate and ultimately transform classrooms and institutions toward more equitable, just, and democratic practices and outcomes. Philip’s recent scholarship explores the possibilities and tensions that emerge with the use of artificial intelligence, data analytics, and digital learning technologies in the classroom, particularly discourses about the promises of these tools with respect to the significance or dispensability of teacher pedagogy.
  2. Summer 2022 Issue

    Abstracts

    Curricular Countermovements
    How White Parents Mounted a Popular Challenge to Ethnic Studies
    Ethan Chang

    Book Notes

    Civic Education in the Age of Mass Migration
    Angela M. Banks

    How the Word Is Passed
    Clint Smith

    Minds Wide Shut
    Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro