The Double LOOP of Datafication in Education: Knowledge Entangled in the Reproduction of the Vulnerable
The Double LOOP of Datafication in Education: Knowledge Entangled in the Reproduction of the Vulnerable
Tuesday, 8 July 2025: 12:15
Location: FSE001 (Faculty of Education Sciences (FSE))
Oral Presentation
This presentation will explore the productivity of three Chilean socio-economical measurements used in education in the emergency of "the vulnerable." Due to the little attention placed on these measurements, we avowed they directly impacted performance (how families should act to be/not be vulnerable) and representations (who the students and their families are, hence, their potentialities in education).
From an educational justice framework, measurement instruments and the practices around them can be used for unfair acts, privileging those with power or distributing unfairly (Stein, 2016). From a New Materialism framework, this work understands measurements as a phenomenon where a double loop is built in the inseparability of the knowledge that supports the measurements, the measuring instruments, and the knowledge that circulates from them.
The techniques used to explore the measurement instruments included interviews with experts of each measurement. The sample was divided into categories based on the roles of the people interviewed - 10 interviewees are associated with the School Vulnerability Index (SVI), and 13 with people who work or worked in the implementation of SIMCE (Chilean Standardized Assessment of Educational Quality) and the PISA index of economic, social, and cultural status.
The knowledge promoted by these measurements has an inescapable connection between those who design these measurements. As a production of governmental knowledge, vulnerability emerged as something that certain bodies carry, a condition that can be self-regulated. Homo œconomicus emerges as we become data, self-regulating for our maximum work potential, a latent potentiality capable of being represented in numbers. The Data then becomes another Capital to reproduce the social order. Exploring the above allows us to understand why, faced with glaring data on segregation, we have not been able to improve equity in education.
From an educational justice framework, measurement instruments and the practices around them can be used for unfair acts, privileging those with power or distributing unfairly (Stein, 2016). From a New Materialism framework, this work understands measurements as a phenomenon where a double loop is built in the inseparability of the knowledge that supports the measurements, the measuring instruments, and the knowledge that circulates from them.
The techniques used to explore the measurement instruments included interviews with experts of each measurement. The sample was divided into categories based on the roles of the people interviewed - 10 interviewees are associated with the School Vulnerability Index (SVI), and 13 with people who work or worked in the implementation of SIMCE (Chilean Standardized Assessment of Educational Quality) and the PISA index of economic, social, and cultural status.
The knowledge promoted by these measurements has an inescapable connection between those who design these measurements. As a production of governmental knowledge, vulnerability emerged as something that certain bodies carry, a condition that can be self-regulated. Homo œconomicus emerges as we become data, self-regulating for our maximum work potential, a latent potentiality capable of being represented in numbers. The Data then becomes another Capital to reproduce the social order. Exploring the above allows us to understand why, faced with glaring data on segregation, we have not been able to improve equity in education.