Effective or affective schools? Technological and emotional discourses of educational change

Abstract

British schools have been positioned by recent educational policy discourses as sites of innovation and transformation in new technological contexts, but more recent concerns about well-being suggest a more ‘affective turn’ in educational policy-making. This article provides an analysis of a project which has explored the ways in which schools are being re-imagined as spaces of effective technology-centredness, as well as sites for more emotional or affective child-centredness. I argue that far from being mutually exclusive categories, these technology-centred and child-centred orientations are conjoined in what I call ‘high-touch-tech’ discourse where the effective and the affective are mutually constitutive. Finally, I situate these changes as consequent upon ‘emotion management’ in work and social life, and suggest that an implication of the new policy focus on well-being for schools will be their requirement to perform ‘affect management’.

Keywords:

• technology
• media
• emotion
• affect
• high-tech
• high-touch

Acknowledgements

This article is based on research collaboration with John Morgan at the University of Bristol and Sarah Payton at Futurelab. It was funded by Microsoft Partners in Learning.