Datafication of epistemic equality: advancing understandings of teaching excellence beyond benchmarked performativity

ABSTRACT

The paper critiques key international teaching excellence and higher education outcomes frameworks for their lack of attention to epistemic equality. It subsequently argues that adequate ‘datafication’ of these frameworks, to demonstrate the extent to which universities offer teaching experiences which promote intellectual equivalence of all ‘knowers’ could advance present understandings of teaching excellence beyond benchmarked performativity. The paper theorises the philosophical basis of a changed ‘datafication’ process under selected national and supra-national frameworks for measuring teaching excellence at universities and shows, by statistically modelling selected national data, how a ‘metric’ evaluating universities on epistemic equality could work in practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Teaching excellence
• TEF
• AHELO
• CLA
• CALOHEE
• international students
• epistemic equality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Aneta Hayes http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3074-9795