‘Technology is not created by the sky’: datafication and educator unease

ABSTRACT

The pressure towards digital education is felt everywhere including in places with extreme digital divides. Resource-constrained educational environments are particularly threatened by datification manifest in the dominant business models of surveillance capitalism as there is less room in such contexts to refuse the ‘free’ offerings from big tech companies; it is these very contexts which are most vulnerable. Yet educators within such environments are not mere pawns of circumstance. While the realities of their structural constraints may be invisible or obfuscated, educators are driven by their own ‘concerns’, which in this case pertain to the needs of diverse students in very challenging circumstances as well as to their personal aversion to being monitored. This paper reports on findings from focus groups in a mixture of institutionsin South African education. Archer’s theoretical framework provides a lens to show how, despite very little choice, educators critically reflect on their circumstances expressing discomfort and unease.

KEYWORDS:

• Agency
• inequality
• datafication
• surveillance
• Archer

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The quintile system was developed to redress past inequalities and provide equitable funding to all government schools in South Africa post-apartheid. Schools were divided into 5 categories based on the poverty, unemployment, literacy rate and infrastructure of the surrounding community. Quintile 1 schools, which are ranked as the poorest most impoverished schools, receive the most funding, while quintile 5 schools, ranked as wealthy affluent schools, receive the least amount of state funding per learner. While the system is regarded as flawed because some schools in more affluent areas now serve students who travel from less affluent areas, the quintile system provides an indicator to categorise schools according to the allocation of state funding.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the National Research Foundation (NRF), South Africa, under grant number 129831