Research project Ethics and Values in educational data-driven practices
This project explores the growing datafication of the education sector in the Nordic countries. Our exploration is concretized through a workshop series. We focus on dimensions of ethics and values embedded in emerging sociotechnical imaginaries of education and learning.
Emergent data-driven practices and the increasing datafication of the education sector contribute to transforming educational imaginaries of modernity, re-position the power of digitalization and automation, and changing ethics and values.
Lately, values embedded in the education sector’s growing datafication have been center-staged in scholarly conversations. These conversations are often related to educational systems that differ from those in the Nordic countries, such as in the USA, Australia, China and the UK. To remediate the knowledge gap regarding datafication in the Nordics, this project explores the growing datafication of the education sector through critical, creative, and proactive approaches with an outlook from the Nordic countries.
Our exploration is concretized through a workshop series that focuses on dimensions of ethics and values embedded in emerging sociotechnical imaginaries of education and learning; that is discourses and actions toward data-driven education.
The full title of this project is “Ethics and Values in educational data-driven practices: Conceptual, Methodological and Pragmatic Explorations”.
Project description
The project consists of three exploratory workshops.
1. The first workshop on concepts aims to engage critically with datafication as a social and cultural phenomenon. It seeks to provide a set of concepts to deconstruct current public discourses on future education related to AI and big data and their emerging sociotechnical imaginaries. In short, we are interested in: Which concepts and notions support nuanced discussions about values reflected in emerging educational sociotechnical imaginaries?
More info on the workshop webpage
2. The second workshop on interventions focuses on collecting narratives portraying sociotechnical imaginaries by amateur and expert writers with different backgrounds and professional profiles at the Jönköping’s Literary Festival 2022. Such imaginaries will contribute to the creation of alternative visions of learning and education in 2032. The question guiding this workshop is: How do we resist and/or promote narratives about the future of education in the Nordic countries? (For the power of literary imaginaries, see, for example, Lindberg, 2016).
More info on the workshop webpage
3. The third workshop explores novel methods, beyond survey and case studies methodologies, by building on the concepts explored in the first workshop and the sociotechnical imaginaries fabricated in the Jönköping’s Literary Festival 2022. This workshop focuses on: Which non-paradigmatic methods help identify, reflect and challenge values and ethical concerns in emerging sociotechnical imaginaries?
Via these workshops, we are establishing a network of researchers and practitioners (young researchers, pre-and in-service educators, and designers), as well as cultural actors (i.e., museums, libraries, knowledge festivals), and engage research with public discourses about the opportunities and challenges of emerging data-driven practices in Nordic Education.
Project members
Project managers
Teresa Cerratto-Pargman
Professor
Members
Ylva Lindberg
More about this project
The emergence of data-driven practices (Cerratto Pargman & McGrath, 2021) and the increasing datafication of the education sector (Williamson, 2017) contribute to new visions of proposed technical solutions to educational problems that make specific discourses and actions (social imaginaries) appear both natural and inevitable (Määttä et al., 2020; Rahm, 2019). In particular, the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) combined with the ongoing pandemic’s social restrictions are renewing educational imaginaries of modernity and the power of digitalization and automation in education (Jasanoff & Kim, 2015).
However, claims about data-driven practices contributing to ensuring the quality and value of the learning experience raise a series of questions that warrant ethical considerations (Slade & Prinsloo, 2013). Concerns have arisen in connection with inequalities, discrimination, algorithmic authority, accountability, and student well-being, as well as advisors’ moral discomfort and violation of a professional, ethical code (Jones, 2019). These issues are all the more pressing in light of recent protests from students in English cities, bearing placards reading “The algorithm stole my future” and “Fuck the algorithm” due to the use of predictive analytics in calculating grades in the so-called A-level scandal (The Guardian, 2020).
In this context, we argue that educational sciences need to pay attention to the values and the ethics associated with emerging sociotechnical imaginaries. Surprisingly, such discussions have been abbreviated, conducted in silos (Cerratto Pargman & McGrath, 2021), and predominantly theoretical (Adejo & Sclater, 2017). The educational research community has yet to provide an understanding of how such aspects are considered in educational sociotechnical imaginaries related to data-driven practices (cf. Slade and Prinsloo, 2013; Daniel, 2019).
With the COVID-19 virus outbreak, remote learning has become more essential than ever. This situation has accelerated the digitalization of educational practices opening questions not only about the types of data collected but, most importantly, about the impact of the growing datafication trend on educational practices and culture. In this context, various social imaginaries reflecting the envisioned role of novel technologies in education are in the making (Juhl & Buch, 2018). In these circumstances, educational actors and research communities are voicing different values and ethical considerations about the future of education within a datafication paradigm (Cerratto Pargman & Jahnke, 2019). Such plurality of voices and interests causes conceptual and terminological confusion and misunderstandings.
The proposed workshops will open a discussion on such differences and contribute to a humanistic-centered discourse in education. Besides, mainstream research methods applied to identify values and ethical considerations are presently misaligned with the unprecedented pace of technological development and societal transformation. The proposed workshops will produce essential contributions to research on the values and ethics inherent to imaginaries bound to data-driven education in the Nordic countries.
References
Adejo, O., & Connolly, T. (2017). Learning analytics in a shared-network educational environment: Ethical issues and countermeasures. International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications, 8(4), 22–29.
Cerratto Pargman, T. C., & McGrath, C. (2021). Mapping the terrain of ethics in learning analytics: A systematic literature review of empirical research. Journal of Learning Analytics, 1–17.
Cerratto Pargman, T. C., & Jahnke, I. (Eds.). (2019). Emergent practices and material conditions in learning and teaching with technologies. Cham, Switzerland: Springer.
Daniel, B. K. (2019). Big data and data science: A critical review of issues for educational research. British Journal of Educational Technology, 50(1), 101–113
Jasanoff, S. & Kim, S.H. (2015) Dreamscapes of Modernity. Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power, Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Juhl, J. & Buch, A. (2018): Transforming Academia: The Role of Education, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 1–12.
Jones, K. M. (2019a). Advising the whole student: eAdvising analytics and the contextual suppression of advisor values. Education and Information Technologies, 24(1), 437–458
Lindberg, Y. (2016). La litterature francophone de l’Afrique subsaharienne en Suède: Les Femmes font place à la honte. Parallèles, 28(1), 64–82. doi:10.17462/para.2016.01.04.
Määttä, J., Bodén, D., Godhe, M. (2020). Ett samtal om AI och science fiction. In: AI, robotar och föreställningar om morgondagens arbetsliv, Daniel Bodén; Michael Godhe (editor), Lund: Nordic Academic Press. 219–241
Rahm, L. (2019). Educational imaginaries: a genealogy of the digital citizen (Vol. 214). Linköping University Electronic Press.
Ross, J. (2017) Speculative method in digital education research. Learning, Media and Technology, 42:2, 214–229, DOI: 10.1080/17439884.2016.1160927 Siemens & Long, (2011)
Selwyn, N., Pangrazio, L., Nemorin, S., & Perrotta, C. (2020). What might the school of 2030 be like? An exercise in social science fiction. Learning, Media and Technology, 45(1), 90–106.
Slade, S., & Prinsloo, P. (2013). Learning analytics: Ethical issues and dilemmas. American Behavioral Scientist, 57(10), 1510–1529.
Williamson, B. (2017). Big data in education: The digital future of learning, policy and practice. Sage.
Williamson, B. (2018). Assessment Imaginaries: Methodological Challenges of Future Assessment Machines. In B. Maddox (Ed.), International Large-Scale Assessments in Education: Insider Research Perspectives (1st ed.). Bloomsbury.