Are digital literacies becoming a ‘soft power’ for educational governance?
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NOTE: Dr. Pangrazio will serve as the opening keynote for the Civics of Technology conference on Thursday, August 3rd. This blog post will familiarize our Civics of Tech community with her critical work.
by Luci Pangrazio
Digital literacies have long been regarded as the key to ‘harnessing the power’, ‘reaping the rewards’, or ‘making the most’ of digital technologies. But more recently they are also heralded as key to addressing complex issues associated with use, such as protecting privacy and reducing the effects of personalized profiling and targeted advertising. In academic circles, educational institutions, and even mainstream media, it is often argued that the issues associated with digital technologies could be avoided if teachers, students, educational administrators, and families just had better digital literacies.
Now while I do in principle agree with this premise – overall the digital literacies of students are lower than we might expect – we really need to think long and hard about what we mean when we use the term ‘digital literacies’. Not only is this necessary to ensure that we are all on the ‘same page’ when we turn these concepts into educational programs, but also so that it does not become co-opted as a tool to help edtech companies increase their power in schools. While this might seem counterintuitive, there are reasons (and evidence) why we should think carefully about when, how and who is using the term ‘digital literacies’.
Software programs impose particular ways of thinking and working. Here we can consider how all the different social actors involved in a chain of production and use – from app designers, producers, and developers through to school administrators, teachers, students and families – are monitored and enabled, controlled and empowered as they design and use these platforms. Digital literacy is often drawn upon as way of theorising learning to use these digital apps and platforms, but increasingly it is becoming a kind of ‘soft power’ of educational governance.
I readily admit this is a rather liberal use of the term ‘soft power’, but it can be usefully employed to describe how teachers and students are enrolled and responsibilised through their use of digital platforms. While this soft power is initiated by tech companies, in our recent research it became clear that school-based actors play a pivotal role in this process. A nexus of actors come together to exert this soft power on teachers and students, including: platform operators, who design the platform with particular practices in mind; school leaders, who are responsible for budgets and procurement of technology; and finally teachers and curriculum leaders facilitating the roll out of platforms in schools.
This was highlighted with the rollout of a software activity monitoring system in one of the schools we were working with during the Data Smart Schools project. The promise of the program was to monitor whether students were staying ‘on-task’ during class time, supposedly without interrupting the workflow of the teachers. Teachers had a dashboard in which each student’s activity could be monitored in real time through a traffic light system – green for websites that were deemed ‘on-task’, amber for websites where the student was maybe ‘on-task’ and red for websites where were thought to be ‘off-task’.
When the program was launched to staff the head of curriculum kept reinforcing that classroom teachers needed to use the program ‘critically’ and not just accept the traffic lights blindly. And that they did, as it often labelled students ‘off-task’ when they were not. Indeed, interviews with teachers quickly revealed the extent of the interpretive work involved in making the system ‘work’, expanding the literacies that were required to use the program effectively. This was a point of contention with some teachers saying they felt it was wrong that they were being used to ‘train the algorithm’. Many also reported that they felt it was highly likely they themselves were being monitored by principals and administrators as they used the platform. Students also felt like their privacy had been breached, with many reporting that they suspected teachers were monitoring them through the platform even when they were at home. Nevertheless, teachers and students had little choice but to be compliant with the program, otherwise they might look like they had something to hide or worse still that they were digitally incompetent.
So what does this tell us about digital literacy and use of contemporary edtech in schools? Being digitally literate with this platform introduced new forms of surveillance, monitoring and accountability that re-shape relations between teachers, students and the school. Teacher’s digital literacies involved using the platform and its data dashboard, as well as reinterpreting student behaviours in light of dashboard visualisations. Student’s digital literacy was not really about using the platform, but it appeared to shift their disposition, so they were more cognisant of what their fellow students and teachers were doing. This worked to extend the reach and effect of the system in the classroom and across the school.
While the processes of how digital literacy becomes a form of non-coercive ‘soft power’ in educational governance is nuanced (and we detail these in length in a chapter coming out next year, see below), the logic of this argument can be boiled down to a rather simple set of steps. If digital literacy is defined and developed in relation to the different platforms and apps in schools, and if the platforms and apps in schools are increasingly designed to monitor and surveil (control) staff and students because that is how learning is evidenced, then digital literacy has become a powerful way of governing both teachers and students in schools.
In the talk I will give next month at the Civics of Technology conference I will explore this example in more detail and argue for the need to reclaim data literacies in a way that is, in part, separate to the educational platforms and apps that are used in schools. Some form of critical distance from the digital technologies in schools is essential for reclaiming what digital literacy is and what it should be in the future. These literacies might be more focused on the ideologies that underpin the platform and the practices and behaviours it inculcates. These literacies are not necessarily gleaned through use, but by stepping back from the interface and considering how the platform operates, who owns it and what behaviours and dispositions it promotes. In the context of software activity monitoring systems, digital literacies are like a lubricant that facilitate particular ways of being and doing with platforms, but reconceptualised critically they can become the friction to help us find the points where we can intercede and resist.
Reference
Pangrazio, L., & Sefton-Green, J. (2024). Digital literacies as a ‘soft power’ of educational governance. In B. Williamson, J. Komljenovic, & K. N. Gulson (Eds.), World Yearbook of Education 2024: Digitalisation of Education in the Era of Algorithms, Automation and Artificial Intelligence: Routledge.