Session Information
23 SES 12 B, To See is to Believe? The Shifting Constitution of Evidence in Educational Research, Policy and Practice
Symposium
Contribution
Recently, educational policy, debates over the politics of knowledge “versus” wisdom, and local research into classroom practice have had to engage a fast moving yet relatively glossed phenomenon: the demand for “evidence” in particular forms. A variety of terms have clustered that point to the stakes around such “truth games”: Cognates such as evidence, proof, data, information, standards, accountability and knowledge circulate in a range of international sites.
This symposium examines the more recent clustering of terminologies and the need for specificity and nuance in regard to context-sensitive vocabularies and their implications. Rather than reduce the advent of such clusters to the effects of neoliberalism, we draw upon philosophical and historical analyses to elaborate the cross-cultural and cross-temporal differences that have emerged in different geopolitical regions, etymologies, and discursive-linguistic heritages. We examine what constitutes or is given as evidence in educational research, policy, and practice, how and why that changes, and the contemporary political implications.
Theoretical Framework: we turn to post-continental frameworks that have engaged with such terminologies: questions of essentialism, of non-representational theory, of flows and enunciations, empiricism and post-empiricism, of technovisuality and the subject, and of the effects of power (Deleuze, 2004; Foucault, 2005; Grace, 2014; Laruelle, 1996/2013; Mullarkey, 2007).
A Genealogy of “Data”: Strategies of Evidence in Mindfulness and Education Discourse
1) What are the genealogical trajectories through which strategies of evidence-as-data have been naturalized as knowledge-production and imported into policy and school practice?
After elaborating the etymological contexts surrounding data and evidence, the paper identifies two dominant traditions of ‘evidence’ that are drawn together in mindfulness discourses in education. These have typically been considered separate epistemological traditions, the ‘hard’ and the ‘soft’ forms of producing ‘data’ in third- and first-person perspectives. We trace their merger into the assumptions, vocabularies and visual technologies of neuroscience and their appropriation in educational sites.
Big Data <-> Big Information
2) How is Big Data making ‘sense’ in education contexts today?
Data infrastructure and ontologies constitute the apparatus that enables ‘datafication’: the translation of qualitative phenomenon into a quantitative data format that is suitable for subsequent processing by computer systems. This datafication is particularly important as education systems and institutions move towards Big Data analysis and prediction. What is often perceived as data that are collected, mined, patterned and used to predict/program flows, is better understood as information. This distinction is crucial because it forces us to see that what is perceived as ‘ontologically raw’ is in fact the opposite, a very human/subjective rendering of the world through those apparatuses that record particular images of a world. The datafication of education involves each apparatus of capture and coding that gives data form as information and that makes it better to talk about Big Information than Big Data.
Brazilian National Common Curricular Base as an Enunciation: Reinforcing Scientific Discourses for the Education Field?
3) How does the analysis of policy as a language artifact of ‘new’ reality constructions demonstrate relationships between curricular proposals and the creation of widespread truth meanings?
After a few decades in which curriculum theory and organization in Brazilian schools were predominantly characterized in the direction of diversity, differences and singularities (Moreira, 2009), last year’s debates were marked by appeals to a common national basis. The official documents of the Brazilian National Common Curricular Base are the result of perspectives that attribute the status of science to the field of education – and its association with reality and truth. This paper analyzes these policies based on categories such as discourse and enunciation (Pinar, 2011), prominent in current international theories and in productive dialogue with the philosophy of Deleuze.
References
Deleuze, Gilles. Logic of Sense. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2004. Foucault, M. (2005). Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France 1981—1982. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Grace, Helen (2014) Culture, Aesthetics and Affect in Ubiquitous Media: The Prosaic Image. New York: Routledge. Laruelle, F. 1196/2013) Principles of Non-philosophy. Translated by Nikola Rubczak & Anthony Paul Smith. London: Bloomsbury. Mullarkey, J. (2006). Post-Continental Philosophy: An Outline. London: Continuum.
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