Data Work in Education: Enacting and Negotiating Care and Control in Teachers' Use of Data-Driven Classroom Surveillance Technology

DOI

Today, teachers have been increasingly relying on data-driven technologies to track and monitor student behavior data for classroom management. Drawing insights from interviews with 20 K-8 teachers, this paper unpacks how teachers enacted both care and control through their data work in collecting, interpreting, and using student behavior data. In this process, teachers found themselves subject to surveilling gazes from parents, school administration, and students. As a result, teachers had to manipulate the student behavior data to navigate the balance between presenting a professional image to surveillants and enacting care/control that they deemed appropriate. This paper identifies and unpacks two nuanced forms of teachers' data work that have been understudied in CSCW: 1) data work as recontextualizing meanings and 2) data work as resisting surveillance. We discuss teachers' struggle over (in)visibility and their negotiation of autonomy and subjectivity in these two forms of data work. We highlight the importance of foregrounding and making space for data workers' (in our case, teachers') resistance and negotiation of autonomy in light of datafication.