Peter W Shay, Precluding Critical Pedagogy: Ethical Democracy and the Tyranny of Functional Metrics, Visible Learning, and Data Surveillance, Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, Volume 21, Number 3, pp. 26-58
http://www.jceps.com/archives/16139
Open access
Abstract
Through a Foucauldian theoretical framework, this article contests the efficacy of the modern assessable and visible learning curriculum, and analyses how the current education episteme disempowers the ethical subjectification of the individual, dislocating the development of aesthetic agency. It articulates a tension between education for the development and enrichment of specific skills and economic growth, which is data-driven, and a more humane, values-driven education. As the vociferous application of, and focus on, standardised tests dominates pedagogical practice and only certain types of empirical knowledge become the accepted norm, then aesthetic agency is subverted. Such data-gazing practices, it is argued, neglect the Foucauldian psychagogical ‘care of the self’ of students through the cultivation of a life practice; instead, as data surveillance pervasively dominates recent pedagogical rationales, students are further alienated from ethical practices of self that lead to an ethically democratic society. Focusing on the Foucauldian concepts of discipline, biopolitics, and biopower, and the way these concepts shape educational practice, some of the studied blindness and lacunae dissimulated in the excitement of measuring the “effectiveness” of education is analysed.
Keywords:
Data-gaze, aesthetic agency, critical education, visible learning ethical democracy
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