Abstract
Schools are increasingly data-driven environments, as digital platforms generate metrics about students’ learning, engagement, well-being, etc. While this so-called datafication of education is often justified through efficiency or personalization, it introduces educational logics that can undermine teachers’ agency and position students primarily as data sources rather than as informed participants in data-driven educational processes. Educational data is therefore not only a technical issue but also a socio-political and ethical one, as it shapes what counts as meaningful educational knowledge, for whom such knowledge is produced, and how pedagogical encounters are organized. Data literacy has been proposed as one response to emerging challenges, but its pedagogical realization has been lacking.
We present findings from the Movement for Data Literacy (MODALITY) project, drawing on ethnographic studies conducted in Finnish primary and lower-secondary education and on sustained researcher-teacher partnerships. Across cases in Grades 4, 5, and 8, we describe how routine classroom data practices were pedagogically redesigned to support teachers’ and students’ increased awareness of educational data practices, including how data is and can be produced, interpreted, and acted upon in everyday schooling. Our vision is to conceptualize data literacy as a contextual and relational practice that makes educational data visible, discussable, and potentially even contestable.
Janne Fagerlund
Dr. Janne Fagerlund works as a postdoctoral researcher in the MODALITY research project at the Teacher Education Department of the Faculty of Education and Psychology at the University of Jyväskylä. He also acts as a regional coordinator for the national Innokas network (www.innokas.fi/en). His research focuses on education related to programming, computational thinking, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and digital data, which he considers relevant for both problem-solving and literacy.
Lauri Palsa
Dr. Lauri Palsa is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Teacher Education, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Currently his research themes focus on datafication and emerging and contextualised literacies, such as data literacy, media literacy and multiliteracies, both within and outside formal education. He is interested in relationship between technology and ecological sustainability. Palsa is also the chairperson of the Finnish Society on Media Education.
Pekka Mertala
Dr. Pekka Mertala works as an associate professor (multiliteracy and digital literacies) at the Teacher Education Department of the Faculty of Education and Psychology at the University of Jyväskylä. He leads the Education, Texts and Technologies research group as well as works within the LearnDigi – Digitalization in and for learning and interaction research profiling area. His key research themes include: critical educational technology research, especially how technology and education are discussed; datafication and data literacy in school (Modality project) and leisure time (Running with Data project); and children’s perceptions of technology and media (e.g., Innokas Artificial Intelligence projects).