Analogue Automation: exploring data epistemologies in school

This research is about the role of data in an English secondary school. The work illustrates how a focus on data enacts a specific form of pedagogy and produces teachers and students as "data subjects".

Data are central to how education is understood and governed, yet there remain relatively few empirical studies of data-driven schooling in real-world contexts. This research addresses such a paucity by contributing an in-depth ethnographic study of data practices in an English secondary school. The research describes how the school was perceived as a hybrid system in which manual, machine-like practices interoperated with technical systems and interwove with messy school life. The observation led to the development of "analogue automation" as a novel conceptual framework for approaching and theorising education data practices.

Analogue automation incorporates a sociomaterial perspective and employs ethnographic and genealogical methods to reconnect contemporary school data activities to their embodied, material contexts and disjointed histories. The empirical work concentrates on three main areas of data activity, and begins with school attendance monitoring. Attention is then drawn to the school's material artefacts and technical systems that served to "format" teachers and students and to facilitate data-driven methods of analysis and self-analysis. Thirdly, the research examines exercise book stickers to uncover the social life of their datapoints and probe the systems of thought that held them firm in school.

The research demonstrates multiple occasions when data-driven logics were subverted or reinterpreted to allow caring relations to emerge and flourish. The thesis argues that an intense focus on data enacts an impoverished education whilst priming the domain for increasing amounts of automation.

At a moment when so-called generative AI systems are fast gaining unchecked entry into school, the research affords insights into processes not yet fully black-boxed into proprietary systems in order to locate sites of difficulty and harm. Analogue automation offers an original and timely framework for conceptualising, theorising, and empirically studying data practices in education.