Governing teachers through datafication: Physical–virtual hybridity and language interoperability in teacher accountability

Abstract

In this paper, we draw on Foucault's and Deleuze's theorisations of discipline and control, respectively, to understand a teacher accountability system in the US state of Texas: the Texas Teacher Evaluation and Support System (hereafter, T-TESS). Specifically, we focus on the interplay of physical and virtual modes of governance – which we develop here as physical– virtual hybridity – and the techniques that make these physical and virtual domains compatible via language interoperability, with T-TESS deployed as a representative empirical case to show how such technologies work to govern teacher subjectivity. First, in-person appraiser meetings and observations re-code teachers’ linguistic behaviours, so their physical bodies and practices can become legible to and interoperable with the hybrid T-TESS system. This avoids any possible syntax errors between the linguistic expression of physical teacher speech and the digital coding language of T-TESS. Second, these digital bodies of data can now be viewed as proxies for the physical teacher body in the classroom, allowing the constant modulation in physical space (teacher bodies) and digital space (bodies of data). This is the physical–virtual hybridity of T-TESS, whereby discipline and control work symbiotically to govern both the physical and the digital expressions of teachers and their teaching. In this way, the disciplining of teachers’ language has profound effects on teachers’ bodies, both corporeal and digital.

Platform Governance and Education Policy: Power and Politics in Emerging Edtech Ecologies

“…At a certain level of saturation, the data dashboards, predictive analytics, and instant assessments that platforms make possible can begin to look less like useful, if imperfect, temperature checks and more like adaptive feedback loops informing us of who we (or others) really are, what we (or they) are really capable of, and what ought to be done in light of these disclosures (cf. Dixon-Román, 2016b; Holloway & Lewis, 2022; Sellar & Thompson, 2016). While our analysis in what follows is not a definitive account of how platforms enact discipline and control in educational systems, it is demonstrative of the slippages that occur between these modes of power as existing governance regimes are platformized.…”

Speculative Capture: Literacy after Platformization

“…With others, we would argue that this “capture” functions as a distinct mode of power that Deleuze (1992) calls control (cf. Holloway & Lewis, 2022; Nichols & Dixon‐Román, 2024). Where disciplinary power, in Foucault's (1995) terms, operates through perceived ongoing surveillance in enclosures (i.e.…”