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Navigating datascapes: mapping testing practices within and across national and global contexts
Journal article   Peer reviewed

Navigating datascapes: mapping testing practices within and across national and global contexts

Vicente Reyes, Louise Phillips, M. Obaidul Hamid and Ian Hardy
Learning, media and technology, Vol.49(1), pp.109-121
2024
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2023.2218645
Appears in  Recent Faculty of Education Publications

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Abstract

datascapes Educational technology inequality meritocracy testing
We draw upon Appadurai's 'scapes' and Latour's Actor Network Theory (ANT) to interrogate historical and spatial flows in relation to specific testing technologies. We reveal how testing systems, conceptualised as actor-networks, rearticulate colonial legacies of inequality which are intensified by new and emerging technologies. ANT helps trace social and relational interactions occurring in various national and global data spaces, and helps make sense of incessant transformations in education datascapes. Mapping actor-networks, and translations, help name and navigate neoliberal forces acting through colonial legacies via emerging educational datascapes. Our examination shows how educational technologies associated with standardised testing in northern and southern contexts - specifically, England, Singapore, Bangladesh and Australia - exacerbate structural inequalities. We consider how such technologies are actants and reflective of co-existing historical and temporal influences, and global cultural and spatial flows, allowing us to map the multiple ways in which educational technologies are manifested in an emerging education datascape.

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