Re-presentations and im-possibilities: the politics of dashboard data

Abstract

Data infrastructures exist in a variety of formats. This article draws on the insights of senior personnel involved in developing a new data dashboard in one state jurisdiction in Australia. While literature on dashboards often focuses on the teachers and learners influenced by them, there is less attention to those involved in their development and the politics that attend their work. While the dashboard initiative holds out the hope of enabling more educationally oriented benefits, such as assisting with cross-school moderation of students’ learning in various ‘like-schools’ in a local region/state, there was also recognition by some involved in the development process that much of the discourse around the dashboard revolved around broader systemic concerns about who should have access to which kinds of data, and that such data were ‘re-presentations’ of actual instances of student learning which limited understanding of what could actually be done to enhance students’ learning. Processes of monitoring and temporal anomalies were key to sometimes problematic governance processes associated with developing the dashboard, eliciting various affective responses amongst different actors involved in its development.