The Datafication of Knowledge Production and Consequences for the Pursuit of Social Justice

Abstract

Educational institutions shape knowledges that students learn upstream and apply downstream in everyday life, notably in workplaces. Based on a critical synthesis of interdisciplinary literatures, the paper argues that current pedagogy datafies knowledges through the edtech industry, prioritizing skills and circumventing contextual and conceptual knowledges. The pedagogical orientation inculcates technocratic, non-relational thinking, obscures the effects of applications to which workers bring their learned skills, and prefigures deepening social and data injustice in a world beset with intensifying societal tensions and deep inequalities. Although scholarship on current educational trajectories presumes that the new, purportedly ‘disruptive’ digitalized technology has prompted a new pedagogy, I show that the so-called ‘new’ pedagogy has a history that would have predicted the wide-ranging problems evident in non-relational thinking and lack of critique in the data sciences and among its users.