Felicitas Macgilchrist
With a background in education, linguistics, and cultural studies, I take a cultural politics approach to media and educational technology.
Current research interests include working with discourse analysis/theory and ethnography to engage with the entanglement of knowledge, schooling, memory, politics, and print and digital media.
I'm also interested in emerging ways of retooling critical analysis. What, for instance, is at stake if we adopt a generative understanding of criticality (Haraway), analyse fissures in the mediascape (Rodriguez), struggles over hegemony (Laclau/Mouffe), semiotic practices as design (Kress), the verification of equality (Ranciére) or the explosive potential of plasticity (Malabou)?
My main research projects currently involve media practices in schools, primarily in Germany and the USA, but also in German Schools Abroad (Deutsche Auslandsschulen) worldwide. We are asking what sorts of technologies are taken up and used? What stops teachers, students or parents from wanting digital technology in schools? Who sees edtech as a solution to problems and where/how are they enthusiastically implemented? How do digital practices change what "counts" as education, or what is seen as valuable and desirable ways of knowing and being?
A different set of projects explore the practices of producing and using educational media such as textbooks, OER and other curricular materials for history education. I follow text trajectories and lines of flight, as "texts" are taken up, adapted and interrupted across time and space. The focus is on curriculum and memory practices in heterogeneous societies; in particular on contested topics such as democracy, colonialism, progress and modernisation.
Current research interests include working with discourse analysis/theory and ethnography to engage with the entanglement of knowledge, schooling, memory, politics, and print and digital media.
I'm also interested in emerging ways of retooling critical analysis. What, for instance, is at stake if we adopt a generative understanding of criticality (Haraway), analyse fissures in the mediascape (Rodriguez), struggles over hegemony (Laclau/Mouffe), semiotic practices as design (Kress), the verification of equality (Ranciére) or the explosive potential of plasticity (Malabou)?
My main research projects currently involve media practices in schools, primarily in Germany and the USA, but also in German Schools Abroad (Deutsche Auslandsschulen) worldwide. We are asking what sorts of technologies are taken up and used? What stops teachers, students or parents from wanting digital technology in schools? Who sees edtech as a solution to problems and where/how are they enthusiastically implemented? How do digital practices change what "counts" as education, or what is seen as valuable and desirable ways of knowing and being?
A different set of projects explore the practices of producing and using educational media such as textbooks, OER and other curricular materials for history education. I follow text trajectories and lines of flight, as "texts" are taken up, adapted and interrupted across time and space. The focus is on curriculum and memory practices in heterogeneous societies; in particular on contested topics such as democracy, colonialism, progress and modernisation.
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Papers by Felicitas Macgilchrist
The talk started something like this:
In the good old days (about 2012), educational technologists openly enjoyed the prospect of accruing masses of data about school students. In one talk, Jose Ferreira, then CEO of the major adaptive learning platform Knewton, almost rubs his hands in glee as he describes how much data his company collects: Education today, he says, is "the world's most data-minable industry by far, and it's not even close. [...] Netflix and Amazon get in the 1s of data points per user per day. Google and Facebook get in the 10s of data points per user per day. [...] Knewton today gets 5-10 million actionable data points per student per day."
Although the vast majority of research on data and educational technology focuses on improving this data mining, a body of critical social analysis is emerging. Datafication, they argue, brings a new logistics of investment into everyday school practice; thinking and knowledge are being replaced by continual monitoring and training (Thompson and Cook 2016). Digital data prefigures techniques of digital educational governance (Selwyn 2016, Williamson 2016). Individualistic, competitive future-subjects are addressed and shaped through personalized learning environments (Macgilchrist 2018). As “educational decisions” are transferred from schools and teachers to the private sector, public education is being corporatized and “Netflixed” (Roberts-Mahoney, Means, and Garrison 2016). Learning analytics’ exploitation of big data raises “moral questions about the nature of what is measurable in education” (Lundie 2017), and how all these changes are tied up with social engineering.
However much I agree with this critique, by orienting to such large-scale, “big”, social transformations, these studies remain within the logic of big data. By analysing at the “scale” of humanity, they are operating at the same scale as the technology firms they critique (who describe “humanity” as their market). Part of this scale means – both for companies working with data and for critical analyses of data practices – deleting the anomalous “outliers”.
So, in this paper, I draw on Tricia Wang’s (2013) notion of “thick data” to step outside the logic of big data. Thick data refers to an ethnographic sensibility which looks closely at a small scale and at the anomalies. Wang argues that we need not (only) broad analysis of how "big data" or datafication saying something about our current historical moment, but (also) thick analyses of the situated specificities of particular kinds of big data practices (cf. Flyverbom/Madsen 2015).
The particular data practices I want to look at today are educational data practices, and more specifically, the strength of the non-profit sector in educational technology. I’m going to suggest that this thick data turns upside down a few broad-scale recent arguments about how datafication is ordering our lives.
The following draws on interviews with CEOs and CTOs in edtech firms here in the US, both for-profit and non-profit; my focus was on companies using adaptive learning analytics to make personalized resources for use in schools. The overarching question is how these companies are talking about their products and the data they generate; and thus how these priorities for their data practices are shaping particular kinds of social-political orders.
German: Durch Veränderungen in der Bildungsmedienproduktion (Verfahrenskontrolle, Unternehmenskonzentration, Dezentralisierung) verstärkt sich, so die These, die Rolle der Ökonomisierung in der Bereitstellung von Wissensangeboten für die Schule. Am Beispiel der Produktion eines Schulbuchs wird herausgearbeitet, wie diese Wissensangebote jedoch hoch ambivalent sein können: Das Leitbild des unternehmerischen Selbst wird konstruiert, aber zugleich von einem gesellschaftskritischen Subjektbild „unterbrochen“.
Schlüsselwörter: Bildungsmedien, Schulbuchproduktion, Wissen, Ökonomisierung, Ethnografie, Diskurs
Herausgeber_innen: Elina Marmer, Papa Sow;
weitere Autor_innen: Daniel Bendix, Danae Christodoulou, Laura Digoh, Catrin Ehlen, Nadine Golly, Saraya Gomis, Modupe Laja, Felicitas Macgilchrist, Regina Richter, Astride Velho, Aram Ziai & Autor_innenkollektiv Rassismuskritischer Leitfaden
Educational publishers have to date been seen as relatively autonomous organization which are driven primarily by economic and politically conservative interests. To develop a more complex understanding of educational publishing, this paper draws on ethnographic observations at leading German educational publishing houses, and on the concepts of relevancy spaces and selection horizons. It thus identifies a range of somewhat contradictory aims of, and members in, the production process. Two case studies from the observations of textbook production – one on gender and one on postcolonial knowledge – enable the paper to explore in more depth how educational publishing produces, cites and transforms discourse. The paper argues that educational publishers can be understood as organizations of discourse production, in which official (school) knowledge is often reproduced and stabilized but also, occasionally, contested and destabilized.
(We haven't uploaded the paper to academia.edu, because it is available open access here: http://repository.gei.de/handle/11428/211)
It begins:
Textbooks, according to Ludwig Fleck (1935/80) and Thomas Kuhn (1962/96) will inevitably produce stable versions of dominant knowledge. Perhaps this is why the US State Department employs people to monitor other countries’ textbooks, “in an effort to understand better how their people think and what their governments want them to think” (The Economist, 2012). As a teenager, Bill Bryson suspected there was “a mystifying universal conspiracy among textbook authors to make certain the material they dealt with never strayed too near the realm of the mildly interesting” (Bryson, 2003: 22). At the same time, school textbooks have been the site of intense controversies. In 2012, ...
Keywords: globalisation, subject, Holocaust education, discourse, ethnography, poststructuralism
The talk started something like this:
In the good old days (about 2012), educational technologists openly enjoyed the prospect of accruing masses of data about school students. In one talk, Jose Ferreira, then CEO of the major adaptive learning platform Knewton, almost rubs his hands in glee as he describes how much data his company collects: Education today, he says, is "the world's most data-minable industry by far, and it's not even close. [...] Netflix and Amazon get in the 1s of data points per user per day. Google and Facebook get in the 10s of data points per user per day. [...] Knewton today gets 5-10 million actionable data points per student per day."
Although the vast majority of research on data and educational technology focuses on improving this data mining, a body of critical social analysis is emerging. Datafication, they argue, brings a new logistics of investment into everyday school practice; thinking and knowledge are being replaced by continual monitoring and training (Thompson and Cook 2016). Digital data prefigures techniques of digital educational governance (Selwyn 2016, Williamson 2016). Individualistic, competitive future-subjects are addressed and shaped through personalized learning environments (Macgilchrist 2018). As “educational decisions” are transferred from schools and teachers to the private sector, public education is being corporatized and “Netflixed” (Roberts-Mahoney, Means, and Garrison 2016). Learning analytics’ exploitation of big data raises “moral questions about the nature of what is measurable in education” (Lundie 2017), and how all these changes are tied up with social engineering.
However much I agree with this critique, by orienting to such large-scale, “big”, social transformations, these studies remain within the logic of big data. By analysing at the “scale” of humanity, they are operating at the same scale as the technology firms they critique (who describe “humanity” as their market). Part of this scale means – both for companies working with data and for critical analyses of data practices – deleting the anomalous “outliers”.
So, in this paper, I draw on Tricia Wang’s (2013) notion of “thick data” to step outside the logic of big data. Thick data refers to an ethnographic sensibility which looks closely at a small scale and at the anomalies. Wang argues that we need not (only) broad analysis of how "big data" or datafication saying something about our current historical moment, but (also) thick analyses of the situated specificities of particular kinds of big data practices (cf. Flyverbom/Madsen 2015).
The particular data practices I want to look at today are educational data practices, and more specifically, the strength of the non-profit sector in educational technology. I’m going to suggest that this thick data turns upside down a few broad-scale recent arguments about how datafication is ordering our lives.
The following draws on interviews with CEOs and CTOs in edtech firms here in the US, both for-profit and non-profit; my focus was on companies using adaptive learning analytics to make personalized resources for use in schools. The overarching question is how these companies are talking about their products and the data they generate; and thus how these priorities for their data practices are shaping particular kinds of social-political orders.
German: Durch Veränderungen in der Bildungsmedienproduktion (Verfahrenskontrolle, Unternehmenskonzentration, Dezentralisierung) verstärkt sich, so die These, die Rolle der Ökonomisierung in der Bereitstellung von Wissensangeboten für die Schule. Am Beispiel der Produktion eines Schulbuchs wird herausgearbeitet, wie diese Wissensangebote jedoch hoch ambivalent sein können: Das Leitbild des unternehmerischen Selbst wird konstruiert, aber zugleich von einem gesellschaftskritischen Subjektbild „unterbrochen“.
Schlüsselwörter: Bildungsmedien, Schulbuchproduktion, Wissen, Ökonomisierung, Ethnografie, Diskurs
Herausgeber_innen: Elina Marmer, Papa Sow;
weitere Autor_innen: Daniel Bendix, Danae Christodoulou, Laura Digoh, Catrin Ehlen, Nadine Golly, Saraya Gomis, Modupe Laja, Felicitas Macgilchrist, Regina Richter, Astride Velho, Aram Ziai & Autor_innenkollektiv Rassismuskritischer Leitfaden
Educational publishers have to date been seen as relatively autonomous organization which are driven primarily by economic and politically conservative interests. To develop a more complex understanding of educational publishing, this paper draws on ethnographic observations at leading German educational publishing houses, and on the concepts of relevancy spaces and selection horizons. It thus identifies a range of somewhat contradictory aims of, and members in, the production process. Two case studies from the observations of textbook production – one on gender and one on postcolonial knowledge – enable the paper to explore in more depth how educational publishing produces, cites and transforms discourse. The paper argues that educational publishers can be understood as organizations of discourse production, in which official (school) knowledge is often reproduced and stabilized but also, occasionally, contested and destabilized.
(We haven't uploaded the paper to academia.edu, because it is available open access here: http://repository.gei.de/handle/11428/211)
It begins:
Textbooks, according to Ludwig Fleck (1935/80) and Thomas Kuhn (1962/96) will inevitably produce stable versions of dominant knowledge. Perhaps this is why the US State Department employs people to monitor other countries’ textbooks, “in an effort to understand better how their people think and what their governments want them to think” (The Economist, 2012). As a teenager, Bill Bryson suspected there was “a mystifying universal conspiracy among textbook authors to make certain the material they dealt with never strayed too near the realm of the mildly interesting” (Bryson, 2003: 22). At the same time, school textbooks have been the site of intense controversies. In 2012, ...
Keywords: globalisation, subject, Holocaust education, discourse, ethnography, poststructuralism
Das zweibändige Handbuch zur interdisziplinären Diskursforschung gibt einen systematischen und umfassenden Überblick über das neue Feld der Diskursforschung. Der erste Band versammelt nationale und internationale Tendenzen, Entwicklungen und Fragen der Diskursforschung. Der zweite Band stellt wichtige diskursanalytische Methoden am Beispiel des Diskurses über die neoliberalen Hochschulreformen vor.
Mit seinem Schwerpunkt auf theoretischen Modellen und Strategien der diskursanalytischen Forschungspraxis im disziplinären und interdisziplinären Kontext richtet sich dieses Referenzwerk der Gruppe DiskursNetz an forschungsorientierte Studierende und alle Diskursforschenden, die sich für den Zusammenhang von Sprache und Gesellschaft interessieren.
Begins with:
Contemporary education is, according to many observers, experiencing a 'digital revolution': New digital tools and practices are - in this view - leading to radical shifts in how education unfolds. Today's schools have access to a wide range of multimedia educational technologies, including interactive whiteboards, tablets, apps, laptops, and assessment software. Educational policy is keen to support digital innovation in schools. Recent initiatives include the German Federal Government's 'Digital Agenda', the European Union's 'Opening Up Education', and the 'Educational Offensive for the Digital Knowledge Society' launched by Germany's Federal Ministry of Education and Research in late 2016. 'Digital literacy' is a key issue, with fiery arguments unfolding over precisely which competences young people need in the twenty-first century. Indeed, schools that are beginning
to introduce digital tools often see heated exchanges at teachers' meetings or parents' evenings. Some teachers and parents enthusiastically embrace the possibilities they see in networked, collaborative digital educational media; others show more resistance, demanding to know whether the school seriously understands
how to improve teaching and learning with digital tools or whether it is simply seduced by shiny new toys.
In the early years of debates on digital education, there was little empirical evidence to support either side of this argument. More recently, an emerging body of research has begun to investigate...
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Ich freue mich, dass ich die schöne Aufgabe übernehmen darf, Tag 1 zu reflektieren. Ich sehe meine Aufgabe hier als die Thesen und Debatten von den verschiedenen Vorträgen und Kontexten gestern für die Personen, die heute neu zugekommen sind, zusammenzufassen; und auch einige der Aspekte, die zu Kontroversen geführt haben, hervorzuheben.
Zusammenfassung
Also erst eine kurze Zusammenfassung der Thesen der drei Hauptvorträge – dies nur sehr kurz und zugespitzt, weil es übergreifende Thematiken gab, die für alle Vortragenden relevant waren. Darauf möchte ich danach näher eingehen.
Martin Lücke hat sich für eine „inklusive Erinnerungskultur“ stark gemacht, statt einer „integrativen“ Erinnerungskultur. Inklusiv bezeichnet er als...