Presenting "Digital instruments and education governance: The case of TeacherTapp"

I am happy to share that I have just begun a new research project to study digital education and education governance by researching the app TeacherTapp

Overview of the study

The project "Digital instruments and education governance: The case of TeacherTapp" was begun at the University of Louvain in October 2021 by myself and professors Virginie März, and Xavier Dumay. It is a three year study funded by the Francophone research council of Belgium (FNRS).

The goal of the research is to understand how new technologies reshape education discourse, while the focus of the project is on the rise of personal digital device centred technologies (e.g. Smart-phone application) and their emerging role in shaping education discourse and reconfiguring the education policy field. The project follows the growing body of scholarly work that studies the rising power of digital data instruments in education, public policy, and governance. We make use of an interdisciplinary framework, combining and integrating neo-institutionalism (NI) with science and technology studies (STS).

From this theoretical starting point, the study will investigate the cycle of institutionalization of the phone-App “TeacherTapp” (see below) in England and in Belgium, composed of three steps: the initial legitimation phase corresponding to the introduction of the App in the policy field (Study 1), the knowledge phase production looking into the concrete functioning of the App through digital ethnography (Study 2), and the field reconfiguration phase (Study 3). Through this methodological approach, with an emphasis on conducting robust empirical observations of what TeacherTapp does and is and constructing innovative interdisciplinary insights, the project will make fundamental contribution to the theorization of institutional change in education going through the digitalization of knowledge, and the interactions between social fields and new sociomaterialities.

The full research proposal can be accessed here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/354531833_Digital_instruments_and_education_governance_The_case_of_TeacherTapp

TeacherTapp - an overview

TeacherTapp is a phone application that, according to the developers of the app, has the dual aim of providing a voice to teachers by surveying them on a daily basis and to provide informal professional development by providing a daily short blog-post to read.

The survey consists of 3-5 questions that range from what national half-term arrangement they would prefer to what e-mail provider the teachers use. These questions are in England either formulated by the TeacherTapp management or by private businesses or researchers who pay to have their questions asked and analysed. In Flanders on the other hand the app is not for profit and is fully funded by the Aterveldehoegschool - questions here are not sponsored.

In terms of numbers, the daily respondents in October 2021 ranged from just above 7000 to around 8000 in England. The results are disseminated on the app and on Twitter, where TeacherTapp in England has 35000 followers at present. The flemish account has 661 followers at the time of writing, and a corresponding presence on Facebook.

The daily read is in the form of a blog-post, mostly external to TeacherTapp, but some blogs (5 out of 21 between the 2 and 27th of October 2021) are written by the TeacherTapp staff. The external blogs are often short 3-5 minute reads and take the form of «tips and tricks»; they formulate a quick and catchy problem (e.g., the breakdown of relationships) followed by a simple solution (e.g., staying on your side of the net).

The app was developed initially in 2017 by Becky Allen a researcher at the Univ of Oxford and Institute of Education and founder of education data-lab (a company that analyses large-scale data in education), Laura McInerney a journalist (Schoolsweek, The Guardian) and former teach first teacher, and Alex Weatherall a physics teacher and former database developer. It spread first to the Netherlands in 2020 then later Flanders, where it is run by Pedro De Bruycere, Geert De Meyer, and Sofie Vanassche - all employees of Artervelde

A summary of findings and evolving hypotheses so far - this will be elaborated upon as the research progresses

28.10.2021 Our ongoing analysis indicate that TeacherTapp has an important role to play in England due to the «evidence era» logic present in political discourse there (see Helgetun and Menter 2020) were quantitative data is worth its weight in gold. Moreover, it is appearing to be a central tool for teachers to express themselves in a context where they often lack any form of voice or felt agency, and often find themselves shouting at a wall (Helgetun and Dumay 2021). However, it is a new data collection tool in a field where multiple more traditional data collection and analysis actors are already present.

update 22.11.2021: Source of data is not overly relevant as long as it has some "research" qualities, mainly that they are reflective and have some sort of methodological qualities. they can be antrophological as well as statistical.

There is a differnce in the framing of questions between England and Flanders/the Netherlands. In England they are often "geeky" and "fun" whilst in Flanders/the Netherlands there is a need to always be "professional"- it seems the meaning of professional differs in the two contexts. Culture of education is important.

Tapp is primarily a research tool (collection and dissemination) and secondarily one for continous CPD (meaning reflection over education practices).

England appears firmly rooted in an "evidence" paradigm where data is central to education discourse and practice.

In Flanders the App was embraced by the Artevelde Hogeschool, a university of applied science, and currently has its results disseminated through their website. However, we also observe resistance to the app, in part due to it infringing on the place of unions, as well as epistemological concerns over its data collection methods and concerns over «who formulates the questions» and the entry of a commercial business model in education that is historically seen as the purview of public administration and the networks of the pillared society. It is currently not used in the Francophone context of Belgium, but is discussed in both academic and policymaking circles. NB: these findings are at present very preliminary.

update: 01.03.2023

Current analysis indicate there is a multiplicity in the functioning of TeacherTapp as a

socio-technical artefact. This is arguably a process where the human user and the technological

artefact continuously interacts to co-produce and co-transmit different forms of knowledge. That is,

the app illustrates how technology is multiple and enacted differently in different localities in spite of

having similar functions on the surface level (cf. Mol, 2002). This multiplicity is in some areas explicit,

such as in terms of questions asked or language of the interface. In other areas, it is more implicit,

such as in how users in different localities engage with the app differently. We have found it to be

both a potential voice for teachers and a constraint on practices, as it attempts to (re)define

professional norms on what is seen as ‘normal’ in the education discourse and define what is ‘really

going on in education‘ to quote Education Intelligence’s own advertisement of the app. This act is not

one guided by the developers of the app, but rather by and through the app itself, as an actor who

acts on its users both in intended and unintended ways (as the users modify the apps output). That

is, the designers of the app choose the questions, but they do not determine the answers of the

users – which is what forms the backbone of the app’s discourse. Meanwhile, the data produced by

the app is in turn enacted differently in education discourse by different communities of users. As

such, the app has a multiplicity in what Bowe and Ball (1992) talk of as the ‘context of policy

influence in education’. This multiplicity rests, on the one hand, in how TeacherTapp pushes a certain

line of thought through its selection of questions and (developer guided) multiple-choice answers

that are complemented by a user (teacher) driven responses. On the other hand, the data from

TeacherTapp undergoes a new enactment as users re-enact the data anew for a political discourse in places such as twitter or in DfE white papers. These enactments are given a particular form here due

to the datafication of education, which does not only extends to the classroom or the teachers’

professional work, but equally to the increasingly digitalized lives of teachers. Hence, we would go

further than Ideland’s (2021) insightful observations on the digitalization of education by ed-tech

businesses that seek to redefine the role of the teacher; to us, apps such as TeacherTapp create,

sustain, facilitate and at once need, participatory forms of data creation. As argued by Decuypere

and Landri (2020), such participatory forms of datafication both enable and interactively govern new

modes of (giving) teachers voice. Indeed, this article has shown the complex interplays that arise

when teachers are allowed to participate and partake in creating data and ‘facts’, yet at the same

time are being governed by various commercial and policy actors that appropriate the generated

data (and hence, teacher’s voices) as a resource to further draw on. As such, such new forms of

‘voice’ are thus stringently limited by their enacted sociomateriality through the apps interface and

user architecture, which lends power to those who select the questions and possible answers. In that

respect, we follow Hartong and Förschler (2019) in arguing that there is a need to closely

disentangling how (participatory) datafication is being done in practice, and to expand the scope of

such analysis to include not only policy analysis and discourse, but equally how sociomaterial

interfaces are constituted of, as well as constituted by, processes of datafication that manifest in

specific contexts.

Beyond the socio-material insights the research enabled, the study of TeacherTapp also

provided some interesting insights into how the teaching profession can be differentially

conceptualized and enacted across different communities of users. In broad terms, the teacher can in

England be seen as a self-improving craftsperson (Helgetun and Dumay 2021) who is to self-educate

through engagement with CPD, which is one of the things TeacherTapp provides. However, debates

in education also range over how to conceptualize teaching, is it a craft or a science? Robin

Alexander (2001) argued for teaching to be seen as an ‘art’ – that is, something that has a scientific

basis, but that is performed as a form of artistic craft in situ as educational contexts differ from class

to class. TeacherTapp, as a digital artefact, can be seen as both a device to potentially provide this

underlying ‘scientific basis’ through providing ‘data’, or at least an experience-based knowledge base,

but it can also become a tool that reduces the scope of in situ context adoption, as users are pushed

to conform their practices to what is pushed by the app. Such a shift at a global scale, we

hypothesise, is increasingly justified through claims of ‘evidence’ and a view on the teacher as

someone constantly plugged into the latest data on ‘what works best in education’ – this appears to

be a feature of the emergent ‘evidence era’ in education that is blossoming from the age of

measurement (Helgetun and Menter 2020).

Meanwhile, the shift towards this new form of the constantly improving teacher runs the risk

of reducing the place of the art of teaching in favour of technical solutions rooted in conformity to

norms that spring from the datafication of education. This potential conformity, rooted in the

datafication of the profession and data-based interpretation of what a teacher thinks and does, or

should think and do, is a potential step towards what Knox et al.(2019) warns of as a form of machine

behaviourism. This is particularly interesting in relation to the expansion of TeacherTapp like

datafication into the domain of youths as is happening in Flanders. However, what remains to be

seen is if any nudging rooted in this data has any uniform qualities or if it will remain multiply

enacted.

Publications related to the project

Helgetun, Jo B. 2021. Maintaining and changing institutionalized environments: Teacher education policymaking in England and France compared. Louvain-la-Neuve: University of Louvain. http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/250862 NB: this publication predates the research project, but discusses the place of TeacherTapp in the context of the English teacher education organizational field in Chapter 6.