SUBVERSIVE LEARNING ANALYTICS WORKSHOP

FORMAT & PARTICIPATION

This first Subversive Analytics workshop will be a half-day workshop. It will be held as a highly interactive synchronous remote event with up to 25 participants. We choose to enact this workshop remotely since it allows for more equitable participation by those who may not be able to travel to Texas for the conference. No application is required, simply click here to register through the LAK'23 website.

Participants can be academics, researchers, practitioners, or students with an interest in Learning Analytics and values-based innovation, as well as critical frameworks and education. Because of the nature of the topic, both those who are highly specialized in LA and those who are beginners in the field are equally welcome. We particularly encourage participation of those who have experience and expertise in considering questions of equity in education. A survey will be distributed amongst participants before the event to better understand their backgrounds and what value systems or experiences they can bring to the discussion.

The workshop activities will introduce the community to the subversive LA approach, exploring together some of the deep seated assumptions in educational practice, and collectively imagining unconventional tools and artifacts. We do so in this instance with a particular focus on equity and the support of equitable practices, noting that a subversive stance could also be taken with respect to other foci.

BACKGROUND & RATIONALE

Innovation has been said to stem from one of two processes. Incremental innovation emerges from evaluating existing situations and pragmatically detecting the gaps for improvement which themselves depend on its embedded value systems (Norman & Verganti, 2013). “Scaling up” an existing practice, or making it “more efficient” are examples of this. To date, the bulk of LA work has been conducted within this tradition, accepting the frame of existing educational institutions and their historical value systems and attempting to use data for “understanding and optimising” their practice (Siemens et. al., 2011). There is another way to innovate, however. A radical approach to innovation creates the possibility for bigger change: a change in core meaning or a shift in paradigms (Norman & Verganti, 2013). One way to foster such innovation is by consciously calling into question the values that are embedded in a system. Instead of being restricted to operating from within, such a process for innovation invites critical change by reflecting on the whys behind practice, meaning behind assumptions, and unorthodox possibilities for futures that might support alternative value systems.

The current landscape of, socio-technical challenges surrounding the generation, analysis and use of data in education, including critical concern with the intersecting ways we engage with algorithms (Noble, 2018), AI (Broussard, 208), ethics(Prinsloo, 2017), surveillance (Benjamin, 2019) and equity (Scholes, 2016) suggest that although an incremental approach to LA development has value, it is not enough. To move towards developing a space for radical innovation in the field, Wise, Sarmiento and Boothe Jr. (2021) presented the idea of a “subversive stance” for LA. The concept draws from a number of critical traditions, including speculative design (Wong & Khovanskaya, 2018), the study of socio-technical systems (Achiume, 2014), feminism (D’Ignazio & Klein, 2021) and design activism (Costanza-Chock, 2018) and proposes ways to help us identify taken-for-granted assumptions-in-practice, ask generative questions about design processes and consider new models of creation to produce tools that may operate differently in educational ecosystems.

Such activities can help us move beyond recognition of problems related to the use of data in education and narrow attempts to ameliorate them in a specific application to take a broader perspective on the different roles that LA could play in educational data ecosystem; for example illuminating the boundaries of where technology can and cannot help, making the dimensions of problems more salient and vivid (Abebe et. al., 2020), or being an agent for equitable practices (Williamson & Kizilcec, 2022).