Ethics and Values in educational data-driven practices: Conceptual, Methodological and Pragmatic Explorations

The motive for this project resides in a current need to explore the growing datafication of the education sector through critical, creative,and proactive approaches with an outlook fromthe Nordic countries. This exploration is concretized through a workshop series that focuses on dimensions of ethics and values embedded in emerging sociotechnical imaginaries of education and learning (i.e., discourses and actions toward data-driven education). More precisely, sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff& Kim, 2015) refer to “collectively held, institutionally stabilized and publicly performed visions of desirable futures that are animated by shared understandings of forms of social life and social order and made attainable through the design of technological projects”(Williamson, 2018, p. 221-222). We argue that emergentdata-driven practices and the increasing datafication of the education sector contribute to transforming educational imaginaries of modernity, re-positionthe power of digitalization and automation, and changing ethics andvalues. Lately, values embedded in the education sector’s growing datafication have been center-staged in scholarly conversations often related to educational systems that differ from those in the Nordic countries, such as in the USA, Australia, and the UK. To remediate the knowledge gap regarding datafication in the Nordics, we propose three thematic workshops.
Via these workshops, we will establish a network of researchers and practitioners, and engage research with public discourses about the opportunities and challenges of emerging data-driven practices in Nordic Education.