Wednesday 2 September 2015

A Cold Data Point, Bereft of Nuance

The 8 screen prints below represent the 10 exam groups I worked with this past academic year. The first 6 are the GCSE classes I taught and managed. Each group has its own story in relation to their outcomes. They range from a class who's teacher who was absent for the majority of the year and the school relied on cover teachers instead of securing a long term replacement, a class with an aggressive bully that the school hierarchy refused to remove from the group, another group who lost their teacher half way through the year and the class previously discussed in the 'Spot the Statistical Anomaly' blog. 2 other groups had consistent teaching for the duration of their course. The final 2 prints represent the 4 A-level classes I taught and managed (the Art & Photo endorsements have been combined into one print for both AS and A2 level). The statement below explains the content of the prints and the theory behind their production, it is important to explain that everything shared and discussed throughout this blog site over the last 2 years has formed the basis for these prints so there is a degree of repetition in some quotes and references to previous writings.


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‘We should resist the temptation to continue looking for a mechanical explanation for something which plainly is not mechanical in nature’
Jacques Bouveresse (1999)


Data is important. It can be extremely useful. I have always said this. What is difficult to comprehend is the fact that data and not the students themselves, is what currently drives the educational picture. An example: Last year in my school a discussion took place regarding the student data flight paths of a particular year group. The flight path is the route towards their predicted grades that they are expected to take. Because the data inputted by teachers, across subjects, in the termly report did not correlate with the flight paths it was discussed, at senior management level, whether or not to amend the teacher inputted data to fit the projected paths.

Bruno Latour, the French philosopher of science, coined the term immutable mobiles to refer to the way science employs summaries of information, abstracted from the messy reality of the real world, in order to be able to share and distribute information. The Unlesson Manifesto (June 2014), goes onto explain that:

‘An immutable mobile is this two dimensional summary of data, often in the form of charts, graphs or tables which is easily transported, hence mobile, and immutable in that it does not change when it is transported.
It is through the employment of immutable mobiles that science is able to persuade and have power over the objects it studies. It’s a useful concept to have in mind when thinking about how teaching is monitored and assessed.
For instance a map is portable, whereas what it represents is not, and the statistical results of tests on laboratory animals are mobile whereas the laboratory and its contents are much harder to move. What is represented in the map and the graph stays the same when it is moved from one location to another.’ 
Pink (2014) as cited in The Unlesson Manifesto (2014)


Immutable mobiles are essentially abstractions from reality and enable scientists to convince people, without the need to go to the original sources. And these immutable mobiles give people power over the things represented in them and actually come to replace the things themselves. A tension is therefore created between Deleuze & Guattari’s (1987) analysis of rhizomatic principles of the abstract machine that ‘connects a language to the semantic and pragmatic contents of statements, to collective assemblages [and the] whole micropolitics of the social field’. (p.7)

Education systems, all over the world, have developed into a global community with a heavy reliance on a particular form of statistical data designed to improve ones national standing in an international competition. The ability to now centralise and compare results has led to the growth of a system where an ideology is allowed to dominate individual achievements through its relations with other national and international competitors. Deleuze & Guattari (1987) see a danger in this approach that will produce a system where there is ‘no mother tongue, only a power takeover by a dominant language within a political multiplicity.’ (p. 4) As a result, unless a national education system is doing particularly well, they will quickly manipulate the PISA evidence, creating policy to suit a sense of personal political achievement over and above a culture of learning grounded in personal independence, creativity, innovation and social and cultural experiences.

The OECD has such a monopoly on statistical data comparisons between education systems that it quickly becomes impossible to ignore their findings once a government has signed up to the league tables. In turn this enforces a problematical paradox, as discussed by Coffield (2008) and quickly leads to the neoliberal demands of measuring teacher ability and performance to student test scores. The result is a workforce low in morale as they see the rich curricula and craft of pedagogy reduced to a colourless classroom where:

‘[e]quating good teaching with good test scores reduces a complex, human process, and the teacher-student relationship, to a cold data point, bereft of nuance’. 
Gude (2013) 

How ironic is it then that it is the use of the visual elements of line, colour, tone and pattern are used to distil this data. The language of pictographs, charts and diagrams are used to reinforce ideas of moving forward and to measure progress. (Davies 2015). Albrecht-Crane & Daryl Slack (2007) go on to analyse:

‘the Deleuze-Guattarian vocabulary and concept of affect, and the attendant terrain of molar and molecular lines [which] are capable of addressing a dimension of teaching and learning that otherwise remains inconspicuous, despite the fact of, or more accurately because of, it’s omnipresence. Affect permeates the space of the classroom. What might this mean? What are the lines one can draw to map and mark the singularity of the classroom?’ (p. 103)

These hand made screen prints have been produced for each of the exam groups I have taught this year and explore the relationship between the immutable mobile: the cold data point of static, predicted grades and rhizomatic reality of their actual marks. They draw the map and mark the singularity of each class and individual within it, where each section of the coxcomb represents a student to which a story can be attached and shared. It also bears the heavier line of the predictions set from their key stage two SAT results. The subsequent relationship between the two forms of data begs the question, how can we ever think to control all of the variables involved in teaching, to know, with any certainty of the impact our individual actions are having? I work with people, not mechanical objects or statistics and as such my classroom is a social space, a rich and complex arena where the art produced is a physical record of ones progress that always bears the trace of human activity and as such it often fails to translate as an accurate immutable mobile. We end up with one system imposing its dominance over the other, a static target subjugating an individual achievement ‘as the refutations of inaccurate claims contained in documents become documents themselves’ and ‘therefore becomes less about accuracy or human knowledge, and more about which prince has the money and inclination to invest in the ‘science’.’ Scott (2010 p.3 & p. 4). 






Class that had mainly cover and supply for 1 year

Group from Spot the Statistical Anomaly blog

Class with continuous, specialist teaching

Class with persistent, disruptive influence

Class with continuous, specialist teaching

Class who lost one Artist Teacher but gained another for year 2 of the qualification

Year 12 Art & Photo groups

Year 13 Art & Photo groups



Data can work and on a large scale it may provide patterns that are useful for monitoring progress and predicting target grades but when it is reduced to individual schools, classes and people ‘like an ultimate fact without any cause, the individual outcome of a measurement is, however, in general not comprehended by laws. This must necessarily be the case.’ Pauli (2013) cited by Didau (2015).


Reference List:

Albrecht-Crane, C. and Daryl Slack, J. (2007) Towards a Pedagogy of Affect in Hickey-Moody, A. and Malins, P. (2007) Deleuzian Encounters: Studies in Contemporary Social Issues 
Palgrave MacMillan 
St Martin’s Press

Bouveresse, J. (1999) Rules, Dispositions, and the Habitus in Shusterman, R. (1999) Bourdieu: A Critical Reader
Blackwell Publishers Inc.

Coffield, F. (2008) Just Suppose Teaching and Learning Became the First Priority
Learning and Skills Network

Davies, W (2015) The Greatest Evils: Art Pedagogy – Measurement, Speculation and Subjectivation, 19th June
http://www.theunlessonmanifesto.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/the-greatest-evils.html

Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

Didau, D (2015) It’s the Bell Curve, Stupid!, 10th June
http://www.learningspy.co.uk/research/its-the-shape-of-the-bell-curve-stupid/

Gude, S. (2013) The Industrial Classroom
Assembly Required
Jacobin Magazine issue 10 
https://www.jacobinmag.com/issue/assembly-required/

Pink, C. (2014) Sacrificing Education On the Alter of Performance, 17th July 
http://www.theunlessonmanifesto.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/sacrificing-educationon-altar-of.html

Scott, E. (2010) The Immutable Mobile: A Vehicle for Domination, 17th November

http://eliotscott.com/documents/immutable_mobile.pdf