How Digital Learning Platforms Transform Teacher Practice

From Self-fulfi llment Nurse to Databased Progression Controller:

Abstract

Currently, school leaders and teachers struggle with how to work with data and evidence based practices within the public primary school
as a mean to solve problems with lacking pupil motivation and unsatisfying academic results. This paper explores how educational professionals on a local school attempt to meet this challenge by implementing different databased management and evaluation activities in the context of new national policy for the Danish public school aiming at increasing the use of data in school management. The starting point for the analysis is the observation of how this leads to changes in the role of the teacher from a personalized and intuition based evaluator role to a more standardized and systematic approach to evaluating pupils. Thus, the article presents a diffractive analysis exploring the becoming of databased evaluation transforming the possibility to manage and stretch both pupil and teacher
potential due to the implementation of the digital learning platform, ‘Mebook’. This lead to a discussion of how this give rise to a new affective economy that may transform subjectivity, learning capacity and the relations between teachers and pupils and teachers and school leader in new ways that produce new demands on managerial initiatives.