Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies (JAAACS)

Data Science, Algorithms, and Curriculum Studies

John Weaver — 2024-02-21

Articles in this issue build on the growing body of humanities-based scholarship delving into the realm of data science and algorithms. This cutting-edge work should not be ignored by our field! Just as Curriculum Studies blossomed through interactions with 20^th-Century humanities, 21^st-Century engagements with data science and algorithms reveals new terrain and conceptual opportunity, elaborating science fields and associated, long standing sociological, historical, cultural and economic concerns. New perspectives on racism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, settler colonialism, and ethnocentrism, for example, potentially bring fresh and vibrant directions. We invite Curriculum Studies scholars to catch up on the growing literature of critical data science, and to begin probing the many ways that data and algorithms shape educational experiences at all levels and in all educational contexts. We also believe that Curriculum Studies can bring many insights to data science and algorithm studies, just as Educational Studies has pushed scholarship on any and all experiences to appreciate the role of power-knowledge relationships, designed environments, and institutions of education (family, religious communities, popular culture, public spaces, advertising, political truthiness, etc.). For us, the “issue” is not, “Should we join in the discourses around data, algorithms and social justice matters?” but rather, “Why has it taken Curriculum Studies so long to explore this work, and to join the fray?”

An Unsettling Artificial Intelligence

Patrick Phillips — 2024-02-21

In this theoretical article and in the context of emerging possibilites and limitations of artificial intelligence in curriculum, we discuss how a particular algorithm informs the curricula of our theorizing, teaching, and wider lives–namely, unsettling accounts of the algorithms of settler colonialism. We trace the development of this artificial intelligence from the beginnings of the nation state we call Canada, illuminating its physical and psychical inscription on the land and settler colonial thinking. We further move through how such thinking has seeped into how we understand ourselves as human–biologically and through practices of education–particularly through histories and lasting influences of eugenics. Returning to the material technology of AI and its futurities, we consider the implications of its future development and deployment amidst this enduring context of “rule.” We conclude with a reading of an Indigenous Futurist novel, The Marrow Thieves, as a counter-algorithmic and counter-genetic curriculum, hopefully inspiring future curricular thinking beyond logics of settler colonial futurities.

AI, digitalization, and the emergence of man3: From Enfleshment to disembodiment?

Liang Wang — 2024-02-21

This paper conceives of the structural injustices of modernity as grounded in a Euro-centric, humanist subject overrepresenting universal manhood (Sylvia Wynter’s “Man”) and engages with the question of moving from enfleshment to disembodiment in post-digital, AI-empowered contexts. Noting that digital technology relies on non-semantic “representation” tied to probability, i.e., binary digits, this paper explores how the sliding signifier of “intelligence,” an indicator of Man once incarnated in terms of moral capacities and phenotype/genotype, has been and is being newly enfleshed through the mutual formation of a “representation”-technology intertwinement. It illustrates that, first, to understand familiar institutional injustices related to Man, it is vital to pay attention to the multiple transitions of Man (to Man1, Man2, and man3). The paper maps these historical shifts in relation to Wynter’s analytics, the shifting inscriptions of enfleshment and intelligence, and the implications of such onto-epistemological gradients and reformulations within compulsory schooling’s histories. Second, the paper focuses especially on the digitally decentered emergence of man3, where “intelligence” is realized, particularly by AI, as flows of digits that attempt to invent, measure, and effectuate sets of emotions “universal” to all human beings. Here we offer three examples in AIEd of how the figure of Man remains operational despite an apparent disembodiment. Last, we consider the questions this leaves education in general and curriculum studies specifically with, when the seeming disembodiment occurring via binary digits does not lead to the eradication of discriminations once associated with semantic “representation.” Rather, enfleshment-as-information and as Life, and the emotional turn of AI, remain embedded in and contribute to a complex “representation”-technology intertwinement that is complexifying historical forms of enfleshing Man, and producing no less exclusion and violence than historical -isms have done.

Counting Publications

Boni Wozolek — 2024-02-21

Tenure and promotion, regardless of context, can be an anxiety-filled time in any scholarly experience. Attending to the intersection of a data-driven tenure and promotion process at a large state institution, this paper considers the curriculum of metrics that emerges from the author’s critical feminist autobiographical narrative. This curriculum, like many curricular dialogues in the field of curriculum studies, attends to the always already complex nature of curriculum as it is imbricated with local and less local sociopolitical and cultural norms and values. Specifically, this paper attends to the intra-actions of the hidden and enacted curricula as they are enmeshed with the broader curriculum of metrics. Finally, this paper briefly explores questions of agency as they are emergent in and across intra-actions and moments of friction in the tenure and promotion process.

Reading Koopman’s (2019) “How we became our data” as an invitation to resist the formatting of the “informational person” with the support of mathematics education

Eva Jablonka — 2024-02-26

In this paper, after a review of Koopman´s (2019) historical account of the ‘informational person’, I elaborate Koopman’s work by pointing to specific formatting techniques that shape the ‘education-informational personhood’ through schooling: school certificates, algorithmic processing of educational attainment, and the formatting of the students’ background. By means of historical and current examples of these techniques, I highlight the weight of specific choices involved in the selection of formats for data production, processing and information sharing. Further, I address the reflexivity of information techniques in the informatics of the students’ background, as these techniques perpetuate historical categories of social difference but are also used as a means for critical reflection of this perpetuation. I proceed with a discussion of the role of implicit mathematics as a formatting technique in education. Finally, I offer possibilities to resist, with the aid of mathematics, ‘infopolitics’ that operates by means of data and algorithms.

A vast literary whiteness and becoming undisciplined: A review of Redlining Culture

Robert Helfenbein — 2024-02-21

This review of Richard So's Redlining Culture considers the implication of algorithmic analysis to work in the humanities and its potetial for curriculum studies. By applying advanced data science techniques and big data analytics, So examines the representation of racial characters in fiction and uncovers persistent patterns of exclusion despite claims of increasing multiculturalism. This review acknowledges the ethical concerns surrounding data-driven scholarship, emphasizing the importance of troubling the data and considering the implications of algorithmic tools in anti-racist interventions. It calls for a reevaluation of the relationships between data, cultural history, and reading, highlighting the necessity of interrogating and disrupting entangled histories to promote inclusive representations in both literature and curriculum studies.

Stochastic Parrots, Policies, Octopi Who Pretend to Be Human, & Dancing Robots

Peter Appelbaum — 2024-02-21

Amid hysteria over chatbots, image creators, and other AI encroachment, it is imperative to deal with data and algorithms taking on seemingly irreversible deterministic roles in educational policy, evaluation, and curriculum development. A lens of synthetic governance leads the focus from hyper-humanism to Afrofuturism. Finally, if we become more like the machines that we created in our image in a perpetually reinforcing cycle, then we can alternatively imagine new relationships by studying the very different relationships demonstrated by trees and oceans, plants, and other more-than-human beings on our planet.

Bernard Stiegler Philosopher of Algorithms and Data Science in the Anthropocene

John A. Weaver — 2024-02-22

I focus my essay on the philosophy of Bernard Stiegler because I think he is the one philosopher who is thinking through the consequences of algorithms and data science. In what follows I give a brief summary of his thought and then discuss the content of his thinking about algorithms, or what he calls automated society, and data science. I then outline a few areas that we can begin to think about how we as professors, teachers, and students can live within the realm of algorithms and data without being authoritatively and completely coopted by them. The intellectual instinct of curriculum scholars is often to dismiss matters that pertain to technology and science as if we were entities separate from the world. The dismissal of algorithms and data science as something unworthy of our intellectual energy comes at a profound environmental, political, cultural, and educational risk. This is fundamentally one of Stiegler’s philosophical points and certainly mine too.