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

Abstract

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.