The role of platforms in diffracting education professionalities

Abstract

This paper examines the effect of data management platforms on professional educators. The ways in which platforms re-shape new professional patterns of school leaders and education bureaucrats is presented through the data management platform, OneSchool. OneSchool is used across 1,258 public schools in Queensland, Australia. Empirical data were gathered from interviews with senior bureaucrats, policy officers, and school leaders from Queensland’s public schooling system. Thematic analysis identified shifts in educational practitioners’ professional roles as they performed their tasks through OneSchool. Analysis of traditional school roles and tasks on the one hand and demands of online security and information privacy legislations on the other were brought together in an access assemblage. Access was provided by the authorized allocation of ‘roles’ embedded into the platform’s technical code. A dual perspective of the development and use of the OneSchool platform is used to show how educational behaviors, skills and qualities are mutually constitutive of platformized professionalities. To make sense of these platformized professionalities, a diffraction lens is employed, derived from Barad’s (2007) considerations within new feminist materialism and physics. Recalling Foucault’s (1983) adage that everything is dangerous rather than bad, this paper provides insight into the positive and negative ways platforms disrupt and re-shape educational practitioners and their professionalities.