Increasingly, the pandemic/post-pandemic teaching and learning moment has been shaped by a swift uptick in surveillance technologies to track student behaviours. These tools are often sold under the guise of care. We use learning analytics, eproctoring, and other tools to ensure students are learning. And yet we know of the significant harms these tools impart, particularly for racialized, gender non-conforming, and disabled students. So what are saying to students when we continue to use these tools in spite of their known harms? Furthermore, these primarily for-profit educational technologies trade in student data, often with limited or poorly understood options for opt-out. Often, they take the place of open tools that might offer better alternatives for creating more equitable learning environments.
This session outlines the harms of surveillance tools and offers a roadmap for resisting these technologies in our classrooms. Participants will be invited to share their contexts and brainstorm a different kind of academic future that rejects surveillance and embraces openness and care. This session is designed for individuals who would like to reimagine education and are ready to get their hands dirty with a little bit of campus activism.
After participating in this session, attendees will be able to:
- Articulate the problems with surveillance technologies in education
- Identify a strategy for resistance in their own contexts
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