Students' experiences of overt data-talk in the classroom : “It’s all just this stupid system”

The proliferating production of student academic performance data in schools is resulting in more performative actions and changed relationships between teachers and students, transforming the experience of students in classrooms. Drawing upon Kemmis et al.'s (2014) concept of practice architectures, this chapter teases apart the specific sayings, doings, and relatings that make up students’ situated practices, in relation to overt data-talk and as elicited from the perspectives and experiences of the students themselves. Emerging findings revealed that as student practices were held in place by the cultural-discursive, material-economic, and socio-political conditions of a “datafied” (Bradbury & Roberts-Holmes, 2018) and “hyper-accountable” (Keddie, 2014) schooling context, student academic performance data was positioned as the key indicator of learning and success. This chapter problematises overt student comparisons in their classrooms through performance data and the ways in which students begin to emulate those practices, embodying the measures that those who have been entrusted with their care use to evaluate and assess their learning. In this chapter, I argue that while the conditions of performativity and datafication permeated students’ schooling experiences, their responses to such conditions demonstrated their deeply democratic inclinations. This serves as a powerful example of how students respond to the often inequitable and antidemocratic nature of performative and comparative assessment.