About

An emerging problem

In what Cheney-Lippold (Cheney-Lippold, 2017, p.157) called ius algorithmi, the common citizen’s interaction with interfaces offering products and services of their interest, becomes valuable raw material for Big Tech companies. Digital data is frequently monetized and used to get further people’s attention, marketable consumers’ profiling, and increase incomes. In this context, there is an exponential growth of data extracted and monetized. Children, as any other citizen with attributed rights, are also part of this landscape. As Barassi (Barassi, 2020, p. 14) explains, children’s datafication “is not linear, cohesive, nor rational, but it is rather a complex an messy process that is defined by a plurality of technological possibilities, designs, and organizational intentions” (p.14). Therefore, the generation of large datasets embeds bias and injustice, beyond the fact that this data is being used with unpredictable impacts (and possible harm) over the children.

In a cycle of preliminary interviews done by our research unit (Pedagogy), while awareness around datafication is increasingly rising in the society, many ECEC educators are feeling overwhelmed and hopeless as they see themselves being part of something they do not necessarily agree with or even worse, do not have the right complex phenomenon. Moreover, in a culture of ECEC where, building on the experience of Reggio Children, documentation and sharing with parents is highly relevant and often mediated by technologies, ECEC educators feeling is that there are no simplistic or straightforward answers to such a complex problem.

There is a concern at a global level, but a shortage of research in early childhood education

Aligning with recent research on datafication and the educators’ conundrum at school and higher education level (Castañeda & Williamson, 2021; Decuypere, 2021; Raffaghelli, 2022), we can consider here the expression of socio-technical assemblages (boyd & Crawford, 2012; Perrotta & Williamson, 2018; Raffaghelli, 2018; Van Dijck, 2014). We argue that data practices in ECEC could be explored as a relational and complex phenomenon, retracing other areas of education, that have an impact on the educational experience (Knox, 2017; Selwyn, 2019).

Through a general focus in education, Decuypere (ibidem, p.68) brings to the fore the multi-layered and complex structure of data practices. He explains that datafication comprises three different, though interrelated features: datafication (the very processes of data practices), data points (the outcomes of those processes) and the infrastructures that allow the users to implement such practices.

Such an understanding enables us as researchers “opening the black box of data practices in the field of education” (Ibidem, p. 68). Though the idea of reading childhood as a bio-coded period of life where genomics, neural, cognitive predictions are blended with computational big data studies (Lupton & Williamson, 2017; Williamson, 2016), it appears that the study of the relationship between platforms, families and the ECEC system requires further consideration.

There is indeed an overwhelming presence of commercial platforms which are designed infrastructures that determine the collection of data points shaping data practices overall in the educational system (Decuypere & Landri, 2021; Perrotta et al., 2020; Saura et al., 2021). But in the case of childhood, the apps are even more entangled with the private life and the parent’s choices (Barassi, 2017). And in spite of several magazine articles listing commercial apps to improve ECEC both from the family side and from the educators’ side, our preliminary search in the literature yielded a dearth of research in the field, apart of the well-known work of Barassi (op.cit).

The problem in Italy requires further exploration...

With the decreasing birth rates in the Western world and particularly in Italy, families and educational institutions are particularly focused (almost obsessed) in understanding, controlling and reaching the best results in their parental and educational roles. This situation often ends in an indiscriminate adoption of platforms that promise easy data tracking and visualisation supporting good decision-making about the child’s health, education and social life (Barassi, op.cit.).

Overall, the technological complexity described above is also embedded in what we have called elsewhere “an educational data culture” (Raffaghelli & Sangrà, forthcoming): the situated ways in which education institutions configure their organisational values, narratives, approaches and strategies towards data, attributing both positive and negative values.

In this complex scenario, the educators’ dispositions and imaginaries towards data practices are connected to competing ideologies heralded by actors such as the market, developers and technologists, and the public space between the government and civil society (Raffaghelli, 2022).

Therefore, we consider that ECEC educators should be explored to uncover conflicting discourses, platforms and apps unethical practices, parents’ digital and data literacy and hence, children exposure to harmful datafication. The educators’ mentioned feeling of being disarmed, without the right capabilities -freedom to act, and without hope as for some, could be, through appropriate recognition and mapping of data cultures in ECEC, changed into ideological, ethical, and political professional imaginaries. Also, they could become active leaders in building fair data cultures in ECEC, learning to live well with datafication (Pangrazio & Sefton-Green, 2022) and promoting critical data literac(ies) (Pangrazio & Cardozo-Gaibisso, 2021) in both educators and parents. Moreover, liaisons between the concept of “learning to live well with datafication” and the Reggio Children approach to documentation (and particularly digital documentation) could be found. Therefore, our research might provide the basis for an integrative re-framing of the Reggio Children approach to documentation, as Emerson & Linder (2021) call for.

REFERENCES CITED IN THIS PARAGRAPH