Learning Analytics and the Abolitionist Imagination
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2023-03-12
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This article advances an abolitionist reframing of learning analytics (LA) that explores the benefits of productive disorientation, considers potential harms and care made possible by LA, and suggests the abolitionist imagination as an important educational practice. By applying abolitionist concepts to LA, we propose it may be feasible to open new critiques and social futures that build toward equity-oriented LA design and implementation. We introduce speculative methods to advance three vignettes imagining how LA could be weaponized against students or transformed into a justice-directed learning tool. Our speculative methods aim to destabilize where power in LA has been routinely located and contested, thereby opening new lines of inquiry about more equitable educational prospects. Our concluding discussion addresses how speculative design and fiction are complementary methods to the abolitionist imagination and can be pragmatic tools to help build a world with fairer, more equitable, and responsible LA technologies.
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Swauger, S, and R Kalir (2023). Learning Analytics and the Abolitionist Imagination. Journal of Learning Analytics, 10(1). pp. 101–112. 10.18608/jla.2023.7813 Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/31302.
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Remi Kalir
Remi Kalir, PhD, is Associate Director of Faculty Development and Applied Research at Duke University Learning Innovation & Lifetime Education. He is also Associate Director of the interdisciplinary Center for Applied Research and Design in Transformative Education (CARADITE).
He is the author of two books published by MIT Press: Re/Marks on Power: How Annotation Inscribes History, Literacy, and Justice (2025) and Annotation (2021).
Much of Kalir's research—which spans literacy education, the learning sciences, and teacher education—examines how annotation facilitates social, collaborative, and justice-directed learning. His scholarship has appeared in the Journal of Literacy Research, Information and Learning Sciences, Research in the Teaching of English, Distance Education, English Journal, and English Leadership Quarterly, among other journals. His writing about the social significance of annotation has also appeared in The Hechinger Report, We Need Diverse Books, LSE Impact Blog, and Commonplace, among other outlets.
Kalir's research has been supported through multiple positions and projects, including as Scholar in Residence with Hypothesis (2020-21), OER Research Fellow with the Open Education Group (2017-18), and as a National Science Foundation Data Consortium Fellow (2016).
Prior to joining Duke, Kalir was Associate Professor of Learning, Design, and Technology at the University of Colorado Denver School of Education and Human Development. He earned his PhD in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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