Paper short abstract:

Fieldwork in an urban American charter high school reveals a conflict between the school's liberation pedagogy and its technical infrastructure. The intensive data-monitoring system and one-to-one laptop program became means to re-impose an institutional mandate to train new knowledge workers.

Paper long abstract:

Ethnographic fieldwork and a series of interviews with students, teachers, and administrators in an urban American 'charter' high school I call Du Bois Charter, as well as within the public-private charter system (i.e., teacher trainings, board meetings) around it, reveals a conflict between the school's liberation pedagogy and its political and technical infrastructure. Du Bois' majority-white faculty developed curricula for their working-class black and Latino students based on individual empowerment and critical engagement with systems of oppression. But the digital entrepreneurial infrastructure supporting these curricula was beyond their control and had other values 'baked in'.

Individual empowerment was realized through an intensive, fine-grained data monitoring architecture that afforded personalized, participatory learning but ultimately catered to the standardized testing regime against which all Washington, DC schools, but especially entrepreneurial 'charters' outside of the regular public school system, are judged. Collaborative, critical engagement with systems of oppression was carried out through a Google-funded one-to-one laptop program and an intranet infrastructure whose form was experimented with almost as much as the first class of seniors. Fights to discipline laptop and internet use became proxy fights over the purpose of education in the lives of these students. Ultimately, administrators used those fights and that data monitoring as evidence of the school's departure from its institutional mandate to train new knowledge workers. The infrastructure was repurposed to more strictly impose a culture of professionalization, against the protests of many teachers, some of whom quit mid-year, and counter to the goals some students set for themselves.