Catherine Thiele

With standardised student assessment data dominating educational policy, school governance, and teaching practices, this paper-creation unfolds from a post qualitative inquiry where a visual artwork artefact emerged as a sensory representation of teacher data relations. In an educational era where the datafication, platformization, and visualisation of students’ assessment data are reshaping ‘quality’ schooling, teaching, and learning, the artwork offers a glimpse into the relationality and affective intensities of school-data-events. Grounded in theorisations of affect, it is proposed that art can draw us into the compound of school-data-events, honour the force of affect, and gesture towards movement orientated renderings of knowledge-ing and not-knowing. We posit that artistic encounters have the potential to ignite lines of flight that can reconfigure the socio-material matterings of school-data-events, support affective sense-making, and gently disturb the commanding metricised logics of data visualisations. This contribution serves to support the imaginaries of those working with data.

In this paper, we problematise the functioning of (straight) lines in student assessment data visualisations to foreground the affective intensities of teachers' encounters with data. Reading with Ingold's anthropological research on lines, we propose that straight lines rupture data visualisations surface to materialise a (re)presentation of students' assessment results. The ruptured surface classifies and segregates students, and consequently, the data visualisations and plotted (re)presentations of students' knowledge affect teacher data relationality. We draw on Spinoza, Deleuze and Guattari, and Massumi's theorisation of affect to explore the complex relationality of teacher/ data visualisation encounters. We discuss the affective intensities and capacities of teacher data interactions, particularly between teachers and their students plotted (as dots) on a ruptured data visualisation surface. Amidst emerging datafied norms and pressures being placed on teachers, this contribution focuses on the force of affect in data encounters to foreground the complex 'sensory labour' of teachers' work.

This chapter is a response to the impact of the prevailing neoliberal discourse of corporate managerialism in universities. It contains the authors’ communal experimentation with collaborative gameplay as an intentional and collective form of arts-based activism and intervention focused on subverting and unravelling the finite and managerial games at work in their universities. As a way of giving pause to how the pandemic and related workforce crises have intensified power dynamics and precarious work, authors use arts-based and poetic offerings to reflect on the role of power operating in their work/lives. Their creative methodology provides a site for playful protest and resistance to the competitive individualism and win/lose outcomes so treasured across the academy. It also offers space for authors’ realisation that while they desire to be radical, they are mostly compliant in their academic work. Subsequent insights about their ‘playing with power relations’ but also how they are ‘being played’ by succumbing to managerial demands helps them stop and ‘ask questions’ and ‘think outside the game’.

Set within the broader employment crisis facing Australian schools, attracting preservice teachers to teach in a regional, rural, and remote (RRR) school community has been a long-standing educational priority. Research has identified the role of placement initiatives, the benefits of preparing preservice teachers for RRR contexts, and the centrality and significance of community and relationships. What is less frequently acknowledged is the role of school leaders in acting as the nexus between preservice teachers and the RRR community. Specifically, how leaders effectively support and enact relationship-based initiatives for preservice teachers. This research explores the leadership strategies of a group of high school leaders—leaders from a large metropolitan Prep-Year 12 College (Brisbane, Queensland) and Far North Queensland. Central to the leadership partnerships is a preservice teacher RRR preparation program facilitated by a Brisbane College via their Teacher Enhancement Centre. In this paper, we report on the strengths of their program in establishing key connections. Implications are drawn in relation to how school leaders connect with other leaders and preservice teachers through the program, and how these connections can support place-based experiences for preservice teachers while concurrently addressing the staffing needs of RRR schools.