Illuminating cracks of resistance: hopeful stories of refusing datafication in young children’s learning.

This paper draws on three empirical studies to highlight the cracks of resistance to the dominant datafication paradigm in young children’s learning. Recent early childhood policy in England, has been marked by intensified technocratic accountability demands (Mikuska and Fairchild, 2020). Such regimes, driven by measurement and datafication (Bradbury and Roberts-Holmes, 2016), can steer pedagogy. With posthuman feminist materialist theories, we consider resistances to datafication. This phenomenon is explored as dynamic and in relation with the more-than-human (Barad 2007). We also think with ‘cracks’ (Holloway 2010) as spaces of disruption to the current neoliberal order. Through interpretivist paradigms, we created multi-modal bricolages arranging images, text and memories. Analysis was ongoing and sensitive to relations between the human and more-than-human participants. (Truman, 2022). All studies secured institutional ethical approval. Additionally, data were seen as generative and analysis was an unrushed process inspired by Stengers (2018) notion of slow scholarship and Taylor’s (2020) emphasis on feminist ethics of caring and relationality. Findings illuminate everyday ecologies in ECEC settings where resistance practices are at work. Those ecologies are complex yet often concealed in the underlife by the grand narrative of datafication. Enactments of resistance by children and educators cause cracks that forge creative spaces for different kinds of doings. Our provocation to educators and policymakers is to attend to the ecologies of resistances and the conditions for cracking points to emerge. We advocate for sharing hopeful stories of resistance to datafication as a realistic and generative endeavour.