Schools Under Surveillance: Cultures of Control in Public Education

5. Online Surveillance in Canadian Schools

Chapter 5 Online Surveillance in Canadian Schools Valerie Steeves Fifteen years ago, I met a music teacher who was about to receive an award for his innovative use of “new technologies” in the classroom. The teacher was being recognized for using video recording equipment to provide his music students with feedback on performances. He prefaced the discussion of his work by saying that of course the best thing about the technology was that he could leave it on all the time.Although the students were unaware of the fact, he used the cameras to take attendance and to monitor them when he was out of the classroom so he could discipline them when they broke the rules. This chapter explores the ways in which the networked versions of those cameras have introduced a host of surveillance practices and dependencies that have in turn reshaped the Canadian educational experience. Canada is an interesting exemplar of what is, in fact, an international trend: it is at the forefront of embedding communications technologies into everyday teaching and learning. There is also a good body of research detailing the ways in which Canadian students use and experience the technologies they use in the classroom. Interestingly, when Canada became the first country in the world to connect all of its publicly funded schools to the Internet in 1999, the $82 million price tag paid by the federal government (Shade and Deschief 2005, 136) came with promises that the wired classroom would help Canadian children become the “skilled techno-entrepreneurs” of tomorrow (Shaw 1998), in turn ensuring that Canada would remain competitive in the knowledge economy. The upbeat rhetoric of the time uncritically celebrated the child’s facility with interactive media and naturalized the role of the child as computer user. Universal Internet access in schools was therefore expected to deepen the educational experience and provide children with the tools they 87 Va l e r i e S t e e v e s 88 would need to succeed in the work force of the future (Shade and Deschief 2005, 143). A decade later, the Internet is now arguably the preferred medium of a large majority of Canadian children and networked computers are a ubiquitous presence in many Canadian classrooms.Yet many of the assumptions of the 1990s have proven false. Although children do see the Internet as a useful learning tool (Media Awareness Network 2005, 19), to them the Internet is primarily a social space.The wired child is not an isolated child or a technical entrepreneur, but a child who has integrated the Internet fully into his or her social life (Steeves 2005, 8).With the advent of videophones, YouTube, and social networking sites, the lines between the classroom and the rest of children’s lives have blurred, complicating the learning environment in unexpected ways. As children have woven the Internet into more of their daily activities— both in and out of school—a growing number of their interactions is being captured by others with an interest in monitoring their behavior, including teachers, school administrators, corporations, and government authorities. This chapter explores the ways in which this monitoring is reconstructing the student’s experience as a learner, a consumer, and a citizen. I argue that although the surveillance capacities of networked computing have been used to deepen the neoliberal tendency to treat students as suspects, the effect of this on the social relationships in the classroom has been ambiguous, and the wired classroom remains a contested site in which students can resist the teacher’s authority.The advent of computers in schools has also exposed children to a variety of corporate initiatives that are designed to “‘commercialize one of the last and largest unexploited markets in the world’ . . . the K-12 sector” (Moll 2001).This online corporatization has done more than open up the school as a potential marketplace; it has naturalized surveillance in the lives of young people and restructured their experience of trust and democratic action in ways that facilitate the needs of the information economy.Accordingly, online surveillance in the classroom has disrupted the social relationships that support learning and provided corporations with an unprecedented opportunity to mine the education system and steer what children learn. The Promise of Canada’s SchoolNet Program The federal government first committed itself to wiring all of Canada’s seventeen thousand public schools to the Internet in 1994, when it announced its Building a More Innovative Economy (Industry Canada 1994) strategy. The umbrella organization...