Wearable technologies are marketed with promises of easily collected and informative data. Lately, various applications have been rolled out in the field of education (Mascheroni 2020). This paper investigates the use of children’s activity bracelets in Finnish Early Childhood Education. As a result of a co-operative project between a technology developer and a Finnish municipality, some ECE groups have had the possibility of testing activity trackers as part of their everyday activity. We have conducted interviews with ECE teachers and the administration on the experiences of working with these technologies.

The theoretical framework of this paper builds on the discussion on datafication of education (Williamson 2014; van Dijck 2014) and the theory of assemblages in the study of social phenomena (Deleuze & Guattari 1987; Paakkari 2020; Paananen, Kuukka & Alasuutari 2019). The assessment tools in Finnish ECE have expanded during recent years, with an increased presence of digital technologies. Data-intensive technologies are introduced with the aim of turning the everyday lives of children into quantifiable data (Williamson 2017). As research on datafication has suggested, data processing technologies are displacing sociological concerns in education governance (Williamson 2014).

The study asks what self-tracking assemblages produce in educational settings. While the self-tracking technologies are presented as straightforward additions to preschool life, they carry the biases and preferences of their developers. This can be seen for example in their focus on the measurement of exercise. In the interviews, teachers often associated the trackers with increased competition between the children. However, we also found cases where teachers actively sought to modify the assemblage and direct it towards other ends. Focusing on instances where self-tracking technologies are used “against the grain”, we look at how the self-tracking assemblage emerges in early childhood education and what it produces.        

The datafied assessment practices have become increasingly popular on a wordwide scale. While there is local variance on how the practices are implemented, general trends towards increased datafication seem clear. This makes the current research highly relevant from a European perspective. 

The data consists of interviews and documents and has been produced during 2021-2022. Interviews (n=12) have been held firstly with ECE teachers and caregivers who work in groups that participated in the activity tracker experiment. Secondly we have interviewed school administration staff that has been involved in the planning and implementation of the experiment. The interviews were conducted at a distance by phone or video call. They were recorded and the recordings transcribed into text. The length of the interviews varied between 30-60 minutes. In the interviews, we discussed the background of the tracker project and the history of how the group became involved in it, and their experiences of using the trackers.

Our findings emphasize that the data produced by the bracelets does not act on its own and is more complex than suggested. It gets plugged in to an assemblage which re-defines it in sometimes surprising ways. While the bracelets are marketed with a simplistic focus on children’s movement and physical education, this was challenged by a more nuanced view of the manifold uses of data in ECEC groups. The interviewees spoke of using the data as means of influencing the dynamics of the workplace, of raising concerns about commerciality, and of dealing with the pressures of diagnostic analysis of children. This further supports the idea of approaching the data and its uses as parts of an assemblage (Paananen, Kuukka & Alasuutari 2019).

Mascheroni, G. (2020). Datafied childhoods. Contextualising datafication in everyday life. Current sociology review 68(6). Paakkari, A. (2020). Entangled devices. An Ethnographic study on students, mobile phones and capitalism. Helsinki: University of Helsinki. https://helda.helsinki.fi/handle/10138/310928 Paananen, M., Kuukka, A., & Alasuutari, M. (2019). Assembled policies: The Finnish case of restricted entitlement to early childhood education and care. Journal of Early Childhood Education Research, 8(2). Van Dijck, J. (2014) Datafication, dataism and dataveillance: Big data between scientific paradigm and ideology. Surveillance & Society 12(2). Williamson, B. (2014). Reassembling Children as Data Doppelgangers: How Databases are Making Education Machine-readable. Powerful Knowledge Conference. Bristol: University of Bristol.