Curriculum, Foundations & Reading: Faculty Publications

Predictive Curricula and the Foreclosure of Pedagogical Futures

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

3-18-2026

Publication Title

Educational Theory

DOI

10.1111/edth.70089

Abstract

This article theorizes predictive curricula: the reorganization of schooling around data extraction, dashboards, and algorithmic governance that translate learners into dividual profiles and narrow inquiry to what is computable. It maps how protocol and platform logics preempt pedagogical judgment, route bodies and knowledges through thresholds and alerts, and sediment a predisteme—an epistemic order that renders deviation a form of computational error and illegibility. Tracing a pipeline from surveillance capitalism, algorithmic governance, and the mediation of flesh and technology to classroom practice, the article details mechanisms of control, somatic and ontic effects on students' bodyminds, and the reproduction of inequity when predictive signals stand in for knowledge and/or being. Classroom vignettes intermittently ground the analysis, showing how readiness scores, data tracking, and auto-scheduling evacuate the present tense—both epistemically and ontically. In response, the article advances destitution and prefiguration as counter-designs: deactivating apparatuses that foreclose study and enacting consent-paced and opaque practices that reopen curricular time.

Comments

Georgia Southern University faculty member, Brad Bierdz authored, "Predictive Curricula and the Foreclosure of Pedagogical Futures."

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