Learning, Media and Technology

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Metaphors we’re colonised by? The case of data-

driven educational technologies in Brazil

Giselle Martins dos Santos Ferreira, Luiz Alexandre da Silva Rosado, Márcio
Silveira Lemgruber & Jaciara de Sá Carvalho

To cite this article: Giselle Martins dos Santos Ferreira, Luiz Alexandre da Silva Rosado,
Márcio Silveira Lemgruber & Jaciara de Sá Carvalho (2019): Metaphors we’re colonised by? The
case of data-driven educational technologies in Brazil, Learning, Media and Technology, DOI:
10.1080/17439884.2019.1666872

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Published online: 13 Sep 2019.

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LEARNING, MEDIA AND TECHNOLOGY
https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2019.1666872

Metaphors we’re colonised by? The case of data-driven

educational technologies in Brazil
Giselle Martins dos Santos Ferreira a, Luiz Alexandre da Silva Rosadob, Márcio
Silveira Lemgruberc and Jaciara de Sá Carvalhoc
a
Department of Education, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, PUC-Rio, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil;
b
Department of Higher Education, National Institute for the Education of the Deaf, INES, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil;
c
Post-Graduate Programme in Education, University Estácio de Sá, UNESA, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

This article discusses issues concerning the spread of data-driven Received 28 September 2018
educational technologies in Brazil. Here, as elsewhere, educational Accepted 29 August 2019
technology continues to be promoted optimistically as the bearer of a
KEYWORDS
panacea for historically-rooted social problems. Whilst some of these Educational technology;
technologies have indeed contributed to important widening- data-driven educational
participation programmes in the last two decades, widespread advocacy technologies; Big Data;
of technological ‘solutionism’, reflected in gradually stronger policy conceptual metaphors;
demands for efficiencies to be improved through ‘innovation’, has critique; Brazil
supported a relentless marketisation of the country’s educational
systems. As transnational corporations position themselves to take
control of key areas of these systems, threatening to restructure the
whole sector, data-driven educational technologies provide the latest
example in a series of ‘new’ ideas offered in an ever-expanding market.
Based on the notion of ‘conceptual metaphors’, which encapsulate
specific ways of perceiving, thinking and relating with the world, this
article examines key metaphors underpinning discourses surrounding
data-driven educational technologies in Brazil. In particular, the article
analyses ways in which these specific metaphors may be promoting
perspectives that ignore difference and obscure broader questions
concerning education, thus contributing to the reproduction of
previously existing problems and supporting new forms of colonisation.

Introduction
As the intial writing of this article began (May 2018), financial media across the world announced yet
another significant change in the Brazilian educational landscape: Kroton (one of the leading pri-
vately-owned Higher Education Institutions operating in the country) acquired Somos, self-
described as the ‘largest compulsory education group in Brazil’ (G1 2018; Mello 2018). This came
a little while after a proposed merger by Kroton with Estácio (another large conglomerate of HEI
that spans practically the country’s entire territory) was vetoed by CADE, the local business regulat-
ory agency (Martelo 2017). Assuming that CADE’s approval for the latest merger is passed, then
Kroton (currently involved in excess of 75% of the country’s higher education student cohort –
INEP 2017) will enter compulsory education through Somos’ mix of school brands and franchises,
publishers and educational technology companies. Indeed, Kroton is already promising further

CONTACT Giselle Martins dos Santos Ferreira giselle-ferreira@puc-rio.br Department of Education, Pontifical Catholic
University of Rio de Janeiro, Rua Marquês de São Vicente 225, Gávea, Rio de Janeiro, 22451–900 RJ, Brazil
© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 G. M. FERREIRA ET AL.

acquisitions of small school-related businesses in what is viewed as an auspicious new sector for
further company expansion.
For international ‘edu-business’ actors, Brazil constitutes an emergent and important market.
Despite the serious economic crisis it has been experiencing since 2015, the country remains posi-
tioned amongst the ten largest world economies (IPRI 2017) and presents great market potential. In
2016 private providers of compulsory education hosted 18.4% of the 48.8 million school student
cohort (INEP 2016). Figures pertaining to higher education (public and private) are equally exten-
sive: in total, 8 million students were enrolled in 2016, indicating a staggering 62.8% increase in num-
bers from 2006. Indeed, the past two decades has seen a significant expansion of the Brazilian private
(including for-profit) education sector. Crucially, digital technologies are gradually supporting the
private sector to position itself, mostly surreptitiously, at the core of Brazilian public education sys-
tems, as elsewhere (Selwyn 2016), with data-driven educational technologies – e.g., adaptive learning
and personalised learning systems – occupying centre-stage in the most recent marketing and media
discourses.
Issues related to the collection and storage of large volumes of data by GAFA1 companies (Lindh
and Nolin 2017) have recently begun to attract the attention of Brazilian academic commentators
(e.g., Amadeu 2017; Rosa and Chevitarese 2017; Nascimento 2016) as well as local news media.
The expression Big Data, specifically, started to appear around 2013, with 53 articles on the subject
published by the end of 2017 in O Globo, the second largest Brazilian newspaper. This level of atten-
tion contrasts with the development of a ‘digital society’ in Brazil. Whilst the country has more
mobile devices (phones and tablets) than its total number of inhabitants (Anatel 2017), only
57.8% of households were connected to the Internet in 2015 (Santos 2018), and 156 million of
the 241 million total mobile connections at this time were prepaid, which may suggest use predomi-
nantly by lower-income classes (Anatel 2017). Brazilians constitute the fourth largest group of Inter-
net users2 and the 4th largest group of Facebook users3 in the world, yet paradoxically the presence of
computer-based technology in classrooms remains inconsistent and differs significantly between
public and private schools. In 2016 computers were present in little over 50% of public-school class-
rooms, whilst the proportion in private schools exceeded 80% (CETIC 2017, 97). Mobile devices are
notably under-utilized by teachers, in part due to poor Wi-Fi infrastructure (CETIC 2017, 107) but
also due to lack of teacher training for their use.
IT infrastructure development has been a concern in Brazil since the 1980s, when public policy
aimed at expanding the country’s technological basis began to be consistently enacted, albeit opening
ample space for more intense public-private partnering and, in particular, for private enterprise to
provide ‘solutions’ for ‘educational problems.’ Local discussions regarding the presence of digital
technologies in education, however, tend to be strongly polarised (Rosado, Ferreira, and Carvalho.
2017). On the one hand, optimistic and solutionist (Morozov 2013) perspectives characterise not
only marketing, institutional and popular discourses but also a significant proportion of the aca-
demic literature. On the other hand, criticism of the affordances of digital technologies in education
have tended to focus primarily on locally practiced models of Distance Education (DE). Here, a siz-
able academic literature has criticised DE as a dehumanising profit-making enterprise devoid of
quality and concern for issues of citizenship and national development. Such criticisms persist,
despite the success of the Open University of Brazil, one of the most significant ways in which tech-
nologies have been used to widen participation in HE nationally.
This article, thus, considers how a new generation of digital technology ‘solutions’ is being intro-
duced in a scenario of relentless marketisation and serious threats to public education. In Brazil, with
the support of contested but favourable policy conditions, international actors (companies, multilat-
eral agencies and Non-Governmental Organisations) are able to search for new spaces to operate,
constituting new markets and data sources. Although purchases and deployment of different
forms of imported IT systems have been taking place in Brazil for decades, the increasing uptake
(in education and other sectors) of services effectively hosted abroad opens new avenues for ques-
tioning, as local processes are situated within the broader context of unprecedented global
 LEARNING, MEDIA AND TECHNOLOGY 3

surveillance and business that exploit datafication. Whilst important questions are being tackled by a
burgeoning literature on this subject, issues that are specific to developing countries, however, have
only recently begun to be raised (e.g., Milan and Treré 2017).
In this context, assuming that ‘critique is essentially making visible the interconnectedness of
things’ (Wodak and Meyer 2009, 7), this article offers a critical perspective on what is being claimed
in Brazil about data-driven educational technologies. The discussion focuses on the use of metapho-
rical language, analysing, in particular, three conceptual metaphors of ‘Big Data’. The idea of Big
Data is a fundamental notion supporting data-driven technologies and offers a ready basis for claims
of the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques frequently embedded in such technologies.
The article takes the approach that conceptual metaphors encapsulate specific ways of perceiving,
thinking and relating with the world, and therefore they may be understood as ‘self-fulfilling prophe-
cies’ (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 156). In this sense, conceptual metaphors constitute key persuasive
devices. Based upon a metaphor analysis of a corpus of texts collated from openly available insti-
tutional, media and marketing sources, the article explores ways in which these metaphors may
be promoting perspectives that ignore difference and obscure broader questions concerning Brazi-
lian education, thus contributing to the reproduction of previously existing problems.

Metaphors, Big Data and bigger pictures

In opposition to a long tradition in the history of Western thought particularly strengthened by phi-
losophers such as Hobbes and Locke, the twentieth century witnessed a reinstatement of the cogni-
tive role of metaphors. Metaphors are no longer conceived as mere ornaments or unwanted
embellishments, a position condensed by Black (1962, 25) in an ironic ‘commandment’: ‘Thou
shalt not commit metaphor’. Contrary to this view, an interactional perspective on metaphors
(Richards [1936] 1964) implies their conceptualisation as a fundamental meaning-making device.
Metaphors are ‘condensed analogies’, according to Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca ([1969] 2008,
670), i.e., they convey qualifications and value judgements more economically and subtly, thus con-
stituting powerful argumentative resources.
In short, from a cognitive perspective, it can be argued that we live by metaphors. Channelling our
perceptions, metaphors can be said to constitute us. What we call ‘real’ is no more than a diminished
range of particles, colours and sounds we capture with our senses. On this basis, diverse societies
create different cultural filters that direct our gaze and model the real into a fabricated reality, i.e.,
a cultural construct. Amongst these social lenses, then, metaphors play an important albeit discrete
role. With recurrent use, they are demetaphorised and their use is normalised. In short, metaphors
act to frame the world: they describe it but, in so doing, configure it in different ways, shedding light
on some aspects whilst obscuring others.
Thus, it is important to recognise that many words and expressions are, indeed, metaphors associ-
ated with what Lakoff and Johnson (1980) describe as more general ‘conceptual metaphors’. Con-
sider, for example, how expressions we commonly use to refer to discussions relate to an
underlying metaphor of discussion as ‘war’ – for example, ‘your strategy is indefensible’; ‘your criti-
cism was on target’; ‘I’ll never win an argument with him’.4 Conceptual metaphors impose a package,
a set of conclusions, value judgements and predispositions towards approaching matters in specific
ways.
Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 156) suggest that ‘metaphors may create realities for us, especially
social realities. A metaphor may thus be a guide for future action. Such actions, of course, fit the
metaphor. This will, in turn, reinforce the power of the metaphor to make experience coherent.’
In talk about educational issues, several widely-known metaphors cast knowledge, if not education
itself, as ‘content’ that is ‘packaged’, ‘transferred’ and ‘delivered’. Metaphors such as Comenius’
([1657] 1907) teaching as ‘printing’ and Freire’s ([1970] 2005) ‘banking education’ also objectify
(albeit in different ways) the processes and the subjects of education. This is consistent with Reddy’s
(1993) conduit metaphor of communication,5 which ‘objectifies meaning in a misleading and
4 G. M. FERREIRA ET AL.

dehumanizing fashion’ (Reddy 1993, 186) by suggesting it is ‘contained in’ and ‘conveyed by’ words.
As Charteris-Black (2004, 29) suggests, ‘metaphors that have become conventionalised (…) consti-
tute verbal evidence for an underlying system of ideas – or ideology’. Hence, metaphor choice can be
seen as a persuasive and profoundly political act, as Freire’s ([1970] 2005) critique clearly indicates.
This perspective brings to the fore the profound significance of metaphors of Big Data, since they
both reveal and conceal important aspects entailed in the creation and circulation of ideas on the sub-
ject. In particular, conceptual metaphors have broader, yet vital political implications. Metaphors that
cast data as ‘natural occurrences’ (Awati and Buckingham-Shum 2015; Lupton 2015; Puschmann and
Burgess 2014), specifically, support their conception as an unproblematic given, an idea embedded in
the etymology of the word 6 and intrinsic to much that is said about Big Data. However, as Couldry
and Yu (2018) point out, this idea obscures critical ethical questions pertaining to freedom, autonomy
and privacy. Indeed, the unparalleled surveillance enabled by ever more powerful datafication tech-
niques has been discussed as a key element supporting not only a new form of capitalism (Zuboff
2019) but also (and crucially to the analysis presented in this article) new forms of colonialism
(Thatcher, O’Sullivan, and Mahmoudi 2016; Couldry and Mejias 2018; Kwet 2019).

Methodology
The remainder of this article applies these notions to making sense of the ongoing discursive con-
struction of (big) data-based education in Brazil, exploring the subtle ways in which conceptual
metaphors act as condensed analogies to make complex phenomena familiar, albeit in biased and
simplified ways. This is not as straightforward as might be imagined. Indeed, metaphors are polyse-
mic and subjective, i.e., they are not universally shared. Hence, identifying linguistic expressions as
metaphors is not a trivial task, as it depends significantly on contextual specificities of their pro-
duction, dissemination and interpretation. Also, as not every metaphorical expression corresponds
to a conceptual metaphor, identification issues can be assumedly resolved with recourse to corpus
linguistics approaches (Charteris-Black 2004). This article, however, draws upon a rather more
focused analysed, as described below.

i) Corpus construction and metaphor identification

The corpus was constituted with texts selected from the open site Porvir7, launched in 2011 to
‘inspire innovation in entrepreneurial initiatives, public policy, programmes and investments that
improve the quality of education in Brazil.’ The site is sponsored by the Inspirare Institute8, a pri-
vately-owned company that supports innovation in Education. Site materials supposedly represent
a ‘new conception of education’ entitled ‘Innovative Integral Education’, which aims to ‘promote the
integral development of students, considering all of their dimensions: intellectual, emotional, cul-
tural, physical and social; [and] to respond to demands of the contemporary world and specificities
of the twenty-first-century student.’ (Porvir 2018). The site’s intended audience comprises educators
and teachers at all levels and sectors, managers, government representatives, foundations and NGOs
and ‘edupreneurs’, making Porvir a rich source for investigating ideas on educational innovation and
technology circulated in the country.
Using ‘Big Data’ as a primary keyword and 2013 as lower limit for publication year, a site-wide
search for articles was conducted in January 2018, yielding 52 results after initial filtering. The analy-
sis was carried out both individually and in fortnightly group discussions. The first stage of the work
involved identifying general themes through unfocused individual readings of the complete corpus.
The material was then divided amongst group members for detailed reading and (potential) meta-
phor identification in respect to the following terms: data, teacher/teaching, learner/learning, stu-
dent/(to) study, education, technology/technologies.9 A frequency count on selected words was
also carried out. Conceptual metaphors were identified based on grouping and categorisation of
phrases agreed-upon as metaphorical expressions.
 LEARNING, MEDIA AND TECHNOLOGY 5

ii) General description of corpus

In general terms, the articles consist of presentations of start-ups, digital technologies, events and
(few) educational actions considered ‘innovative’, reflecting the site’s conception of ‘educational
innovation’ simply as the use of digital artefacts. Most of the texts appear to have been produced
from information available on company and institutional sites (e.g., World Bank Blogs) or provided
by representatives of companies (e.g., Pearson, Blackboard, Knewton), universities (e.g., MIT, Har-
vard, Columbia) and research centres. From the 52 articles, only 13 mention Brazilian experiences or
interviewees who do not figure as representatives of international organisations.
Some articles are short summaries of material originally published elsewhere (e.g., New York
Times and the Harvard Gazette), and various items refer to findings of the NMC Horizon Project.10
The set includes also translations of material originally written in English by company representa-
tives (e.g., Knewton’s José Ferreira and EdSurge’s Tony Wan), suggesting themselves as pieces of cor-
porate marketing. A single article in the set selected is attributed to an educator (US-based senior
management level). Essentially, then, three-quarters of the material analysed convey perspectives,
opinions and information sourced in the Anglophone world. Significantly, named EdTech products
and artefacts appear to be in their early phases of design or prototyping: they are mere promises, not
actually tested products with results to be discussed and problematised.
Table 1 shows the results obtained from the word frequency count. The terms in bold are relevant
to the site as a whole. Italicised terms are more directly relevant to this article. Words between brack-
ets have their frequencies included in the figures shown for the main term indicated.
Terms that appear more frequently are directly related with the site’s core agenda, reflecting the
premise that ‘innovation’ in education is a ‘problem’ to be ‘solved’ with the use of technological
devices brought into educational settings by external initiatives and ‘entrepreneurs’. In this vein,
technologies are framed as ‘tools’, ‘products’ and ‘resources’ with the ability to ‘change and

Table 1. Frequency of selected terms in corpus (English

equivalents).
Term Frequency
Education (to educate; educator) 386
Student (to study) 361
School 267
Data 262
Teaching (to teach) 235
Teacher (tutor; mentor) 234
Technology (technologies; EdTech) 187
Brazil 149
Learning 145
Innovation (to innovate; innovative) 135
Big Data 101
Information (to inform) 96
USA (United States of America) 96
Entrepreneur (enterprise) 80
Tools 77
To personalise (personalisation) 71
Change (transform) 63
Problem 61
Product (to produce) 45
Learner (to learn) 44
Specialist 40
Solution (to solve) 35
Resource 33
Path 33
Pedagogy (pedagogical) 21
Collective 1
Socialise 1
Citizenship 0
6 G. M. FERREIRA ET AL.

transform’ education. The other end of the frequencies scale, where absences are identified, com-
pletes the picture. The absence of words like ‘citizenship’ and the negligible frequency of appearance
of ‘socialise’ and ‘collective’ are consistent with individualistic agendas promoted by the EdTech
industry. This is further indicated by the high frequency of ‘USA’, which appears as the main source
of systems and ideas.

Findings: three conceptual metaphors of Big Data in Brazilian Portuguese

A great variety of metaphors emerged from the analysis, but three have been selected for discussion
in this article as they lend structure to much of this variety and, thus, suggest themselves as concep-
tual metaphors. The first metaphor discussed (Big Data is a natural resource) subsumes the popular
idea from elsewhere in the world of ‘data as the new oil’. The second metaphor (Big Data is a tool)
relates to a more general ‘technology is a tool’ metaphor. The third metaphor (Big Data is a subject)
reflects the ‘radical displacement’ discussed by Barreto (2017): technology and artefacts framed not
as objects, but as subjects with agency, an idea that can be identified in discourses that support auto-
mation in, essentially, all areas of human activity.

i) Big Data as a natural resource

Within the corpus, ‘Big Data’ appears associated with various processes applied to natural resources:
‘raw’ data is ‘captured’, ‘collected’, ‘obtained’, ‘retrieved’ and ‘extracted’, prior to being ‘treated’ and
‘processed’ in operations such as ‘grouping’, ‘cross-referencing’ and, interestingly, ‘welding’. Even-
tually, data is ‘transferred’, ‘stored’ and ‘exploited’, ‘deposited’ in ‘databases’ or ‘databanks’. These
findings are consistent with the associations of Big Data with natural resources in non-educational
contexts identified by Anglophone scholars.
This metaphor has been consistently criticised for obscuring the issue that data results from
human-devised operations, i.e., they are not materials that exist in the physical world prior to
human intervention. As Kitchin and Lauriault (2014, 4) suggest, ‘databases and repositories are
expressions of knowledge/power, shaping what questions can be asked, how they are asked, how
they are answered (…)’. The metaphor conceals that choices and conventions drive science and tech-
nology, supporting their view as objective and value-free enterprises. The excerpt below is telling in
this respect:
[Big Data provide] a complete X-ray of what is assimilated by students.

In equating Big Data collection with X-ray imaging, the extract suggests an organic, ‘natural’
relationship between a representation and what is represented. It is interesting that the relationship
proposed is not with a photograph: X-rays supposedly shed light on inner workings that are invisible
to the naked eye, whilst photographs assumedly capture what presents itself directly to vision.
Obviously, neither photographs nor X-rays are neutral: both entail various levels of representation
and, therefore, are open to interpretation. The extract also articulates another key metaphor: learning
as ‘assimilation’. This is reminiscent of the printing and banking education metaphors mentioned
above, suggesting a conceptual metaphor related to the idea of ‘filling a container’, which is also con-
sistent with the metaphor of learning as ‘absorption’ associated with the ‘cerebral subject’ that con-
strues the human as a brain (Vidal and Ortega 2017). Whether the learner is conceived as a blank
sheet, an empty vase or a computational tabula rasa, it appears that all these metaphors assume
there is no interpretation involved in any of the processes is question.

ii) Big Data as a tool

The metaphor of technology as a tool is another common facet of how the IT industry has long pro-
moted itself as capable of realising the ‘transformation’ and ‘improvement’ that education is claimed
 LEARNING, MEDIA AND TECHNOLOGY 7

to require. In this context, data-driven technologies can be viewed as the latest entry in a long list. As
such, they are ‘likely to reproduce, perpetuate, strengthen and deepen existing patterns of social
relations and structures – albeit in different forms’, as Selwyn (2013) suggested in respect to other
forms of digital devices.
Within our examined corpus, the metaphor condenses the insidious idea that technological arte-
facts are neutral, promoting an uncritical perspective that obscures fundamental questions concern-
ing products of an industry primarily moved by commercial interests (Ferreira and Lemgruber
2018). Tools have a what-for – they materialise specific design purposes (Ferreira and Lemgruber
2018) – and claims surrounding Big Data as an educational tool suggest there is a profound, consen-
sual and widely-shared understanding of learning processes, as illustrated with the following
excerpts:
With Big Data, it’s possible to guarantee student learning, since it’s possible to measure and observe if they are
learning or not, how their learning is and how they are evolving.

[Two developers] got together to build a technological tool that uses data analysis and prediction as a way to
decrease evasion and bring parents and guardians closer to the school routine of children and adolescents.

The second extract above is a clear example of a solutionist perspective on potentially complex social
issues. It is noteworthy that, from the 52 articles analysed, only two list possible data categories,
which include a mix of ‘location’, ‘behaviour’, ‘academic record’, ‘performance assessment’, ‘attend-
ance’ and ‘interests’. However, these categories are relatively meaningless given the lack of clarity
concerning models underlying data collection. This highlights the ways in which such a metaphor
supports various premises. In addition to the notion that education is broken (bankrupt, in the Bra-
zilian equivalent), teachers are anachronistic characters, out-of-touch with practices of the assum-
edly digital world of today, and technological artefacts will solve these problems. These premises
compose a backdrop for most of the articles analysed, which fallaciously present a complex scenario
as an impoverished straw man, as illustrated below:
Most of the time, students are encouraged to remember facts and dates, following a standard procedure. The
maths class requires the correct application of a formula, whilst in history what is required is the citation of
dates and places.

With the help of algorithms (…) you will stop judging the student on the basis of their performance in a single
day. This would make sense in a world of paper where data circulation was difficult.

Although technology is able to capture diverse and precise data that capture students’ performance, the Stanford
researcher says that analysis requires clear theories.

The first extract highlights pedagogical practices that have long been criticised by specialists, whilst
the second raises assessment-related issues that have little to do with the current positioning of digi-
tal technologies as the epicentre of radical changes and historical discontinuity. These misleading
portraits of pedagogy and assessment, however, invariably support discourses that confer salvationist
powers to technology. Since no actual critique of pedagogical issues is offered, nor any real discussion
of alternatives is developed, adjectives are used to fill the resulting conceptual void, as the third
extract above illustrates with the qualification of data as precise and theories as clear. Assumedly
the ‘Stanford researcher’ has their own methodological preferences but, by not mentioning them
in the article, its author seeks to establish a prior understanding with the reader that such ‘clear the-
ories’ exist. As a premise, the claim requires no explanation, particularly as the underlying assump-
tion is that, given we are a faced with an anachronic education, constant novelty and updating are
needed: new methodologies, new modes of assessment, new teacher, new technologies, new tools.
Adjectivation suffices to support these ideas by underpinning them with a positive value judgement
brought to light by another conceptual metaphor: NEW IS UP.
If education requires an upgrade, this will be assumedly achieved by ‘resorting to best practices
already established in other sectors’ (New 2016, 1). The articles on Porvir reverberate key aspects
8 G. M. FERREIRA ET AL.

of the Silicon Valley narrative critiqued by Weller (2015, 3): ‘that a technological fix is both possible
and in existence (…) that external forces will change, or disrupt, an existing sector (…) [and] whole-
sale revolution is required; lastly that the solution is provided by commerce’. Despite problems high-
lighted by research into educational reforms led by businesses in the USA (Ravitch 2011), Brazilian
policy has been incorporating the same ideas, which not only demoralise teachers and deskill their
profession but also contribute to dismantle the local public education system (Freitas 2012). These
ideas echo in the sample analysed, with 75% of the texts directly reproducing opinions produced
abroad, and all of them clearly representing a Silicon Valley rhetoric.

iii) Big Data as a subject

In contrast with the metaphors discussed above, here Big Data is ascribed the status of a self-motiv-
ated agent rather than recipient of external actions. Various ontological metaphors, which cast
events, activities, emotions and ideas as entities and substances (Lakoff and Johnson 1980), were
identified within the corpus. Generally, they suggest that Big Data, while materially stored in hard
drives, becomes a powerful entity endowed with its own motivations as well as abilities to decide
and act. Data ‘help’, ‘support’, ‘provide foundations’, ‘facilitate’, i.e., embody a guide that ‘measures’,
‘predicts’ and ‘encourages behaviours.’ Some claims associated with the potential of Big Data and
Learning Analytics border the mythological: these things, together with AI, are equated with power-
ful precognisant beings, soothsayers who can foretell the future on the basis of what they learned in
the past. Data-driven AI becomes a superhuman entity with ‘predictive’ abilities due to an assumed
capacity to process and find meaning in large volumes of data.
Whilst science may be concerned with prediction, this is done on the basis of recognising cor-
relations, which are not taken to be evidence of causation. However, the hyperbole surrounding
Big Data is infused with the idea that causation has become irrelevant and theory is no longer
required (Anderson 2008). A more sensible approach might posit that identifying causal
relationships may be essential, albeit in the guise of ‘counterfactual reasoning – asking ‘what
if?’ (…); and no amount of data or brute computing power can replace this’ (Barrowman
2014, n.p.). Yet, in the scenario of a brave new (data-driven) education, ‘pedagogy is being dis-
tributed to automated machines such as ‘teacher bots’ and ‘cognitive tutors’, responsible for con-
ducting learning in real time’ (Williamson 2017, 7). These ideas permeate the texts analysed,
reflecting also a broader trend in recent Brazilian educational policy thinking towards partial
or total replacement of teachers by machines, as, from the prevailing economicist perspective,
teachers are ‘always the most expensive technology’ (Barreto 2017, 129). The following excerpts
from the corpus illustrate this:
We use data mining to find models that represent the behaviour of students during a task. We use observations
by humans to create models that no longer need humans, models that will detect and provide this information
themselves.

Imagine AI-driven lifelong learning companions that can accompany and support individual students in their
studies - at and beyond school - or new forms of assessment that measure learning, while it happens, shaping
the learning experience in real time,

These extracts frame data-driven technologies not only as subjects but, more specifically as better
subjects, since data is supposedly objective (unbiased), encompassing (omniscient) and precise.
The idea of precision integrates a discursive fabric that suggests Big Data knows us better than we
do ourselves. In juxtaposition to such perfection, humans emerge as savages in a scenario that is
strongly reminiscent of Huxley’s dystopia. However, what remains concealed are the human choices
effectively made at the backstage of data-driven ‘personalised’ systems: teachers are not necessarily
replaced entirely by machines but displaced by systems that also involve decision-making and
actions by entrepreneurs and developers, as Bannell (2017) pointed out. Indeed, within the corpus,
arguments from authority11 abound that appeal to businessmen, TV personalities, football players
 LEARNING, MEDIA AND TECHNOLOGY 9

and Formula 1 drivers as heralds of an ‘innovative’ education – in Brazil, these actors are enabled to
obtain copious amounts of public funding for their educational foundations.

Discussion: towards new modes of colonisation?

These analyses need to be contextualised within the specific Brazilian scenario in which they are situ-
ated. Historically, Brazil was seen, for a long time, as an immense reserve of resources to be extracted
and shipped to Europe, particularly during the rise of capitalism, and a comparable mechanism
appears to be inscribed in the corpus discussed here. In this respect, it is especially significant
that, in one of the articles, Brazil is framed as a key ‘user base’ of a large US-based MOOC provider,
an idea presented within the globally-promoted narrative that justifies data collection for the pur-
poses of improving ‘personalisation’. This ‘user base’ is cast as a territory ripe for exploitation. Cru-
cially, a high-ranking Brazilian university manager optimistically proposes a metaphor for the
‘productive use of data’ as ‘turning the Cape of Torments and transforming it into the Cape of
Good Hope’, in an explicit reminder of the world’s colonialist past. In fact, while the educational
data might be collected locally, processing takes place elsewhere, and the sale of processed data in
the shape of new systems and devices back to the source appears to complete a lucrative cycle of ‘digi-
tal colonialism (…) [,] a structural form of domination exercised through the centralized ownership
and control of the three core pillars of the digital ecosystem: software, hardware, and network con-
nectivity’ (Kwet 2019, 2). The resemblance between what happens in Brazil and Kwet’s (2019) analy-
sis of the South African case (and likely other countries in the ‘global South’) is striking. In particular,
when GAFA companies generously offer technologies to disadvantaged students, data is unimped-
edly extracted and subsequently treated in a manner that renders local specificities devoid of
importance.
As already mentioned, long before the expansion of the Internet and the advent of massive data
collection mechanisms, standardisation was already imposed locally through import of IT products,
albeit initially in the guise of closed commercial software and hardware packages. Indeed, such IT
imports from the US, particularly relevant to the education sector, have long been supporting the
appropriation of discipline-based language across areas of knowledge (with computing and manage-
ment neologisms entering the educational arena) as well as languages (in the Brazilian context: from
English to Portuguese). Language appropriations across boundaries such as these often involve re-
versioning metaphors (Papadoudi 2014), sometimes through free, word-by-word translations,
other times through the integration of English words into the Brazilian Portuguese lexicon as neolo-
gisms, in our case. Whilst local versions of metaphors such as ‘delivery of education, ‘delivery of con-
tent’ and ‘knowledge packaging’ are a relative novelty and still tend to strike Brazilians educators as
strange or foreign (even in distance education circles), the metaphors of Big Data identified in our
analysis appear to be on their way towards being absorbed in Brazil with little dispute, at least so far.
However, if ‘a borrowed metaphor is a borrowed item of culture’ (Oncins-Martínez 2014, 149), the
need is clear for critically approaching metaphors such as those discussed in our findings: since these
metaphors specifically encapsulate apolitical perspectives, it is essential to question the processes sur-
rounding their appropriation.
The colonisation of educational institutions by management-originated language, in particular,
critiqued by Fairclough (2010) in respect to the UK, has been taking place in Brazil to such an extent
that Barreto (2017, 134) was able to argue that Brazilian Education ‘itself dislocated to the territory
governed by a business rationale’. Local discourses on education have become gradually more closely
aligned with market-oriented rhetoric, constituting a point of contestation and debate amongst sta-
keholders involved in educational policy formulation. As suggested above, big companies now
appear to be shifting their interest towards compulsory education, as their hold over higher edu-
cation is practically consolidated, at least in numbers. This takeover appears to have marked the
development of the latest National Common Curricular Basis (NCCB) (Brazil 2018), originally
entrusted to a group of specialists including teachers, academics and civil society associations, but
10 G. M. FERREIRA ET AL.

gradually transferred to representatives of private interest groups (ANPEd 2017). A mapping of indi-
viduals and groups that led another key educational reform (Peroni 2018) revealed the dominance of
various organisations that both support Porvir and (perhaps unsurprisingly) were involved in the
creation of the NCCB. These business-led reforms were enacted at the level of central government,
but similar trends can also be identified across the State hierarchy.12
Porvir is connected to private organisations that have penetrated key sites of educational policy for-
mulation, where reforms are invariably proposed on solutionist bases. Therefore, it is somewhat pre-
dictable that the Porvir website, which emerges as a window of EdTech products and neoliberal ideas,
promotes entrepreneurship and private initiative as the sources of ‘solutions’ for the problems facing
education. Porvir disseminates strongly individualistic discourses, defending performance measure-
ment and self-management mechanisms for the individual-cum-business. The allure, to managers,
of the ideas and ‘tools’ promoted by the site resides in the possibility of control: although what is effec-
tively being captured and processed is unclear, control takes the guise of personal rewards to be reaped
as the individual adapts, competes and wins. The slogan ‘education for employability’ eclipses others
such as ‘education for life’ or ‘education for citizenship’. In disseminating discourses that pay little
attention to pedagogy and stress individualism, Porvir positions the resourceful, self-reliant and inde-
pendent individual as the client of an education reduced to learning (Biesta 2005).
This neoliberal conception of the twenty-first-century student (and, more broadly, the worker as a
‘lifelong learner’) is obviously familiar to non-Brazilian readers. The issue at stake here, however, is
that, given the blatant inequalities of material conditions as well as cultural diversity across the globe
(critical aspects of a territorially-vast country such as Brazil), it is difficult to imagine that ‘North–
South, East–West divisions no longer matter in the same way’ (Couldry and Mejias 2018). Whilst
the new logic of surveillance capitalism examined by Zuboff (2019) positions users not as clients
but as sources of the surplus behavioural data upon which value is created, it is not clear how that
this new regime will be able to manage the potential effects of cultural and material aspects involved
in the lives actually lived by people. For one, existing geopolitical structures that guarantee sourcing
of cheap raw materials and labour required for hardware production may turn out irreconcilable
with the push towards a globalised ‘data subject’ strongly constructed as a consumer of costly
goods circulated worldwide. In spite of the idea of neutrality that permeates many of the key meta-
phors of Big Data, social, political, and economic interests are profoundly embedded in datafication
processes (Thatcher, O’Sullivan, and Mahmoudi 2016, 995). Given these biases, it is reasonable to
speculate that, in unprivileged locations (usually contexts that most sorely need efforts directed at
developing different forms of data literacy – Pinto 2019), ‘datafied’ educational systems may special-
ise in creating subjects that will merely support previously existing power relationships and their
associated material arrangements.
In this respect, it is significant that the metaphors of liquidity often highlighted by Anglophone
researchers were not identified in the corpus examined in this article.13 In an analysis of how Big
Data is discursively constructed in Anglophone outlets, Lupton (2015, 107) highlights the prevalence
of expressions related to water – e.g., ‘streams, flows, leaks, rivers, oceans, seas, fire hoses and even
floods, deluges and tsunamis of data’ – that encapsulate ideas such as ‘vastness, unpredictability and
difficulty of control and containment’ (Lupton 2015, 107). These images reflect, according to Suther-
land (2013), an ‘ontologization of liquidity’ identified in recent theorisation in the social sciences
(e.g., Bauman 2000; Castells 1999). Crucially, they are justified as pointing to wider concerns with
excesses and the lack of control of covert surveillance and massive data collection, as Lupton
(2015) suggested. The absence of liquidity-related metaphors from a representative corpus such as
the articles analysed here suggests that, in peripheral locations, liquidity-pertaining issues may be
secondary, since the ‘tsunamis’, ‘oceans’ and ‘big waves’ of data hit other shores, as Big Data is stored
and processed elsewhere. In this light, despite its stated commitment to education, Porvir emerges as
an industry showcase that sheds no light on questions related to costs, finances and their flows, per-
haps strategically. However, it is certainly not the case that local subjects need not concern them-
selves with such matters.
 LEARNING, MEDIA AND TECHNOLOGY 11

Questions such as ‘who owns data?’ and ‘who profits from it?’, therefore, urgently need to be
asked. Yet they need to be asked and answered in the light of contextual specificities. Indeed, Taylor,
Cowls, Schroeder, and Meyer (2014, 438) call for local civil societies to engage in Big Data discus-
sions – arguing that ‘Big Data is shaping up to be one of the key battlefields of our era, incorporating
many of the issues civil society activists worldwide have been working on for decades’,. Such voices
are obviously not discernible in the discourses represented in Porvir: local initiatives, at least in the
sample selected, are few and outshined by the more numerous and colourful foreign proposals.
Unfortunately, the predominance of imported ideas and devices is consistent with an easily seduced
and exploitable local imaginary marred by a FOREIGN IS UP conceptual metaphor.
In Brazil (and elsewhere), digital technologies continue to be promoted as a panacea for histori-
cally-rooted social problems. These remain within the remit of a government(s) that is (are), overall,
ill-equipped to resist the movement towards deterritorialization and deregulation imposed by large
US-based multinational corporations. In this context, it is vital to contest the multifaceted neutrality
implied by metaphors such as the ones we discussed above. Although our findings – alongside Coul-
dry and Yu’s (2018) recent ‘deconstruction’ – consistently suggest this neutrality is an unfounded
myth, those metaphors constitute a powerful means to maintaining local issues out of view. From
this perspective, all that might seem to be left is an invitation to conform with an inevitable ‘inno-
vative’ future that will only reproduce the past, albeit in a different guise.

Closing remarks
Between the initial submission of this article and the preparation of its final version a year later, the
acquisition of Somos by Kroton was (unfortunately, if we may say so) approved by CADE. More
importantly, a convoluted presidential campaign paved the way for the election of a controversial
figure known to his supporters as ‘The Myth’ and to the rest of the world as ‘The Trump of the Tro-
pics’.14 A volatile situation now unfolds in Brazil, as neo-Pentecostal fundamentalists, military per-
sonnel and, crucially, representatives of powerful economic forces have been brought together to
compose a government in obvious internal turmoil.15 In fact, it is yet to be confirmed if all of the
current actors will remain in the scene for much longer.16
However, a (possibly) stable aspect of this new government is its aggressively neoliberal economic
agenda. Indeed, Brazilian academics generally agree that public education is set to endure more
blows in the shape of funding cuts coupled with further legislation that unashamedly favours private
enterprise. Some commentators have even suggested that Brazil may yet provide the stage for the
most extreme neoliberal experiment in history. Ominously, the latest local announcements on edu-
cational matters suggest no radical change of direction as far as this ideological basis is concerned.
On the contrary: they point to measures that are consistent with the trend towards marketisation and
privatisation of the sector described in this article’s introduction, which should support further
expansion of technology-mediated modes of education. Ideas currently under consideration17
would surely benefit ‘edu-businesses’ that supply technologies (from textbooks to ‘edu-games’ and
VLEs), distance learning (also in compulsory education) and, conceivably, entirely ‘Uberised’ teach-
ing services.
Although it would be unwise to make too many predictions at this point, as decisions have been
announced only to be quickly dismissed either as fake news, groundless rumours or inappropriately
‘leaked’ possibilities still under discussion,18 a key role for digital technologies appears to be guaran-
teed. In particular, if home-schooling is legalised and distance education is permitted at all levels of
compulsory schooling, the country should witness a significant expansion in the market for all sorts
of data-driven educational technologies. The trend should continue towards ‘fixing’ Brazilian edu-
cation through technology in a context where educators must assume the role of entrepreneurs
and promote ‘innovative’ actions with new digital tools created, predominantly, by companies
based in the global North. It is necessary to question the assumption that teachers generally accept
and will adapt to this new order by acknowledging their ‘efficiency’ needs to be increased by tools
12 G. M. FERREIRA ET AL.

that commodify their skills, a demand created by the assumed need to develop educational systems
that are fit-for-purpose in the globalised twenty-first century. However, expanding conservatism is
already restricting space for resistance in the context of broader societal issues. In this scenario, the
issues identified in our analysis remain critical, as, with the support of powerful conceptual meta-
phors gradually imported into the local vernacular, Big Data may constitute the surest bet of big
business as it continues poised to take over Brazilian education in ways strongly reminiscent of a
parasitic cultural invasion (Freire [1969] 1983).
We conclude, however, with an attempt at a more optimistic reflection. In nature, potentially
destructive parasitism is not the only observable type of relationship between organisms: highly pro-
ductive types of symbiosis exist that are essential for maintaining the balance amongst differentiated,
yet coexisting ecosystems. Whilst new forms of capitalism enabled by Big Data may exacerbate old
inequalities, reasserting difference and cooperation in diversity may yet play a key role in resisting a
‘data colonialism’ based on automated attempts to impose the specific configurations required for
efficient datafication (Couldry and Mejias 2018). Indeed, if ‘(…) universal history is the history of
various intonations of a few metaphors’, as the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (1999, 353)
suggested, then there may be yet unknown or, perhaps, forgotten metaphors we can live by. Resist-
ance might involve searching for them precisely in difference.

Notes
1. Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon. Kwet (2019) adds Microsoft to this list (GAFAM).
2. c.f. https://www.internetworldstats.com/top20.htm (22 July 2018)
3. c.f. https://www.statista.com/statistics/268136/top-15-countries-based-on-number-of-facebook-users/ (22 July
2018)
4. The same conceptual metaphor is expressed in Portuguese.
5. Also relevant in Portuguese.
6. In Portuguese, a single word is equivalent to data and given, which provides further support to metaphors that
conceptualise data as things that exist ‘naturally’.
7. Porvir is a possible Portuguese translation of ‘future’, which means, literally, ‘to come’ and, thus, suggests a
stronger measure of fatalism than its more common alternative, futuro. Available at: http://porvir.org
8. http://inspirare.org.br/
9. All the material extracted from the corpus included in this article is presented in English translation.
10. https://www.nmc.org/nmc-horizon/
11. Arguments from authority use ‘the acts or opinions of a person or group of persons as a means of proof in
support of a thesis’ (Perelman and Tyteca-Olbechts [1969] 2008, 513)
12. Despite strong centralisation, Brazil is, technically, a republican federation.
13. The ‘data is the new oil’ metaphor, however, does circulate widely in management media outlets based in this
country (e.g. Época 2018; Loureiro 2018).
14. Prior to the election day, evidence was uncovered that pointed to the strategic dissemination of fake news via
WhatsApp, the most popular messaging service in Brazil, as well as support from USarian alt-right (also)
through the possible involvement of Cambridge Analytica’s Steve Bannon as campaign advisor (https://
www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/18/brazil-jair-bolsonaro-whatsapp-fake-news-campaign). For com-
ments in English published soon after the election results were announced, see https://www.theguardian.
com/commentisfree/2018/oct/29/brazil-election-far-right-democracy-social-media.
15. For comments in English by a Brazilian journalist, see https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/
10/jair-bolsonaro-brazil-minorities-rainforest.
16. In particular, public rejection has been consistently voiced in respect to: the ultra-conservative (Colombian nat-
uralised Brazilian) Minister of Education (indeed, as this article reaches the press, a new minister has been
appointed and futher draconian funding cuts have been announced), the conspiracy-theory believer Minister
of Foreign Affairs and, last but not least, the neo-Pentecostal female preacher chosen for the controversial new
Ministry of Families, Women and Human Rights, referred to, in some quarters, as ‘Aunt Lydia’, in an allusion
to Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale. For an overview of some of the pertaining issues
here, see https://medium.com/@lioliveiraz/would-be-brazilian-politics-a-satire-of-house-of-cards-
1bdd7d7f6094.
17. The latest proposals include: legalising DE models at all levels (including compulsory education and post-
graduate studies, previously excluded), legalising home-schooling (currently unconstitutional), implementing
a system of educational vouchers (as replacement to other forms of funding), and promoting grassroots
 LEARNING, MEDIA AND TECHNOLOGY 13

conservative movements such as ‘School without Party’ (an extreme-right initiative based on the absurd notion
that ‘ideology’ can and must be ‘eradicated’ from educational contexts – Giorgi et al. 2018).
18. Many Brazilians and political commentators consider this apparent ‘comedy of errors’ a smokescreen aimed at
obfuscating potentially unpopular economic measures (see, for example, https://www.ft.com/content/1a2ba4f4-
de4e-11e8-9f04-38d397e6661c).

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors
Giselle Martins dos Santos Ferreira is a Lecturer at the Department of Education of PUC-Rio. Previously, she was a
Lecturer at the Post-Graduate Programme in Education of UNESA (2011-July 2018) and a Lecturer at the UK Open
University (1998–2013), where she also acted as Visiting Researcher (2013–2016). E-mail: giselle-ferreira@puc-rio.br.
Luiz Alexandre da Silva Rosado is a Lecturer at the Department of Higher Education, INES, where he acts as the Post-
Graduate Studies Coordinator. Previously, he was a Lecturer at the Post-Graduate Programme in Education of
UNESA.
Márcio Silveira Lemgruber is a Lecturer at the Post-Graduate Programme in Education of UNESA since 2012. Pre-
viously, he was an Associate Professor at the Department of Education of the Federal University of Juiz de Fora,
UFJF (1991–2011).
Jaciara de Sá Carvalho is a Lecturer at the Post-Graduate Programme in Education of UNESA. Previously, she worked
at the Paulo Freire Institute (2009–2012), São Paulo, having also worked as a journalist.

ORCID
Giselle Martins dos Santos Ferreira http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8498-5390

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