Presenter(s): Megan Bam & Yusra Price

This 90-minute session combines play and reflection to surface the trade-offs, assumptions and conflicts that underpin data-driven strategies for student success.
 

Institutional logics provide valuable insights into decision-making and strategic planning by exploring the cultural beliefs, rules, and values that shape organisational and individual behaviours when implementing disruptive innovations (Christensen and Eyring, 2011), such as data analytics. Institutional logics are ‘…the socially constructed, historical patterns of material practices, assumptions, values, beliefs, and rules by which individuals produce and reproduce their material subsistence, organise time and space, and provide meaning to their social reality’ (Thornton & Ocasio, 1999, p. 804). In laymens terms ‘an institutional logic is the way a particular social world works’ (Thornton & Ocasio, 2012, p. 101).
 

Universities are shaped by the pursuit of knowledge, academic autonomy and high standards of excellence. At the same time, they face competing pressures from government regulation, financial sustainability, market competitiveness and professional academic values. These demands reflect the influence of different institutional logics, such as the state, market, business and academic/professional, which often pull institutions in conflicting directions. In South Africa, these tensions are heightened by persistent inequities in student participation, completion and success rates.
 

Data analytics has emerged as a prominent strategy to address such disparities through tools such as dashboards, predictive models and early warning systems. However, critiques highlight the risks of deficit framing, racial profiling, surveillance and a loss of trust, raising questions about whether data-driven approaches really advance equity and success in higher education. Logics at Play is an interactive boardgame designed to investigate how institutional logics shape the implementation of data analytics in universities. Participants will work in teams of four to six people, adopting different institutional logics to navigate real-life dilemmas using event and data cards inspired by South African higher education contexts.
Participants will gain a deeper understanding of how institutional logics influence equity and success initiatives; have greater insight into the tensions between data, trust and social justice; and be familiarised with a practical tool to engage staff and students in meaningful dialogue about equity and student success.

Limited seats available (25 total)

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