Ontological Transparency, (In)visibility, and Hidden Curricula: Critical Pedagogy Amidst Contentious Edtech

Abstract

The steady migration of higher education online has accelerated in the wake of Covid-19. The implications of this migration on critical praxis—the theory-in-practice of pedagogy—deserve further scrutiny. This paper explores how teacher and student-led educational technology research and development can help rethink online critical praxis. The paper is based on a recent research project at the University of Edinburgh that speculatively explored the potential for automation in teaching, which generated insights into current and future pedagogical practice among both teachers and students. From this project emerged a series of pedagogical positions that were centred around visions of the future of teaching in response to automation: the pedagogical potential of visibility and invisibility online, transparency, and interrogating the hidden curricula of both higher education and educational technology itself. Through the surfacing of these pedagogical positions, this paper explores how critical pedagogy can be built into the broader teacher function and begins to identify the institutional structures that could potentially impede or accelerate that process.

Teaching Novice Teachers to Enhance Learning in the Hybrid University

“…This process also entails the negotiation of conflicting views within the university, corresponding to different values driving imaginative and otherwise desirable futures (Barnett and Bengsten 2020 ). Several scholars defend critical, emancipatory educational traditions, insisting on the intertwinement of humans, technologies and collaborative joint engagements in valued activities (Gallagher et al 2021 ; Networked Learning Editorial Collective (NLEC) et al 2021 ). Others argue that ethical practice, conceived as affective encounters, is at the core of academic work and post-anthropocentric educational processes of knowledge production (Taylor 2019 ).…”

“…First, a sociomaterial approach has at its core hybridity , as it refers to blurred boundaries (Mol 2002 ), negotiations among groups (Bijker 1995 ) and ‘webs of relations’ (Fenwick and Edwards 2014 ) in agentic assemblages (Latour 2005 ). As such, it can offer a valid alternative to deterministic and instrumental perspectives (Feenberg 2017 ) as well as essentialist views (Gallagher et al 2021 ; Lamb and Ross 2021 ) that take technology as the main driver for learning (Johri 2011 ; Nespor 2012 ). In this way, the adjective ‘hybrid’ refers to the assemblage of tools, platforms, resources, pedagogical approaches, institutional arrangements, power structures, norms, discourses and agentic tensions that shape the ‘materiality of learning’ (Sørensen 2009 ).…”

Postdigital Research, Networked Learning, and Covid-19

“…Interesting exceptions arrive from Edinburgh University’s Centre for Research in Digital Education 2 and projects such as Teacherbot: Interventions in automated teaching (Bayne 2015 ; Ross 2016 ). In this issue, Gallagher et al ( 2020 ) share insights from the group’s research project that speculatively explores potentials for automation in teaching through a series of design events with teachers. This type of work shows a lot of promise, as it combines critical-theoretical inquiry with playful experimentation involving digital technologies.…”

Biology, Information, Society

“…These reconfigurations of biology, information, and society are closely related to our understanding of postdigital humans (Fuller 2020;Savin-Baden 2021), and to new transformations of belief and religious practice (McLaren 2020;Reader and Savin-Baden 2021;Trozzo 2020). Perhaps less obviously, but just as importantly, these new reconfigurations underlie 'traditional' research topics as diverse as epistemology of truth/deceit (MacKenzie et al 2021), online behaviours (Koole et al 2021), and learning (Fawns et al 2021;Gallagher et al 2020;Goetz 2020;Networked Learning Editorial Collective 2020). They also have implications for postdigital thinking (Ryberg et al 2021), living (Lacković 2020), postdigital spaces (Calder and Otrel-Cass 2020), political economy (Arantes 2020), and activism (Bauwens and Jandrić 2021).…”