Who cares about learning design? Near future superheroes and villains of an educational ethics of care

Abstract

This article undertakes a critical appraisal of learning design and its relation to ethical ideas of care. We give an account of three personae of near future learning designers, developed using speculative methods, seeded with real-world data comprising job advertisements and validated with learning designers. The personae illustrate conflicts about the role of learning designers within the teaching and research missions of the academy and issues of care or lack thereof for these workers. The disembodied skills of learning designer job advertisements are contrasted with the bodies of (more than) real people that can suffer and care. We finish by contributing elements of a speculative job advertisement for a learning designer, who will help shape educational spaces of the near future by entangled care and unencumbered attentiveness.

Methods for dreaming about and reimagining digital education

“…Considering university as a space with highly visible hierarchies this could result in uneven and unwanted power relations for group work. The call for better inclusion of students in learning design and co-creation activities is not new and since the pandemic lockdowns more collective approaches that include learning designers and other staff have similarly received more attention (Costello et al, 2023;Prusko & Kilgore, 2023). Considering how to ensure inclusion so that participants could express themselves and their ideas without being judged in such a diverse professional setting became central in this context.…”

“…Indeed, a paradox of the pandemic is that while it was one giant act humanity trying to care for itself (Costello et al, 2023) it did not change many existing inequalities and reminded us of the tensions in how and for whom care is conceptualised and enacted. Otrel-Cass et al International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education (2024) 21:31…”

Rewild My Heart: With Pedagogies of Love, Kindness and the Sun and Moon

“…It uses the body and experiences of the first author-the I so far of this text-and takes them via a speculative auto-ethnography, further into the terrain hinted at in the Prologue. Speculative approaches are being increasingly used in a variety of ways in education (Costello et al 2020(Costello et al , 2022Kupferman 2022;Suoranta et al 2022). In academic literature, they may comprise science fictions of teachers with built-in obsolescence (Jandrić and Hayes 2021), classrooms from the future (Selwyn et al 2020), explorations of AI educational futures (Cox 2021) and medical education futures where struggling medical schools offer perks of 'comfort animals' (Cifu et al 2021).…”

Equity-Oriented Learning Design: An Entangled Future

“…Understanding learning design as a practice is complicated as it can be embedded in roles and positions linked to technology support, course, and curriculum design, educational development, and training. Learning design can be taught as part of a formal certification or can be part of scholarly and/or policy endeavours (Costello et al 2022;Grupp 2014). This requires a wide range of skills such as project management, creativity, design thinking, knowledge of pedagogy and educational technology, content creation, and more and more caregiving and sometimes 'in loco therapy' (Prusko and Kilgore 2020).…”