Excalidraw
How Scientific Taxonomy Constructed the Myth of Race
Interview with Katherine Hayles 11th Beyond Humanism Conference
Pedagogy of the Oppressed
What is education? A definition and discussion
To Infinity and Beyond the Syllabus: Playing With Speculation and Tactile Curriculum Co-creation.
Overview
A professional resource for Master's-level Digital Technology in Education Students. It presents information to help teachers consider how purposeful embodiment in learning processes that counter digital platform mediation can challenge Big Tech's hidden agendas and leverage student and teacher creativity through thinking forward and back using collaborative with open, online tools. In addition, users will explore the idea of curriculum conceived as praxis, and why this type of curriculum is useful in revealing power struggles in education and beyond.
Timeframe for this OER
Total time: 3 hrs
Users are encouraged to read the supporting article, then use the additional resources to inform their thinking and reflection on the topic.
Background Reading
Preamble for Objects, subjects, bits and bytes: learning from the digital collections of the National Museums (Bayne, et al., 2009)
Published in 2009 when Twitter was popular and mobile phones were becoming more mainstream, this article by Bayne et al. discuss the tangible artefacts of museums that were being transformed and remade in digital, online compositions that reduced their authority over their ‘subjects’ and became more easily manipulated for learning. On page 111 the authors point to the focus of learning being on the processes of those who are learning, instead of the objects used to ‘transmit’ knowledge. The article also discusses issues of authority versus open processes that create ambiguities for understanding the digital objects, and how they are used to learn.
After reading this article, you will consider purposeful embodiment of learning processes involving powerful platforms that have become more commonplace in education since 2009. This lesson suggests that, to counter the hidden authority of learning platforms, education instead should focus on using collaborative online tools to create novel learning objects that has potential to replace the traditional syllabus where curriculum is conceived as a form of emancipation, or praxis.
Bayne, S, Ross, J & Williamson, Z 2009, 'Objects, subjects, bits and bytes: learning from the digital collections of the National Museums', Museum and Society, vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 110-124. http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/museumstudies/museumsociety/documents/volumes/bayne.pdf
Introduction
Large Technology companies market their digital platforms for schools as tools to make the processes of learning more efficient, but they also quietly collect information from students and teachers in the process (Lindh & Nolin, 2016). These platforms tend to commercialize digital interactions of its users, something that Srnicek (2016) refers to as Platform Capitalism. To make these platforms appealing, marketing and promissory features of the platforms highlight problems in teaching, such as efficiency of student work production and barriers to smooth digital communication for groups (Pollock and Williams, 2010) as reasons teachers should seek their products. But when users engage with platforms in educational settings, teacher and student activity on the platforms is recorded as data. Do teachers and students realize that their movement is being watched, and producing capital for large technology companies?
In post-secondary settings, platforms also include software that directly intends to observe students during assessments and make value judgements on their final products. In its proposed meaning to reduce teacher workloads to manage issues such as plagiarism and other forms of assessment cheating, student and teacher relationships can be minimized to crude interactions. This can impact the relationship building and trust that is the baseline for authentic learning and teaching (Selwyn, 2022). In fact, some believe that pedagogy is built upon the interactions that students and teachers create when they come together for a time, in a particular place. When platform-based learning is involved, the owners of the platform can be considered silent actors in the processes of education. But, who invited them, and their hidden values? Why do large technology companies, who tend to convert data collected from their users into data sets that are assigned values without permission from the users who created the data, get to determine when users are watched and what their data means. Further, little is known about how the personal profiles of users are arranged and categorized to make money.
The business of categorizing people has a history fraught with oppression and discrimination (Kenyon-Flatt, 2021). Education via knowledge transmission depends on many of these organizational tools, such as hierarchies, to help students categorize objects and ideas. But this may also indoctrinate them into accepting how knowledge was and should continue to be organized. Meanwhile, large technology companies are organizing students and using their promises to impact the future-oriented expectations of education. (Pollock and Williams, 2010). Now is a time to examine pedagogy, and its traditional tools, to understand how big technology is using participatory actions to impact the work of knowledge building. How pedagogy is conceived impacts how education works, and for whom. In other words, depending on how pedagogy and education is defined, participants in its processes can be visible by choice, made visible for exploitation without giving explicit consent, or have the privilege of remaining invisible for the purposes of impacting the enactments of learning for their hidden purposes. It is important for teachers to understand how these things can occur in seemingly subtle ways and consider alternatives for commonly accepted tools of education that may continue to indoctrinate students for opaque purposes.
Waypoint 1: What is Education in a digital world?
Purpose: Build your concept of what curriculum and its tools should be.
As Mark K Smith (2021) describes in his Infed article, education should be “hopeful”, among other things. Smith’s article is not specifically about digital education but may provide key concepts to help you reflect on your beliefs about what education, and curriculum should be.
Use the questions that follow to reflect on the information in relation to contemporary education.
- Smith refers to Freire’s idea of schooling as a bank where knowledge is deposited and learners are treated as things. What is removed from students when they are treated as objects? How does this situate students to be conceived when pedagogy is planned for their education? What does this assume about artefacts in education?
- What does Smith say about hopefulness, interactions and physical environments of learning? How can these themes play out in digital education futures?
- One section of Smith’s article refers to respect, and the actions that enact respect. Do you think the introduction of his ideas about respect to students could affect how they can conceive digital education, and their futures?
Waypoint 2: Processes and Praxis
Purpose: Consolidate the material you have engaged with up to this point to define your understanding of curriculum conceived as praxis.
Michel Foucault believed that when knowledge is produced in an entanglement with power structures, the processes of learning should also be examined (Foucault, 1975). To not recognize this power and how it plays out means that education places students in positions where they are producing something for someone, even if they do not recognize it in their day-to-day actions. However, students need practical knowledge that prepares them to act in civic-focussed ways. In his book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paolo Freire (2005) writes this about praxis:
"Reality which becomes oppressive results in the contradistinction of men as oppressors and oppressed. The latter, whose task it is to struggle for liberation together with those who show true solidarity, must acquire a critical awareness of oppression through the praxis of this struggle. One of the gravest obstacles to the achievement of liberation is that oppressive reality absorbs those within it and thereby acts to submerge human beings' consiousness. Functionally, oppression is domesticating. To no longer be prey to its force, one must emerge from it and turn upon it. This can be done only by means of praxis: reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it."
In the efforts to create knowledge using digital platforms, the commodification aims of the platform are prioritized in the shared actions. Without setting conditions for supporting students to recognize this authority over them, students cannot come to examine their own values and curiosities, constructs that only they can know and that stand to support them in whatever futures they can conceive for themselves.
Further, as data is organized by the values of large companies, the diversity of students is neglected and hidden. Conceiving curriculum and education as praxis may differently position students and teachers to deflect from these hidden, yet powerful processes, to instead focus on playfulness and exploration in between waypoints for reflection that hold potential to reveal who students are, and where they want to explore. In many online learning modules, learning is linear and has set responses based on student’s use of memory to recall facts. Instead, it may be more helpful for learners to create their own set of resources, similar to how this OER was developed. Soon you will try to apply the idea of praxis, playfulness and reflection using a speculative method of exploring ideas.
Considering Bayne’s et al. and Smith’s articles, and the information you have accessed about co-creation of learning, now try creating a definition of praxis that you can use as you progress through this resource.
Embodiment and Action
Katherine Hayles describes posthumanism as a paradigm that does not see humans at the centre of the world but instead coworking in symbiosis with other beings and objects in the world, including digital technology. When someone is working with digital technology, it can be conceived that both human and tool work together to produce something through their interactions and that thing they co-create holds within it the collection of knowledge they produced together, for their own determined purposes, not the purposes of outside actors, the purposes under which the tool came to be, or the student’s individual wants. It is challenging to conceive embodiment when engagement with visual media platforms dominate relationships to break down the potential for, what Hayles refers to as symbiotic work processes. Instead, it is useful to think about tools that students can engage with to create customized products that show their learning. From the creation of such tools, students can use futures methods to conceive new ideas to bring back to their original object of course learning. Using tactile course paths, students and teachers can block the ‘personalized’ features of digital platforms that make too efficient the hard work of learning (Davies, et al., 2021) and instead forge relationships with objects and one another to learn something that they value for the present and the future.
Waypoint 3: Embodying Course Learning Narratives without a Syllabus
Purpose: Consider alternatives to the traditional objects and artefacts of learning, in their concrete or digital forms.
A common tool of courses across the education sectors, the syllabus, is the embodiment of determined pathways of student learning that contain stated learning outcomes, and how a student’s actions of learning will be judged against these set criteria. Many educational institutions require a course syllabus and forget to include requirements about how students may perceive the course of learning. But how can what students need be determined in advance of opportunities to work with students and their diverse qualities? While teachers could employ a futures technique of looking forward using a method of playful creation to conceive what the future of the (non) syllabus could be, but it may also be worthwhile for teachers themselves to play with ideas around embodiment of a course of learning that can become a final syllabus record of learning. For the purposes of this OER, we will use the idea of speculation via simple imagining as a method for regarding the future possibilities for students. (Cerratto Pargman, et al., 2023)
Hopefulness in Affordances
Smith’s idea of respect that includes looking back and forth via reflection is part of the journey of student’s shared learning. When students choose to co-work with objects, they collectively decide on the affordances, a combination of tool’s features that suggests how it can be used, and the user’s beliefs about how it can be used. Neither tool nor user is in a position of power, but they have collective agency regarding their work. When learning is approached as praxis, students decide what parts of them, and their culture are included in the learning. Further, teachers can ask students to create futures-focused narratives that give body to their courses of learning, before students are directed back to their tools and relationships to design their own course of learning to suit their self-determined needs.
Waypoint 4: Speculate, play and reflect to recreate your own learning as praxis.
Purpose: Revisit an experience of your own learning that could be recreated and speculated with in co-creation with a digital, open-source tool.
Peruse the Excalidraw tool and consider how they could be used to support students and teachers to make concrete their actions as learning. You don’t need to spend much time with it, unless you want to. The goal is to help you think of possibilities of using it in co-creation of learning.
Using the concepts reviewed in this resource, reflect on a course or learning activity you have completed in the past, at any age. Now imagine a different future for yourself, or a fictional student in a similar position. What different possibilities of the future could you imagine? Next, bring back your possible futures and describe the potential impact on your professional practice.
Write a short statement of intent that explains a little bit about yourself, your past experiences and your future goals, as well as a short explanation about how you could use one of the above tools to reconceive your past learning experience as a form of co-creation and praxis.
Guiding questions:
How do you remember feeling about your past learning experience?
How do you feel about your experience of revisiting this experience through a lense of speculation, reflection and recreation?
How will your actions of looking back, then imagining other possibilities impact your approach to education?
Summary
The derivatives of museum artefacts, digital objects, are changed in their composition as they were moved from museum buildings to the web. In their journey, they lost some of the authority over their subjects, people who can interact with them and remake them in part, through a variety of shared activities (Bayne, et al., 2009). Since then, the educational platform established itself as a tool through which students could engage in personalized forms of learning. But in remaining open to education, invited themselves as participants with the privilege to silently observe and collect student information and activity to be reorganized as data. In this creation of a new form of authority, students were once again subjectified. But how learning is conceived by education, combined with open co-creation between students and digital tools, reflection and speculation about the future as viable actions of learning, creates hopefulness for something more. In this resource, you were encouraged to engage with a tool to conceive how these processes can play out and even give rise to a dynamic example of how students and teachers may choose to conceive and arrange their course of learning and produce an explicit and open syllabus of learning that can be reused by other groups of students across times, and purposes.
References
Bayne, S, Ross, J & Williamson, Z 2009, 'Objects, subjects, bits and bytes: learning from the digital collections of the National Museums', Museum and Society, vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 110-124. http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/museumstudies/museumsociety/documents/volumes/bayne.pdf
Cerratto Pargman, T., Lindberg, Y. and Buch, A. (2023) ‘Automation Is Coming! Exploring Future(s)-Oriented Methods in Education’, Postdigital Science and Education, 5(1), pp. 171–194. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-022-00349-6.
Davies, H.C., Eynon, R. and Salveson, C. (2021) ‘The Mobilisation of AI in Education: A Bourdieusean Field Analysis’, Sociology, 55(3), pp. 539–560. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038520967888.
Foucault, M. (1975) Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison. Translated by A. Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, Random House, Inc. Available at: http://architecturalnetworks.research.mcgill.ca/assets/disciplineandpunish-min.pdf.
Freire, P. (2005) ‘Chapter 1’, in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 30th Anniversary Edition. New York, London: The Continuum International Publishing Group, p. 51. Available at: https://envs.ucsc.edu/internships/internship-readings/freire-pedagogy-of-the-oppressed.pdf (Accessed: 21 November 2023).
istvangyal [Digital Photo] retrieved November 25, 2023 from https://pixabay.com/photos/phone-whale-remix-design-iphone-2255117/
Lindh, M. and Nolin, J. (2016) ‘Information We Collect: Surveillance and Privacy in the Implementation of Google Apps for Education’, European Educational Research Journal, 15(6), pp. 644–663. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/1474904116654917.
Kenyon-Flatt, B. (2021) How Scientific Taxonomy Constructed the Myth of Race. Available at: https://www.sapiens.org/biology/race-scientific-taxonomy/ (Accessed: 21 November 2023).
Pollock, N. and Williams, R. (2010) ‘The business of expectations: How promissory organizations shape technology and innovation’, Social Studies of Science, 40(4), pp. 525–548. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312710362275.
Smith, M.K. (2021) What is education? A definition and discussion. Available at: https://infed.org/mobi/what-is-education-a-definition-and-discussion/ (Accessed: 20 November 2023).
Srnicek, N. (2017) ‘Platform Capitalism’, in. Cambridge, UK: Polity, pp. 23–31.
Strickland, J. (2009) Top 5 Technology Trends of 2009, electronics.howstuffworks.com. Available at: https://electronics.howstuffworks.com/everyday-tech/5-technology-trends-2009.htm (Accessed: 23 November 2023).
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