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Critical Digital Pedagogy in Higher Education: Introduction

Critical Digital Pedagogy in Higher Education
Introduction
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“Introduction” in “Critical Digital Pedagogy in Higher Education”

Introduction

Shortly after we started working on this book, we witnessed a class discussion on Twitter which highlighted once again how education, as a formal system and process, is not always liberatory for our students. In this discussion, a student protested that, though she had many talents and aspirations, a rigid and predetermined educational system was constantly working against her, leaving her feeling hollow (Poyraz, 2020a). She argued that students should be given opportunities to cultivate their interests, to learn in critical and creative ways, alluding to the fact that an authoritarian model of education seldom provides such opportunities (Poyraz, 2020b). The analogy that this student was drawing was of contesting labour, or of contesting forces, in education: the labour of education—no matter how hard, deliberate, or thoughtful it can be—might be at odds with students’ backgrounds, aspirations, talents, and life experiences.1 Educational resources, activities, spaces, expectations, norms, regulations—the system as a whole and in part—can contradict what a student might find meaningful in the immediate context, in the future, for one’s self, or for one’s community.

Based upon our own experiences in higher education, we are convinced that the search for meaning is also true for higher education staff. In higher education contexts, we have experienced significant pressures with serious implications for professional practice: cuts in higher education funding are justified and perpetuated by neo-liberal agendas, which reinforce the notion of “education as a commodity” and “students as customers” in an ever-expanding market economy.2 Although there is growing emphasis on “value for money” and performance and outcome measures that often benchmark individuals and entire institutions against imposed criteria, less attention is given to the well-being and professional outcomes of staff, especially those who find themselves in precarious positions. In this environment, many digital technologies are touted by providers and adopted by institutions for efficiency, progress tracking, and automation, yet the outcomes of educational technology adoption are often questionable and contested. Such pressures and tensions are global and, increasingly, emblematic of educational technology (Veletsianos & Moe, 2017).

The COVID-19 pandemic has amplified and aggravated such issues. The chapters in this collection were written between 2019 and 2020, shortly before and after the first wave of the pandemic, which meant that the book took shape among complex social, political, and economic crises, one of which was the sudden pivot to online education in many countries around the globe. In this unexpected shift to the “digital” for all aspects of teaching and learning, educational technology both served as “a frontline emergency service” and became a crisis in and of itself (Williamson et al., 2020, pp. 107–114). The speed and nature of the transition to remote teaching and learning meant that, in many instances, digital practices were adopted without a good understanding of the spatial, temporal, and social dimensions of online teaching and learning. In our work contexts, especially early in the pandemic, many colleagues wanted to learn more about how to teach better in online and blended contexts. They wanted to know more about how to protect their students’ well-being, privacy, and dignity; how to build meaningful connections and communities; and how to create inclusive and accessible educational materials and spaces. Also, importantly, many wanted to be able to practise a pedagogy of care (see, e.g., Bozkurt et al., 2020; VanLeeuwen et al., 2021) in a culture in which education is increasingly viewed as an economic transaction.

We find it remarkable and hopeful that there is so much humane and critical teaching, and desire to do so, given the pressures that educators are under. This is one of the reasons that we decided to edit this volume. Considering the current context of higher education, the practice and study of critical digital pedagogy have much relevance for teachers as well as researchers, learning designers, academic/faculty developers, and administrators. Here, like Bradshaw (2017), we do not use criticality as “a simple negativity or opposition” (p. 9). Rather, in the spirit of critical pedagogy, we see criticality as a commitment to understand ourselves and the world better through connections with other people: this is a self-reflective and dialogic experience. These two qualities of critical pedagogy reveal why it is difficult, or perhaps undesirable, to provide or prescribe a specific method of going about critical pedagogical practice in digital contexts. We agree with Giroux (2020), who said that critical pedagogy is “not about a priori method that simply can be applied regardless of context. It is the outcome of particular struggles and is always related to the specifics of particular contexts, students, communities and available resources” (p. 2).

There are some assumptions and shared values, however, that characterize critical pedagogy, guided by canonical texts such as Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire (2017; originally published in 1968) and Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom by bell hooks (1994). Critical pedagogy intersects with social theories of learning in the sense that learning starts with experience, and that experience is always social or socially organized: the problems, issues, and realities of the society, as well as personal struggles and aspirations, shape educational processes and outcomes.3 In this socio-political context, meaning making in critical pedagogy is imagined as a shared, mutual process grounded in the life experiences of both students and educators. Co-construction in education is good pedagogy, of course, but there is an important political dimension of critical pedagogy often missing in other approaches: this is a reflexive and democratic process that sees the humanization of education both as a pedagogical aim and as a frame of reference for pedagogical praxis—the iterative cycle of “action and reflection upon the world in order to change it” (hooks, 1994, p. 14). In other words, a desired outcome of pedagogical praxis in critical pedagogy is “critically informed social action” (Brookfield & Preskill, 1999, p. 36). Teaching democratically means that we, as educators, “make an effort to create conditions under which all voices can speak and be heard (including our own), and in which educational processes are seen to be open to genuine negotiation” (Brookfield, 1995, p. 45). Thus, critical pedagogy, as an educational philosophy and practice, opposes and resists authoritarianism, both in a political and pedagogical sense.

Traditionally, critical pedagogy is concerned with a critique of oppressive educational systems and practices through the lens of power. For example, critical pedagogues might ask who or which system has power in a particular context, why, and how? What are the consequences? Critical social theories, “a range of theoretical [social justice] projects that self-define or might be classified as critical” (Hill Collins, 2019, p. 56) directly inform critical pedagogy. These projects (for example, feminist, post-colonial, or disability studies) address the intersectional struggles of race, ethnicity, gender, class, disability, while at the same time such struggles change and intersect in different ways depending on one’s social location. In simple and broad terms, perhaps critical pedagogy could be viewed as opening up spaces in education for deeply humane connections, to make education “vital and relevant” (Seal and Smith, 2021, p. 2) and rewarding for our students and for ourselves.

Critical education scholarship in general provides a solid base from which to draw for critical digital pedagogy. As this collection demonstrates, critical digital pedagogy thrives in scholarly literature and debate in different forms within and across different disciplines. Contributors to the collection critically examine digital pedagogy drawing from cultural studies, digital humanities, environmental studies, ethnography, history, law, music, politics, sociology, and education (including educational technology), reflecting the rich diversity in disciplinary and cross-disciplinary knowledge and practice in critical digital pedagogy.

In educational technology, we have seen in the last decade prolific writing showing how higher education teaching can engage in “reflective, nuanced, and critical thinking” (Stommel, 2014) about digital technologies, largely in response to “significant [and persistent] inequalities of educational opportunity, alongside poor-quality teaching, curriculum and school organization” (Selwyn et al., 2020, p. 1). As Bradshaw (2017) argued, this type of critically reflective work invites both practitioners and scholars to recognize how “culture interacts with learning and technology” (p. 20), and the ethics of this interaction, which largely has been absent in academic training and professional practice in educational technology programs. Public scholarship, typically outside the peer-reviewed journals that one might consider as the contours of the discipline has also helped to demystify the scholarship on critical digital pedagogy and to extend the reach and impact of ethical pedagogical practices and theories in educational technology (see, for example, #LTHEchat on Twitter, the journal Hybrid Pedagogy, etc). With this book, we aim to build upon and contribute to previous work in this area as well as to assist in making issues of concern to critical digital pedagogy more widely available.

There is another significant aspect of critical digital pedagogy that this collection demonstrates: reflexivity in critical digital pedagogy—the ongoing inquiry into our “attitudes, thought processes, values, assumptions, prejudices and habitual actions” (Bolton & Delderfield, 2018, p. 13)—calls for frameworks of thinking, the use of concepts and ideas, outside disciplinary boundaries. These include Indigenous knowledge systems and practices, narratives passed down in families and communities, non-academic literature and our everyday observations and experiences—in other words, the many ways in which we make sense of our world. Borrowing from Hall, viewing critical digital pedagogy as “the opening of a transdisciplinary field of inquiry” (Media Education Foundation, 2021, 01:15) might be helpful in that it represents a field that cannot be confined to the boundaries of a traditional academic discipline. Nor does it lie strictly at the intersection of multiple disciplines. As the pedagogical work is reflective, it is always under construction.

A central theme that characterizes critical digital pedagogy in this collection is the humanization of education (Freire, 2017): the affirmation of students and educators as whole persons with cultural backgrounds, life experiences, emotions, beliefs, and values. With humanizing education, we do not suggest a way of life and thinking that privileges human concerns, feelings, and affairs above everything else. Rather, our position is that humanization is a starting point for the nurturing of students as critical and compassionate human beings able and willing to imagine different and better possibilities for themselves and others, including the material world. There seems to be a need to define more clearly and perhaps rethink our relationship with the digital to widen such possibilities. This is particularly important in the current educational landscape, where digital educational practice is a crucial element of teaching in higher education through different modes of practice (open, online, and blended education) and a variety of digital platforms and tools, such as learning management systems/virtual learning environments, blogs, wikis, and social networking tools, and certain practices such as datafication, credentialing, learning analytics, upskilling and reskilling, and flexible learning. Although much has been written about these topics, and critical scholarship on them has existed for decades, critical examination of them at a larger scale has only gained traction recently (Macgilchrist, 2021). That is not to say that optimism about the digital and techno-solutionist approaches to education have disappeared. On the contrary, critical approaches to digital learning have arisen amid an expansive resurgence of local, national, and global efforts that centre technology in education that begin with the premise of solving education’s problems, of solving the problem of education, via technology.

When Freire was writing Pedagogy of the Oppressed in exile in the late 1960s, he yearned for democratic education, the teaching and practice of democracy as a life skill, a way of thinking, which at the time did not have much room to flourish in his native country of Brazil under the auspices of an authoritarian military regime. Similarly, the chapters in this book reflect the political and societal concerns of our times, and the pedagogical work can be seen as a direct response to some critical issues, which include but are not limited to the rise of extremism and white supremacy, inequality laid bare by the COVID-19 pandemic, climate catastrophe, structural racism, and digital hegemony. We invite you to approach this book as a pedagogical project still in the making in response to such critical issues.

We group the chapters into four themes corresponding to key concepts in critical pedagogy: shared learning and trust, critical consciousness, change, and hope. Although the categories might seem to be distinct, the themes are interrelated and often occur concurrently in the chapters. We elaborate on these themes in the conclusion of this book.

The chapters in Part I: Shared Learning and Trust challenge hegemonic teacher-student relationships and practices in higher education. In Chapter 1, Schofield, Johnstone, Kayes, and Thomas demonstrate how they develop relational trust in their teaching by embracing Pacific Indigenous values and ways of knowing. Next, in Chapter 2, drawing from an ethics of care approach to online course design, Robinson, Al-Freih, Kilgore, and Kilgore note “active listening, dialogue, trust, and openness without judgment” as some core values in online teaching. Also, in Chapter 3, Acevedo argues that an academic culture of distrust and surveillance is incongruent with creating learning environments that promote “creativity, expression, synthesis, and dissent.” Finally, in Chapter 4, de Lacey shows the careful pedagogical work required to “break down patterns of domination in the classroom,” essential for students to develop their critical media literacy and “interrogate normative representations of gender, sexuality, and race.”

In Part II: Critical Consciousness, the chapters call for critical awareness of specific topics. Silver describes in Chapter 5 an interdisciplinary law and technology module driven by the ideals of social justice. Through an iterative process of co-construction and reflection, students engage critically with lawtech as a discipline, their learning, and “their place within this world.” In Chapter 6, Fovet argues that critical digital pedagogy must include a reflexive analysis of how learners perceive online learning within a neo-liberal context. Skallerup Bessette, in Chapter 7, critiques unequal access to technology and stresses the need to understand students’ cultural and material contexts to inform institutional decisions about technology. Her compelling discussion sits at the intersection of digital redlining, minimal computing, and equity.

The chapters in Part III: Change are concerned with the liberating potential of education. In Chapter 8, Gonye and Moyo, drawing from African Indigenous knowledge systems, imagine and put into practice a liberatory pedagogy that disrupts digital hegemony in the Global South. Next, in Chapter 9, Thomas and Romero-Hall discuss the demographic attainment gaps in higher education and provide practical suggestions for educators to use culturally relevant pedagogy and corresponding emancipatory pedagogies to address this critical issue. In Chapter 10, Knowles-Davis and Moore use Black Twitter as a site of and for doing critical visual pedagogy. They call for the creation of ethical educational spaces that challenge “social stereotypes, hierarchies, and oppressive structures, especially those that affect marginalized communities.”

Although the thematic groupings overlap, the themes of “Change” and “Hope” are the most closely connected. The chapters in Part IV: Hope are united by a desire for things to be different and better, a desire that becomes a possibility, an optimistic endeavour. Scott and Jarrad write in Chapter 11 that “critical pedagogy needs to have hope, idealism, and inspiration at its heart—the power of the possible.” Through an international collaborative project, the authors discuss how they use project-based learning as a method to dignify and educate students in a troubled Palestinian context, while acknowledging that emancipation through education is not always viable in a politically oppressed society. In a very different context, Lynch uses a post-humanist lens in Chapter 12 to offer a critical yet hopeful account of how technology can be used to form and sustain “interconnectedness with the more-than-human” world. Finally, in Chapter 13, Collier and Lohnes Watulak describe how they led “curricular change from the margins and into a partnership model” and how, in the process, they became oriented toward hope to open up new academic spaces that challenge existing academic hierarchies and silos of knowledge.

There is much in the pages that follow that can spark alternative practices, propel research agendas, and foster future research. The contributors to this collection, as well as we, the editors, often commented during the project on how pedagogical reflection and praxis are always works in progress: we learn significantly from our reflections and from our interactions with others deeply and passionately interested in humanizing education, with or without digital technology. We hope that you will be part of this reflective process too as you pick up the threads in this book and find different and unique ways to explore critical digital pedagogy in your scholarly practice, whether that is research, teaching, service, or administration.

Notes

1 In her tweet, Poyraz draws an analogy with classic pipe and water tank problems in Math Education. For example, as one pipe fills a tank in 4 hours, a drainpipe empties it in 8 hours. With both pipes open, how long would it take the tank to be filled?

2 See, for example, proposed government cuts in art and design, music, dance, drama and performing arts, media studies, and archaeology in the United Kingdom (Arts Industry, 2021).

3 This reminds us of Mills (2000), who wrote, “neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both” (p. 3).

References

Arts Industry. (2021, July 21). Cuts to higher education arts funding to go ahead. https://artsindustry.co.uk/news/2587-cuts-to-higher-education-arts-funding-to-go-ahead.

Bolton, G., & Delderfield, R. (2018). Reflective practice: Writing and professional development (5th ed). Sage Publications.

Bozkurt, A., Jung, I., Xiao, J., Vladimirschi, V., Schuwer, R., Egorov, G., Lambert, S. R., . . . & Paskevicius, M. (2020). A global outlook to the interruption of education due to COVID-19 Pandemic: Navigating in a time of uncertainty and crisis. Asian Journal of Distance Education, 15(1), 1–126.

Bradshaw, A. C. (2017). Critical pedagogy and educational technology. In A. D. Benson, R. Joseph, & J. L. Moore (Eds.), Culture, learning, and technology: Research and practice (pp. 8–27). Routledge.

Brookfield, S. D. (1995). Becoming a critically reflective teacher. Jossey-Bass.

Brookfield, S. D., & Preskill, S. (1999). Discussion as a way of teaching: Tools and techniques for democratic classrooms. Jossey-Bass.

Freire, P. (2017). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Penguin Books. (Original work published 1968)

Giroux, H. (2020). On critical pedagogy (2nd ed). Bloomsbury Academic.

hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. Routledge.

Hill Collins, P. (2019). Intersectionality as critical social theory. Duke University Press.

Macgilchrist, F. (2021). What is “critical” in critical studies of edtech? Three responses. Learning Media and Technology, 46(3), 243–249.

Media Education Foundation. (2021, April 14). Trans-disciplinary thought & intellectual activism—Stuart Hall: Through the prism [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/VbgVIEIR1vc.

Mills, C. W. (2000). Sociological imagination: Fortieth anniversary edition. Oxford University Press.

Poyraz, G. [@poyraztgizem]. (2020a, October 28). Hani havuz problemlerinde üstteki musluklar havuzu doldurmaya çalışırken alttakiler de boşaltır ya, işte ben kendimi o havuz gibi hissediyorum. Yeteneklerim . . . [Tweet]. Twitter. https://twitter.com/poyraztgizem/status/1321535977165389826.

Poyraz, G. [@poyraztgizem]. (2020b, October 28). + dolayısıyla tüm öğrenenlerin beyin havuzlarının özgür bırakılıp, eleştirel ve yaratıcı öğrenme olanaklarının sunulduğu ortamlar çok kıymetlidir. Örneğin içerisinde bulunduğum bu . . . [Tweet]. Twitter. https://twitter.com/poyraztgizem/status/1321537959112417283.

Seal, M., & Smith, A. (2021). Enabling critical pedagogy in higher education. Critical Publishing Ltd.

Selwyn, N., Hillman, T., Eynon, R., Ferreira, G., Knox, J., MacGilchrist, F., and Sancho-Gil, J. M. (2020). What’s next for ed-tech? Critical hopes and concerns for the 2020s. Learning, Media and Technology, 45(1), 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2020.1694945.

Stommel, J. (2014). Critical digital pedagogy: A definition. Hybrid Pedagogy. https://hybridpedagogy.org/critical-digital-pedagogy-definition/.

VanLeeuwen, C. A., Veletsianos, G., Johnson, N., & Belikov, O. (2021). Never-ending repetitiveness, sadness, loss, and “juggling with a blindfold on”: Lived experiences of Canadian college and university faculty members during the COVID-19 pandemic. British Journal of Educational Technology, 52(4), 1306–1322. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.13065.

Veletsianos, G., & Moe, R. (2017, April 10). The rise of educational technology as a sociocultural and ideological phenomenon. Educause Review. http://er.educause.edu/articles/2017/4/the-rise-of-educational-technology-as-a-sociocultural-and-ideological-phenomenon.

Williamson, B., Eynon, R., & Potter, J. (2020). Pandemic politics, pedagogies and practices: Digital technologies and distance education during the coronavirus emergency. Learning, Media and Technology, 45(2), 107–114.

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