Conclusion

Shared Learning and Trust

The chapters in this collection show how important it is to build trust in order to begin engaging with critical pedagogical practices. Trust is the foundation for creating horizontal structures in education, by which we mean democratic, nourishing, and meaningful relationships in teaching and learning. In Chapter 1, Schofield, Johnstone, Kayes, and Thomas argue that “building online relationships . . . must be deliberately interwoven into the learning in an online space” for relational trust. Students need to know other students and their teachers and feel comfortable in their presence. Likewise, teachers need to know their students to be able to relate to them and facilitate educational processes successfully. As Robinson, Al-Freih, Kilgore, and Kilgore write in Chapter 2, “a climate of care in an online learning space—with its focus on community building, relationships, and the learners’ expressed needs (versus assumed needs of the instructor, school, or educational system) . . .—can support the development of safe and inclusive spaces that enhance the potential for critical pedagogical practices and aims to emerge and grow.” Indeed, how to go about critical pedagogy is not always something that can be known or defined before the actual teaching experience. There is a need for “creating environments that promote discovery, divergent thinking, skepticism, resourcefulness, and creativity,” as Acevedo argues in Chapter 3, yet most learning experiences are preplanned, ready to be delivered to imaginary students with imaginary needs. Do we allow spaces for critical pedagogical practices to emerge and grow in our work, whether that is teaching, design, or administration? This is a critical question in teaching with technology in higher education. De Lacey’s work in Chapter 4 shows how educators need to have both patience and will to create such spaces in their practices.

The issue of trust (or mistrust) can be extended to the systems, tools, and organizational structures of higher education. Both Acevedo and Collier and Lohnes Watulak (in Chapter 13) show how an academic culture of mistrust often hinders creativity and innovation. Collier and Lohnes Watulak argue that there needs to be structural changes in institutions for the higher education community (including professional services, academic departments, and students) to work together as partners, which calls for transparency and openness to learn from others, as Scott and Jarrad demonstrate in Chapter 11 in their collaborative teacher education work in Palestine. Skallerup Bessette further argues in Chapter 7 that how educational systems and tools work should be “visible and legible” to those who use or are exposed to them. When educators embrace the transparency of educational processes and products as a central value and aim in their work, opportunities for critical digital pedagogical practice emerge. These are opportunities for both educators and students to engage with “the how and the why of the education in which they are participating.”

Critical Consciousness

Critical engagement with educational content, tools, and processes also creates spaces for critical consciousness,2 which can be described as the process of gaining awareness of one’s political and social location in society and corresponding responsibilities. Hooks (1994), for example, argued that students and educators should regard “one another as ‘whole’ human beings, striving not just for knowledge in books, but knowledge about how to live in the world” (p. 15). In online education, there seems to be a need for both educators and students to become aware of and resist the “misleading fantasies of education” (Bayne et al., 2020, p. 13) often perpetuated by neo-liberalism in and out of higher education. As Fovet writes in Chapter 6, “[in a neo-liberal system,] students are often perceived as customers, and courses marketed as commodities, with value for money, convenience, time efficiency, and ease in achieving outcomes seen as key desirable and commercially competitive features.” Fovet further notes that “online education—indeed education in every modality—must be examined within a wider neo-liberal context within which it has been reshaped and portrayed”: flexible, convenient, cost effective, time efficient, self-driven. Emerging technology solutions in higher education, such as performance tracking, surveillance, or automation (often created in response to arbitrary needs), should also be examined in the context of neo-liberalism. This reflective analysis should be done with students, Fovet argues. In Silver’s work in Chapter 5, self- and group reflections and the co-construction of educational content and activities (through co-inquiry, peer-to-peer learning, and interdisciplinary collaborations) help both educators and students to develop their critical consciousness. Teachers see content “in a new light,” and students “not only develop academic skills and knowledge but also learn how to become responsible citizens and active participants in their communities” through the digital projects on which they work.

Another example of raising critical consciousness is provided in Chapter 8. Gonye and Moyo engage in critical media analysis through the lens of African critical race theory to show how social media—with their intent, user interaction design, and content—might become tools of cultural hegemony. The authors critique representations of African Indigenous practices and knowledges on YouTube as an example of how one’s cultural and historical traditions might be erased—or dismissed—through shared content and user interactions designed around that content (through views, likes, shares, comments, etc.). They describe this as “digital hegemony,” a more nuanced understanding of the role of the digital in the Global South compared with the problematic concept of the digital divide.

In Chapter 9 Luna-Thomas and Romero-Hall discuss digital hegemony in a broader context, noting “technological frameworks such as artificial intelligence, digital surveillance, digital marketing, even automated soap dispensers that fail to recognize black skin,” as “hegemonic instruments that automate and digitize human racism and discrimination.” In other words, such digital tools and systems are expressions of power, whether committed intentionally or unwittingly. In higher education, critical digital pedagogy is decolonial pedagogy when it challenges “power imbalances” (Schofield et al., Chapter 1) brought by colonial education. Critical digital pedagogy, Luna-Thomas and Romero-Hall (Chapter 9) write, “lends itself to decolonization of knowledge by allowing a participatory approach to learning in which knowledge sharing is a social movement that deepens democracy.” Again, there is a need to open up spaces in higher education for such approaches, “spaces that foster self-awareness, self-interrogation, and dialogue for individuals to learn from one another,” Knowles-Davis and Moore write in Chapter 10. These spaces, they argue, should be “inclusive and diverse” in order to “facilitate conversations addressing inequality and cultural bias.”

Change and Hope

We see in the collection how the specific teaching methods used in critical digital pedagogy are diverse and context dependent; critical pedagogy serves as a broad methodological orientation that guides educators in choosing the right tools, approaches, and learning activities for their work. For example, in Collier and Lohnes Watulak’s work in Chapter 13, critical pedagogy provides “a framework and shared language” to build critical digital fluency across the institution. Schofield, Johnstone, Kayes, and Thomas (Chapter 1) use the Pacific cultural model of Talanoa as a pedagogical framework to build horizontal relationships in education. Luna-Thomas and Romero-Hall (Chapter 9) show how educators might complement critical (digital) pedagogy with culturally relevant pedagogy and ethical approaches to learning design to address significant issues in higher education such as closing the BAME/BIPOC attainment gap. Attending to students’ cultural and local contexts as content for education also appears as a central theme in de Lacey’s work (Chapter 4). Scott and Jarrad (Chapter 11) use project-based learning to help students share their lifeworlds3 and students’ digital stories as context for critical digital pedagogy: “Methods of social constructivism (experiential, discovery, problem based) in which interaction, discourse, and mediated meaning drive the process . . . [comprise] an educational paradigm of the possible reified through human agency.”

These are the kinds of methods that help educators to connect formal education with life beyond the institution. Silver’s interdisciplinary work in Chapter 5 is a good example of this as students from computing and law work together to solve real-life issues in their communities via digital technology. Knowles-Davis and Moore also make a strong argument in Chapter 10 for using social media (i.e., #BlackLivesMatter on Twitter) to “bring marginalized voices and perspectives into the classroom and stimulate critical dialogue.”

So far, we have considered the social and social change in digital higher education, which might begin with building relationships, democratic and respectful class activities, and culturally sensitive and ethical approaches to curriculum design, but as Bayne et al. (2020) noted “the social isn’t the whole story” (p. 13). Critical digital pedagogy is needed to critique our relations with the environment, the “more than human.” Lynch writes in Chapter 12 that “places can never be just a backdrop pedagogically. The world is full of abundant relations that can link us to the Earth and the co-implications of any human-environment relationship.” In which ways can we avoid human exceptionalism with the choices that we make and the tools that we use? In which ways can we use digital technologies to build better and meaningful relationships with our environment? How can critical digital pedagogy help us to dignify the non-human world? These are critical questions in the age of the Anthropocene.

A central aim in critical pedagogy is to help educators and students become “critical, self-reflective, knowledgeable, and willing to make moral judgements and act in a socially responsible way” (Giroux, 2020, p. 1). Analyzing a situation through the lens of power and reflecting on it in order to create change might be two habits of mind needed for critical pedagogical practice, but change is a nuanced concept. It might not be visible or impactful right away; it can be slow, small, and intermittent. It might take a lifetime for someone to change ideas or beliefs or how things are done. In some instances, change simply begins as hope, for hope is not only an antecedent to change but also change itself, only perhaps in a less visible and tangible form. To reiterate what Scott and Jarrad wrote in Chapter 11, we believe that “critical pedagogy needs to have hope, idealism, and inspiration at its heart—the power of the possible.” We trust that this collection provides some ideas about and some hope for the power of the possible. For an instructor, this might mean creating new opportunities for democratic participation. For a researcher, it might mean directing scholarly efforts toward working with community members to examine and address inequitable educational practices. For an administrator, it might mean viewing institutional policies through a new or different lens, one that includes issues of equity or power. Regardless of your role, we hope that this book offers a glimmer of hope, a glimmer that things can be better, and that you, and us, and our colleagues can and will make something better of the circumstances in which we find ourselves.

Notes

References