1 Media Ecology | 2 Tools & Things | 3 Paradigms in Context | 4 Pedagogic Communications | 5 Externalizing Technologies | 6 Prescriptive v Holistic Models | 7 Re-mediation | 8 Lines of Flight | 9 Accountability | 10 New Materialism

Pre-recorded Syllabus Tour 

Before you begin,  take an introductory tour of the course, and note down any questions you have.

 

Post to slack, any questions you have, bit or small!

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Topic 1: Educational Media Ecologies: Asking the Right Questions

Back in 1968, Postman emphasized the survival value of media ecology as a scholarly activity. He did so, not because media ecologists have all of the answers. They didn’t back then, and we still don’t today. Rather, it is because media ecology scholars ask the right questions. That is who we are, that is what we do, and that is how we can make a difference.
                                  — Media Ecology as a Scholarly Activity, Lance Strate, 2002

Readings:

1. Casey Man Kong Lum (2000) Introduction: The intellectual roots of media ecology, New Jersey Journal of Communication, 8:1, 1-7, DOI: 1080/15456870009367375
2. Lance Strate & Casey Man Kong Lum (2000) Lewis Mumford and the ecology of technics, New Jersey Journal of Communication, 8:1, 56-78, DOI: 1080/15456870009367379
3. de Castell, S., Droumeva, M. & Jenson, J. (2014). Building as interface: Sustainable educational ecologies. MedienPädagogik Vol. 24, Berlin, Germany. Or online at https://www.academia.edu/8301131/Building_as_Interface_Sustainable_Educational_Ecologies

Intellectual production #1 (required)
This assignment must be submitted on or before Sept. 15th, 2022

Your task is, first,  to explain Strate and Lum’s understanding or ‘definition’ of media ecology (this is a summary challenge – your job is to as best you can, define and summarize what media ecology entails). In what ways does media ecology “ask the right questions”? What do you think an educational media ecology would have to involve, and what “right questions” might that theory allow us to ask? (no bullets please, but you may add a  diagram or image to your written account). 

To do this, you’ll need to think deeply and seriously about what “education” has been, is, and should be/come, and then focus attention on what facets and complexities an educational media ecology has to encompass, identifying as many specific elements as you can. The “building as interface” paper should help you with this,  as one example of a media ecology study that focuses on an educational context. This opening (required) “intellectual production” activity is your (“meta-theoretical”) foundation for the rest of this course, so extra effort on this one will be especially worthwhile. No more than 600 words, and non-textual media etc. are welcome.

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Topic 2: Tools of Intellect: From Tradition to Innovation

When we look at tools, we are looking at more than just objects—we are looking at “things”. It turns out that “thing”  might not be such a simple concept: nowadays we have more and more work on the how and why things can be actors and have agency, how they are changing, not static, and even how things (and other non-humans) can be political and ethical subjects. Philosopher Jane Bennett observes, “As our ability to detect and translate the more subtle forms of animal behavior and communication has grown, so, too, has our willingness to attribute intelligence to it and to recast it from behaviour to action.” (Bennett, 2009: p.108). It’s increasingly common to think of even our tools as ‘intelligent’, as non-human agents that act on us, not just objects we use. In what ways do technologies act as “tools of intellect”, and how do different educational technologies shape our thinking? What ideas and practices are enabled by the various specific technologies we use to teach and learn, and what might they impede? To begin to understand technologies as agents, and not just inert objects, we’ll be looking at ‘things’ from a media ecology standpoint, enlivened by a bit of actor-network theory.

What could be a simpler ‘object’ than…a door! In the paper you read, written, by the way, 4 decades ago (!) Latour leads you painstakingly through the complexities of a door, showing us how the necessary door-opening actions that had to be performed by humans came to be “delegated”  to doors (and hinges, and…). We are reading Latour here because that path breaking work to develop actor-network theory perfectly exemplified what a “metatheory” is, and what it can do to enable much-needed and very different ways of seeing. Here is a terrific example of how Latour’s metatheorizing works: “Rather than accepting culture or nature as explanations at face value, Latour, like many others in science and technology studies, turns them over from being explanations to being topics for his inquiries. Where the argument at its starkest uses, say “bacteria” as a source of explanation, Latour makes “bacteria becoming an explanation for X happening” the topic of his inquiry.”

How does this perspective make a difference to our knowledge and actions? Again, from the same essay: ” From his [Latour’s] studies what we then find are the connections which associate specific explanations and ensuing courses of action (i.e. building the networks of pasteurisation, practice of sterilisation in hospitals, changes in food production etc.) with specific kinds of bacteria. His studies convincingly describe a world where there is no pure nature nor pure culture. There are only fibrous webs gradually extending and contracting, erasing one another, copying one another and producing the shape of space and time in doing so.” (Eric Laurier, Bruno Latour: Biographical Details and Theoretical Context, p.6).

This is metatheory, its  “thinking about thinking”, and actor-network theory gives us a  way to understand how our ways of understanding/misunderstanding shape our world, for better and, too often, for worse—which is why we need the intellectual acuity to, as the Apple slogan (1997-2002) used to say,  “think different”.

Readings:

1. McLuhan’s tetrad: https://web.archive.org/web/20180426192133/http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/innis-mcluhan/030003-2000-e.html  and https://blogs.commons.georgetown.edu/cctp-505-fall2014/files/2014/08/McLuhan-Tetrad.pdf  
2. Laws_of_the_Media_by_Marshall_McLuhan_and_Preface_by_Paul_Levinson https://www.academia.edu/28948299/ (download)
3. Latour, B. (1992) ‘Where are the missing masses? The sociology of a few mundane artifacts’, in Bijker, W. E. and Law, J. (eds) Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, pp. 225-58, and, in an intriguingly different version, Mixing Humans and Nonhumans Together: The Sociology of the Door Closer, by Jim Johnson (aka Bruno Latour)   (and to think about why they are different versions : https://asociologist.com/2013/08/30/the-sociology-of-the-door-closer-redux/
4. Latour’s “Parliament of Things”: http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/downloads/96-MTP-DING.pdf

Intellectual Production #2 (required)

IP#2 is due on or before Sept 29th

Research one of these educational technologies: abacus; audiocassette; ballpoint pen; blackboard; digital video; document camera; encyclopedia; eraser; filmstrip; Gestetner; hole-in-the-wall; hornbook; logo/microworlds; lyre; makey makey; microcomputer; pencil; quill; radio; seven grandparent teachings; slate; smartboard; tablet; television; textbook; videocassette, DVD, overhead projector; videogame; whiteout.

When, where, how and by whom has your chosen technology been used as a learning tool? Create a 5-slide presentation with speaker’s notes that describes/explains that technology’s users and uses to your peers.

At least one slide should use McLuhan’s “tetrad” to situate that technology in relation to its context, its predecessors, and its successors. You’ll need at least 2 slides to represent the main ideas of “actor-network theory”, using examples from Latour’s essay to sketch out/theorize about a possible actor-network for the ‘object’ you have selected to focus on. (Hint: In Latour’s terms, we have “delegated” innumerable tasks and responsibilities to ‘objects’, to machines. What actions have been delegated from teachers to these educational technologies, and with what consequences? How, in turn do those technologies, these ‘things’  impact us, change our actions, expectations and behaviours in response.) BE SPECIFIC. The more “fine-grained” your examples, the better. And what does Latour mean when he writes that “…what defines our social relations is, for the most part, prescribed back to us by nonhumans”? Give an example. These first three slides are where you will be summarizing and ‘brick laying’ to get to whatever you chose in your 2 ‘choice’ slides.

The content of the other 2 slides is your choice. Make an effort to elucidate one or more of the main ideas in Latour’s short essay on “things”, and pay attention to the important distinctions he makes between ‘objects’ and ‘things’, and between “matters of fact” and “matters of concern”. (These papers are challenging, so you’ll need time and concentration and to look up things as you read, but its totally worth the effort, and will take you into levels and kinds of thinking you rarely get to experience—like an epistemic roller-coaster! It should make your heart beat faster if you are doing it right. Very scary but exceptionally rewarding.)

Alright then, can these two theoretical frameworks, ANT and media ecology, “speak to each other”? What would they say? What connections and disconnections do you see between these two approaches to understanding educational technologies. (Stop a second here…Look! Now you are comparing theories with other theories, and applying them to educational technology to see how they construct, reveal and conceal ‘reality’—And that’s “metatheory!”).

Reminder: Be creative with the medium, avoiding “walls of text” and text “bullets”. Cite all images, cite all quotes. Cite, Cite, Cite.

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Topic 3: Tools and Technologies in Context: People, Places, Paradigms

Required Readings:

1. de Castell, S and Luke A: (1986) Defining Literacy in North American Schools: Socio-Historical Conditions and Consequences in de Castell, Luke and Egan (eds) Literacy, Society and Schooling. Cambridge University Press.
2. Watters, A.: (2021) Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning.  MIT Press. Chapter 1, chapter 11, and conclusion.

Intellectual Production #3 (optional)

First, choose an educational theorist of particular interest to you:
Choose one from this list: Aristotle, Augustine, Dewey, Egan, Freire, Greene,  Illich, Knowles, Locke, Malaguzzi, Montessori, Piaget, Plato, Skinner, Steiner, Von Bingen, Vygotsky, Whitehead, Wollstonecraft, Pythagoras,  Bruner,  Froebel,  Pestalozzi, Rousseau, Bourdieu, .

Using the paradigms chart from your reading as a model, create a chart for the theorist you have chosen. Supplement the chart with brief (300 words) comments–this can be written or a short video) addressing questions raised below. What educational tools and technologies were associated with this theorist/theory, and what educational tools and technologies did that paradigm modify or replace?

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Topic 4: Pedagogic Communications

Required Readings:

(Choose 2 of these 6  for close reading)—and enjoy a skim through the others! This IP gives you a chance to overview, and then dig into, the pedagogical impacts of specific educational media forms. 

1. Watt, Ian (1964) The Seminar. Higher Education Quarterly,  Volume18, Issue4. Pages 369-389 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2273.1964.tb01035.x
2. Tomislav Jagusta, Ivaca Botick, Hyo-Jeong So (2018). Examining competitive, collaborative and adaptive gamification in young learners’ math learning. Computers & Education, Volume 125, Pages 444-457.
3. Jason Nolan and Melanie McBride (2013)  Beyond gamification: reconceptualizing game-based learning in early childhood environments. Information, communication & society, 17, 5, 594-608.
   
4. Brice-Heath, Shirley (1993). Re-thinking the sense of the past: The essay as legacy of the epigram, pp. 105-131 in Theory and Practice in the Teaching of Writing: Rethinking the Discipline, Lee Odell (ed).
5. A.W. Frank (1995) Lecturing and Transference: The undercover work of pedagogy. Pp28-37 in – Pedagogy: The question of impersonation, Jane Gallop (Ed).
6. Olson, David (1980/2006). On the Language and Authority of Textbooks. Journal of Communication. Volume 30, Issue 1, 1 March 1980, Pages 186–196, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.1980.tb01786.x
7.  Jane E. Caldwell (2017). Clickers in the Large Classroom: Current Research and Best-Practice Tips. Life Sciences Education Vol. 6, No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.06-12-0205

Intellectual production #4 (optional):

Select 2 of the above 6 papers discussing different forms of pedagogical communications: the lecture, the seminar, the essay, the textbook, gamification and…the clicker!  From these 2 articles, your job is to create a short video (5 mins max, not ONLY talking head please), to accomplish the following:

1. Explain how the educational technology described in each article might support different communicative relations among teachers and students.
2. Describe what you think are the two most important ideas in each article, and explain them in your own words.
3. Choose a “representative quote” from each article and then explain what it means, how it is ‘representative’ of the article as a whole, and why it is of particular interest to you.
4. Ask a thoughtful question that points back to these 2 articles considered together, and then, to pedagogical communication considered more generally, from the standpoint of having at minimum skimmed all 6 papers. (You are invited to replace any with one or more of your own to help give a wider view of  ‘pedagogical communication’ and the uses, and biases,  of educational media/tech.)

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Topic 5: Technologies of Externalization: From Embodied Knowledge to Virtual Realities

In 1931, Soviet psychologist A. R. Luria, conducted experiments to identify differences between literate and “illiterate” minds. Responses by Uzbek peasants to a syllogistic question indicated to Luria that non-literate persons were incapable of standard logical inferences. Here’s the Q & A from that study:

Question:
“In the far north, where there is snow, all bears are white. Novaya Zemlya is in the far north and there is always snow there. What color are the bears?”
Answers:
“There are different sorts of bears.”

“I don’t know. I’ve seen black bear; I’ve never seen any others .. . each locality has its own animals: if it’s white, they will be white; if it’s yellow, they will be yellow.”

“I don’t know, I’ve never been to Novaya Zemlya. You’ll have to ask someone who has been there.”

“We always speak only of what we see; we don’t talk about what we haven’t seen.”

Now that the internet has come to Novaya Zemlya, everyone who cares to know, no matter where they are physically located, or what they have personally seen, can tell you that the bears there are white. Has the internet made us more logical? (this is intended to be an ironic question, but no less an important one. How is syllogistic reasoning working out nowadays? What is educational technology externalizing?)

The purpose of this IP is to explore, from an educational standpoint,  ways knowledge can be and has been externalized, moving beyond embodied human experiences into distant and then virtual spaces.

Required Readings:

1. Taylor, Peter G. (1996). Pedagogical challenges of open learning: Looking to borderline issues. In E. McWilliam & P.G. Taylor (eds) Pedagogy, Technology and the Body. New York: Peter Lang.
2. Rowling, J.K. (2003). Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Ch12 (excerpt)
3. Johnson, Melissa Carol. (2015). Wands Or Quills? Lessons In Pedagogy From Harry Potter. The CEA Forum. journals.tdl.org/ceaforum/inde … um/article/view/7061
4. Bayne, Sian et al. (2014) Being ‘at’ University: The Social Topologies of Distance Students. Higher Education 67:569-583

Intellectual production #5 (optional)

“Wizards much older and cleverer than you have devised our new program of study. You will be learning about defensive spells in a secure, risk-free way . . . ” — HARRY POTTER

Risk-free education takes on new meanings in a pandemic that has seen online learning soar. For this activity, you are encouraged to form an online discussion group of 4 or 5 people to help you grapple (more fully than you can for this IP) with the Taylor article, which is complex but VERY relevant to MET students and VERY worthwhile understanding. This two-part question asks you to bring together two unlikely texts: Dolores Umbridge’s introductory lecture on the sufficiency of textbooks for learning Defence against the Dark Arts (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix), and Peter Taylor’s paper on some of the unrecognized perils of online learning.

First, sticking closely to Taylor’s specific arguments, (and plucking a few choice examples from Dolores Umbridge’s speech to the Dark Arts class), identify and explain some ways that online learning can risk reverting to The Umbridge Approach. Has COVID driven education even further away from embodied knowledge? What does that mean when all bodies are virtual? And what to do about that!

Then, using Taylor’s own terms, supplemented by your reading of the Baynes et al paper on being  ‘at’ UBC as a distance ed student, what has been your own experience of online learning—as student, as teacher, as parent, etc. Describe your own current situation in the MET program at UBC. How would you take up Taylor’s argument/s about the “relative value” of your degree under conditions of massification of online education? Has COVID impacted that? How?

(500 words max, however you would like to represent those)

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Topic 6: Prescriptive vs Holistic Technologies:  

“It is my view that today’s real world of technology is planned and run on the basis of a production model that is no longer appropriate for the tasks we want to undertake. Any critique or assessment of the real world of technology should therefore involve serious questioning of the underlying structures of our models, and through them, of our thoughts”. (Franklin,p.26)

Required Listening: Ursula Franklin (1989) The Real World of Technology, part 1. https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/the-1989-cbc-massey-lectures-the-real-world-of-technology-1.2946845.   or at this link   https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/14195315

Required skimming: Ursula Franklin (1989) The Real World of Technology. House of Anansi Press (Lots of free online versions, or UBC library)

Required CLOSE reading: CLOSELY READ Illich, ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind, ch 2. paying particular attention to the “memory palace” as an oral technology.

Intellectual Production #6 (optional)

This set of Massey College Lectures on technology is 30 years old. The recording, the first of its kind, takes place at Massey College, University of Toronto, a place “emblematic” of Canada’s intellectual establishment.

Using the form (slides, audio, video, text, formal essay) you find most useful for this IP to consider these questions about your assigned listening/skimming/reading:

1. What was it like for you, listening in to this lecture from 30 years ago in the elite educational setting of Massey College? Describe the kind of “media ecology” this lecture created? In what ways is the formal lecture an “educational technology”?
2. Skim Franklin’s text The Real World of Technology. How do Franklin’s categories of “prescriptive” and “holistic” technologies apply to educational technologies?
3. Closely read the chapter by Illich and Sanders (ABC). What “oral technologies” are described, and how do they shape thinking, memory, communication? How is the ‘memory palace’ a peculiarly “oral” technology?
4. What differences did you see as you switched from listening to skimming to close reading? Were you able to experience the recorded lecture in any ways differently than when reading the text? Listening takes more “real world” time, so where did spending that extra time get you in terms of understanding?  What things did you notice?

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Topic 7: Mediation/Re-mediation

Media ecologists like McLuhan and Postman drew attention to what have been called, a bit misleadingly, “properties of the medium”. Their work paid attention to the ways in which the conditions of a medium, both its affordances and its constraints, impose ‘biases’ (Olsen) or ‘tendencies’ more than strictly predefined and stable “properties”. And these shape and constrain what we can, and cannot, and cannot help but do in/through that medium. How does the specific medium in which we operate ‘re-mediate’—(change, transform, re-figure) what that we are trying to accomplish through its means?  What are the formative/transformative “properties” of the specific, different material forms in which our own (personal, cultural, political, professional) information is encoded, exchanged, managed—and destroyed. Safiya Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression provides one current example of the often-overlooked impacts of remediation from material text to digital algorithm. She writes about…”why we should be concerned about data retention in the digital world and… ways in which the previous paper-based information-keeping processes by institutions faced limitations of space and archival capacity.” Here record keeping has been profoundly changed. And why? Because the storage medium itself is an ‘actor’ in the network. As Noble explains “These limits of space and human labour in organization and preservation presuppose a type of check, or “institutional forgetfulness” … that was located in the storage medium itself, rather than relating to policy limits on holding information for long periods of time (e.g. The EU’s Right to be Forgotten) (p.125)

Required Readings:

1. Bolter, J.D.& Grusin, R. (2000). Networks of Remediation. In Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press
2. Your choice: find a research paper that contributes to your understanding of how your own area of concern has been “re-mediated” by specific technology/ies.

Intellectual production #7 (optional)

Identify and describe a particular tool/technology that is remediating your educational practices at work, in the classroom, or in other education-related areas of your daily life. Referring back to Bolter and Grusin, prepare a presentation for your colleagues that helps them understand how remediation has changed “knowledge” and ‘’knowing” in your area of concern, and what specific technologies have played a role in those changes. If text, then 500 words max, if slides then 5 max, with explanatory speaker’s notes, if video then 5 minutes max-NO talking heads only, must be multi-modal, for any other formats you would like to try out, email instructor.

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Topic 8: “Lines of Flight” Over Times and Across Space: Historical and Cultural Trajectories

“…observing the use of laptop computers in a Seoul high school raises a completely different set of issues from observing what appear to be the same devices being used in high schools in inner city Sao Paulo, or, indeed, in a classroom in rural Wales…The use of any ‘digital technology’ device in any country is therefore a complex knot of issues, interests, actors and agendas.”  — Neil Selwyn (2012) Education in a Digital World: Global Perspectives on Technology and Education

Required Readings:

1. Mitra, Sugata & Crawley, Emma (2014) Effectiveness of Self-Organised Learning by Children: Gateshead Experiments. Journal of Education and Human Development, Vol. 3(3) pp. 79-88
2. Brayboy, Brian (2009) Indigenous Knowledges and the Story of the Bean. Harvard Educational Review, Vol 79, no. 1, pp. 1-21.
3. Third reading is YOUR choice. Post to the class site one reading you would like to see added to this course that looks BEYOND current mainstream anglo-american, first world contexts and extends our perspectives on educational technologies and their associated practices. Work by indigenous scholars is particularly needed in educational technology studies, and especially welcome in this course.

Intellectual Production #8 (optional)

First, read Brayboy and Mitra, and then try to identify what educationally significant taken-for-granted assumptions these papers disrupt and destabilize. Why and how? And specifically, for example?  Next, invite your suggested reading into the conversation, explaining how it contributes to understanding educational technology in richer, broader and more diverse contexts of practice. Here again, be as specific, using examples from the papers. To conclude swing back up to this topic’s opening quote from Selwyn (2012), and focus on identify[ing] the “issues, interests, actors and agendas” within which that technology is/was/will be used.

500 words max, or equivalent in the form/medium you choose.

Here are your guidelines:

1. In your own words, what is the main point of the article you’ve chosen with respect to contributing new trajectories for technology in education? What, for you, are its highlights (why do you recommend this paper)? make sure to discuss Mitra and Brayboy in some depth, and bring the three papers into the picture.
2. What methodology do the authors use? Be specific, and cite sources.
3. Who or what are the author’s subject/s, in your chosen paper? Purposes?
4. Analysis/Argument: What are the paper’s main arguments?
5. What are the author’s primary conclusions? Your own conclusions?

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Topic 9: Educational Accountability: Technologies of Surveillance; Technologies of Support

“But you’ve spent a lot of time in hospital yourself of course,” she said.
 I stared at her. The imbalance in the extent of our knowledge of each another was manifestly unfair. Social workers should present their new clients with a fact sheet about themselves to try to redress this I think. After all, she’d had unrestricted access to that big brown folder, The Bumper Book of Eleanor, two decades worth of information about the intimate minutiae of my life. All I knew about her was her name and her employer.”
                                          –Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, Gayle Honeyman, 2017

Many of the educational technologies we now use collect, compile and report information on its uses and users. Privacy violation is just one of many new forms of risk that digital technologies, in particular, enable and intensify. After decades of relative immunity, tech companies today are beginning to be held to account for the consequences of their designs, and new protections and controls are, slowly, being implemented. (Think here of impacts of Facebook on people and politics, or the gruelling work of content moderators, or how racism and sexism gets hard-wired into video games, for example).

Educational technologies, too, bear ethical responsibilities for the capture and uses of data. The purpose of this IP is to crack open a few of the documentation tools and practices used in education in order to think critically about these as designed technologies. The reading should help you consider these questions: What kinds of documentation do we routinely carry out in the name of education? What are we documenting, and what have been the main uses of documentation in education? What relationships does this documentation create and enable? Who has been well served by documentation and who has been harmed? What kinds of documentation support learners (and which learners?), and what kinds prioritize other ends–institutional management, for example, or ideology, or capital accumulation (or all of the above)? What ethics govern, or should govern, data collection and uses?  Who are we accountable to, what are we accountable for?

Required Readings:

1. de Castell, S., Jenson, J. Thumlert, K., & Muehrer, R. (2016). Assessing assessment: An exploratory study of game-based, multimodal learning in Epidemic. Digital Culture & Education (8)
2. Romero, C; Ventura, S. & Garcia, C. (2008) Data mining in course management systems: Moodle case study and tutorial. Computers & Education, 51, Issue 1, pp.368-384 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2007.05.016
3. (SHORT) Carol Ann Wien (2013) Making Learning Visible Through Pedagogical Documentation http://conference-handouts.s3.amazonaws.com/2019-nctm-san-diego/pdfs/378-
4. Bjiarveit et al (2019). The Living Wall: Implementing and Interpreting Pedagogical Documentation in Specialized Settings https://journals.uvic.ca/index.php/jcs/article/view/19058

Intellectual Production #9 (optional)

Paying particular attention to the kinds of learner data captured and documented, provide an overview of the functions and uses of learner documentation discussed in these assigned articles. Then identify and describe a specific approach to learning assessment that is of particular interest to you (and say why it is of particular interest)—this can be a digitally enabled environment, like a learning management system, or any other form of assessment that involves collecting and analyzing student data. How does this approach to learner documentation and assessment construe knowledge and understanding? How does it assess and report learning, and to whom does it report? What ethical questions arise with assessment tools and technologies generally and this one in particular? What issues of social justice and human rights might be raised?  Be as specific as possible. This is a choose whatever medium you want activity, just make sure you cover each of the readings and are explicit as possible when taking up and engaging with the required readings. Don’t be afraid to detail your thought processes.

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Topic 10: The New Materialist Turn

An introductory note to our concluding topic:

These readings and this last IP are intended to give you insight—with a final surge of epistemological vertigo—into a fairly new trajectory of theoretical work with big implications for both education and technology. Choose from the resources you find most interesting and useful, making sure to pay attention to unpacking the quotes from Toohey and Bennett that introduce your final required IP—no fewer than 3 sources should be used.

I hope you will find these readings helpful in getting the gist of what “New Materialism” is about, and how it changes so many of our “taken for granted” assumptions: about agency, about the epistemic shift from studying “what actually happened”, “how things work”, what the facts are”, how things are, etc, to “what is this thing becoming? What are the agents of change and transformation?, How are we and things “entangled”?  How is inTRA action different from inTERaction?. Science (but no less philosophy,  social sciences, etc) has concentrated on causation, on the past, on ‘what is”, on distinctions between and among people and things, (People are ‘sentient’, things are not; people are rational and use tools, animals do not. NM attends to convergences, assemblages,  intersections, entanglements, inTRA action: how people and things are related, not how they are different; what animals and humans share, not what separates them.

We are now watching eons-old glaciers melting, oceans heating up, species disappearing, catastrophic storms that neither our ships nor our airplanes were engineered to withstand, and new maladies, both physical (COVID and fertility are notable areas) and mental, are erupting at unprecedented rates—most intensified or even caused by environmental pollutants. We are quite literally sharing this trajectory with every other creature, since all of us, even in the remotest, uninhabited islands of the Galapagos, now have plastic as part of our bodily structures. For these reasons and more, we can no longer turn to epistemologies rooted in the past, but must instead find new ways of thinking and acting focused on what is becoming. Greta T makes the point (not her words) that the question we and our governments must face—our “new economic metrics’” you might say, are no longer “How much does this cost?” but “How much can this save?”

Donna Haraway (Living with the Troubles), Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Jane Edwards, Bruno Latour, and many others have tackled these hard and urgent questions about how to live in a dying world, and I think they make very clear why we need new theories, new methods, and above all new purposes and perspectives. It’s for this reason I’ve wanted to conclude our meta-theoretical studies with “New Materialism” as a promising new framework for building better theory.

This future-oriented perspective is a place to begin to rethink education, teaching, learning, technologies, policies, and indeed every aspect of our work, because business-as-usual is no longer possible and our best chance is to focus on what and how we are becoming with others.

OK, now lets get back to introducing IP#10…

The New Materialist Turn

The persistent calls for inter-or transdisciplinary and engaged research by many scholars recognize the entangled and material nature of humans, discourses, machines, other objects, other species, and the natural environment (Frodeman et al, 2017). The growing scholarship that recognizes these linkages refers to such a perspective as posthumanism, feminist materialism, process philosophy, relational ontologies or new materialism… New materialism sees people, discourses, practices and things continually in relation, under construction and changing together. (Kelleen Toohey, 2018: 25; 29)

Required Readings:

1. Toohey, Kelleen (2018) “New materialism and language learning”, Ch. 2 in Learning English at School (2^nd edition) Multilingual Matters: Bristol
2. Jennifer Charterisa, Dianne Smardona and Emily Nelson (2017) Innovative learning environments and new materialism: A conjunctural analysis of pedagogic spaces. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 49, No. 8, pp. 808–821 https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2017.1298035
3. Cher Hill (2018) “More-than-reflective practice: Becoming a diffractive practitioner” http://journals.sfu.ca/tlpd/index.php/tlpd/article/viewFile/28/pdf
4. A pretty good intro that is readable I think, and covers the main ideas, is this paper. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2159676X.2018.1428678 (There are also videos online, YouTube, search for “new materialism”: here’s one a 3 minute one:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0SnstJoEec&feature=emb_title

Intellectual production #10 (required) 

Due Nov. 24th

Making direct and substantive reference to at least 3 resources,  please respond in writing (no bullets) to ONE of the following questions;

1. Returning to the specific educational technology activity you worked on in Topic 2, focus on the ways that technology was “entangled’,  with humans and non-humans. Looking this time into that tool’s inter-dependencies, inTRA activities, processes of change,  what could you now change or add to your initial description/characterization, reconsidering that technology from a new materialist perspective. (500 words max multi-modal work is encouraged.) OR
2. Imagine you are leading (You are getting paid a lot of money to do this!) a professional learning seminar for educational technology specialists wanting to “think outside the box”. How would you get them to understand what new materialism is? What are some examples, or activities, you could use to illustrate some of the differences a new materialist perspective offers to educational technology studies? How would you get them to understand why new materialism invites a re-seeing and re-thinking of “best practices”? (5 slides with speakers notes that elaborate on each slide)

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