Critical pedagogies in the neoliberal university: What happens when they go digital?

Abstract

Universities everywhere have been transformed as a result of expectations of labour flexibility and the implementation of market‐oriented policies and practices including cost containment measures and efficiency‐driven management models. Online teaching can be seen as a reform to education constituted by a “common sense” vision for post‐secondary education survival. Critical pedagogical approaches in social work education, geared towards fostering critical thinking skills and an insistence on students taking into account the social and historical positioning and identities of professionals and service recipients, must function within this context. This article explores how digitalized learning spaces in online social work education programs shape critical pedagogies and create different knowledge, power, and spatialized relations as universities are being restructured along neoliberal lines. Our central question is: What gets produced in the neoliberal university when critical pedagogies go online? We situate our discussion at the intersection of four areas of literature: critical pedagogies; geographies of education; neoliberalism; and distance education. Online education is analyzed as a technology of governance that effectively restructures the workplaces of university educators while constituting and disciplining willing subjects who can respond successfully to the demands of the neoliberal university.