Abstract
The steady migration of higher education online has accelerated in the wake of Covid-19. The implications of this migration on critical praxis—the theory-in-practice of pedagogy—deserve further scrutiny. This paper explores how teacher and student-led educational technology research and development can help rethink online critical praxis. The paper is based on a recent research project at the University of Edinburgh that speculatively explored the potential for automation in teaching, which generated insights into current and future pedagogical practice among both teachers and students. From this project emerged a series of pedagogical positions that were centred around visions of the future of teaching in response to automation: the pedagogical potential of visibility and invisibility online, transparency, and interrogating the hidden curricula of both higher education and educational technology itself. Through the surfacing of these pedagogical positions, this paper explores how critical pedagogy can be built into the broader teacher function and begins to identify the institutional structures that could potentially impede or accelerate that process.
Highlights
This paper presents pedagogical positions that emerged from a collaborative project exploring the role of automation in teaching in higher education
Postdigital Science and Education (2021) 3:425–443 automation can be used to stimulate a reconfiguration of pedagogical practice in ‘complex, dynamic, messy, political social and organizational contexts that are constantly changing and that will shape, and be shaped, by “digitalisation”’ (Jandrić et al 2018: 3)
This is an observation building on past research and one made even more complex, dynamic and messy by the onset of Covid-19. These reconfigured pedagogical practices are possible expressions of a critical pedagogy, one which critically interrogates ‘the subsumption of life itself within digital technology and a “digitalist” rationality, and the naturalisation of this process’ (Lazarus 2019: 392) and how that can be employed alongside institutional values and expressed through critical praxis
Summary
This paper presents pedagogical positions that emerged from a collaborative project exploring the role of automation in teaching in higher education. Postdigital Science and Education (2021) 3:425–443 automation can be used to stimulate a reconfiguration of pedagogical practice in ‘complex, dynamic, messy, political social and organizational contexts that are constantly changing and that will shape, and be shaped, by “digitalisation”’ (Jandrić et al 2018: 3) This is an observation building on past research (notably Bayne 2015 and Bayne and Gallagher 2020) and one made even more complex, dynamic and messy by the onset of Covid-19. There has been increasing experimentation in higher education exploring how automation can ‘extend human capabilities and possibilities of teaching, learning, research’ (Popenici and Kerr 2017: 4) This is not an ahistorical experimentation but rather a continuation of educational technology increasingly performing portions of the work of the teacher and the student. This change raises questions about if and how pedagogies need to respond, adapt, or potentially reject shifting engagements and uses of technology
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