The NMC 2019 Horizon Report states a need to ‘rethinking the practice of teaching’ in a soon to come future. Already in early 1980s the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke said “Any teacher who can be replaced by a machine should be”, this much-repeated statement is often used to stress the need for technological up-skilling of teachers, but sometimes also a statement that illuminates how a rapidly changing technological society impacts education. Education is often described as the means by which the greatest future can be shaped, and as the best way to prevent impending dangers. As such, technology might impact education, but education and educational research can and should contribute to critical didactical perspective on technology as well. As such, online facilitation techniques can be seen as methods for teaching in diverse natures of mediated ecologies.

However, critical pedagogy seems oddly enough always to be absent in strategies for online teaching. Critical pedagogy stresses that even, if we have the best of intentions, we tend to interact with one another differently depending on our interpretations of different behaviors and bodies. Thus, a reflective perspective on one’s own teaching cannot be based on shared lived experiences, since we simultaneously create a ‘constitutive outside’—the others (Mouffe, 2005). As such it is neither desirable nor possible to eradicate conflicts.

Conflicts, disruptions and failures are often reasons behind new insights and can map out new and better trajectories striving for anti-oppressive education. Much has of course been written about the classroom as a normative space, digital space is often a normative space as well, but the digitalization of the classroom could perhaps help in queering that space, making room for diversity. One way to achieve this is to work with positive resistance in order to fight discrimination from within. As such, design for online and blended learning could re-think the ‘placelessness’ of the digital and open up for a multiplicity of residences, emotions and realms as Rouhani describes:

There are (at least) two different ways to think about resistance here. Initial, there is resistance against uncommon ways of doing things as it may arise from student, co-teachers, or co-workers. Next, with inspiration from Halberstam’s notion of queer failure, we can think of teaching as being about supporting resistance—namely, the resistance against repetition of common-sense and familiar stories. Resistance and failure are crucial for learning, as Kevin Kumashiro (2002, p. 63) argues:

“Education is not something that involves comfortably repeating what we already learned or affirming what we already know. Rather, education involves learning something that disrupts our commonsense view of the world.”

In summary, in order to design for online learning, we need an openness towards working with resistance and conflicts. So, as a teacher, one important mission is to work with resistances together with students. Instead of trying to defeat (negative) resistance, one should try to develop (positive) resistance. By this I refer to the development of resistance against oppression and the appeal to values such as fairness, social justice and ethical accountability. A systematic and continuous connecting of values, like the ones mentioned, to positive resistance would ideally boost not only contemporary critical thinking, but also a view of oneself as “doing the right thing. Thus, I think we need to zoom out once in a while and try to see the bigger picture. We can do this by talking about systemic or structural issues in education. As Kevin Kumashiro puts it:

“Without a structural analysis, we are more likely to buy into neoliberal ideologies that tell us that market-based solutions are going to solve all problems. Without structural analyses, we are more likely to individualize the problem”

(Kumashiro, 2012, p. 11).

Sources:

City University London. (2016).Online Facilitation Techniques.

Halberstam, J. (2011). The queer art of failure. Durham: Duke University Press.

Kumashiro, K. (2002). Troubling Education: Queer Activism and Antioppressive Pedagogy. New York: RoutledgeFalmer.

Kumashiro, K. (2012). Reflections on “Bad Teachers”. Berkeley Review of Education, 3(1), 5-16.

Mouffe, C. (2005). On the Political. Abingdon – New York: Routledge.

NMC Horizon Report 2019 available here

Skågeby, J. & Rahm, L. (2013) Positive resistance and the queering of digital media theory: on course dis/contents and classroom spaces. Media Fields Journal, 7 (special issue on Media Spaces of Gender and Sexuality: http://mediafieldsjournal.org/issue-7/).

Rahm, L & Skågeby, J. (2014) Making change: producing hybrid learning products. Hybrid Pedagogy – a digital journal of learning, teaching and technology. (accessible at: http://hybridpedagogy.org/making-change-produsing-hybrid-learning-products/)

Rouhani, F. (2012). Practice What You Teach: Facilitating Anarchism In and Out of the Classroom. Antipode, 44(5), 1726-1741.