I

Politics and Instrumental Logics

Manifesto Points Covered

Figure 1.1

Introduction

This part tackles five key points from the manifesto, in the process setting out some of the theoretical foundations drawn on throughout the book. First, we introduce theories of sociomateriality, which emphasize that teaching is a complex and highly contextual activity bringing together people, texts, images, locations, objects, technologies, and methods in many different ways. These gatherings are situated, multifaceted, emergent, and therefore unique, requiring us to question the notion of best practice and replace it with an openness to multiplicity and difference. There are many ways to get it right online. “Best practice” neglects context.

We then build on this in chapter 2 as we rethink the dominant assumption that human sociality and agency alone drive the practices of education. Instead, we emphasize the agencies of the materials, objects, and infrastructures that come together in the production of teaching and learning. In this way, we briefly introduce theories of posthumanism and make this argument: We should attend to the materialities of digital education. The social isn’t the whole story.

Digital education is often perceived as being complicit with the reproduction of the instrumental logics of neoliberalism and commodification within education. In chapter 3, we make an assertion that is central to the message of the manifesto: Online teaching need not be complicit with the instrumentalization of education. We argue that understanding digital education as critical and sociomaterial opens up new, and better, ways of understanding and practicing online teaching.

We then extend these ideas into a discussion in chapter 4 of the role of the teacher online, arguing that reductive understandings of the “teacher function”—those that see digital technologies as unproblematically enabling the automation, scaling, and acceleration of education—converge with “learnification” (Biesta 2012) to deprofessionalize teaching. They underemphasize the role of the teacher as subject expert and critical practitioner by describing the core skill of the online teacher as facilitation. We argue that this reduces teaching to a level where it can be conducted by automated agents or unproblematically delivered by an underpaid, undervalued academic precariat. Online teaching should not be downgraded to “facilitation.”

Finally, in chapter 5, we continue the consideration of how we value the teacher by tackling the idea of the digital native—one of the terms that has been most damagingly formative for digital education and continues to persist. We argue that this is an essentializing term that is problematic for the way in which it normalizes colonialist metaphors and has historically worked to devalue the professionalism of the teacher. Can we stop talking about digital natives?