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We Should Attend to the Materialities of Digital Education. The Social Isn’t the Whole Story.

Higher education is often understood in terms of a materiality anchored in Matthew Arnold’s “dreaming spires” and iconic architectural statements, lecture halls, libraries, offices, and meeting rooms (Selwyn 2014). Indeed, our research shows that such physical imagery of “the university” retains much of its symbolic strength in the context of distance and digital education (Bayne, Gallagher, and Lamb 2014). Yet digital education also enrolls misleading fantasies of education unbounded by material and temporal constraints, where students and teachers are infinitely nomadic, flexible, fluid, mobile. It often draws together the digital with notions of democratization and diversification, promising access to teaching, learning, and education regardless of where students are located or which time zone they inhabit. This fantasy of a weightless and untethered digital education can be contrasted with the monolithic physicality found in the prestigious steel and glass new university buildings and with the expensive renovation of iconic, historic buildings (Selwyn 2014). It can also obscure the other materialities that make such education possible: the physical infrastructures of connectivity involving cables, routers, mineral mining, server farms, toxic waste, and energy (Wajcman 2015); the precarious and casualized labor of teachers brought in to “deliver” it; and the brute inequality of access to the material and temporal resources still needed to attend college in any form (McMillan Cottom 2017).

While there are many researchers considering the various materialities of education infrastructure and politics, much educational theory and research on teaching practice continues to be focused on the sociality of learning. Material infrastructures are often rendered invisible or marginal, sidelined by a default assumption that the learning human subject is the only entity that really counts. Usher and Edwards (1994, 24) have critiqued this default humanism in the context of education for being based on

an idea of a certain kind of subject who has the inherent potential to become self-motivated and self-directing, a rational subject capable of exercising individual agency. The task of education has therefore been understood as one of “bringing out,” of helping to realise this potential, so that subjects become fully autonomous and capable of exercising their individual and intentional agency.

In this view, human agency is the supreme driver of the educational project, and the structural factors that constrain—or indeed enable—the exercise of that agency are rendered invisible. Education is seen as a process by which the individual moves toward being more fully human (Snaza 2014), making the human subject the center of educational processes and outcomes. This perspective views education as a process of socialization into prevailing cultural norms or as functioning to develop the “full potential” of an individual’s capabilities. In either case, the core processes of education and learning are presented as fundamentally untroubled and unchanged by the material context in which they occur. In this context, technologies are often seen in terms of their capacity simply to assist and enhance human capabilities and so are understood as neutral instruments of human intention (Hamilton and Friesen 2013).

A growing body of research in education is working against these assumptions, bringing a posthumanist (or “more than human”) sensibility to the study of teaching. This asks us to rethink our assumption that technology itself can be simply harnessed by teachers or students or unproblematically used to empower or drive better learning. Rather, we need to think of educational technology as produced through complex interactions between human and material entities within a specific, situated educational and political context. Technology changes teaching, and using technology well in the classroom means we have to rethink the definition of the classroom, and of teaching, itself.

Snapshot

In her 2009 book, The Materiality of Learning, Estrid Sørensen describes the challenges posed by the inclusion of a virtual world, Femtedit, in an educational assemblage. She emphasizes how the teacher in a physical classroom setting can monitor children within a bounded space, with full awareness of the key knowledge content of the textbooks used and the sequencing of learning activities. However, in the virtual world, children could interact with one another as avatars in unpredictable ways, and they could, and did, engage in continual processes of knowledge gathering and building by making and following hyperlinks within the virtual world. In this situation, the teacher was unable to know what knowledge content was being used or the sequencing of learning activities that were taking place.

The static objects of more conventional teaching practice such as textbooks and workbooks allowed the teacher to have a clear notion of what activities the students were, or should have been, engaged in. They created teaching as a controlled practice or even a practice of control. The tangle of dynamic sociality and materiality in the virtual environment, by contrast, produced unexpected and fluid patterns of activity in which hierarchical forms of control became impossible. To paraphrase Sørensen, the technologies of the virtual environment acted to challenge the traditional hierarchies of the classroom, placing the pupil and teacher at eye level.

We argue in our manifesto that digital education is best understood as a set of social and material practices involving complex interactions of humans and nonhuman entities. Material things and contexts are integral components of practice and co-constitute social action (Law 2004). Material objects are not passive instruments but active participants in the practices of education. Such sociomaterial approaches disturb established understandings of education “by making visible the everyday dynamics, particularly micro-dynamics of education and learning” (Fenwick and Landri 2012, 3–4). The material and the technological in this view are vital, active, generative, and autonomous: technologies produce their own effects. The social is not the whole story.