Introduction

What is already known about this topic? 

The relationship between education and technology is a well-mapped field.  

The field maps and questions the nature of relationships between the socio-material elements of education and broader political and philosophical areas such as learner agency and autonomy.  

What this report adds 

An outline of ‘entangled pedagogy’ can provide a set of heuristics to explore the complex relationship between education and technology.  

Implications for practice or policy 

A critical approach to education and technology can help to raise questions that are often overlooked as part of a ‘techno-solution’ approach to educational problems.  

 

There is a body of literature in the field of educational technology that could be best described as ‘critical’ because it explores issues related to the nature of technology and how its integration in the field of education raises complex issues related to pedagogy, ethics, context, purpose and value. The ‘critical’ study of technology is not new and nearly a century has passed since the publication of Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Civilisation (1934) which traced the historical effects of technology on society. The work of Winner (1980) explores the question of whether technology can be considered political and a critical perspective on technology in the field of educational is well illustrated in the work of Selwyn (2020). Due to the disparate and wide-ranging concerns of the critical approach, it is often difficult to provide a focus on how these ideas can be applied in the field of education. What are the issues, for example, in choosing between a technology-driven or pedagogy-driven approach and what are the implications of these decisions for students?   

A critical approach to educational technology is often associated with approaches that are cross-disciplinary and a paper is likely to traverse disciplinary boundaries in the examination of practices or processes associated with the use of technology in educational settings. For example, what do we mean by flexibility in online learning? Is the learning self a ‘universal’ subject? Is learning analytics a mode of surveillance or a tool to improve student learning outcomes? A critical approach, therefore, takes terms or words that are commonly used in the field and uses a variety of lenses to question concepts, terms or common assumptions. A good example of the difference between orthodox and critical approaches in educational technology is clearly evident in two recent papers on the ‘online learner’.  

Conceptualising the online learner: critical and orthodox approaches  

Kara (2022) presents an orthodox study of the features or characteristics of online learners that are predictors of engagement in online learning environments such as motivation and self-regulated learning. Houlden and Veletsianos (2019), on the other hand, take a very different perspective on the ‘learner’.  For them, the exploration of online learning requires the exploration of one of the key claims of online learning, namely flexibility, and the assumptions that the promise of flexibility makes about the nature of the learner. This is a good example of a critical approach to the field of educational technology because it examines what is meant by ‘flexibility’ from different lenses drawing on fields from philosophy and sociology.  

A case study  

A recent article (Fawns, 2022) has managed to bring together the range of concerns that constitute a ‘critical’ approach in educational technology which is defined as ‘entangled pedagogy’.  

A ‘pedagogy first’ approach is often the mantra that is commonly used to describe the most appropriate practice for teaching that uses technology. It contrasts with a technology-centric approach to teaching which views technology as driving teaching and learning choices and practice. In ‘entangled pedagogy’, the suggestion is that the technology-pedagogy dichotomy is not a useful lens and that a more useful and productive perspective is to view technology and pedagogy as ‘entangled which can, in turn, help to promote a generative model of teaching and learning that integrates a recognition of the emergent importance of values, ethics and participatory design as important factors in the process of teaching and learning.   

Some of the key aspects in the ‘entangled’ model include the following.  

The technology-pedagogy dichotomy . The adoption of a technology-centric view or a pedagogy-led position are both options but they can also lead to their own forms of determinism. A view defined by technological determinism tends to overemphasise the role of technology in shaping the learning experience or student performance. Pedagogical determinism, on the other hand, suggests that teachers use technologies and teaching methods to bring about the intended objectives embedded in their learning designs and that their agency in this process determines student learning. Both positions are problematic because they tend to lessen the social and emergent characteristics of the learning process that are important factors in shaping student learning.   

Technology . The enactment of formal education takes place through technology but there are two positions or perspectives on the nature of technology that pre-date the mass integration of technology in education. These are the two broad camps of essentialism and instrumentalism. An essentialist position sees technology as possessing properties that are independent of human activity and an instrumentalist view adopts a view of technology as a mere tool that is used to meet an educational objective. In this view, technology is a neutral tool that is defined by its technical properties but its value and use come alive when it is used in an educational context. Both views, however, are problematic because as Dron (2022) points out, we are users and co-participants in shaping how technology is integrated and embedded in educational practice.  

Methods . These include items such as lectures, lesson plans, problem-based learning formats and so on. Typically, methods will use technologies (online lectures, for example) but methods are not neutral mechanisms for the facilitation of educational objectives – they are also part of a value system that is conveyed to students. A problem-based learning format, for example, conveys the value of autonomy and group learning whereas the values related to online lectures, for example, are more tightly related to the individual as learner even though this format is likely to be associated with a flipped model which is a model that implies the value of preparation and social learning.  

Purposes and values . It is important to convey educational purpose to students and to communicate these more broadly at the micro (student/teacher), memo (school/department) and macro (institutional) levels. Purposes might include the three aspects identified by Biesta (2015), namely, qualification, socialisation and subjectification and it is likely that all three will intersect with technology, methods and values at various points.  Like educational purposes, values intersect with methods and technologies and values, like purposes, shape provide the content for the ‘why’ of educational practice.   

Context . Context relates to both the set of factors that pre-exist or co-exist with educational practices as well as what emerges during the educational process. Context can include student histories, cultural backgrounds, study environments and the built environment associated with the institution.  How teachers decide which contextual factors are relevant or how they respond to context as it emerges during the educational process is a further feature of this dimension.   

Knowledge . The entangled model builds on the TPACK model (Shulman, 1986) and broadens its scope from a classroom-based model to include contextual factors as well as recognising the collective nature of teaching. In this sense, the model has affinities with approaches like Activity Theory (Engestrom, 2001) which is a theoretical framework for the analysis and evaluation of complex social environments. Mason and Rodas (2022) present an example of how Activity Theory is being used to evaluate the introduction of technology in the context of a Social Sciences program of study.  

Ethics . What is the shape of an ‘entangled’ ethics? This includes implications of the use of technology in specific contexts such as Zoom meetings in personal spaces through to ethical considerations about the introduction of technologies at an institutional level. In the same way that entangled knowledge, methods and pedagogy are a collection of collective events and practices, ethical considerations should be collectively negotiated and discussed.   

Evaluation . In the evaluation of technologies in education, Oliver (2011), makes an important observation, namely, that it is important to avoid “simplistic claims about impact, effect and technical causation, and [concentrate] instead on descriptions of practice, accounts of purposeful action and negotiated meanings.”. To do this, however, it is important to establish that the unit of analysis is a combination of factors (such as context, knowledge and methods, for example) rather than focussing on one component such as a particular technology or method. Dron (2021) also makes a similar argument when he suggests that “…reductive approaches to studying methods and tools of teaching have resulted in very little improvement in teaching overall, despite hundreds of thousands of attempts over many decades.”  

The entangled model is illustrated below.  

An entangled pedagogy, including an aspirational view from Fawns (2022)  

Future trends  

Another resource that brings together a range of ideas and concepts in the field of critical perspectives on education and technology is Bayne et al. (2020). Written as a series of provocations, the text is an excellent place to start framing our collective response to how and why technology is used in the classroom and beyond (Mackenzie et al. 2022). It is difficult to predict the shape of the field in future years but content from the latest version of Learning, Media and Technology, an important journal in the field, includes the following topics (this is not an exhaustive list): a critical discourse analysis of key publications in the area of higher education, radical forms of participation in decision-making related to ethics and the area of data brokering in online learning. This is a broad set of topics and it reflects the complexity and scope of work in this area . The parameters outlined in the ‘entangled pedagogy’ approach provide a useful set of heuristics to disentangle the range of issues and problems relate d to the area of education and technology and how they can be explored. The nature of the relationship between artificial intelligence and education is a good example of this and f uture work in this area using an ‘entangled’ approach will be interesting to follow.  

References  

Bayne, S., Evans, P., Ewins, R., Knox, J., Lamb, J., Mcleod, H., et al. (2020). The Manifesto for Teaching Online. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press  

Biesta, G., Priestley, M., & Robinson, S. (2015). The role of beliefs in teacher agency. Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, 21(6), 624–640. https://doi.org/10.1080/13540602.2015.1044325 .  

Dron, J. (2021). Educational technology: What it is and how it works. AI and Society. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-021-01195-z .  

Engeström, Y. (2001). Expansive Learning at Work: Toward an activity theoretical reconceptualization. Journal of Education and Work, 14(1), 133-156. https://doi.org/10.1080/13639080020028747  

Fawns, T. An Entangled Pedagogy: Looking Beyond the Pedagogy—Technology Dichotomy. Postdigit Sci Educ 4, 711–728 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-022-00302-7  

Houlden, S. and Veletsianos, G. (2019), A posthumanist critique of flexible online learning and its “anytime anyplace” claims. Br J Educ Technol, 50: 1005-1018. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.12779  

Kara, M. (2022). Revisiting online learner engagement: exploring the role of learner characteristics in an emergency period, Journal of Research on Technology in Education, 54:sup1, S236-S252, DOI: 10.1080/15391523.2021.1891997  

MacKenzie, A., Bacalja, A., Annamali, D. et al. Dissolving the Dichotomies Between Online and Campus-Based Teaching: a Collective Response to The Manifesto for Teaching Online (Bayne et al. 2020). Postdigital Science Education 4 , 271–329 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-021-00259-z  

Mason, G. & Rodas, A. (2022). The Youth Justice Portal and Transformative Digital Education in Criminology. In S. Wilson, N. Arthars, D. Wardak, P. Yeoman, E. Kalman, & D.Y.T. Liu (Eds.), Reconnecting relationships through technology. Proceedings of the 39th International Conference on Innovation, Practice and Research in the Use of Educational Technologies in Tertiary Education, ASCILITE 2022 in Sydney: e22107. https://doi.org/10.14742/apubs.2022.106  

Mumford, L. (1934). Technics and civilization. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace  

Oliver, M. (2011), Technological determinism in educational technology research: some alternative ways of thinking about the relationship between learning and technology. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 27: 373-384. https://doi-org.ezproxy.uws.edu.au/10.1111/j.1365-2729.2011.00406.x  

Selwyn, N., Hillman, T., Eynon, R., Ferreira, G., Knox, J., Macgilchrist, F., & Sancho-Gil, J. M. (2020). What’s next for Ed-Tech? Critical hopes and concerns for the 2020s. Learning, Media and Technology, 45(1), 1-6. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2020.1694945  

Shulman, L. S. (1986). Those who understand: Knowledge growth in teaching. Educational Researcher, 15(2), 4–14. https://doi.org/10.30827/profesorado.v23i3.11230 .  

Winner, L. (1980). Do artifacts have politics? Daedalus, 109(1), 121–136. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315259697-21