The pandemic affected more than 1.5 billion students and youth, and the most vulnerable learners were hit hardest, making digital inequality in educational settings impossible to overlook. Given this reality, we, all educators, came together to find ways to understand and address some of these inequalities. As a product of this collaboration, we propose a methodological toolkit: a theoretical kaleidoscope to examine and critique the constitutive elements and dimensions of digital inequalities. We argue that such a tool is helpful when a critical attitude to examine ‘the ideology of digitalism’, its concomitant inequalities, and the huge losses it entails for human flourishing seems urgent. In the paper, we describe different theoretical approaches that can be used for the kaleidoscope. We give relevant examples of each theory. We argue that the postdigital does not mean that the digital is over, rather that it has mutated into new power structures that are less evident but no less insidious as they continue to govern socio-technical infrastructures, geopolitics, and markets. In this sense, it is vital to find tools that allow us to shed light on such invisible and pervasive power structures and the consequences in the daily lives of so many.
29 December 2018 in Postdigital Science and Education
Recognition of inclusion in mainstream schools for all people with disabilities is enshrined in the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). General Comment 4 on Article 24 (Right to inclusive education) of the CRPD provides a concept of inclusion and its core features which we discuss here. Article 7 of the same enjoins state parties to give young people’s opinions and views ‘due weight’ on matters that affect them. Despite calls to gather their views on education to better inform policy and practice, autistic young people have been largely missing from the research, girls most notably. Research on the efficacy of mainstream inclusion and the educational experiences of autistic young people has focused mainly on the perspectives of adult stakeholders such as parents, teachers and classroom assistants. Inspired by Article 7 of the CRPD, we present the educational experiences of two teenage girls with Asperger’s Syndrome in a mainstream setting in the UK with respect to the school environment, teachers, the curriculum and peers. The findings from semi-structured interviews and a number of participatory methods reveal that girls reported feelings of exclusion, isolation and anxiety. We discuss these findings in the light of the concept of inclusion provided in the General Comment and conclude with the girls’ recommendations on how to include people with ASD in mainstream settings.
29 October 2021 in Postdigital Science and Education
This article is a collective response to the 2020 iteration ofThe Manifesto for Teaching Online. Originally published in 2011 as 20 simple but provocative statements, the aim was, and continues to be, to critically challenge the normalization of education as techno-corporate enterprise and the failure to properly account for digital methods in teaching in Higher Education. The 2020Manifestocontinues in the same critically provocative fashion, and, as the response collected here demonstrates, its publication could not be timelier. Though theManifestowas written before the Covid-19 pandemic, many of the responses gathered here inevitably reflect on the experiences of moving to digital, distant, online teaching under unprecedented conditions. As these contributions reveal, the challenges were many and varied, ranging from the positive, breakthrough opportunities that digital learning offered to many students, including the disabled, to the problematic, such as poor digital networks and access, and simple digital poverty. Regardless of the nature of each response, taken together, what they show is thatThe Manifesto for Teaching Onlineoffers welcome insights into and practical advice on how to teach online, and creatively confront the supremacy of face-to-face teaching.
This paper is a summary of philosophy, theory, and practice arising from collective writing experiments conducted between 2016 and 2022 in the community associated with the Editors’ Collective and more than 20 scholarly journals. The main body of the paper summarises the community’s insights into the many faces of collective writing. Appendix 1 presents the workflow of the article’s development. Appendix 2 lists approximately 100 collectively written scholarly articles published between 2016 and 2022. Collective writing is a continuous struggle for meaning-making, and our research insights merely represent one milestone in this struggle. Collective writing can be designed in many different ways, and our workflow merely shows one possible design that we found useful. There are many more collectively written scholarly articles than we could gather, and our reading list merely offers sources that the co-authors could think of. While our research insights and our attempts at synthesis are inevitably incomplete, ‘Collective Writing: The Continuous Struggle for Meaning-Making’ is a tiny theoretical steppingstone and a useful overview of sources for those interested in theory and practice of collective writing.