Techne and Design: Maker Literacy as Agency
(Where Ann the Victorianist channels Arts & Crafts as a
#moocment)
I’ve spent a large part of this week thinking about
instructional design as pedagogical practice and how use is often at odds with
design. So this week’s readings for the final #moocmooc #critped discussion was
very appropriate. Use often seems at odds with design because use is very fluid
yet most educational design (especially in relation to LMS’s) is predicated on
a static immovable space. Rudimentary ed
tech is an LMS with content housed in a labyrinth of IT accessible only to
registered students at a particular institution. Like Woolf’s encounter with
the beadle, this is knowledge locked away only accessible to a select few. This is sadly a far too prevalent thought
about technology in education.
What Blikstein demonstrates in this week’s reading is that
as Freire and Papert both put forward technology can be used to reinforce
agency and support advocacy. On many levels technology provides access to
literacy which rests at the heart of learning and is pedagogically foundational
to education. Much more than digital or
information or even communicative literacy, technology (be it high tech or low
tech) opens up a space, a maker space—and the literacy necessary to navigate
that space is agency.
I spent much of the first weeks of this iteration of
#moocmooc highlighting how for my student demographic access to high tech is
simply not a logistical or economic possibility. My philosophy of “low tech can
be high touch” is reinforced by Blikstein’s article. We are very much immersed in a maker culture
at the moment. Even the most culturally “avant guard” ideas and concepts are
rooted in making and hacking. The adage “everything old is new again” is very
much alive and well in our media culture. But underscoring this are the politics
of our technological and pedagogical choices. On an institutional level the
choice of an LMS for example comes down to money, IT infrastructure, and who
tendered the best proposal. Rarely are pedagogical frameworks taken into
consideration in these decisions. Often politics in technology choices means
advocating for a specific type of technology that supports a specific aim. The best
example of this are programs that mandate a purchase of an iPad or computer in
order to enrol in a program. Nothing says latent class system and railroading
students out of certain careers like mandating tech purchases. This is why my critical pedagogy starts with questioning
high tech and providing a space to hack this tech first so that students can
build their own tools. This in turn increases knowledge, learning, and agency
through literacy. This is about techne before technology.
Making and hacking are truly highest level learning. This
what was advocated by the arts and crafts movement in the 19th
century. Oh no, there goes the Victorianist on her Ruskin Morris rant again.
Yes, a bit, but hear me out. Much of Blikstein’s experience is very arts and
crafts in philosophy. The students took what they had and created new from old.
The produced one-of-a-kind pieces with unique aesthetic, use, and more
importantly a unique learning experience attached to the creation of them. And
I think this thought process has to be where we start as educators (more on
this below).
Critical digital pedagogy and hybrid pedagogy, highlight
cool uses, insightful and innovative applications and analytics of the ever-expanding
resources we have available to us as educators. And that’s amazing if you have
access and “buy-in” and infrastructure or political representation and advocacy
for these things at an institutional level- but what if you don’t? I know
Blikstein demonstrates that you can do anything with seemingly nothing in terms
of backing and infrastructure, but can that work, truly, within where we
practice as educators today? I am not so sure and that again is a political and
institutional roadblock. And yet the low tech things I do in my class do work,
do have “buy-in”, do promote learning, making, literacy. They are just more techne than technology.
I disagree that we are the stimuli to students. The stimuli
rests within themselves. Saying that we are the stimuli takes all agency away
from the students and makes us a prominent point in this equation when we are
not. It’s a horse to water scenario. I can only suggest so much and even then
it’s not my suggestion but rather born from the ideas and concepts brought out
by discussion in class. Railroaded “lesson plans” (in whatever format they may
take for you) often make for the best classes. Again it’s use not design. Even
writing blogposts have a mind of their own. Learning, like writing, is not a
linear process, it’s organic.
Ultimately, I believe low tech can and should be a great
equalizer or at least does not have as many potential political, social, and
cultural roadblocks. There is something about laddering to high tech without
considering low tech first that alienates the creation of a community of
practice or pedagogical community in terms of gender, class, and race. Start
low and the high will come quickly as Blikstein demonstrates.
I want to end with an example of what happens in the seminar
presentations in the class I presently teach. I do not give the students a
topic, they pick their own topics. The only caveat is that is needs to relate
to either women’s literature or a gendered sociological issue as presented in
our class discussions. I allow them to use whatever they wish in this seminar
in terms of technology. Here is the list of non-exhaustive suggestions:
I.
PowerPoint
II.
Prezi
III.
Visuals
(paper, material, electronic)
IV.
Video
V.
Audio
VI.
Internet
resources
VII.
Any
other media resources, including handouts for your classmates
Some try Prezi for the first time and acquire the fluency to
use it in their seminars through practice and love it to the point that they
will now use it in their other courses. Some choose to bring in artifacts to
show the class. Both demonstrate tactile engagement with their topic, both play
with the architecture of the space they are given. That is maker culture in its
infancy, that is hacking their learning space, that is gaining literacy and
demonstrating agency and ultimately responsibility for their own learning. I am
always so pleased to see the results of these seminars and how excited the
students are to present. Yes, excited to present, words you rarely see together
I know.
So what next? Build a chair, bake some bread (btw check out
this great story about the place where I buy my bread, they are great )
maybe yes, maybe more than that. We need to reflect, harness, promote, engage
with techne.
We need to remember our etymological roots in our pedagogical architecture.
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