Key words: Policy Learning Theory Posthumanism Maker Culture Technological
Background
From the cloud where I sat, I couldn’t really see the Koala in his natural habitat. I wanted to be part of his world, not simply it’s observer. I wanted like the wind, to make something happen. I was too often an observer or the mere recipient of action (Mukhopadhyay, 2015, p. 18)
As an educator and researcher in higher education, like Mukhopadhyay, I welcome the opportunity, to ‘step from the shadows’, to make something happen, to entangle and grapple with (re)generating strategic policy. The policy rhetoric in many of our national higher education institutions adopts a ‘holistic student centred’ approach to teaching and learning. As a result of my own teaching and research endeavours, I think-feel a growing disquiet around a humanistic educational orthodoxy, in an era of ‘super complexity’ (Barnett, 2000), maker culture (Johnson, Adams Becker, Cummins, Estrada, & Freeman, 2015), and calls for education to attune to the global present (Taylor, Blaise & Giugni, 2013). I contribute to “working the stuck places” (Lather, 2013), at a time where technological and pedagogical movements necessitate new theoretical frameworks (Bayne, 2014 / 2015; Gunawardena et al., 2009; Knox, 2016; Hasse, in press; Stoszkowski and Collins, 2017).
Theoretical
This paper is framed as a theoretical play, with(in) the epistemological and ontological shifts of a post-human logic, to explore new theories of learning, relating in particular to technological innovation, in the project of education. Much research and writing is critical of a humanist orientation to educational practice (Bayne, 2015; Hasse forthcoming, Lather & St. Pierre, 2013; Knox, 2016; Holmes & Jones, 2016; Taylor et al., 2013). The post-human landscape, allows the consideration for less hierarchical ways, where learning is constituted in more-than-human worlds, as an entanglement, an assemblage, intermingling and co-constitutive (Bayne 2015; Fenwick et al., 2011: Knox, 2016).
A Theoretical Musing
Within the literature on teaching with technology, writing tends to fall within the anthropocentric, a dualistic “landscape of resistance or embrace”, where conceptual engagement with the posthuman is rare, argues Bayne, 2015. Bayne amongst others (Knox, 2016), takes pleasure in this “torn landscape”, refuting ontological hierarchy, the human over the material, providing an example of the ‘Teacherbot’ project conceived by a team at the University of Edinburgh. Here the theorization of technology with(in) practice, positions teaching and learning as a socio-material enactment, a generative ‘assemblage of teacher-student-code’, of the human and non-human (Bayne, 2015).
Conclusion
Instead of falling back on the sedimented habits of thought that the humanist past has institutionalised, the posthuman predicament encourages us to undertake a leap forward into the complexities and paradoxes of our times (Bayne, 2014 citing Braidotti, 2013, p. 54).
Pushing against the edges, posthumanist perspectives unsettle traditional concepts, breathing flattened, onto-epistemological spaces of encounter. There is a need to rethink and enact new educational theorizations for policy, to consider who and what matters.
