Description
We live in a world saturated with media. Platforms, algorithms, and digital technologies are not just infrastructures for learning; they actively reorganize what counts as knowledge and how curriculum takes shape. They shape whose voices are amplified, what becomes visible, and what remains unseen, operating across both formal and informal learning spaces. In doing so, they carry an implicit curriculum that is always already at work, whether or not we choose to name or examine it.
In this course we will examine the lenses and assumptions that shape curriculum as designed learning, the ways learning is structured and made possible across formal and informal contexts. By this, we mean the ways learning is both intentionally and unintentionally structured through institutions, technologies, cultural practices, and everyday interactions. In doing so, we challenge the enduring dominance of Western, colonial frameworks through five orienting moves:
UNDERSTAND, EXPOSE, RESIST, RELATE, and IMAGINE.
Each week we encounter a new media artwork that surfaces and complicates the curriculum questions we are exploring: how knowledge is produced, organized, and taken up; whose knowledges are centred or marginalized; how learning is shaped by platforms, data, and AI. We come to these works not to analyze them as art objects, but to think with them as curriculum—sites. They open up possibilities for what technology can be, beyond its conventional uses, and in doing so pose questions that scholarship alone cannot.
This course is a sustained inquiry into media, technology, and curriculum in practice. We ask how technological change reshapes educational contexts, how media participates in the production and circulation of knowledge, and how an anti-oppressive framework including issues of equity, diversity, inclusion, decolonization, and anti-racism, might guide curriculum toward more just and accountable futures. Together, we examine media not only as representation, but also as a political, economic, material, and cultural force within contemporary education. ETEC 531 asks students to consider:
- The relationship between education, technological innovation, and change.
- How curriculum shapes our understanding of self, society, and the world around us.
- How we might engage new media to foster anti-oppressive frameworks for teaching and learning.
New media is not a neutral backdrop to curriculum. Platforms, tools, and artifacts actively shape what counts as knowledge, who gets to produce it, and how learning is organized — and they do so unevenly, maintaining as well as challenging social and cultural inequities. This course examines that shaping through theoretical and practical lenses, treating curriculum critique and reimagining as forms of creative intervention.
Course Objectives
- Develop a framework for understanding the role of curriculum as related to and impacted by new media and technology.
- Apply theoretical, conceptual, and methodological frameworks to anti-oppressive approaches for curriculum development and pedagogical practices.
- Understand equity, diversity, inclusion, decolonization, and anti-racism (EDIDA) frameworks for implementation within curriculums.
- Examine ethics, fair use, data politics, and demographic inequities in the context of learning and new media.
- Practice curricular and pedagogical integrations of new media technologies.
- Engage in curriculum critique and revisioning.
- Reflect critically on personal educational experience as a form of curriculum inquiry, attending to the conditions of power and relation that have shaped it.
- Engage new media artworks as theoretical provocations that surface and reimagine curriculum.
Example Readings & Resources
This course uses a selection of readings available online via the Library Online Course Reserves (LOCR) as well as select videos, social media spaces, and digital artifacts.
- Caranto Morford, A., & Ansloos, J. (2021). Indigenous sovereignty in digital territory: A qualitative study on land-based relations with #NativeTwitter. AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples, 17(2), 293–305.
- Alvarez, M. (2019). (Digital) media as critical pedagogy [full paper, pp. 82–102]. Media Theory, 3(1)
- D’Ignazio, C., & Klein, L. F. (2020). Data feminism. MIT Press.
- Buckingham, D. (2019). The media education manifesto. John Wiley & Sons.
- Costa, C. & Murphy, M. (2025). Generative artificial intelligence in education: (what) are we thinking? Learning, Media and Technology.
- Tuck, E. & Gaztambide-Fernandez, R. (2013). Curriculum, replacement, and settler futurity. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 29(1), 72-89.
Assignments & Assessment
| Assignment | Weight |
|---|---|
| Curriculum Journey ~ A look at the curriculum that has shaped who you are, brought into conversation with the course’s critical frameworks. | 15% |
| Doings (7 of 13) ~ Complete 7 weekly activities (3 required, 4 of your choice) | 35% |
| Curriculum Otherwise critical response ~ A collaborative critical reading of a real curriculum artifact, exposing what it conceals and gesturing toward what it could become. | 20% |
| Curriculum Otherwise re-envisioning ~ The reimagined curriculum, built over the course of the term, following the five moves of the course. | 20% |
| Participation ~ Your presence in the learning community, measured by how seriously you engage with your peers’ thinking across the term. | 10% |
Minor course topic, activity, reading/resource, and assignment details may change from year to year.