ETEC 534: METatheory: New Materialism Meets the History of Educational Media

As every MET student knows particularly keenly, it matters a lot what medium educational communication happens in. This course is about how educational technologies, past, present and future, shape curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment. It’s also about how to understand the changes and challenges educational technologies have catalyzed, and about the theories we have developed to research, describe, analyze, and explain how they ‘work’. That’s the ‘meta’ part. In other words, a metatheory is a theory of theories that looks at concepts, assumptions, and patterns across different theories. That is what we will do in this course – engage with a range of theories to look at their set of practices, commonalities, assumptions, and where those converge and diverge.

We’re especially interested in the relations of tools to educational ideas, to people, and to other biological and physical beings and non-beings that educational theory has typically disregarded or overlooked. For example, we will explore Actor Network Theory (ANT), which assigns meanings to non-human things like doors and networks, and we’ll also examine New Materialism, which emphasizes the inseparability and co-constitution of matter and meaning. Taking a New Materialist turn will also mean attending to non-humans, be those plants, animals, rocks, and so on, as part of what matters to and when learning, and new materialism also attends to convergences, assemblages, intersections, entanglements, inTRA action: how people and things are related, not how they are different; what animals and humans share, not what separates them. This will mean that we need also to reach out to other places and times in exploring the technologies people used and use in trying to ‘educate’, look especially at the forms of pedagogical communications those tools made and make possible (and suppress), and how “knowledge” was— and is—conveyed, understood, and mobilized in the contemporary educational media ecologies we now inhabit.

Instead of the more usual approach of reading about the history of educational ideas, or even charting the development of educational media and technologies, Metatheory is, perhaps improbably, a “making” kind of course. Rather than prioritizing academic texts (we’ll also have plenty of these, not to worry!) as a way to think about theory, we are going to focus on the making of “things”, on the design and development of useful tools and purposeful digital artifacts, and to ground “theory”— which a lot of people think of as an alienated, terrifying, autocratic and remote spectre haunting the academy—in a larger networked ecology of assemblages and adhesions that extend well beyond humans, and which can be best explored through productive engagements with “things.” To accomplish that, you will tackle three kinds of ‘making’:

First, you’ll be engaged, individually, in intellectual production, where you grapple with making theory yourself, based on a set of texts and resources, classic and contemporary, and mobilizing both traditional and new media forms to extend and communicate your growing understandings through the course.

The second kind of ‘making’ will be a small adventure in original research, specifically a mini-internet research project to discover what “doing theory” looks like when it’s re-mediated through Twitter. This mini project involves you in both ‘making research’ and ‘making theory’ from that research.

Third is the final project: the (small scale) design and production of an educationally useful tool. This can be a searchable archive, a lesson, a game or quiz, a way of recording student progress, an online survey, or other digital tool that supports your educational work. The purpose of this assignment is to experience thinking and working as designers and creators, not merely users and consumers, of technologies for education, and in that process, encountering more explicitly the mostly un-acknowledged ‘parliament of things’ that goes into getting anything done.

In this course, then, we will examine the educative possibilities for new and emergent digital media, asking whether and how what we know and how we know is re-shaped, re-mediated and invariably altered by education’s technological affordances. Focusing on the design, development and practical implementation of learning tools, we will explore technologies for education as necessarily constructive, rather than receptive, media.