ETEC 565B: 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 tells a counter-story to the introductory one that students usually encounter (and that scholars mostly work with and within), which is a (western) history of ideas. That approach has had to be rethought, as we’ve recognized the narrow span of the ideas this story has included.

So we will take a different route to cover the same terrain as well as to venture beyond its usual pathways. This course is more like a history of tools. But more than a history of tools as material “things,” this course will be concerned with understanding the relations of tools to ideas, to people, and to the places and times technologies people used in trying to ‘educate’, the forms of pedagogical communications those tools made possible (and suppressed), and how “knowledge” was – and is – conveyed, understood, and mobilized in peoples’ lives.

As well, this will be a “making” kind of course. First, you will be engaged in regular activities of intellectual production, where you grapple with a set of texts, classic and contemporary, across the spectrum of research traditions and use both traditional and new media forms to extend and communicate your understandings through the course. Second is a whole-class collaborative production. Focussing on the impacts of media and technologies on how educational work (and play) get done, each student will contribute an entry to a digital archive: an educational technology timeline that describes, illustrates, and discusses significant educational artifacts and their associated technologies and techniques. The intent here is to contribute to a more expansive and deeper understanding of what we are choosing, and what we may be losing, in implementing specific educational technologies. The third and final project will be to design and produce an educationally useful tool – this can be part of a lesson, a game or quiz, a way of recording student progress, an online survey, etc. The purpose of this assignment is to involve students as designers and creators, not merely users and consumers, of technologies for education.

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. Focussing on the design, development, and practical implementation of learning tools, we will explore technologies for education as necessarily constructive, rather than receptive, media.