Reflections on the Digital and the Sensibilities of Learning.
Sean Micheal Morris’s article, which revolves around the distinctive definition of pedagogy as a relation as well as process, discusses various aspects of digital pedagogy which ends with a few questions. One of them is, what happens when the learning is removed from the classroom and exposed to the entirety of digital landscape? Let me reflect on this question, especially in the wake of the pandemic that almost defined our form of life today. This short comment is not about the digital technologies per se, but about how the ongoing process of digital invasion over the classroom precipitated by the pandemic restructured the sensibility of learning/being in the classroom.
It is however obvious that the notion of classroom being a physical location has been entirely changed into a virtual and affective location- which is to say, the classroom has become about a particular sensibility in regard to the mode of education. This sensibility is formed through the dissolution between home and school. There was a very strong sense among students that the school/classroom is a certain kind of antithetical to the home. Which is to say, both of them kept maintaining an exclusive attitude to each other. You cannot act like you are home when you are at your classroom. However, this sense has been complicated when your home itself has become a classroom in the age of pandemic. Now let’s think about how this construction (of the classroom) takes place. As home is primarily affective, that is, we constantly try to recreate ‘home’, an affective space, within the house, it is entirely reasonable to keep the ‘classroom’ away at the school. But now that the classroom came after you where you sleep by exploding your ‘home’. I found myself frantically engaged in creating a classroom inside the house in a way that is ensured not to infect my ‘home’. It is Walter Benjamin who wrote about how the emergence of the division between ‘office’ and ‘home’ has been a turning event in the creation of the industrial labor class in 19th century Europe. However, I do not dare to claim that such kind of class configuration has been entirely created/restructured in the pandemic age, but it is however to acknowledge that the sense about classroom has been underway to a radical change.
I feel that this needs to be properly identified and articulated in order to address the changing sensibilities/structure of feeling in the wake of the digitization of the classroom that is at work now, instead of, maybe, putting up some superficial measurements of how to do digital classroom.
October 31, 2020 @ 4:40 pm
Shah, thank you for this post. I think it is very interesting here to bring Benjamin into the conversation as well as the relation between home and classroom. For Benjamin, as you insightfully note, analyzes how the home is curated and becomes a sort of ‘cockpit’ that gives us a sense of feeling insulated and comfortable. I think in many ways, and here I am recalling our previous post on ‘safe spaces’ the manner in which the classroom is oftentimes supposed to be uncomfortable, at least to the extent that students are pushed to consider and encounter new horizons of meaning that expose them to various forms of alterity. I had not previously considered how COVID-19 has mashed these two violently together, but I think it is worth considering more. How do our classrooms preserve this important element to cultivate critical thinking, while allowing students to have that separation? I am not entirely sure, nor will I even attempt an answer here; however, I think it is something to consider more as we design our classrooms in light of the ongoing pandemic.
November 1, 2020 @ 9:39 pm
I believe that the pandemic has really shaped our thinking and changed what we though cant be done before. Digital pedagogy calls us to envision teaching and learning within and without classroom walls. It begs the question, what should knowledge development and the learning experience be in the 21st century? And how do you, as the instructional architect develop and guide that learning experience? I think we really need to reflect on how to maximize the opportunity to take digital pedagogy to the next level