Rowell, C. (2022) What is Critical Digital Pedagogy?. Totallyrewired, 6 April. Available at: https://totallyrewired.wordpress.com/2022/04/06/what-is-critical-digital-pedagogy/ [Accessed 20 April 2022].

Simple overview

• A process of teaching and learning that aims to challenge systems of oppression and dominating power structures, both within and outside of the classroom.
• Alongside this guiding principle, it must also take a critical view about digital education, so that it raises questions about when, if and how that learning technology should be used by students and teachers.

Why now?

• These issues and more have been brought into the digital and physical classroom by all those who want a better world to live in.

Principles

Knowledge should be co-created between tutors and students

• based around Paulo Freire’s rejection of ‘banking education’ where students are seen as receptacles to be filled up with knowledge by the expert teacher. 
• dialogical system of education where knowledge is co-constructed between students and the teachers based on discussion, dialogue and interaction. 
• The role of the teacher is to facilitate this democratic learning process rather than to be the authoritarian figure in the classroom.

Knowledge should relate to and develop from the lived experience of participants

• These experiences have brought them knowledge but also learning skills such cooperation, collaboration and empathy that are useful for the HE learning process.

Education (and technology) is inherently political

• The technology that digital education is using is not a ‘neutral’ space developed entirely for the needs of the students learning. The firms that provide the ‘edtech’ are multinational corporations, like Microsoft, Google, Turnitin, Blackboard; they are profit-making entities who operate to satisfy the needs of their shareholders, which are often not the same needs as the students.

Education is a human process

• always underneath or within the digital learning processes there are human interactions, processes and reflections.

Education is built on trust and belonging and should cultivate hope and optimism

An essential requirement of critical pedagogy is that there should be a mutual trust between staff and students, this will enable students to have a stronger sense of belonging on their courses. 

‘My hope emerges from those places of struggle where I witness individuals positively transforming their lives and the world around them. Educating is a vocation rooted in hopefulness. As teachers we believe that learning is possible, that nothing can keep an open mind from seeking after knowledge and finding a way to know.’

bell hooks (2013 p.14)

Education should encourage symbolic resistance

• CDP should encourage and develop a resistance to the mainstream ideology within society that fosters oppression and discrimination.

‘The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.’

Marx

Aims

Enabling students to become critical thinkers to create new knowledge

It requires students to create new knowledge, be able to apply new ideas to different and evolving situations and think about alternatives from different perspectives.

Students become aware of their, and others’ oppressions

• Conscientisation: the process of making others aware of the economic, political and social conditions that give rise to inequalities and oppression. (Freire)

Students making connections between personal experiences and wider societal forces

• Once students developed a ‘critical consciousness’ and saw the links between their experience and what was happening in society to groups who where discriminated against – then they could actually do something about it. 

Digital learning environments develop the importance of democracy

• HE, schools and colleges are not often democratic spaces as the teacher or tutor is the ‘person in charge’ and they are encouraged to feel responsible for maintaining discipline and order within these spaces. 
  • Learning activities, tasks and assessments can be negotiated between teacher and student, often with better outcomes because students are involved in the design of the learning process.

The learning process is achieved by a co-created flexible curriculum

• Teaching moments (Smith, 1994) are times when teachers can improvise and take an issue or event raised by a student and develop it into a more profound learning experience. It might be something that happens in a lesson or within a digital tool and then expanded upon into a meaningful learning experience.

Learning environments develop the importance of digital equity and openness’

• there is equal access and opportunity for all students from different races, ethnicity, socio-economic class, language and gender. The leaning technology must be designed with their different needs and requirement. 

Practices

Critical use of digital tools and ‘minimal computing

• Is the digital system/tool the best answer in all cases?

Plagiarism/proctoring software is replaced with a variety of assessment tasks and methods of unmarking

Critical use of social media in the curriculum

• Social media when used well and carefully can really bring the outside world into the classroom, good examples of this have been the #blacklivesmatter #MeToo hashtags used on Twitter and Instagram.

Collaborative learning using digital tools’

• Miro, Mural and Padlet have enabled students to work across geographical boundaries and time zones to create new synchronous and asynchronous learning activities.

Using mobile technologies to discover wider societal and environmental changes

Co-created flexible curriculum using digital learning design practices/methods

References

Freire, P (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, London, Penguin

hooks, b. (2013). Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope, Abingdon, Routledge

Marx, K. & Engles, F. (2011) The German Ideology, Martino Fines Books

Smith, M.K. (1994) Local Education Buckingham, Open University press.