Academ-ecologies: Reviewing the Academic Commons Through Illich's Work on Eco-Pedagogy and the Global Classroom

• In Event: Academ-ecologies: Learning, Unlearning, and Resistance

Abstract

We will conduct a closer reading of Illich’s idea of research by people versus research for people vis-à-vis educational technology. In doing so, we want to establish that the academic commons reifies a kind of e-cology that in fact inscribes individual learners and groups into a global educational system through technological means that are then romanticized seductively. Moreover, we find that it is through this movement that all manner of “lifelong learners” have become targeted clientele for MOOCs and other academic commons pedagogical ventures. We thus find that Illich’s ideas about the growth of an academic, or educational, industrial complex that dominates through uncritical technological relationships are highly salient for the present moment and deserve wider attention.

Authors

• Jennifer Stoops, The City University of New York

• Richard V. Kahn, Antioch University Los Angeles