Critical Pedagogy and Artificial Intelligence Education

• In Event: Critical Pedagogy, the Body, and the Politics of Data

Abstract

This paper situates the advent of digital technologies in the context of structural economic and ideological shifts of the past forty years. Such changes include neoliberal restructuring, the repressive school and social turn, changes in the use of positivist ideology in schooling, the role of new technologies in social and cultural reproduction and changing imperatives for capital accumulation. The paper considers how changes in the ownership and control over different aspects of public school relate to the cultural politics of knowledge and learning by examining 1) adaptive learning technology and transformations to teacher work and conceptions of knowledge and learning, 2) biometric pedagogy and the cultural politics of locating learning in the body, and 3) the convergence of impact investing and digital surveillance technologies. Under the guise of disinterested objectivity and neutrality, particular class and cultural ideologies and interests are promoted through new technologies with significant pedagogical, cultural, economic, and political implications. The paper illustrates as well the use of artificial intelligence for a critical pedagogy project highlighting how the technology needs to be comprehended as a contested cultural and political site.

Author

• Kenneth Saltman, University of Massachusetts - Dartmouth