Rethinking Agency in Digital Education: Creating Digital Citizens of "Making Kinds of People"

• In Event: Certainty Amid Uncertainty in the Future: Making Kinds of People

Abstract

The increased usage of digital education has been framed as increasing student agency, given the rise of learning opportunities, relational connections, and personalized learning and feedback (Castaneda & Selwyn, 2018). However, it also challenges student agency by governing or manipulating students’ notions to make certain kinds of people. For instance, Google classroom, which is an online platform for learning, creates a new space to build relationships between teachers and students and makes students obedient citizens. Even though it has positive effects on learning, it causes unforeseen effects from Foucault’s perspective. This study employs the reassembled notion of agency using the concept of Critique and Governmentality (Foucault, 1984 & 1991). This study’s goal is to offer the right agency in digital education by using Foucault’s theory and new ways of making kinds of people who recover their own autonomy and rights.
Perspectives
Governmentality is the form of power, which exerts on all areas, such as the economy, territory, and people (Foucault, 1991). Governmentality examines agency through the relationship between teachers and students, by showing the control techniques in a digital classroom. The concept of Critique (Foucault, 1997) reveals governmentality in education, which means creating awareness for people to question themselves about what they are doing. It is a practice that not only suspends judgment for him but offers a new practice of values based on that very suspension (Butler, 2000/2002). The idea can be applied to new kinds of making kinds of people and build agency in digital education. Critique can reassemble Governmentality (Foucault, 1991), which deconstructs the power to control.
Data and Methods
This data comes from a literature review and the teaching experience of Google classroom. Two journals, Michel Foucault’s “What is enlightenment?” and Judith Butler’s “What is critique?”, are mainly used to explore the meaning of agency. The other two journals, Foucault’s “Governmentality” and Popkewitz’s “What is really taught as the content of school subjects?” are used to explore the power structure of the classroom. Google Classroom is compared to other journals, in which keywords “ digital education”, and “agency” are reevaluated with these theoretical frameworks.
Findings and Scholarly Significance
When Governmentality affects Google Classroom, students are subjugated by the power of control, and the teachers become the authority. Students possess false autonomy, manipulated by teachers, making the relationship more hierarchical. Digital education needs new kinds of people, who have a critique, which makes people able to call foundations into question, denaturalize social and political hierarchy, and even establish perspectives by which a certain distance on the naturalized world can be had (Butler, 2002). This is the agency, which makes people better citizens. This work expands scholarship done in the post-structuralist perspective of education, focusing on the power relationship in education. As digital education is becoming an important role in education, this research provides to rethink the education system, a better approach to making kinds of people, and an inspiration to how people teach in digital education.

Author

• Younsun Choi, University of Wisconsin - Madison
  Presenting Author