Resist! Refuse! How Educators Care for Students by Opposing Educational Technology’s Harms

• In Event: Civic Learning With, Within, and Against Digital Platforms

Abstract

A wide range of intellectual traditions have examined the importance of resistance and refusal for establishing lifeways that support knowledge-building and dignity-affirming situations. Feminism (Barabas, 2022; Honig, 2021), developmental psychology (Gilligan, 1990; Turiel, 2003), anthropology (McGranahan, 2016; Prasse-Freeman, 2022), and Indigenous studies (Corntassel & Hardbarger, 2019; Tuck & Yang, 2014) articulate the critical role that resistance and refusal play at the individual, communal, and societal scale.

There is also a long history of resistance and refusal of new and emerging technologies—from resistance against the languages, orthographic systems, and vocabularies of imperial oppressors over thousands of years (Plaut, 2022), to the collective labor actions of the 19th century Luddites against a technosolutionist ethos of cost savings and efficiency (Mueller, 2021), to the current-day struggles of Hollywood writers and actors against the use of generative AI. This history tells us that resistance and refusal of emerging technologies is not rooted in ignorance, but rather resistance and refusal can be strategic and informed. What’s more, resistance and refusal do not merely foreclose possibilities: by questioning and rejecting taken-for-granted assumptions and creating critical distance and space, resistance and refusal can generate new possibilities.

A literature of resistance and refusal has begun to form within educational technology practice and research (e.g. Lanclos, 2019; Author, 2020; Author, 2022; Watters, 2020). This work offers a provocation to educators who are tasked with confronting educational technologies in their institutions and classrooms, and challenges educators to consider resisting the logics that put these technologies in front of them and refusing to implement these technologies as intended (or at all). The urgency of this work is only growing, as evidenced by debates around the ethics of chatbots and other forms of generative AI within education.

In order to better understand how educators resist and refuse educational technology, we organized a roundtable discussion at a recent virtual conference focused on technology and civic education. At the session, educators shared when, why, and how they resist and refuse educational technology. While data collection and qualitative analysis (Miles et al., 2020) are ongoing at this time, we are examining the transcript from the roundtable and digital texts created during and after the session, such as audience comments in the Zoom chat and tweets posted to Twitter. Our data sources will help us to answer our research questions: 1) What brings educators to engage in resistance and refusal of educational technologies?; 2) What specific strategies of resistance and refusal do educators employ, and in what circumstances?; 3) How do educators understand the consequences of their resistance and refusal?

Our findings will document and describe the varied forms of, and opportunities for, resistance and refusal in different roles and sites of practice in education settings. With calls to resist artificial intelligence (McQuillan, 2022) and the harms posed by large language models such as ChatGPT (Bender et al., 2021) occurring alongside powerful education actors testing their chatbots in schools (Singer, 2023), now is the time to more fully articulate how resistance and refusal can–and should–be part of educators’ pedagogies.

Authors

• Michelle Ciccone, University of Massachusetts - Amherst

• Charles Logan, Northwestern University