Recognizing Digital Technology as Educational Actor: A Sociomaterial Perspective on Remote Teaching

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Thursday 7:45 am - Gold 2
  In Roundtable Session: Posthuman Encounters with Educational Technologies

Abstract

We conducted a post-qualitative inquiry into how technologies mediate pedagogical practices in remote teaching contexts. The dataset consists of 147 valid responses to an open-ended question about strategies of instructors for promoting engagement and interaction. This study adopts the sociomaterial perspective, relying on Sayes’s (2014) framework which conceptualizes more-than-human agency in four forms: (1) conditions of the possibility; (2) mediators; (3) members of moral and political associations; and (4) gatherings. We observed that instructors’ language of education was displaced by the language of technology. Our research illustrates how educational technologies (re)configure spatiality and visuality. This, in turn, opens the possibility of (re)distributing educational responsibilities across the networks of human and more-than-human for the new vision of education research.

Authors

• Woomok Jeong, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• YangHyun Kim, City University of New York

• Alex Kumi-Yeboah, University at Albany - SUNY