(Digital) Media as Critical Pedagogy

International audienceFrom chalkboard sites to social media, from smartphones to interactive grading software, there is an overabundance of digital learning tools at our fingertips, many of which float into our classrooms on airy praise from university administrators, politicians, and corporate technicians alike who tout the incorporation of these technologies into our teaching as an undeniably positive step toward the “enhancement” of student learning. Rather than promoting a critical model of learning by which students and teachers can explore the matrix of possibilities “afforded” by their relationship to new media, the techno-fetishist instrumentality of “technology-enhanced learning” functions as an efficient means of materializing neoliberal market ideology and adjusting usto accepting our positions as self-contained users of discrete tools that define for us what the goals and processes of learning will be. It is imperative, then, that we engage ourselves and our students in the critical pedagogical process of learning to learnin conversation with–not at the behest of–media. To do so gets to the very heart of critical pedagogy itself, because, as I argue, the ontological assumptions underwriting the very hope and possibility of critical pedagogy as a political projectare nothing if not the essential coordinates for a media theory of being. If we are to determine how to develop a sufficiently critical pedagogy in the age of digital media, we must first re-locate the learning process in the exploration of the open, dialectical circuits between human and world through which life itself is mediated, and from which political change is made possible