‘Choice is yours’: anatomy of a lesson plan from university V

This chapter aims to explore education as posthuman practice via the anatomy of a lesson plan. The lesson is narrated through the methodological device of speculative fiction. It is a fabulation set in the future but with roots that tangle with the past. Dark histories and futures are set to flicker here. Deception, de-identification and datafication lurk everywhere. If you are squeamish, you may wish to read no further. The datafication of people, their reduction to numbers, bytes and, most fatally of all, words, is laid out here in gory detail. If you do wish to read on, however, then you need nothing: just come as you are, and be assured as always that as the reader, choice is yours

‘The Pandemic Will Not be on Zoom’: A Retrospective from the Year 2050

This paper aims to interpret, analyse, and critique educational pasts, presents, and futures. It is framed by potentially falsifiable memories of colonization and struggles for identity and social justice. We adopt the device of social science fiction (Gerlach and Hamilton 2003) as a specialist genre of speculative fiction (Graham et al. 2019). Such speculative approaches seek to develop provocations rather than predictions (Selwyn et al. 2020) and to implicate their readers rather than to inculcate them. In this tradition, we seek to ponder possibilities of post-pandemic educational futurities. Our work centres on the ramblings of an unknown scholar who, on the cusp of a postscientific world, screams a maddened poem into the void titled ‘The Pandemic will not be on Zoom’. The events surrounding this poem are pieced together to reveal a world of stark inequities and digital and biological fractures. These fractures prefigured a bleak colonization of humankind by a deepmind hive Artificial Intelligence (AI) (Fig. 1) that caused us to become forever isolated from ourselves and that brought an end to the grand projects of science and education. In our conclusion, we call for other historians of futures past to help uncover timelines, and write alternative fictions, that promote pedagogies of hope, care, justice, and a brighter day

Books (Are Not Like People): A Postdigital Fable

What are books? In 2054, where reading and writing have been banned, a scholar in a dystopian academy known as University V might legitimately pose such a question. This article uses speculative fiction as a form of narrative enquiry to explore the socio-materiality of the iconic educational artefact of the textbook. It gives an empirical account of socio-material practices of textbook use (and non-use) gathered from a series of interviews with online distance education students. We analyse these interviews via speculative fiction. We engage in a sense-making activity of the student testimony by narrating their story, via a scholar looking back at our times from a post-literature future. We seek to contribute to a relative dearth of future studies that use real student data. We give an example of how speculative fiction may be used as a form of research method to analyse and interpret such data. In so doing, we seek to cast a light on current educational practices, to show how books and people are entangled. As people, objects and spaces of education intertwine, they call our attention to the interplay of form and function. They decentre the human actor. We attempt to show how form legitimates certain types of knowledge, certain people, indeed people themselves from other non-human actors. We conclude that knowledge is not disembodied, is not stable and is not locked up in books. In our final analysis, we conclude what may seem obviously true, that books are not like people

Dissolving the dichotomies between online and campus‑based teaching: a collective response to The Manifesto for teaching online

This article is a collective response to the 2020 iteration of The Manifesto for Teach-ing Online. Originally published in 2011 as 20 simple but provocative statements, the aim was, and continues to be, to critically challenge the normalization of education as techno-corporate enterprise and the failure to properly account for digital methods in teaching in Higher Education. The 2020 Manifesto continues in the same critically pro-vocative fashion, and, as the response collected here demonstrates, its publication could not be timelier. Though the Manifesto was written before the Covid-19 pandemic, many of the responses gathered here inevitably reflect on the experiences of moving to digi-tal, distant, online teaching under unprecedented conditions. As these contributions reveal, the challenges were many and varied, ranging from the positive, breakthrough opportunities that digital learning offered to many students, including the disabled, to the problematic, such as poor digital networks and access, and simple digital poverty. Regardless of the nature of each response, taken together, what they show is that The Manifesto for Teaching Online offers welcome insights into and practical advice on how to teach online, and creatively confront the supremacy of face-to-face teaching

Dissolving the dichotomies between online and campus-based teaching: a collective response to The manifesto for teaching online (Bayne et al. 2020)

This article is a collective response to the 2020 iteration of The Manifesto for Teaching Online. Originally published in 2011 as 20 simple but provocative statements, the aim was, and continues to be, to critically challenge the normalization of education as techno-corporate enterprise and the failure to properly account for digital methods in teaching in Higher Education. The 2020 Manifesto continues in the same critically provocative fashion, and, as the response collected here demonstrates, its publication could not be timelier. Though the Manifesto was written before the Covid-19 pandemic, many of the responses gathered here inevitably reflect on the experiences of moving to digital, distant, online teaching under unprecedented conditions. As these contributions reveal, the challenges were many and varied, ranging from the positive, breakthrough opportunities that digital learning offered to many students, including the disabled, to the problematic, such as poor digital networks and access, and simple digital poverty. Regardless of the nature of each response, taken together, what they show is that The Manifesto for Teaching Online offers welcome insights into and practical advice on how to teach online, and creatively confront the supremacy of face-to-face teaching

Who cares about learning design? Near future superheroes and villains of an educational ethics of care

This article undertakes a critical appraisal of learning design and its relation to ethical ideas of care. We give an account of three personae of near future learning designers, developed using speculative methods, seeded with real-world data comprising job advertisements and validated with learning designers. The personae illustrate conflicts about the role of learning designers within the teaching and research missions of the academy and issues of care or lack thereof for these workers. The disembodied skills of learning designer job advertisements are contrasted with the bodies of (more than) real people that can suffer and care. We finish by contributing elements of a speculative job advertisement for a learning designer, who will help shape educational spaces of the near future by entangled care and unencumbered attentiveness

Embedding Digital Assessment in STEM Education Lessons Learned from a European Joint Venture Focusing on Sustainable Development

Assessment of Transversal Skills in STEM (ATS STEM) is an innovative policy experimentationproject, which aims to enhance digital assessment of students’ transversal skills in STEM. ThisErasmus+ project is situated in primary and secondary schools across eight European countries,involving 12 partners on different levels of educational system.Teachers and researchers havecollaboratively developed and piloted several integrated STEM learning activities all focusing onUNsustainable development goals. Embedding formative digital assessment of STEM learners’work has been a central component. This paper provides an overview of the project and shares someresults from Sweden and Ireland. We provide examples from practice that help illustrate thecomplexitywith a particular focus on technology education.Co-funded by Erasmus+, Haninge municipality and the ATS STEM partners. QC 20220927ATS STE

Embedding Digital Assessment in STEM Education Lessons Learned from a European Joint Venture Focusing on Sustainable Development

Assessment of Transversal Skills in STEM (ATS STEM) is an innovative policy experimentationproject, which aims to enhance digital assessment of students’ transversal skills in STEM. ThisErasmus+ project is situated in primary and secondary schools across eight European countries,involving 12 partners on different levels of educational system.Teachers and researchers havecollaboratively developed and piloted several integrated STEM learning activities all focusing onUNsustainable development goals. Embedding formative digital assessment of STEM learners’work has been a central component. This paper provides an overview of the project and shares someresults from Sweden and Ireland. We provide examples from practice that help illustrate thecomplexitywith a particular focus on technology education.Co-funded by Erasmus+, Haninge municipality and the ATS STEM partners. QC 20220927ATS STE

Is it in the bin? Seeking authentic assessment in STEM : ATSSTEM

Assessment of Transversal Skills in STEM is an Erasmus+ research project engaged with teachers and learners in schools across several European countries in helping them develop transversal skills. The project seeks to help teachers in the formative digital assessment of STEM learners’ work as they develop real-world, authentic STEM skills. But what are authentic skills? Where do real worlds exist? In this presentation, we give an overview of the project and an introduction to some tools for formative assessment in STEM. We go on to present some examples of student work in Sweden and Ireland, where students and teachers are working outdoors, drawing trees, and looking into recycling bins in sites of real-world activity. We hope to show that teaching itself is real and authentic activity and cannot be easily divorced or separated from some “real-world” of STEM.Funded by Erasmus+. QC 20210525ATSSTE