Open education as a 'heterotopia of desire'

The movement towards ‘openness’ in education has tended to position itself as inherently democratising, radical, egalitarian and critical of powerful gatekeepers to learning. While ‘openness’ is often positioned as a critique, I will argue that its mainstream discourses – while appearing to oppose large-scale operations of power – in fact reinforce a fantasy of an all-powerful, panoptic institutional apparatus. The human subject is idealised as capable of generating higher order knowledge without recourse to expertise, a canon of knowledge or scaffolded development. This highlights an inherent contradiction between this movement and critical educational theory which opposes narratives of potential utopian futures, offering theoretical counterpositions and data which reveal diversity and complexity and resisting attempts at definition, typology and fixity. This argument will be advanced by referring to Gourlay and Oliver's one-year longitudinal qualitative multimodal journaling and interview study of student day-to-day entanglements with technologies in higher education, which was combined with a shorter study focused on academic staff engagement (see article for full text reference). Drawing on sociomaterial perspectives, I will conclude that allegedly ‘radical’ claims of the ‘openness’ movement in education may in fact serve to reinforce rather than challenge utopic thinking, fantasies of the human, and monolithic social categories, fixity and power, and as such may be seen as indicative of a ‘heterotopia of desire’

'Student engagement' and the tyranny of participation

Student engagement in higher education has tended to be discussed in mainstream discourses by invoking typologies, seeking to place students into categories and focusing on the importance of ‘participation’. I will give a critique of these ideologically loaded and normative constructs and their inherent contradictions, proposing an alternative framing drawing on sociomateriality. This framing, I will argue, allows us to explore the complexities of day-to-day practices, acknowledging the centrality of texts and meaning-making in ‘being a student’. Referring to a longitudinal multimodal journaling study, I will argue that contemporary student engagement and sites of learning are constantly emergent, contingent and restless – not only transgressing the mainstream constructs mentioned above but also raising fundamental questions about apparently ‘common-sense’ binaries such as digital/material, public/private and device/author. I will suggest implications in terms of research and understanding of the day-to-day unfolding of higher education as situated social practice

Presence, Absence, and Alterity: Fire Space and Goffman’s Selves in Postdigital Education

The literature on space in higher education has arguably been dominated by the concept of ‘learning spaces’. In this paper, I will argue that this construct, while appearing student-focused and creative, is ideologically circumscribed by an underlying social constructivism. Following Bayne et al. (2014), I draw on science and technology studies to consider social topologies, in particular regional space, network space, and their proposed fluid space, and the work of Law and colleagues on the category of fire space, derived from Bachelard’s (The Psychoanalysis of Fire, 1964) disquisition on the nature of fire. I work with this construct in an analysis of postdigital education, in particular looking at synchronous interaction via video conferencing software such as Zoom. Linking this analysis to the work of Goffman and his concept of the lecturer selves (Goffman in Forms of Talk, 1981), I argue that the concept of fire space may allow for a more nuanced and accurate account of the flickering, contingent nature of (co) presence, absence, and alterity, allowing for a more immanent account of digital interaction in ‘distance’ or ‘online’ education

Quarantined, Sequestered, Closed: Theorising Academic Bodies Under Covid-19 Lockdown

The term ‘quarantine’ is derived from the Italian quarantena, from quaranta, referring to the forty days of isolation traditionally imposed during the era of the Black Death in Europe. This paper examines this and related contemporary terms, in order to consider the complex and contradictory nature of enforced sites of isolation, with reference to the historical literature. The centrality of spatial practices in the current pandemic is emphasised, with a focus on the normally unobserved, micro practices of individuals under ‘lockdown’. The paper reports on an interview study conducted at a large UK Higher Education institution during the Covid-19 ‘lockdown’, and analyses the accounts of six academics, focusing particularly on their embodied and sociomaterial practices, with reference to the etymological analysis. The paper considers the extent to which their reported experiences reflect the various meanings of the term sequestrato, going on to propose that their working practices, particularly focused on screens and video calls, are characterised by a need to ‘perform the university’. I speculate on how the ontological nature of the university itself has been fundamentally altered by the closure of the campus and lockdown, proposing that the site of the university is now radically dispersed across these sequestered bodies. I conclude by calling into the question the accuracy of the term ‘online teaching and learning’, instead suggesting that in a fundamental sense, none of these practices is in fact ‘online’ or digital

Cyborg ontologies and the lecturer's voice : A posthuman reading of the 'face-to-face'

The lecture is often posited as the prototypical ‘face-to-face’ educational encounter, seen as embodying key features of the pre-networked academy. These are implicitly characterised as forms of boundedness or impermeability, in terms of both the physical and temporal context, and the ontological status of the participants and the nature of the event in terms of rhetorical structure. However, the increased ubiquity of digital technologies such as virtual learning environments and networked mobile devices has altered the nature of the lecture in profound ways. Drawing on posthuman theory, this paper will argue that both overt and covert uses of digital media in ‘face-to-face’ educational encounters such as lectures have served to undermine several taken-for-granted binaries, such as: material/virtual, digital/analogue, then/now and here/not here. It will conclude that this breakdown of dualisms – in terms of social and representational practices – repositions lecturers and students as hybridised ‘cyborg’ subjects

There is no 'virtual learning': The materiality of digital education

The distinction between face-to-face and distant digitally-mediated educational engagement is a complex one, and the two modes are often combined in practice, via ‘blended learning’ or the use of a VLE to support campus-based teaching. The current Covid-19 pandemic has thrown this distinction into relief, in a context where educationalists have been forced to move to fully distant engagement in a very short timeframe. This paper explores how this predicament has brought to the fore the nature of our engagement with digital knowledge practices and screen-based communication, arguing that the notion of ‘virtual learning’ is a flawed one. Instead, adopting a sociomaterial perspective, it argues that all aspects of digital engagement are in fact grounded in material and embodied entanglements with devices and other artefacts

The research-teaching nexus revisited

This chapter explores the idea of the research–teaching nexus, which provides the foundation for research-based approaches to education, such as UCL’s Connected Curriculum. Although this is an idea that can be traced back across two centuries, it remains controversial, and its feasibility is still questioned. However, research has developed an increasingly sophisticated account of the various strands that this ‘nexus’ consists of, and how students experience it. These strands will be reviewed to identify opportunities for building connections between research and teaching

Reflecting on things: Sociomaterial perspectives on academic development

The aims, discourse and practices of academic development in higher education rest on a series of assumptions about the nature of academic practice and student engagement, assumptions which shape its approaches to enhancement and change. In this chapter, we review and critique these, drawing on sociomaterial theory and evidence from a project that explored the academic practices of students and staff

Students' physical and digital sites of study: Making, marking, and breaking boundaries

This chapter argues that studying draws in a wide array of technologies, takes place in both institutional and personal settings, and involves the consumption and production of a variety of digital and print texts. Knox exploring educational discourses about openness challenged the negative way in which discussions of technology framed the idea of liberty. The post-human, sociomaterial perspective Gourlay uses highlights another important principle: the idea that things such as technology also need to be treated as actors in social processes. The study received institutional ethical clearance and followed British Education Research Association (BERA) guidelines about informed consent, including guarantees of anonymity and confidentiality, and the right to opt out at any point. Rather than being bound within educational institutions, studying spills out across many public and private spaces, moored as part of a consistent practice of education by the consistent uses of print and digital technologies