The fuzzy and the techie: The ontology of education and epistemic justice

The first part of the title is borrowed from Scott Hartley’s (2017) book in which he argues that the liberal arts will rule the digital: in the burgeoning world of technology, a broad liberal arts education will be increasingly needed to help, create, guide and implement technology to increase its human utility, and ethical and just application. While the present day argument often is that science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education is the main promise for future employment security, broad liberal arts provide the transformative learning to make that technology more pragmatic and humane. Such argument can therefore be made for the acquisition of fundamental thinking and communication skills and the fundamental necessities found in topics such as the humanities and the social sciences, the sciences devoted to the study of human nature, culture and our larger societies as whole.

It is from this viewpoint that much of the creative innovation that alters our lives and the ensuing implications of those innovations are discovered. Hartley (2017: 26) proposes that ‘The ideal is that broad liberal arts exposure tugs on the mind, forcing a student to consider positions and opinions that make him or her question perspectives and biases, often fuelling late-night debates with classmates’. It therefore has the potential to provide thinking skills that are necessary to challenge old ways of thinking and develop new and other models that can be accessed and/or enhanced through technological development. Hartley’s ultimate argument, however, is for an interdisciplinary and/or transcurricular approach to education that harnesses both the benefits from STEM and those from the liberal arts – including the humanities and social science background. The one is not perpetually more significant than the other. Hartley further argues that what may have a monumental impact on transformative learning is the integration of technology into education, often termed blended learning. Loosely defined, blended learning uses technology in ways that allow more self-guided instruction, which requires more student participation hence enforcing student active learning methodologies. I think such blends are fundamentally complex and paradoxical, simultaneously real and virtual. With a view to justice, they require immanent approaches with/in life, escaping nature–culture divides; a way of collectively thinking together across differences without reducing those differences to similarities.

The algorithmic condition

Opening up spaces between the fuzzy and the techie, constantly adding digital diversity for justice highlights, therefore – the way I see this – the entangled contours of inequality, equality and quality in education. FuzzyTechie challenges generate new questions requiring new theoretical, conceptual and pedagogical approaches forcing us to focus on transcorporeal collectivities rather than autonomous identity constructions. Pedagogy and research on pedagogical praxis performed as conceptual research activities of materiality critique transformations and thinking with theory subject matter. It implies a move from praxis of criticism and value assessment based on notions on the one hand, of problems as results of either lacks or political choice instead of systems and structures in our economies and thinking, and, on the other hand, a treating of problems as moral and/or ideological problems instead of scientific epistemological thinking possibilities. Hence, this represents a secular and scienced-up approach to pedagogical innovation and research to avoid instrumentalism and reductionism, which creates echo chambers of knowledge sameness only.

As far as science, research and use of research is concerned, we need a better database for research on inequality and educational digital justice. This includes micropolitical and biopolitical explorations. Put bluntly, we need better science through better data; hence, we need methodological diversity beyond effect estimations and a moving beyond empirical analysis of single policies or interventions. Finally, yet importantly, we need research synthesis and the paying of greater attention to theory in empirical research, the main ethical challenge of Higher Education, ultimately kindergartens and schools, being to affirm the existence of different ontologies; unpacking the ways in which our relative locations and historicized, accepted ways of being and knowing conceive, enact and normalize ‘quality’. Such research expansions and movements are what is referred to as dataphilosophy in the title. It can alternatively also be referred to as datapoetization; data primarily seen as something to poeticize – think and philosophize with both in real and virtual perspectives and spaces. It implies a focus on and expansions of both the production of data and the processes of analysis, including a virtualization of data for the researcher and the researched, the student and the teacher … to philosophize – read, also theorize further with together. We speak of data oriented praxes but in expanded perspectives that are open and inclusive.

This implies, and both as prerequisite and condition for success, a theorizing of education and the teacher role and teaching, thus pedagogies, pedagogical praxis and professionalisms, as an ontologizing praxis and learning as process ontologies; again bluntly speaking, producing better pedagogies through better data and a deepening of our understanding of moderators and mediators of effects. Ontologizing education and the teacher role is thus about making own knowledges available to Others. It is about making oneself available for Others’ knowledges. It is about sharing experiences, creating words, putting in words and creating connections; connections between humans and more-than humans, nature and culture, man and machine (fuzzy and the techie), society and education. Through this, experimenting with our epistemic understandings of subjects and curriculum, theory and practice, the digital and analogue, objects, research and knowledge production, relations and responsibility, autonomy and identity. This is to potentialize and focus on the multiplying character of difference and repetition, and not its return in the same, that which was, has been, or in a coarse way realizing the same functions.

What we wish for and ask

We speak of teachers who through this are becoming pedagogical leaders and research leaders in their kindergartens and classrooms: enacting immanent pedagogies and research for digital justice. These are – and also referring to processes of dataphilosophy – processes of putting theories to work through plugging back into the educative contexts they belong to, in multidimensional ontologies and at different levels. Ultimately opening for similar processes between students and teachers, students and researchers and between researchers. These engagements do not simply strive to inquire into the dominant discursive and material forces, but engage in a ‘mapping’ of forces that can have the power to transform or reconfigure reality; asking hard questions about epistemic bias and injustice so that more and other stories can be told; teachers and researchers thinking and acting in possibilities in every situation, producing tensions that everywhere propel thought towards inventiveness; not undermining any child´s or pupil´s capacity as knower. The aim is to exceed what we already know, creating layered upon layered thinking as entanglements, connections and bifurcations of lines, all sorts of possible digital becomings. The concept of justice – and put in motion, referring mainly therefore to all individuals being met with equal opportunities, expectations and support – in thought as well as in action, avoiding, for example, child and pupil learned helplessness.

What is required is the development of new values and sensibilities around educational technologies. This implies experimenting with our epistemic understandings of subjects and curriculum and the ontological models that we have brought to bear, and to potentialize the shaping of other configurations of – and models for knowledge production – thinking, critiquing and learning.

The overall questions that we ask in this Special Issue are, first, does the digital society and education demand new learning perspectives? Does the digital society and education demand new pedagogical research approaches? How can dataphilosophy open up fuzzytechie spaces for pedagogical innovation? What implications for educational policies might digitalization have?

What we have done and present

I invited colleagues at my working place to join me in writing about digitalization, fuzzy, techie, philosophy, pedagogy, teaching and learning … For me this is a start only to be continued. The first article is mine: ‘Fuzzytechie languaging and consilience: Dataphilosophy and transdisciplinary digital force for justice’. I think I put it first just to show some of the confusions, dilemmas and paradox that I experience. It is a post-human and new material article based on Deleuze’s and Guattari’s (Deleuze, 1994; Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) experiential process philosophy, and takes on indirect and informal learning, critical concepts as always performative and methodological, inherently experimental and open to yet-unknown territories of thought.

Thinking with, through and beyond concepts involves developing conceptual foci whilst also, and at the same time, designing for debate.

In the next article, ‘The beauty of abstraction in mathematics’, Thomas Lingefjärd and Russell Hatami write about the/a fact that abstraction and generalization of itself may very well be a beauty of the human mind. We humans continue to explore and expand mathematics, which is truly beautiful and remarkable. In this article, abstraction and the different beautiful properties of mathematics are presented with examples, where the connection between algebra and geometry is discussed. Modern technological tools enable and encourage us to perform mathematical investigations of a complex nature.

Article three is also from the mathematical field. In ‘Teaching programming and mathematics in practice: A case study from Swedish primary school’, Henrik and Susanne Stigberg describe three cases of how programming is introduced in Swedish primary schools in the first semester, which is compulsory in the mathematics curriculum. They have followed four teachers, in second, sixth and ninth grade, in their mathematics lessons when they have taught programming. Henrik and Susanne observed the lessons and interviewed the teachers and students to get a comprehensive picture on how programming is introduced. They report on teachers’ reflections regarding how they acquired programming knowledge, how they connect programming and mathematics and how students reflect on programming in mathematics lessons. Henrik and Susanne believe that presenting these descriptions from the classroom will help to enrich the research communities’ understanding of implications and challenges of curriculum changes.

The fourth article is about ‘Use of videos in the Information and Communication Technology Massive Open Online Course: Insights for learning and development of transformative digital agency with pre- and in-service teachers in Norway’. This study examined how videos may support participants’ learning in the Information and Communication Technology Massive Open Online Course aimed to develop digital skills with pre- and in-service teachers in Norway. Findings revealed the patterns of teachers’ interactions with videos: (a) seeking explicit information about how to engage in learning; (b) seeking assistance while engaged with the assigned tasks; (c) support to compare learning outcomes with the requirements outlined in the videos. In doing so, the videos provided orienting, executive and controlling support and might have contributed to enhancing teachers’ capacity to learn in digital environments and their transformative digital agency. The majority of participants used videos for executive support and the learners preferred videos in the range of 5–10 min. By providing these types of support by the videos, a learning activity carries a new function as a tool for studying the essence of learning in digital environments.

In his article ‘The role of mathematics and thinking for democracy in the digital society’, Johan Bredberg writes that in today’s digital society, people encounter a lot of information on a daily basis. This information should, in his view, be really grasped and understood by citizens in order for them to be able to properly engage in political issues, something the population of a healthy democracy does. Much of such information involves mathematics and fully comprehending it requires so-called quantitative literacy. All students should learn this as well as critical thinking at school. The article also discusses how abstract mathematics can indirectly be beneficial for democracy.

Andrew Thomas, in his article ‘Sources and citizens: An essay in applied epistemology’, takes a critical look at the practice of teaching source criticism, distinguishing between reading for information, which involves checking facts about the world with competing sources, and reading for evidence, which observes discourse in the world as the object of knowledge. The first requires scepticism regarding the discourse’s reference, the second regarding its author. The first asks if the writer is telling the truth, the second asks who the writer is and what they are doing. The first has had endless educational resources, online and in learning materials, devoted to it. The second has been neglected. Thomas identifies problems with this: pupils encouraged to use the internet as a source of information are no longer constructing knowledge themselves or choosing their own questions, and their forms of source criticism risk dismissing minority voices. He claims that the first without the second is by nature a conservative force in education, and inculcates passivity in pupils. At best, they develop healthy scepticism. At worst, they lose all belief in their own education.

The last article, ‘Technology and sustainability for/in early childhood education and care’, by Anita Crisostomo and myself, examines the paradoxical non-position (posthuman) subject position and the necessary subjectivity when merging the fuzzy with the techie. Through the theory-method of dataphilosophy, we explore sustainability within kindergartens as a (re)grounding of the subject in a materially embedded sense of responsibility and ethical accountability for the environment we/the professionals inhabit. To explore boundaries – thresholds of sustainability – we experiment, thinking with the death of a child under the care of the early childhood professionals; creating encounters, transformation and change. Being more fuzzy than techie, we embrace and critique technology and technological solutions, asking (in)directly, trying to contribute, realize visions about how the power of algorithms could be applied to serve sustainability and social just pedagogies through dataphilosophizing, becoming and affect.