Reflecting on my own engagement with information experiences outside of teaching, I connected emerging theorist movements of politigram and donotrearch.net (Pusz & Bergamini, 2021) to the information theory of Giles Deleuze, whose insight into changing relations of human and text theorised dynamic learning environments of today. Bernard Steigler’s concern for incurie or carelessness of late capitalist educational systems (Lindberg, 2020) directed me to identify three major failures in current practice:
- anti-production of outcomes-based approaches presented as utilitarian career paths currently contributing to exhaustion, burnout, competition, pathologising of the most intimate of human joys and suffering . countering the banking model of education/commodification of learners – critical pedagogy
- lack of smoothness between information landscapes of the classroom and home leading to confusion and a loss of confidence resulting in diminished participation in learning by those with diverse literacies
- order-words that over-emphasise scarcity and promote urgency – leading to competition rather than collaboration – resulting in greater alienation and class divide based on information literacy.
Research connected me to scholarship of Masny and Cole (2009) whose Multiple Literacies Theory empowers learners’ skillsets beyond proletarianisation and towards greater exploration of self and identity, shifting focus from endless outcomes to boundless experience when language of curriculum is transformed to activate its creative and collaborative potentials in guided dialogue rather than command.
Stiegler’s intersection of technic and memory consolidated the need to cultivate relationships of apprenticeship that would allow students to gain confidence to explore more controversial aspects of the text and its interpretations, through an informed topography of the stratification of the information environments they inhabit, particularly acknowledging informal information communities in the dark forest of the net. (Lindberg, 2020)
I was influenced by Yao’s feminist engagement with text informed dispersal models of assessment to protect the space to practice new information skills, creating with technology, without fear of academic consequence (Yao, 2018). Embedding opportunities for practice and play with these skills ensures the empowerment of learners.
The broader framework of transition theory, likewise, reinforced this shift in method from production to process, seeking to extend transformative potentials of inquiry learning when informed by Deleuzian dispositions. Envisioning learners as active participants in the collective conscience, cultural horizons are expanded to include emerging platforms like letterboxd, which have democratised audiences’ relationships to discovery and experience of Text through independent review and evaluation.
I hope that this learning tool may strengthen resistance to forces of automation disguised as enabling upward mobility but polarising, fragmenting and destabilizing communities by sanctifying spaces of becoming and unbecoming in virtual education, empowering participation and enfranchisement with cultural production. (Cole & Pullen, 2009) Engaging and sharing in critical pedagogies that deterritorialise and decolonise knowledge (Hicks, 2020) TLs initiate learners into commons of cultural discourse as new voices capable of revitalizing an educational project which has become tragic.
Cole, DR & Pullen, DL, Multiliteracies in Motion: Current Theory and Practice, Routledge (2010).
Hicks, A. (2020). Negotiating change: Transition as a central concept for information literacy. Journal of Information Science.
Lindberg, S. (2020). Politics of digital learning—Thinking education with Bernard Stiegler. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 52(4), 384-396.
“Xine” Yao, C. (2018). #staywoke: Digital Engagement and Literacies in Antiracist Pedagogy. American Quarterly 70(3), 439-454.