Critical Digital Pedagogy | PressBooks

Authors: Jesse Stommel, Chris Friend, and Sean Michael Morris

Book Description: Since 2011, the journal Hybrid Pedagogy has published over 400 articles from more than 200 authors focused in and around the emerging field of critical digital pedagogy. A selection of those articles are gathered here. This is the first peer-reviewed book centered on the theory and practice of critical digital pedagogy. This version is open-access on a pay what you can basis.

From: https://hybridpedagogy.org/critical-digital-pedagogy/

The Urgency of Critical Digital Pedagogy

“The world is not a cul-de-sac.” ~ Paulo Freire, Education for Critical Consciousness

There is no hope for the future without education.

For the past ten years, Hybrid Pedagogy has worked to help craft a theory of teaching and learning in and around digital spaces, not by imagining what that work might look like, but by doing, asking after, changing, and doing again. Since 2011, Hybrid Pedagogy has published over 400 articles from more than 200 authors focused in and around the emerging field of critical digital pedagogy. This book gathers together a selection of those articles. Much of the writing on Hybrid Pedagogy feels just as timely now as it did when it was written (and even more prescient). The journal has spent the last decade working to support voices which are “emotionally resonant and intellectually vital” and their vision of an equitable, resilient, critical pedagogy, and a hopeful future toward which education might arc. That work has become more vital and must continue.

Critical digital pedagogy is activism as much as it is a field, practice as much as it is theory, derived from experience and then reflection upon that experience. In his definition, Jesse asserts that when “we’re looking for solutions, what we most need to change is our thinking and not our tools.” He further argues that critical digital pedagogy is more defined by its questions, by the problems it poses, than it is by answers, and that it “will not, cannot, be defined by a single voice but must gather together a cacophony of voices” (“Critical Digital Pedagogy: a Definition”). It’s not a stack of content or a bibliography; critical digital pedagogy is a way we treat one another.

We have long held that “every voice is needed within academe, within education. The more we leave out, the less we have to offer” (Morris, “Call for Editors”). Hybrid Pedagogy’s collaborative peer review process is decidedly not “blind” and typically includes open discussion about the overall direction of a piece and its author’s voice as much as the specifics of its rhetorical strategy. We work to build personal relationships between and among authors and editors. Writing requires trust. Editing requires trust. Building communities of trust is at the center of our work.

Hybrid Pedagogy authors have written about and around some of the most vital issues in pedagogy and digital learning. The writing done on the pages of the journal are a critical, in-depth resource for teachers, administrators, instructional designers, and others as they begin to navigate digital, remote, and hybrid learning.

As Hybrid Pedagogy’s work continues, we recognize that education is, in many ways, at a vital moment. The response to the COVID-19 pandemic has abruptly shifted more than one million students to fully online or remote instruction. And what has become immediately clear is that students face much more than technological hurdles. As Jesse writes in an article for AAUP’s Academe: “When so many higher education teachers have almost no training at all, it’s hard to imagine how faculty could be adequately prepared for working with students who are increasingly nontraditional and often lack access to basic needs such as food and housing.” The work of students and teachers is increasingly precarious.

Critical Digital Pedagogy: A Collection is the first peer-reviewed publication centered on the theory and practice of critical digital pedagogy. The collection represents a wide cross-section of both academic and non-academic culture and features articles by women, Black people, indigenous people, Chicanx and Latinx writers, people with disabilities, queer people, and other underrepresented populations. The goal of this collection is to provide evidence for the extraordinary work being done by university and college faculty, librarians, instructional designers, graduate students, technologists, and more — work which advances the study and the praxis of critical digital pedagogy.