Reconsidering digital education through a theory of practice
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Through a Bourdieuian lens, the document discusses digital technologies in higher education. It summarizes key Bourdieu concepts like habitus, capital, and field as lenses to understand student experiences with digital learning. Specifically, it examines how habitus, represented through student dispositions, interacts with digital cultures and literacies within the field of higher education. The document advocates combining Bourdieu with other theories for a flexible research approach to challenge assumptions and understand student practices.
Reconsidering digital education through a theory of practice
- 1. through a Bourdieuian theory of practice
- 2. Costa, C., & Harris, L. (2017). Reconsidering the technologies of intellectual inquiry in curriculum design. The Curriculum Journal, 28(4), 559–577. https://doi.org/10.1080/09585176.2017.1308260 Costa, C., Murphy, M., Pereira, A. L., & Taylor,Y. (2018). Higher education students’ experiences of digital learning and (dis)empowerment. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.14742/ajet.3979 A form of digital scholarship
- 3. Know your field of research well! Read! Read! Read! And question!
- 4. “One of the most disappointing aspects of academic work in this area—especially from within the field of ‘educational technology’ studies—is a general failure to think carefully about the social nature of digital technology” (Selwyn, 2012, p.82) Technological & Social Determinism Anti- Determinism
- 5. Many available theoretical perspectives have advanced the case for taking both the technological and the social seriously. In seeking to make sense of the many issues surrounding young people, education and digital technology, there is little value in lapsing into a determinist mindset either where digital technologies are shaped exclusively by stakeholders and end-users or are seen as autonomous shaping forces in their own right. (Selwyn, 2012, p. 91) Selwyn, N. (2012). Making sense of young people, education and digital technology: the role of sociological theory. Oxford Review of Education,38(1), 81–96. https://doi.org/10.1080/03054985.2011.577949
- 6. And recognising the social and interactional circumstances in which digital technologies exist and through which they attain their meaning(s) (Selwyn, 2012, p.92)
- 7. The digital learning practices of HE students
- 11. What are practices? Operationalising dispositions (which ones?) to capture habitus (which method?)
- 12. Mental structures inscribed in the body … represented (and externalised) by individuals’ dispositions the habitus exploits the body’s readiness to take seriously the performative magic of the social (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 57)
- 13. a system of dispositions with a past, present, and a future The notion of habitus has several virtues. (…) agents have a history and are the product of an individual history and an education associated with a milieu, and that they are also a product of a collective history, and that, in particular, their categories of thinking, categories of understanding, patterns of perception, systems of values, and so on, are the product of the incorporation of social structures’ (Bourdieu and Chartier, 2015, p.52)
- 14. Durable and transposable Transformative and regenerative Dispositions Primary habitus Secondary habitus
- 16. Bourdieu defends the flexibility of the research process as a form of challenging assumptions and rectifying taken for granted conceptions.
- 17. Ethnographic Action Research The combination of ethnography (a way of understanding cultural practices) and action research (a form of inquiry to nurture new practices) (Tacchi, Slater, & Hearn, 2003) Tacchi, J., Foth, M., & Hearn, G. N. (2009). Action research practices and media for development. International Journal of Education and Development using Information and Communication Technology, 5(2), 32–48.
- 18. An open and flexible curriculum: a change of approach Ambivalence and digital learner autonomy Continuous assessment: new rules for an old game Online learning as exposure
- 19. misreading the changes applied to the field may result in the misalignment of practices and outcomes Dispositions as a representation of habitus can be regarded as a tacit understanding of the field
- 20. ‘… combining elements of different theories to from another is a vital tool for theory building’ (Murphy, 2016, p.13) ‘… an important activity for when it comes to the theory-method relationship, as too often researchers approach theories (…)as if they were set in stone and therefore immune to change or even challenge’ (p. 14). Murphy, M. (2016). Habermas and Social Research: Between Theory and Method.Taylor & Francis.
- 21. When the dialectics of structure and agency is not enough to understand interpersonal recognition I enlisted the work of Axel Honneth
- 22. When Bourdieu’s work did not account for power struggles through perspectives of surveillance I enlisted the work of Michel Foucault Image: Grigoryan, Sona.“Facebook:The Panopticon of Modern Age.” Online Image. Flickr. Flickr Creative Commons, 9 March 2014.Web. 2 Feb 2014.
- 23. Bourdieu, habitus and social research: The art of application (Costa and Murphy, 2015)