Questioning Technology in Education: Countering Dominant Narratives and Developing Strategies of Resistance
When: Submission deadline: November 15, 2024
Contact: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Proposals papers and panels (symposia) are invited for the 2025 Canadian Philosophy of Education Society (CPES) pre-conference. The preconference, which will take place the day before the CPES conference in Toronto, will include at least one invited speaker, as well as what we hope will be a solid number of presentations by those who are members, or are considering membership, of CPES. Graduate students are especially encouraged to submit a proposal, and proposals from other disciplines are welcome, as long as they clearly address the theme.
• Proposal length: Max. 3 pages, double-spaced in 11-point font or greater. References may follow on additional page(s). Proposals must include a title.
• Proposal types: Papers (single-authored or multi-authored) or panels that include 3- 4 short presentations by diTerent authors on the same topic.
• Submission format: Submit as Word or .pdf email attachment to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
• Submission deadline: November 15, 2024
• Submission or registration fee: none! The pre-conference is sponsored by the Canadian Philosophy of Education Society, the journal Philosophical Inquiry in Education, and the Centre for the Study of Learning and Performance, Concordia University. Lunch will be included.
Questioning Technology in Education: Introduction of Pre-Conference Theme
25 years ago, we found ourselves at the end of a technology hype cycle. Academics and public intellectuals made breathless pronouncements about the advent of the “global village,” and wrote high-minded essays about how the internet would empower ordinary citizens to become more politically active. One laptop per child, the internet on everyone’s desktop and perhaps, even, in everyone’s pocket. John Dewey’s dream of “knowledge becoming liquid,” knowledge democratized and flowing through the fibre-optic cables to whoever might want it, was finally at hand. Sure, there might be a few conspiracy theorists
here and there, and a few corporate types looking to line their pockets, but this would all give way before the internet’s overwhelming democratizing power.
In retrospect, we would have done better to read Jacques Ellul than Nicholas Negroponte. There’s no good or bad use of the internet, Ellul would say, there is just the most eTicient use, or what he would have called the “technical” use of it. The technical use, Ellul thinks, always dominates. In other words, it may not be especially democratic or empowering for Uber to have replaced all those independent taxi drivers, but we can’t deny that Uber has made the transactions smoother and more eTicient. The aggregation of corporate power in this way has continued in many other sectors. For example, social media companies professionalized the early internet’s “amateur hour” look and feel, aggregating audiences of billions on their platforms.
We find ourselves amid a renewed tech hype cycle today. This time, AI technology is at the forefront, although the blockchain is still in the mix. AI is going to be great for education, we are told. Everything is going to be transformed by it. A school board oTicial recently asked me how it could possibly be useful for a student to learn to do a task which could be performed by AI. I had a lot of diTiculty sympathizing with this point of view, since much of schooling, and maybe even learning more generally, has historically consisted of the execution of tasks more eTiciently accomplished by other means.
Scholars working in the foundations of education, at least compared to their colleagues elsewhere in Schools of Education, have usually been better than average at resisting tech hype. Perhaps this is because philosophers have a good view of the core principles of education, which have proven relatively stable over time, while historians understand the institutional dynamics of schools and their general resistance to change. As historian Larry Cuban pointed out, we have seen many cases in which the technology has been “oversold and underused,” or, as philosopher Kieran Egan might have noted, in which new technology has been emphasized at the expense of a coherent educational vision.
The purpose of this CPES preconference is to provide a space to question and resist dominant discourses around educational technology. There are many ways to do this, as there is a long tradition of questioning technology both within Western philosophy, as well as in other, non-Western philosophical traditions. Although this is a CPES preconference, approaches from other foundations disciplines are welcome, as sociologists and historians have made critical contributions to this question in the past. Views that are more hopeful about technology are also welcome, on condition that they engage the “Questioning Technology” theme of the preconference.
