Networked, Information, and Systems as Generative Words: A Freirean critical pedagogy template

Wolske, Martin

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/106990 Copy

Description

Title

Networked, Information, and Systems as Generative Words: A Freirean critical pedagogy template

Author(s)

Wolske, Martin

Issue Date

2019-11-07

Keyword(s)

• Critical Pedagogy
• Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy
• Information Science Education
• Community Informatics Practice
• Capability Approach

Abstract

Introduction to Networked Information Systems is a course that has been taught by the author since 1997. For much of the time, a participatory action research service-learning component has sought to address the digital divide while supporting hands-on sociotechnical skills development of students and community members. However, extended research on this course has identified key limits in the essential advancement of critical student values development related to the deeper socio-cultural agendas interconnected with digital technologies and the Internet. Unless primed, students often remain centered on problematic political agendas revolving around hyper-individualism, neoliberal capitalism, and technological utopianism. This paper introduces a new teaching template, sans the service-learning component, in which the teacher-student uses “systems”, “information”, and “network” as generative words, and carefully selected hands-on exercises and digital counter-storytelling as codifications and situation-problems. Through text/context analysis, small group discussions and professional journal reflections, and hands-on activities as innovators-in-use of microcontrollers and computers, student-teachers work to identify and decode these situation-problems. Learning outcomes sought include questioning: who is shaping the design, creation, distribution, selection, and implementation of the many different information and communications technologies we use as a daily part of our personal and professional lives, and for what agendas?; who WE are shaping in our selection, appropriation, and implementation of information and communication technologies within our work as information professionals, and for what agendas?, and; ways to better work as ally’s and co-conspirators with the marginalized and oppressed, using their valued functionings as guiding points, to advance individual and community capability sets.

Type of Resource

text

Language

en

Permalink

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/106990

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