Creating sustainable Posthuman Adaptive Learning environments for pregnant teenagers

abstract

Posthuman theorisation provides us with the conceptual tools to analyse and to understand how sustainable learning environments (SuLE) are created through adaptive learning (AL) as a form of artificial intelligence (AI) and as an aspect of a broader collective of relationalities. In this study our focus is on how pregnant teenagers relate to the curriculum, one another, other learners, parents, teachers, schools, communities, and non-human and more-than-human entities as they learn. Their condition currently makes them vulnerable and places them in less powerful positions to influence their learning in ways that align with their abilities and modes of being. The Posthumanist lens assists moves away from socialised gender, racial or generally underclass categories and dispositions. It enables us to situate pregnant teenagers’ feminine subjectivities beyond Humanism’s representations of this demographic as bearing-stigma, facing exclusion and marginalisation. This mode of seeing enables the possibility of re/imagining the pregnant teenager’s experiences through modes of being in which participation in networks and collaborations through adaptive learning, among others, draw on pedagogic technologies of change. We argue for a dissolving of Humanist barriers that define, stigmatise and burden the pregnant teenagers as they are fully integrated in their relationalities as learners in AI learning networks. Access to AL and similar software and gadgets need to be massified and opened up for use by all, irrespective of gender, socio-economic status, religion or any marginalising marker.

keywords:

• Adaptive Learning
• Sustainable Learning Environments
• pregnant teenagers
• Posthumanism

Notes

1 “The Fourth Industrial Revolution is the current and developing environment in which disruptive technologies and trends such as the Internet of Things (IoT), robotics, virtual reality (VR) and artificial intelligence (AI) are changing the way modern people live and work”. See: WhatIs.com (Accessed 10 November 2021).

2 Artificial Intelligence (AI) refers to sophisticated computer programming using algorithms and sensors among others to perform human-like functions in an automated way almost independent of human control. It is the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines, especially computer systems. The term AI is often used as an umbrella term for machines that are capable of perception, logic, reasoning, and learning. Another useful way to think about AI is in terms of a spectrum from automation (rules-based) to intelligence (learning systems) applied to various problems or use cases. See: https://www.altronsystemsintegration.co.za/ai-and-automation/?gclid = Cj0KCQiAweaNBhDEARIsAJ5hwbdbq-4409EbA17TdUE4qN4ltufO8tHgCsky4z9vrBgqPQ3P7G1IcRsaAozeEALw_wcB (accessed 21 December 2021).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Makeresemese Rosy Qhosola

MAKERESEMESE ROSY QHOSOLA has a PhD is Curriculum Studies where she advances boundaries of knowledge around what is termed critical accounting education. To date as a lecturer, she uses transformation as the backdrop against which she paints the tapestry of her research. The Fourth Industrial Revolution with its attendant concepts of Adaptive Learning, block chaining, use of sensors and sophisticated mathematical algorithms has taken her to new heights. Email: [email protected]

Sechaba Mahlomaholo

SECHABA MAHLOMAHOLO is a Professor of Education. His area of research lies in the creation of sustainable learning environments in terms of teaching, learning curriculum and governance. Theoretically he experiments with all the eight moments of a bricolage, from the traditional through to the fractured futures, to bring to light deeper understanding of multiperspectival and multilayered approaches to education. He is a graduate of the Universities of the North, Western Cape and Harvard and has guested several accredited Education journals nationally and continentally. Email: [email protected]