The invisible made visible through technologies’ agency: a sociomaterial inquiry on emergency remote teaching in higher education

ABSTRACT

We are used to considering human agency as the most important aspect of the educational process. Technologies are seen as inert matter, subordinated to human intention and design, as if they did not have a role in the eclectic combination of teaching, learning, and knowing about the world. Their agency is invisible until a breakdown occurs, a material moment which shows their doing. In this paper, we make digital action visible by focusing on emergency remote teaching in higher education during the Covid-19 pandemic breakdown. Data were collected/co-created in a graduate course in Education in the first three months of lockdown in Brazil. Through a queer assemblage of teaching-researching-writing, we present a sociomaterial analysis that shows multiple entanglements of bodies, material things, and pedagogic time-spaces. In this exercise, social inequality issues, power structures and ethical problems come to the surface, while students struggle for quality participation in the digitised classes.

KEYWORDS:

• Breakdown
• sociomateriality
• higher education
• Brazil
• emergency remote teaching

Acknowledgements

The authors sincerely appreciate the participant students’ contribution.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported partially by the Fundação Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo a Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (FAPERJ) [grant number E-26/202.337/2019], and partially by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior – Brasil (CAPES) [grant number 88887.363051/2019-00].