Why the digital classroom is a bad model for digital learning

ABSTRACT

The pandemic has compelled educational institutes across the world to hastily adopt, adapt and cope with digital learning by developing ‘digital classrooms’, virtual learning environments replete with sophisticated technological features. The eagerness of the intent to ramp up technological infrastructures, however, is not reflected in the rethinking or redesigning of pedagogies for digital learning. Technocratic ambitions often have very little, if anything, to do with pedagogy. Moreover, the digital classroom is ‘global’ by design, and the ethnocentric framework wrought upon by such designs impedes the decolonizing of the curriculum. It depletes local pedagogic cultures: local histories and cultures, political and moral economies. This article argues that imagining the digital classroom a-temporally and a-culturally, typically from a technocratic point of view, signals a tryst with (techo-)orientalism in its new avatar.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital classroom
• techo-orientalism
• techno-futurism
• critical pedagogy

Acknowledgements

I thank Rohan D’Souza for helping shape a preliminary draft, and Dibyadyuti Roy for his incisive comments on it. I am also thankful to the anonymous peer-reviewer(s) whose well-considered feedback has helped bring clarity to this piece.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In this connection, D’Souza (2020, 45) warns: ‘An individual’s learning curve, emotional states, psychological dispositions and learning abilities, for example, could be minutely mapped and tracked through the trail of data exhaust. Every digital indent, in the form of a like button, emoji use, a quiz, a survey or a simple click, could be graphed to size up as a behavioural analysis that, in turn, could then be conveyed as a score to a potential employer or authority’.

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Avishek Ray

Avishek Ray is the author of The Vagabond in the South Asian Imagination: Representation, Agency & Resilience (Routledge, 2021) and co-editor of Nation, Nationalism and the Public Sphere: Religious Politics in India (SAGE, 2020). His research appears in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Contemporary South Asia, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Multicultural Education Review, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies, Tourism, Culture & Communication, among others; and he has held research fellowships at the University of Edinburgh (UK), Purdue University Library (USA), Centre for Advanced Study, Sofia (Bulgaria), Mahidol University (Thailand) and Pavia University (Italy). In 2021, he was awarded a Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellowship