Special issue on hybrid pedagogies editorial

ABSTRACT

An increasing awareness of the potential biases and problematic impacts of digital technologies is driving a renewed focus on social responsibility and ethical considerations within the fields of engineering and the computer and data sciences. Similarly, a renewed sense of complicity in our socio-technical environments has encouraged scholars from a range of design, humanities, and social science disciplines to engage more directly in public-facing work, often through prototyping, exhibitions, and hands-on educational activities. This special issue on hybrid pedagogies contributes to this developing and ongoing conversation in a resolutely interdisciplinary way.

KEYWORDS:

• Editorial
• hybrid
• pedagogy
• education
• computing
• ethics
• social values
• Science and Technology Studies

An increasing awareness of the potential biases and problematic impacts of digital technologies is driving a renewed focus on social responsibility and ethical considerations within the fields of engineering and the computer and data sciences. Similarly, a renewed sense of complicity in our socio-technical environments has encouraged scholars from a range of design, humanities, and social science disciplines to engage more directly in public-facing work, often through prototyping, exhibitions, and hands-on educational activities. However, practical and epistemic difficulties continue to impact our capacities to bridge social and technical orientations and to design pedagogical activities that are responsive to these entanglements. The so-called ‘great divide’ as described by Bowker, Star, Turner, and Gasser remains as challenging today as when they engaged with similar issues in the late 90’s (Bowker et. al, 1997). Yes, significant progress has been made in the ways we theorise about the tensions (Latour 1999; Stengers 2000) and indeed in how we might approach them productively (Benjamin 2019; Parreñas 2018; Pérez-Bustos 2017; Puig de la Bellacasa 2017). The rub, however, surfaces in how we put these ideas into practice and, pertinent here, how we build hybrid pedagogies that are able to work at the messy but nevertheless generative intersections.

This special issue on hybrid pedagogies contributes to this developing and ongoing conversation in a resolutely interdisciplinary way. It includes articles by scholars within the fields of computer science (CS), engineering, critical race studies, postcolonial, queer, feminist, and learning theory, arts, architecture, STS, and others. The contributions offer alternative starting places to explore the themes of hybrid pedagogy and include auto-ethnographic accounts of teaching and mentorship, descriptions and analyses of organizational efforts and curriculum development, the positioning of design and engineering in wider sites of world-building, methodological inventions on the cusp of the social and technical disciplines, as well as pedagogical interventions that amplify under-recognized legacies of data science or technology development.

Contributions

In ‘A “Speculative Pasts” Pedagogy: Where Speculative Design Meets Historical Thinking’, Tega Braine and Laine Nooney introduce a technique the authors call ‘speculative pasts’ where students revisit and retell a conventional or dominant historical account around/with technology development. With this technique, students ultimately create and present an artifact that does this historical retelling. The authors describe not only a subset of the artifacts produced but also the structure of the course and the ideas that informed it. The article represents a strong articulation of a new pedagogical method. Beyond the particulars of their case study, the method promises to enliven new and important connections between humanistic (specifically historical) and pragmatic (specifically designerly and technological) ways of working.

Similarly, in ‘Analyzing Public Interventions through the Lens of Experimentalism: The Case of the Museum of Random Memory’, Annette Markham and Gabriel Pereira provide an analysis of their ambitious Museum of Random Memory (MoRM) project, a series of material and conceptual interventions that prompt members of different publics to reflect on the digitization (or ‘datafication’) of memory. Taking the form of an exhibition and performance, these interventions serve to spark conversation and debate about continuous transformations around personal data. Their article aims not just to introduce the MoRM project, but more importantly to unpack the conceptual orientation that inspired their performance of everyday digital media engagements, a framework they refer to as ‘experimentation.’ Focused on informal learning and ‘lay audiences’, the multiple techniques they describe in this article will be useful to both researchers and educators interested in digital and data literacy.

‘Cultivating Critical Imaginations: Post-disciplinary Pedagogy in a Computational Design Laboratory’ also explores the intersection of pedagogy and techniques. Daniel Cardoso Llach and Mine Özkar present a case study of a highly successful and innovative post-disciplinary, computational design programme, consisting of research seminars and studios. They engage readers in a rich description of how the university programme functions by using four compelling examples from student work. These examples help to shed light on the hybrid pedagogical approaches of material and socio-technical, creative and critical exploration. The material presented is both detailed and specific, and provides examples of the themes and tensions entailed in working across disciplinary and epistemic boundaries.

The fourth article in this special issue turns from specific pedagogy to more general themes. ‘What Design Education Tells Us About Design Theory: A Pedagogical Genealogy’ explores key themes within education that link technical practices to more conceptual work. Using an historical approach, Malileh Ghajargar and Jeffrey Bardzell explore how design education navigates a complex path between technical rationality and more pragmatic/phenomenological perspectives and processes. This intervention offers an interesting framing for thinking about hybridities and specifically what it means to take seriously pedagogies that afford or necessitate a pragmatic synthesis of these approaches. The authors highlight design and its history as a particularly valid site for entangling rationality with phenomenological approaches. With this hybridity, they suggest that educators from adjacent areas, such as STS, media studies, digital humanities and the like might meaningfully use design and its history as a lens for thinking through similar entanglements within their own fields.

The fifth contribution to this special issue presents a compelling argument for considering the complexities of (infra)structural inequalities in pedagogy and pedagogical hybridities. In ‘Infrastructures of Abstraction: How Computer Science Education Produces Anti-Political Subjects’, James Malazita and Korryn Resetar move through the complexities and recognize the always emergent tensions at play by introducing the reader to a critically orientated perspective/syllabus in Computer Science (CS) education. Specifically, they employ the common trope in computer science, abstraction, to show how programming practices come with particular epistemic cultures and political potentials. However, at the same time the application of abstraction allows these ‘social’ concerns to be legitimately bracketed off and placed out of bounds. Rather than reaffirming them as separate from or inert in CS programming and design, Malazita and Resetar put forward a radically alternative curriculum that places identity, power structures and epistemics centre stage and integral to students learning to programme.

In ‘Doing Thinking: Revisiting Computing With Artistic Research and Technofeminism’, Lorren Britton, Goda Klumbyte, and Claude Draude address similar themes and tensions but from a very different disciplinary context. In this article two methodologies often considered as non-complementary, namely that of artistic research and of computing, are brought in conversation. Through their collaborative research project ‘Reconfiguring Computing through Cyberfeminism and New Materialism (CF+)’, the authors aim to refigure the dominant epistemologies and practices of CS and electrical engineering by introducing unconventional technofeminist and speculative material concepts. Drawing on a more open-ended and experimental culture as frequently experienced in artistic practice and research, the hybrid methodologies offer a greater attentiveness to the hierarchies informing the traditions and practices of computing and beyond.

We end with ‘Navigating Equity Work in Engineering: Contradicting Messages Encountered by Minority Faculty.’ Here, Diana Chen and Alex Mejia offer a timely critique of the challenges minority engineering faculty face while teaching within an engineering programme. Rather than provide a simplistic critique of existing practices, the authors aim to highlight contradictions experienced in the classroom based on their firsthand experiences. The article addresses critically and in detail the structural activities required to reform engineering education that are being undertaken by junior faculty, women faculty, and faculty of colour. Informed by feminist, postcolonial, and engineering education theory the paper addresses such issues as the ongoing power of ‘white male’ stereotypes, hegemonic norms, and microagressions prevailing in engineering culture, and the need to develop cultural norms based on diversity and social justice that are substantially backed up by auto-ethnographic reflections.

Read together, this collection of articles shows that sites of pedagogy – and the spaces, people and practices that constitute these sites – are potent assemblages for making a difference in technoscientific ways of being. That making a difference is necessary is made obvious in increasingly impactful events where the lack of attention to the complex linkages between technical systems and social life is manifested. Whether through image tagging algorithms that label photos of black people as gorillas, social media platforms that simplify practices of political manipulation, or racially-biased AI systems in policing and in healthcare, it is clear that we need new ways to reflect, teach, learn, and make. Through cases, examples, and close readings, the articles teach us that myriad worlds awake from educational experiment, from testing and reworking the hybridities so that more is able to happen. What though is this more? From the cases and stories that follow, are there ways to think with hybrid pedagogies, altogether, that enlarge and thread across the woven knots we clumsily divide into the social and technological? And what might such rethreadings tell us?

In a recent article in Wired Magazine, Irani and Chowdhury (2019) critique the technology sector’s ignorance of long-standing fields – such as STS – that provide tools for better parsing the complex nature of socio-technical systems. Instead of encouraging students in computing related fields to cross-train in the social sciences and the humanities, the authors note the ways new fields are proposed. In particular, they criticize Tristan Harris’ proposal to create a new field of ‘Society & Technology Interaction’ intended to address an engineer’s lack of social and cultural knowledge. Seeing such a move as colonizing of valuable but often under-represented scholarship, Irani and Chowdhury encourage the tech sector to be more respectful of multiple forms of experiential expertise and to ‘learn from history and the contributions of others.’ While sympathizing with Harris’ intent, we agree, and see this special issue as a way of modelling what such respect and learning might entail.

Something that is recognized in all the special issue contributors is the necessary investment in a continuous project of working across worlds and staying with the tensions and ‘troubles’ that arise (Haraway 2016). Joe Dumit, in his own pedagogical engagement (2014), links Haraway and Deleuze to the main problem we face in addressing the complexity of the world. It is hard, he notes, to not ‘turn away’ from the troubles, from the violence. It is easier to step back and away. Yet, as Dumit writes, ‘Non-innocence and complicity are necessary if one is to confront world histories as histories that one is a part of and accountable to.’ We agree and indeed, we learn it is finding and working through the sources of trouble that demands our attention in pedagogical practices. What we might take away from this then is that hybridities are more than bringing things together, they involve efforts to resist practices that close down, bracket off, and let things be.

Building up a hybrid pedagogy includes the making of space that allows us to be unbounded by our relations and rapport with things (Taylor 2017; Devendorf and Rosner 2017) while remaining tied to these things and complicit with them (Ratto 2017). To do hybridity is to be willing and open to what the entanglements invite, and at the same time to continue to be responsive and responsible for the worlds-in-the-making. To be pedagogical in this vein is to hold open this invitation with others, and to be ready with them for what might come.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Matt Ratto is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto and the Bell University Labs Chair in Human–Computer Interaction. His research focuses on how theories and perspectives from technoscience research can usefully extend and contextualize design and engineering practice – and vice versa. He coined the term ‘critical making’ in 2007 to describe this ongoing research project and has published widely on this concept, including book chapters in digital humanities and engineering collections, articles in journals and magazines including ACM Interactions and The Information Society, and conference proceedings such as ACM Computer Human Interactions (CHI). He is the co-author (with Megan Boler) of DIY Citizenship: Critical Making and Social Media (MIT Press).

Daniela Rosner is an Assistant Professor in Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) at the University of Washington and co-director of the Tactile and Tactical Design (TAT) Lab. Her research investigates the social, political, and material circumstances of technology development, with an emphasis on foregrounding marginalized histories of practice, from maintenance to needlecraft. Rosner's work has produced several best paper nominations and awards and appeared in Public Culture, New Media & Society, and other journals, conference proceedings, and edited volumes. She is the author of Critical Fabulations: Reworking the Methods and Margins of Design (MIT Press). Rosner serves as an editor-in-chief of Interactions magazine, a bimonthly publication of ACM SIGCHI.

Yana Boeva received her PhD from the Science & Technology Studies programme at York University, Toronto. Her dissertation considered the sociopolitical and historical dimensions of digital fabrication in design. Starting in January 2020, she is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Cluster of Excellence on Integrative Computational Design and Construction for Architecture and the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Stuttgart, Germany.

Alex Taylor Co-Directs the Centre for Human–Computer Interaction Design at City, University of London. He has been contributing to the areas of Science and Technology Studies and Human–Computer Interaction for over eighteen years, and held positions in both academic and industrial research, including the University of Surrey, Goldsmiths, Xerox EuroPARC and Microsoft Research Cambridge. Showing a broad fasciation for the entanglements between social life and machines, his research ranges from empirical studies of technology in everyday life to ethnographic investigations of computation in the life sciences. Largely, his interests are in how digital technologies are co-constitutive of forms of knowing and being, and, as a consequence, provide a basis for fundamental transformations in society. Alex has published widely in these areas with over 60 conference, journal and book publications.