Different voices, different bodies: presence–absence in the digital university

ABSTRACT

The move to digital, and now hybrid, education has defamiliarised teaching practices and unsettled experiences of what it means to be and to engage at university. In this article, I examine what new questions evolving teaching and learning practices provoke with regards rethinking notions of the body, and concepts of presence and absence. Interweaving theories of performativity, of strangeness, and of agency as a cutting together/apart, I explore a specific example of online course design, a Small Private Online Course. I consider the dispersed and fragmented subjects and bodies that evade enclosure within the course, and the ontological implications for thinking about how subjects, bodies and materialities are cut, performed and made strange: what it means to ‘be online’. I suggest that such a rethinking is necessary if we are to meaningfully conceptualise engagement, and to move beyond limited, but durable, assumptions that pervade contemporary discussions around digital learning.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital education
• pedagogy
• presence
• postdigital
• engagement

Introduction

Digital education is experiencing an accelerated period of evolution, as Covid and its after effects continue to reorientate educators’ practices and conceptions regarding face-to-face and remote digital engagement. In this article, I theorise and explore a specific example of online course design and its insights for thinking about how subjects, bodies and materialities are absent and present within digital education, and the implications for postdigital pedagogies. I draw upon the idea of the postdigital to represent a rapidly approaching time when digital learning has become ubiquitous. This, I suggest is leading to an obscuring of the significant impacts of digital education upon changing teaching practices, subjectivities and identities, while limited, dualistic, conceptions of what it means to ‘be online’ remain entrenched. My concern is that as ‘digital education’ becomes education, educators have not had time to fully evaluate the ontological, ethical, and pedagogic impacts generated by such a transition to a postdigital era. As such, while I reflect upon a particular example of online course design, a Small Private Online Course, constructed within a Postgraduate Certificate in Learning and Teaching programme, I use this digital assemblage as a microcosm to offer a rethinking of how students and staff’ voices and bodies entangle together within digital education more broadly. I examine how digital education creates an ontological blurring of presence and absence, and unpack the significance of bricolages of text, videos, voices and bodies in order to understand what happens when boundaries are cut, blurred and disrupted. In order to do this, I put to work Karen Barad’s notion of agential cuts (2007), as well as theorisations of strangeness (Bayne 2010), performativity (Sørensen 2009; Gourlay 2022a; 2022b), and mattering (Gravett, Taylor, and Fairchild 2021), to offer generative (re)theorisations of space and pedagogy. I ask: how are bodies and subjectivities performed, cut, present and absent in digital spaces? Moreover, what implications does this have for the ways in which teaching practices are evolving − and yet remain occluded − within the postdigital university?

Postdigital education

Of course, digital learning has been occurring successfully for many years. Neither are critical perspectives on digital education anything new. However, the Covid-19 ‘pivot’ has led to disruptive and rapid changes in learning and teaching, instigating what has been described as an ‘enforced online migration’ to emergency remote teaching (Watermeyer et al. 2020, 9), with sudden and profound effects on how universities operate (Gourlay 2021). Before this dramatic shift, engagement at least for face to face students would happen predominantly through activities (e.g., sports, culture, clubs), curricular connections (e.g., classroom teaching; peer friendship) and within the physical places and spaces of university buildings. Today, the very notion of what the university is, and what it signifies, has experienced a profound challenge, as evolving teaching and learning practices unsettle entrenched understandings of the bounded university. Ray Land reminds us that since medieval and Renaissance times, the book, the classroom, the discipline, the library, and the university have created ‘spaces of enclosure’ within higher education (Land 2004, 150). He explains that:

the embodied learner and the embodied teacher might also each be represented as enclosed entities insofar as they appear to be relatively defined with seemingly obvious physical boundaries. Cyberspace on the other hand complicated and disrupts such preconceptions and habituated practices.

These words were written sixteen years ago, however they carry increased resonance today. With such a rapid shift online, taken for granted spaces and places on campus have been displaced; boundaries between home and work disrupted; habituated practices reshaped. The university feels more permeable, fluid and fragmented. Spaces of enclosure have become an anachronism. Furthermore, what universities signify is in process more than ever before: rapidly evolving along with the instability of our not-yet-post-Covid times. For Knox (2019, 367) the notion of the postdigital might be understood as a kind of ‘holding to account’ of many of the assumptions associated with digital technologies in education, as well as enabling a more nuanced discussion of human-technology relationships. Understanding the complexity of what engagement for teachers and for students looks like, within these permeable contexts, has become pressing.

Digital education and the ‘incorporeal fallacy’

With the increased permeability of the university’s boundaries, questions such as how we might understand notions of presence, absence and the body come to the fore, and require attention if we are to fully understand some of the ways in which digital engagement might be experienced by students and teachers. Bodies too can be understood as permeable. As Land explains (2004, 150), the rigid boundaries of face-to-face bodies are only ‘seemingly obvious.’ Are bodies present, or absent, online? Are we ‘in person’ when we engage with online content, or when as we feature in online content? Does asynchronous teaching remove our presence, or just complicate it? Calls for greater attention to be paid to the notion of being, and for an ontological turn in teaching and learning are not new (e.g., Barnett 2007). However, the altered spaces and practices of a newly destabilised higher education landscape bring such questions to the fore once more and with new significance, necessitating a troubling of well-worn assumptions surrounding bodies, spaces and interactions.

This article engages sociomaterial sensibilities and posthuman perspectives in order to expand upon exciting work that has begun to disrupt simplistic narratives of digital learning as non-material and disembodied. For example, both Gourlay (2021; 2022a) and Land (2004) caution against the widespread idea of the ‘incorporeal fallacy’: the idea that bodies and materialities are somehow absent within digital spaces, as opposed to being grounded in material and embodied entanglements with devices and other artefacts (Gourlay 2021). Indeed, the shifting, and sociomaterial nature of education practices are becoming more widely understood (e.g., Fenwick, Edwards, and Sawchuk 2011; Acton 2017; Gravett 2020; Sørensen 2009), offering insights into the complexity, materiality and fluid nature of educational practices and engagement. And yet, although these ideas are increasingly offering new perspectives, simple conceptions regarding online learning as disembodied, and as oppositional to real and more authentic learning experiences, abound. Linguistically, common expressions such as ‘remote,’ ‘not the same,’ ‘in person’ and ‘face to face’ create limiting thought enclosures that conflict with the fluid, unbounded, experiences of digital learning practices. Moreover, implicit within such hard binaries of remote/face to face; virtual/in person are often deficit and hierarchical assumptions of experiences and connections. These are crucial assumptions for educators to unpack when seeking to understand both the campus, and also the nature of digital engagement.

What lies behind the durability of these thought enclosures? Fawns, Aitken, and Jones (2021) explain that depictions of digital learning as a ‘unified concept, with inherent properties, can be seen in policies, advertisements, blog posts, social media comments, and even in educational reserarch’ (2021, xvii). They remind us that given the material aspects of education are commonly overlooked, it is not surprising that digital learning is often discussed as though it were a disembodied experience that happens in a separate reality (2021, xviii). Another sticky narrative surrounds the revolutionary potential of the digital, the digital utopia, where the affordances of online learning are espoused uncritically (Gourlay and Oliver 2018); ideas which also contribute to the belief that digital education can be unproblematically scaled up without investment, or that technologies can provide solutions to complex, wicked, educational problems. Such narratives do not hold well under critical scrutiny. However, more importantly, they also limit educators’ ability to develop a nuanced reading of what happens when we engage digitally, to understand the ethical and pedagogical issues that accompany digital education, as well as to understand how our increasing knowledge of the digital might enrich our knowledge of other modes of learning interaction.

In this article, I entangle theoretical concepts of performativity, of strangeness, of mattering, and of agency as a cutting together/apart, to build upon this troubling of the assumptions surrounding digital engagement that has begun in the literature, in order to draw out new insights for theory-practice, and for postdigital pedagogies in higher education more broadly.

Different voices; dispersed bodies

The prompt for this rethinking comes from a project that formed part of an experimental Small Private Online Course (SPOC), entitled Different Voices, which itself sits within a newly designed Postgraduate of Learning and Teaching in Higher Education (PGCLTHE). The PGCert is a programme designed for new teachers but also includes established teachers who are looking to develop their experiences and attain a formal teaching qualification. Participants include colleagues from across the University’s three Faculties as well as from professional services departments such as the Library, or Postgraduate Researchers. The Different Voices online element sits as the second of six overlapping themes that comprise the non-linear, programmatic, design of the PGCert. Within Different Voices are four sections that are undertaken each week over a one month period: Learning in the twenty-first century; Integrated and inclusive learning; Enhancing learning through connection; and The role of a higher education. Within each weekly section are three subthemes (for example, Contemporary teaching methods, Intercultural awareness and diversity and Digital learning and technology). Here, sit three videos that participants watch, as well as discussion boards, textual information and other resources such as links to literature. Videos include edited video dialogues of different speakers that create representations / performances of the university. Videos are sliced, can be sped up and watched at participants’ leisure. The following figures (video examples 1-3) show stills of the videos and also display some of the accompanying textual information that comprises Different Voices (Figures 1–3).

Figure 1. Video example 1.

Figure 2. Video example 2.

Figure 3. Video example 3.

The aim of Different Voices was to gather a diversity of staff and students together within one ‘space’, in order to create a community of voices, and to discuss key themes pertinent to learning and teaching. Following Covid, the creators’ view was that building a community, and introducing teachers to the diverse voices of the university, was especially important, as participants may have felt particularly isolated and dislocated from the physical campus by the pandemic. A further goal of Different Voices, as an online theme, was also to offer an area away from the core teaching of the rest of the programme, in order to create spaces for participants to reflect and engage in new ways. This was an experimental activity in course design with the view that the SPOC may also evolve in time to become a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) and ultimately open itself up to a wider audience that escaped the boundaries of the university even further. Each video includes voices cut and edited together and these voices come from students, academics, professional colleagues, and external teachers. Participants also engage in discussion boards that are monitored and responded to by the four lead course tutors, as well as by supporting teacher mentors.

Of course, asynchronous engagement with online videos and discussion boards is nothing new. We can see that so far Different Voices looks not entirely dissimilar to the multitude of online courses created in higher education. However, what is of specific interest is the ways in which the different voices (and of course bodies) represent the increased presence and abundance of voices and bodies online, as a result of the burgeoning of digital content being created following the pandemic. Of interest is both the timing of the creation of Different Voices, being developed in a moment of particular flux within higher education, as well as the deliberate aim to experiment, edit, and play with a collation of voices and bodies within a digital realm. Voices and bodies are cut, fragmented and entangled as ‘presences’ within the SPOC ‘space’.

The Different Voices SPOC was co-created by students and teachers working together within the Surrey Institute of Education at the University of Surrey, UK, and the project was initiated and lead by four colleagues working within the Institute. Following the end of the first participant cohort engaging in Different Voices, myself and the three lead tutors engaged in a series of short discussions in order to reflect together on the experience and its insights. Watching these different bodies speaking and momentarily entangled, I began thinking about our own ‘presences’ elsewhere within Different Voices − via engaging in the discussion board, via links to our publications, via our profile images, or through other textual information about the course. I wondered, with teachers and students being present online in more ways than ever before, how can we move beyond the restrictions of our current conceptions regarding digital engagement and what it means to ‘be online’? Reflecting on our presence–absence, co-creation and production of Different Voices, and engaging the ideas above, our discussions generated the following questions. How do teachers inhabit the SPOC ‘space’? How are voices and bodies present and absent? What cuts were made and why? How does our experience of the SPOC feel, and how might this be the same/different from classroom teaching practices?

Theorising different voices

In order to reflect upon these questions, and upon our experiences as creators, teachers and learners, I engage theory to help us in our thinking about digital education. In the following sections, I have knotted together concepts from the work of Barad, Sørensen, and other key education scholars, to consider the subjects and bodies within the course, and the implications for thinking about how voices, bodies and materialities are cut, performed and made strange in digital education more broadly.

Performativity in education

Our understanding of learning interactions can be enriched further if we think with some of the theories that can help us to understand bodies, materialities, absence and presence in new ways. The concept of performativity in education has been usefully explored in the literature. Lesley Gourlay examines the effects of digitisation on day-to-day academic practices. She examines how the rectangular portal of our screens required academics, while exiled from the physical campus, to perform the university itself (2020, 808). Describing how teachers perform identities when creating online content, she also examines how these performances become altered by the presence of the screen, the recording technology, and by asynchronicity (2022b). In other conceptual work, Gourlay (2022a) employs the concepts of firespace and alterity as useful ideas to suggest the flickering, ephemeral, nature of digital education. She writes how digital engagement is ‘characteristic of alterity, a form of simultaneous absence and presence, in which one is both ‘there’ and ‘not there.’ Like fire, it has a flickering ontology, with sudden flares of visual presence, loss of video or sound’ (2022, 65). The notion of a flickering ontology upends conventional conceptions of presence and absence, online and face to face, and encourages educators to ask different ontological questions about their identities and subjectivities.

Estrid Sørensen also examines the ways in which performances take place within physical and online classrooms. Specifically, Sørensen theorises how ‘intimately technology contributes to performing forms of presence’ (2009, 175). Sørensen defines presence as an effect of sociomaterial practices (2009, 139). In her sociomaterial ethnographic study of primary school children, Sørensen demonstrates how presences are performed differently in the classroom, where the teacher’s presence and authority can be more easily and consistently located at the site of the blackboard, or connected to the students. In the virtual learning environment, the discontinuities of presence mean that teachers were recurrently connected and disconnected within fluid, restless, interactions. These ideas are generative for our thinking about bodies, teachers and students in digital education. If bodies and subjects are performances, that do not represent coherent identities, then we can see the subject as continually founded and refounded through the foreclosures and repressions, absences and presences of digital education. Teacher as subject becomes interpellated within the digital space, performing an identity that is always partial, always fragmented.

If we employ these ideas to analyse Different voices, we might consider ourselves as both present and not present within the online course, situated in a continuum of otherness or alterity. This was clearly evident in the SPOC, as one teacher-creator commented upon, citing an experience of ‘disruption to the more vividly felt presence of teacher situated at the front of the physical classroom, or leading/controlling the dialogue’. We might understand, then, the many performances throughout Different Voices, and elsewhere in digital learning interactions, as fractured subjects: momentary absence-presences, that are never coherent. Critically, we might equally attend to the multiple nonhuman actors that generate the ‘diverging socio-material constellations of practice’ and spaces of agency described by Sørensen. These include the screen, the text, the images, the virtual learning environment, the activities, the hyperlinks, the objects in the background, the laptop or device used to engage in the SPOC. We might equally understand the learners (who are also teachers) as present and absent within the online course, flickering in their presence–absence; but no less real in their embodied situatedness.

And yet crucially, we might also question whether these subjects are more fractured for ‘being online’. In problematising the certainties of bodies and binaries within digital education, it also becomes necessary then to consider the cracks in our ontological assumptions regarding identities and bodies in a broader range of educational contexts. If we perform our bodies online, do we also perform as teachers in the campus classroom? If we are both absent and present online, how might we be absent and present in other spaces? We are always present in our body. Even now, writing on my laptop, I have not escaped my body. And yet, how is this body different to the body ‘present’ within an online course, or the static bodies fixed within the photographs included in this article? Sociologists, and poststructural and posthuman scholars has destabilised coherent interpretations of the self, offering critiques of individuality (e.g., Giddens 1991; Bauman 2000; Goffman 1959), or of human selves as divorced from matter (Barad 2007). However, importantly, both Sørensen and Gourlay’s work, and the absence-presences of the SPOC, show how this incoherence may be further complicated online. In the physical classroom boundaries are performed, and the illusion of engaging with a fixed, coherent, teacher is retained. In the digital spaces of the SPOC, you might understand myself and co-teachers as both absent–present, in fluid and emergent ways. The body evades enclosure, and is instead, cut and fragmented, flickering across different times and spaces.

Cutting and sticking

We can also understand digital education differently through engaging ideas from Karen Barad’s work, specifically her theorisations of phenomena, agential realism and agential cuts (2007). For Barad, phenomena are constitutive of reality:

Reality is composed not of things-in-themselves or things-behind-phenomena but of things-in-phenomena. The world is a dynamic process of intra-activity and materialization in the enactment of determinate causal structures with determinate boundaries, properties, meanings, and patterns of marks on bodies. It is through specific agential intra-actions that a differential sense of being is enacted in the ongoing ebb and flow of agency. That is, it is through specific intra-actions that phenomena come to matter – in both senses of the word. (2007, 140).

Despite different conceptual approaches, there are clear resonances here with Sørensen’s and Gourlay’s exploration of humans as actors within sociomaterial constellations of practice. Barad, discusses a reality that is enacted, constituted, and materialised in dynamic ways, as opposed to being real or represented. All boundaries and meanings are enacted, created in the ongoing ebb and flow of a wider web of relations. Presence and absence are suggested to be partial, momentary, and fluid. Barad also employs the notion of agential cuts to explain how the cut imposes a momentary resolution within the phenomenon. Such practices create a stabilisation and demarcation of a particular happening with the phenomena which produces a body or entity (Barad 2007). Barad explains how the cuts that we participate in enact matter: ‘Intra-actions cut ‘‘things’’ together and apart. Cuts are not enacted from the outside, nor are they ever enacted once and for all’ (2007, 179). We can put these ideas to work to help our understanding of the absence–presence of teachers and students within digital education. We can see that bodies and voices are artificially cut, bounded, to enact momentary presences. We might understand the bodies and voices collated together within our videos as bodies temporarily cut, momentary demarcations from a larger ‘ongoing ebb and flow of agency’. These bodies are no more or less real than physical bodies within a classroom, but offer a stabilisation, that constitute just one performance of reality. They offer a momentary materialization of a dynamic process of intra-activity, that includes intra-actions with multiple other agential actors within the assemblage, both human and nonhuman. These may include texts, software, screens, virtual learning environments, objects such as books, notebooks, learning spaces, hyperlinks, photographs and many others.

Strange spaces

When reflecting upon our thinking points, one of the key shared insights of engaging with a digital course such as Different Voices, and with the many entangled voices and bodies that occupy its ‘spaces’, was the experience of an otherness. As a teacher, I experienced this to be a different kind of presence and absence than you might find within a campus classroom teaching experience. For some of us this was discomforting. The asynchronous video content or discussion board engagement experienced as ‘transactional’ and ‘mechanistic’; online teaching as lacking in the body language and affective connections that constitute effective listening, empathy and dialogic interaction within the physical classroom. This disquiet was felt to be heightened by the speed with which the teaching landscape had changed. For others of us, the alternative sense of presence–absence was freeing in its ‘disruption to the more vividly felt presence of teacher situated at the front of the physical classroom, or leading/controlling the dialogue’. Through the altered absence-presences of the online interactions, more opportunities for destabilising teacher-student hierarchies could be afforded as the videos and content became prominent actors that could be shaped and used at the student’s will. These thoughts echo ideas from Roland Barthes who explores how teachers’ subjectivities are created through classroom dialogue (1977, 194):

Imagine that I am the teacher. I speak endlessly in front of and for someone who remains silent. I am the person who says I … I am the person who under cover of setting out a body of knowledge, puts out a discourse … which would constitute me … it is not knowledge which is exposed, it is the subject.

Teaching in the physical classroom is often dominated by the presence of the teacher, masked ‘under cover of setting out a body of knowledge’. However, in digital spaces this presence becomes altered with the teacher’s subjectivity and role disrupted, her position dislocated. The putting out of knowledge is altered and escapes the teacher’s control. These thoughts also resonate with Sørensen’s work (2009) which showed how the discontinuous presence-absences served to disrupt the teacher’s authority within the primary classroom.

For all of us, online teaching felt different. Presence and absence felt changed; other. We might further understand this otherness by using ideas from work by Sian Bayne, who draws upon critical theory and psychoanalysis to employ the concept of the uncanny in relation to digital education. Bayne suggests that digital education offers ‘a positive embrace of a different kind of presence, one which opens up new ways of defining and re-thinking “contact”’ (2010, 8). The concept of the uncanny evokes a sense of strangeness and unsettles our thinking of presence and absence in binary ways. Bayne suggests that digital pedagogies might actively embrace its own otherness, and considers how digital models of engagement can be seen as positively defined by fragmentation:

by a flexible, fluid movement between groups and applications which requires individuals to re-make their identities – to double themselves – every time they register for a new network, a new service … .our images and profiles – and, in more visual environments, our avatars – represent a ‘re-embodiment’ within the terms of the digital, we scatter our ‘bodies’ across the web where they gain a kind of independence as nodes for commentary, connection and appropriation by others into new networks and new configurations (2010, 9).

Bayne’s exploration of re-embodiment, and of a scattering of bodies, resonate clearly with the student and staff bodies that comprise Different Voices. In these spaces too we are required to present ourselves differently, we are interpellated to remake and re-embody our subjectivities. Cut and edited into new assemblages, we are fragmented, scattered and dispersed. Bodies and voices sit alongside other nonhuman actors: text, video, the virtual learning environment window, the laptop or computer screen, and so on. This requires us to embrace a different kind of presence–absence, and to consider anew our roles, within networks, and assemblages. As the unfamiliar and familiar come together, identities double and bodies scatter, presence and absence can be understood as a continuum. Thinking this way about presence recognises the wider webs of relations that we sit within when engaging online, how our bodies and voices become present in a multitude of spaces and configurations. Bodies and voices can be understood as gaining a kind of independence within new porous networks and spaces become unbounded. Indeed, Bayne and Ross (2013, 4) describe how digital spaces can be thought of both ‘as a place, and a non-place’. Courses are not closed but rather are open, ‘leaky’, as content and bodies are intertextually and relationally connected online to other sources of information, spaces texts and elements.

Notably, for Bayne this otherness, or uncanny disturbance, is ripe with possibility:

There is a sense in which the digital uncanny reflects the ontological disturbances opened up by a genuine higher education. Digital ‘spectrality’, while troublesome, also offers us opportunities to re-think higher education teaching in new and enthralling ways … When viewed through the lens of the digital uncanny, the established certainties of our social practices relating to how we are positioned toward our institutions, our texts, our own experience of ‘being’ as teachers and students, becomes new, rich and strange … Within this view the digital represents not an enhancement to, extension of, or substitute for familiar, offline practices. Rather, it is a privileged mode, one in which new ontological positionings, and new dispositions toward teaching and toward knowledge might be explored and delighted in (Bayne 2010, 10–11).

The strange spaces of the digital offer openings to explore new ontological positionings, to see education and its practices differently.

Pedagogies of mattering

These approaches also resonate with work that has engaged sociomaterial and posthuman theories in order to articulate ways in which educators might enact pedagogies of mattering: relational pedagogies, that involve the nonhuman and more-than-human. For example, Gravett, Taylor, and Fairchild (2021) explore how the digital spaces, Teams and Zoom rooms, in which we presently teach and learn:

provoke new questions in terms of how the curriculum is taught, prompting, as Mulcahy (2018, 13) suggests, a ‘thinking [of] the term learning spaces as something we do (stage, perform, enact), rather than something we have (infrastructure)’. These platforms are ‘tools’ that connect us with one another; without these, our online teaching relationships cannot happen. And yet, these ‘tools’ are also agentic. Online teaching and learning physically affect our bodies. Engaging with one another online can be surprisingly exhausting, and our bodies shift in response to sitting awkwardly, our eyes tire after reading a screen for too long. A pedagogy of mattering prompts teachers to consider more closely how curricula is enacted through contextualised, sociomaterial, practices and spaces. It pushes us to consider how students and staff engage materially with curricula, its objects, resources and spaces (2021, 8).

In the above extract, we see again how the idea of performance can be useful, as well as the notion of enactment. Online platforms are not simply static, or passive, tools but they are themselves agentic. The notion of learning space, with its suggestions of hollow passivity, appears unhelpful. Rather, as Mulcahy (2018, 13) suggests, we need a rethinking of the term learning spaces ‘as something we do (stage, perform, enact)’ rather than something that pre-exists, or something that we simply have. Here, we also see insights for thinking not just about the blurring of online/face to face but of the impact upon bodies of online interaction and how bodies are shaped and shifted by engaging in different ways. Our bodies shift and tire when engaging online; curricula is shown to be enacted through contextualised, sociomaterial, practices and spaces. Critically, we also see opportunities for thinking in new ways about how educational matterings are enacted. Sørensen explores how the digital classroom enabled a disruption to the continuity and authority of the teacher. In the SPOC, the cut and edited videos were purposefully designed to disrupt the authority of teacher with different and multiple voices, including students, teachers and colleagues from diverse backgrounds and roles. Thinking in more nuanced, material, ways about who and what matters, and how presence-absences are cut, created, performed and enacted, may be helpful in also offering new ways to think about power and agency within the learning environment.

Insights and implications

This article has explored a specific instance of digital education, considering how this project can be theorised to disrupt simplistic notions of face to face/online. Within Different Voices, boundaries are blurred between teacher and student, campus and digital, presence and absence. Moving then to draw out the wider resonances of this experience for our understanding of digital and postdigital higher education, I have interwoven theoretical concepts in order to offer a rethinking of how we might understand what it means to engage online. As a result, I join and build upon those voices who have recommended a need for a move away from binary conceptions of digital learning, and suggest a need to smudge the lines of those enclosures of thought that current discourses surrounding the digital impose.

Specifically, I suggest that we look to the materiality of education to better understand the teacher’s role and notions of engagement and presence. Departing from uncritical and simplistic narratives, underpinned by humanism is important. Indeed Knox (2016) has shown how the possibilities of MOOCs have to date been limited by a fundamental orthodoxy that has meant that technologies have relied on certain kinds of conceptions about the centrality of humans. I suggest that changing practices lead us to require new concepts to think with, and to unbound our thinking. As Elizabeth Adams St Pierre explains in an interview with Guttorm, Hohti, and Paakkari, ‘one of the things that happen when you begin to study ontology is that the old words don’t work anymore’ (2015, 15). As we move to more nuanced understandings of digital ontologies we will need to escape the thought enclosures of face to face versus in person learning; absence versus presence, and instead to think about what presence-absences occur and how these play out in different ways, focusing on the materiality of all engagement as embodied, entangled and fragmented. These ideas are themselves uncanny, strange, disturbing the ways in which we think but also offering us opportunities to re-think higher education teaching in exciting ways. Land and Bayne explain that ‘currently available learning theory appears inadequate to deal with the complexities of agency, discursive practice, identity and subjectivity within virtual learning environments’ (2004, 177). As we have seen, fortunately, poststructural, posthuman and sociomaterial theories are offering us new ways to think about subjectivity, agency and the body. We can now take these ideas into higher education, as we urgently need more complex ways to think about contemporary educational experiences if we are to not resort to simplistic representations of what it means to learn and to engage.

What then are the insights of this troubling of binaries and the enclosure of bodies and spaces in higher education, for educators’ conceptions and practices of student engagement? I recommend that this understanding is accompanied by greater opportunities for discussions with new teachers about the multiple impacts and affects of evolving practices. This will include discussions around issues of teacher visibility, professionalism, performativity, and materiality, and what these ideas might mean for their future teaching practices. It might involve conversations about the ontological disturbances, the strange and uncanny experiences of teaching online and of absence–presence. It might involve discussions about the impact of such discontinuities upon notions of authority and power, and how we can think more deeply about who and what matters within the learning environment. If we are to avoid privileging one space or modality, then teachers may need greater support to understand what hybrid and blended digital education looks and feels like. Increasingly we see teachers as artefacts – voices and bodies captured on screen within momentary presences. In a postdigital age, teachers are asked and expected to be visible in ways like never before. There are ethical and affective ramifications of this that warrant greater discussion. We see teachers performing identities and performing the university. We see teachers’ identities as fragmented, artificially cut, momentary snapshots of voices and bodies in a way that may feel strange, troublesome and other. Bodies are not absent from the digital university, but neither is power. As a result, such cuttings deserve discussion about who and how online content is edited as well as about what happens to that content. Who owns online presences and how are they used, shared and archived? How do such uncanny, discontinuous absence-presences make us feel? What do such performances require of us? It may be that, like for some of the teachers involved in designing Different Voices, teaching online is freeing in its removal of the I that speaks ‘in front of and for someone’ (Barthes 1977, 194). Or it may lead to a sense of disquiet, concerns about representation and misuse that need to be accompanied by further support.

In the rapid pivot to remote learning there was not time to delve into these debates, but even for those reluctant online teachers, hybrid and asynchronous teaching is likely to be here to stay. With an increase in digital engagement comes ethical, pedagogic, epistemological, and ontological questions that need to be thoughtfully addressed. This theorisation of an online course has analysed some of the assemblages of absence-presences within digital education and disrupted commonplace conceptions regarding digital education. However, it also raises complexities that are relevant to all modes of teaching in higher education. When thinking with ideas of agential cuts we can see all curricula, all classroom interactions as cuts, intra-actions, and relational connections. When thinking about performing the university we might think about how teachers perform selves and bodies in classrooms elsewhere. If we challenge the boundaries between online and face to face we can also think differently about education within physical spaces. When thinking about pedagogies of mattering we may ask both what and who matters in this context, and look to sociomaterial or posthuman inflected research methods that enable us to conduct research with and engage with nonhuman and human participants (Adams and Thompson 2011). When thinking about concepts of the uncanny online, we may also question the uncanny strangeness of those emptier lecture theatres, or the hybrid class and meeting rooms of a postdigital era. This otherness offers new possibilities for thinking about performativity, identity, authenticity, cutting, time and the text that can be exciting and generative for teaching practices in a multiple of contexts. As Bayne explains (2010, 10–11):

in defamiliarising the familiar through creative pedagogical appropriation of the digital, teaching becomes newly, and productively, strange … our own experience of ‘being’ as teachers and students, becomes new.

Thinking differently about digital interactions, then, may help to ‘dislodge’ our conceptions of teaching more broadly. We might also consider how classroom teachers on campus might be understood as actors within assemblages, performances, momentary cuts of bodies and identities. We have seen both how online engagement shapes bodies, and how boundaries between physical/digital spaces are permeable. In increasing years these boundaries may become further ‘leaky', and we may find the binds of linguistic thought enclosures no longer fit for purpose. We will want to pay close attention to the impacts of digital engagement and resources upon our own changing selves as teachers.

Conclusions

This article concludes with the suggestion of a beginning. I suggest that the beginning of a more thoughtful approach to understanding digital engagement is required as digital education becomes pervasive, and as teachers’ interpellation as online subjects becomes expected, normalised, and yet its ontological, ethical, pedagogic, and epistemological impacts remain obscured and under-theorised. In this article I have engaged a constellation of theories, in order to expand upon the literature which has suggested that the digital offers scope for new exploration of pedagogies that attend to the ontological. I have examined how teachers are not simply passively represented, recorded, or disembodied within online learning spaces. Rather, we are affectively and materially present–absent, enacting those spaces as agentic bricolages of voices and bodies, creating uncanny yet generative spaces of ontological otherness. I have offered new conceptions for understanding digital ontologies and considered the value of thinking about presence, absence and otherness within digital education. I conclude by suggesting that higher education is approaching a time when digital learning has become ubiquitous. As a result, it is now, more than ever, becoming important to understand more richly what it means to 'be online.’

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all the students and colleagues who took part in the making of Different Voices and whose absence-presences generated my thinking. I specifically thank the teachers who led the design and creation of Different Voices, Laura Barnett, Simon Lygo-Baker and Marion Heron for their generative reflections that informed the development of this paper.

Disclosure statement

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