Socio-technically just pedagogies: a framework for curriculum-making in higher education

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic sparked an unprecedented expansion of educational technologies and digitisation of the university sector, and also amplified existing inequalities and crises. In this paper, we introduce the ‘socio-technically just pedagogies framework’ to systemically explore curriculum-making, student-staff partnerships, knowledge production, and networked capabilities in higher education. This conceptual innovation seeks to (re)articulate pedagogy across four aspects: (i) a commitment to curriculum-making as a form of everyday activism; (ii) a nurturing of student-staff coalitions to expand student-staff partnerships; (iii) development of generative spaces for transdisciplinary co-creation; and (iv) the deliberation of networked capabilities. This framework emerged from a partnership with students at an Australian university that sought to experiment with pedagogical practices and possibilities. Our coalition then responded to the framework to illicit collective insights about the curriculum-making phenomenon. The framework seeks to articulate curriculum-making initiatives that collectively enact socio-technically just pedagogies.

KEYWORDS:

• Curriculum-making
• student-staff coalition
• socio-technically just pedagogies
• transdisciplinarity
• networked capabilities

Introduction

As the coronavirus epidemic spread around the world, Indian novelist Arundhati Roy stated: ‘Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next’ (Financial Times, April 4, 2020). From a historical perspective, the university as an institution has always responded to societal crises over time, which in turn shape educational reforms (Cook 2021; Connell 2022). As intersecting crises (ecological, economic, ideological, and cultural) characterise and threaten society’s present condition, there is a pressing need for conceptual complexity, moving beyond narrow and siloed definitions of crisis and the structural divisions of race, class, nation, and other markers of difference (Ang 2021). Furthermore, as the pandemic has amplified and accelerated processes that were already underway to privatise, commercialise, digitise, and datafy Higher Education (HE), there are urgent calls ‘to define alternative imaginaries that can guide post-pandemic recovery of HE’ (Williamson and Hogan 2021, 65). Amid the gateway of possible worlds, a postdigital perspective of education foregrounds the digital/nondigital spaces and dialogue that can valuably inform curriculum co-creation between students and staff (Lubicz-Nawrocka and Owen 2022).

Over the past two decades, universities have been investing in, and increasing digitised modes of delivery and engagement, which are re-working organisational, academic, and student practices. Well before the pandemic, new forms of online, offline, blended, and ‘hyflex’/’hybrid’ learning environments across HE have been embedded within broader socio-technical infrastructures, pedagogical practices, and institutional agendas (Swist and Kuswara 2016; Castañeda and Selwyn 2018). Amid these trends the pre-pandemic university has been theorised as a ‘platform’ (Carrigan 2020), similar to big tech corporations and venture capitalist firms, which is transforming the labour of teaching, learning, research, and administration within the university, mostly in unjust ways (Ivancheva, Lynch, and Keating 2019). In recent work, critical educational technology scholars have reflected on the challenges of technologised education in the next 10 years, which span: new forms of digital in/exclusion, the commodification of data extraction, new forms of human and machine learning, the rise of ‘edu-businesses’, as well as advancing technologies in a resource-constrained environment (Selwyn et al. 2020). Complex entanglements of educational technologies at the intersections of advanced technological development and climate crisis, and, by extension, other crises such as pandemics and precarity demands a ‘planetary edtech’ focus: an expansion of critical research and practices ‘that enable (or: could enable) multiple liveable presents for humans and more-than-humans on our damaged planet’ (Macgilchrist, Potter, and Williamson 2021, 372). In response, social science-oriented researchers must critically rework theoretical frameworks and contribute to ‘context specific understandings of edtech and practices in local settings’ (Castañeda and Williamson 2021, 11).

In light of the implications of this historical juncture for the HE context, and, more specifically the complexity of curriculum-making, this paper is guided by the following question: How can curriculum-making be reimagined during a pandemic and beyond in HE? Curriculum-making is organised and shaped by a range of disciplines, ideologies, external organisations, institutional logics, and hierarchies (Slaughter 1997; Barrier, Quéré, and Vanneuville 2019). As Jester (2018) notes, curriculum is made through a set of choices or actions made by educators. These can be disruptive and resistant, as much as they can maintain a status quo, but these practices are always action orientated to the extent that they seek to influence the contributions that the academy makes within society. We therefore need critical frameworks that can respond to, and account for, these multiple aspects of curriculum-making within changing university contexts. To do so, our aim is to explore how curriculum-making can be re-imagined within the (post)pandemic university.

In what follows, we outline the background to our argument: the interrelationship between social justice approaches, digital inequalities, and curriculum-making. We then introduce our ‘Socio-technically Just Pedagogies Framework’, which synthesises our experiences and literature from a range of interdisciplinary fields. We conclude by testing the framework with a composite vignette about a short unit of study developed in partnership with students at an Australian university. Key learnings and implications inform our discussion and conclusion.

Background: social justice, digital inequalities, and curriculum-making

Social justice is recognised as an interdisciplinary concept about the nature of an equitable and just society, driven by ‘the search for a fair (not necessarily equal) distribution of what is beneficial and valued as well as what is burdensome in a society’ (Singh 2011, 482). More specifically, the concept of justice can be categorised in three main ways: (i) distributive theories focused on how goods and services are distributed; (ii) recognition theories about the social relations within institutions; and (iii) theories which combine distributive and relational justice (Zeichner 2009). University policies have focused mostly on distributive theories, yet more multifaceted social justice commitments are possible, which requires: ‘reflecting continually upon factors that can influence how/if people are recognised as individual political agents, valued as subjects with the right to speak and be heard, and understood as capable co-creators of the world’ (Rowan 2019, 14).

Yet digital inequalities across social structures of age, gender, race, class, sexuality, disability, and nationality have only been amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic (Robinson et al. 2020), resulting in varied outcomes for academics and students alike. Such inequalities are amplified in the age of artificial intelligence and big data, which demands a new investigative focus upon digital traces, algorithmic surveillance, and data-based discrimination (Lutz 2019). Using the ‘platform’ metaphor acknowledges not only these structures and divisions, but also the volumes of (often unpaid) ongoing digital labour being generated for educators (and students) by digital technologies, systems and practices (Woodcock 2018). Digital labour has intensified since the COVID-19 pandemic, where teaching and pedagogical practices have shifted to online spaces as educational technologies act as immediate intermediaries between university academics and students (Komljenovic 2021). At the same time, many educators found that the sudden demand for digital learning within a very short time-frame opened up diverse encounters for student engagement. Such technologies include Zoom, Microsoft Teams, email, blackboard, amongst other technologies that have intensified in their use(s) (Stevens et al. 2021).

Curriculum-making and delivery takes place in these unequal contexts and across local-global scales. Emerging approaches must centre and address the technologised privileges and disadvantages that are manifesting within the university and across society. Socially just pedagogies are linked to critical and transformative practices focused on ‘enabling democratic educational relations and empowering people to be critical agents in order to transform unequal capitalist orders’ (Osman, Ojo, and Hornsby 2018, 400). Contributions are often embodied within graduates and the knowledge, values, and practices they develop during their studies, which they take with them into their professional and personal lives (Pantić and Florian 2015). Educators see curriculum-making and pedagogical practice as a critical site for not only learning, but also making a positive difference in society (Kabo and Baillie 2009; Sultana 2019). Curriculum-making is therefore far from value neutral in that ‘Teaching and research only have point if they are conducted in a spirit of contentiousness’ (Barnett 2021, 518, emphasis in original). Higher eduation is ‘a space for justice’; this is because curriculum and pedagogic practices ‘shape how students learn to see themselves in relation to knowledge, to others and to the world – and this may be enabling or constraining, and more or less socially just’ (Walker and Wilson-Strydom 2016, 4).

Socio-technically just pedagogies framework

As the complexity of social and technological change, entangled with HE, has intensified since the COVID-19 pandemic, we propose re-situating socially-just pedagogies: toward socio-technically just pedagogies, as a way to work firmly in a transdisciplinary mode, highlighting the social, technical, material and cultural relations of curriculum-making. This approach aligns with feminist, sociological and posthuman literatures that point to knowledge production as always composed of human and non-human relations, distributed, and laden with power (Hayles 2017; Haraway 2019; Braidotti 2019). Sociotechnologies are defined as ‘processes in which the social and the technical are indivisibly combined’ (Vojinović and Abbott 2012, 164). Christie (2020), for instance, uses socio-technologies as a conceptual framework to contest Western assumptions, and to focus upon the practices and politics of ‘making a difference’ (6). Alternative visions of education, such as manifestos for transforming HE and online teaching (Ashwin 2020; Bayne et al. 2020), also help to counter narrow employability and techno-instrumentalist approaches and emphasise the interdependencies of the social, technical, and ethical. Such public and social good orientations connect with pre-pandemic visions of the university: the ‘good university’, ‘ecological university’, plus educational and cultural practices aligned with a ‘social-ecological imagination’ (Connell 2019; Barnett 2017; Swirski 2013a). In the following section, we outline a synthesis of interdisciplinary literature that extends upon this work and informs our conceptual innovation.

The Socio-technically Just Pedagogies Framework (Figure 1) is a tool to explore curriculum-making in HE. Our experience of co-creating a unit of study produced this framework, defined as an everyday activist commitment to curriculum-making which nurtures student-staff coalitions, generates spaces for transdisciplinary co-creation, and deliberates networked capabilities in higher education. Grounded in a synthesis of interdisciplinary literature, the four framework aspects outlined next do not denote a linear process, or order, but rather particular perspectives that interrelate with one another. Underpinned by a process of collaborative reflection and inquiry, our partnership was a generative method to make this framework together, closely tied and informed by our reflective practices, which are described in a later section.

Figure 1. Socio-technically just pedagogies framework.

Aspect 1: commit to curriculum-making as everyday activism

This aspect invites university curriculum-makers to commit to curriculum-making as everyday activism. To enact and participate in the everyday actions that are directed towards socio-technically just pedagogies is activism. Curriculum-making is a critical space where these actions take place, and is, as Chatterton and Pickerill (2010) argue, ‘everyday activism’. We are using ‘everyday activism’ to conceptualise teaching and learning as acts of everyday opposition and resistance within the institutional confines of HE. But also, we are making a conscious decision to (re)frame curriculum-making as activist work for a ‘more just world’ (Sen 2009), and a way to drive forward a socio-technically just pedagogy. Academics and educators (and students) may not necessarily identify as ‘activist’ or see their curriculum-making as ‘activism’ but their work can be understood as such, especially where it seeks to challenge and/or disrupt the neoliberal university. For many people living and working within neoliberal systems, ‘taking up the subject-position of ‘activist’ is not an easy task and it is not one that is available to everyone’ (Chatterjee et al. 2019, 196). For example, it is likely easier to identify as a scholar-activist when in a permanent lectureship position vis-a-vis a precarious casual academic position.

Deliberate or not, everyday activism gets produced and enacted across multiple directions, including, for example, by university structures and institutional demands. New influences and demands on curriculum such as incorporating industry and corporate partners are shaping teaching and learning experiences and pedagogical practices (Gyamera and Burke 2018). The impact of such partners can be deeply problematic, where new curriculum can get diluted, watered down, and/or made invisible, disrupting the intent of the actions being taken. Activism, as in other contexts, is always at risk of being co-opted in the neoliberal university (Chatterjee et al. 2019). On the other hand, resisting and redirecting corporate interests can create new opportunities for activist practices to surface voices and ways of working beyond the classroom. The aim becomes to create spaces for critical interrogation of various organisations, people and their impact upon social life (Richter et al. 2020).

To navigate the complex territory of neoliberal academia requires careful reflexivity and accountability. One way forward is what Chatterjee and colleagues (2019) call ‘critical scholar activism’, which is work that is grounded in an ethos of social justice, advocating for frameworks that engage in self-reflexivity and a feminist ethics of care (Gilligan 1995) that accounts for power and its distribution. It argues for collaborative and relational practices so that ‘a collective of important voices can help challenge neoliberal dominance’ (199). The ‘collective’ here refers to both interdisciplinary knowledge(s) and scholar-activism across career stages, including excluded voices, such as students in curriculum-making, and amplifying those voices to engage in collaborative praxis. It is positioned well with political philosopher Sen’s (2009) idea of justice, which locates just outcomes and the creation of a more just world through the involvement of multiple people in democratic ways – that is multiple people engaged in reasoning about the future. We suggest that critical scholar activist approaches mean bringing multiple voices into curriculum-making for generative, affirmative and socially just practices and outcomes.

Aspect 2: nurture student-staff coalitions to expand pedagogical partnerships

This aspect invites curriculum-makers to nurture student-staff coalitions to expand pedagogical partnerships. To this end, we propose that a collective approach to ‘critical scholar activism’ (Chatterjee et al. 2019) can be enacted with students. Student partnerships, formed through a ‘partnership mindset’ involves values such as communication, trust, and mutual respect (Peseta et al. 2020), which support and enable students to insert themselves ‘bravely’ (Cook-Sather, Becker, and Giron 2020) into the very centre of curriculum-making. We extend this collaborative approach by framing these relationships as student-staff coalitions, which we define as collaborating towards the common goal of socio-technically just pedagogies. The impetus for student–staff coalitions operates across two levels: at a practical level, this approach expects that students work with university staff toward the common goal of co-creating a curriculum; at a political level, it affords students and staff opportunities for progressing socio-technically just pedagogies. While having the curiosity and the drive for affirmative change are the only prerequisites for becoming a student partner in a coalition, students enter this space to have an effect and be affected. We use student-staff coalitions to go beyond ‘we’ as consumerist and the staff-student binaries, to experiment with ‘we’ as collective subjects that can (re)assemble and direct the focus and purpose of HE in socially just ways.

The value of such a coalition is its collective response to the challenges of living through a pandemic which articulates the ‘untenability of the current global order’ (Ang 2021, 3). In the face of crises, even universities struggle to maintain their appeal ‘as a space of argument’ (Barnett 2021, 6). Furthermore, there are also the possibilities of student disempowerment due to the advances in learning analytics and the use of digital technologies to surveil them rather than support student learning (Costa et al. 2018). This necessarily calls for critical thinking and questioning outside the conventional analysis on what it means to be a student (not as simply a consumer of knowledge). How can new digital spaces for learning challenge the all too familiar power hierarchies that HE upholds? How do students strive for agency to take responsibility for their learning within a curriculum designed for them and not with them? These are some critical provocations for curriculum-making.

Student-staff coalitions can illuminate power formations and diversify representation – by expanding curriculum-making to engage with ‘posthuman thinking’ (Braidotti 2019) as a mode of prioritising ethical relationality and a desire to prioritise the ‘missing others’, i.e., the sexualised, racialised, and non-human. In doing so, students and staff can think together in multi-scalar, creative, and emancipatory ways, and thus make knowledges for ‘collaborative survival’ (Tsing 2015). Whether human or non-human, all entities involved in the creation of curriculum must be thought of in terms of the affective and agential capacities they possess, imaginaries they facilitate, and assemblages they form. In doing so, student–staff coalitions can support activist collaborations for ‘staying with the trouble of complex worlding’ (Haraway 2016, 29). Specifically, student-staff coalitions can enable students to become co-visionaries that influence the direction of curriculum-making, and actively shape the collectively held, institutionally organised and publicly performed dialogues about the dominant ideologies on education futures. Furthermore, it provides new openings for students to participate in and learn about the ‘back-stage’ space of education, and how curriculum-making is re(produced) in certain ways and for particular agendas.

Aspect 3: generate spaces for transdisciplinary co-creation

The third aspect invites curriculum-makers to generate spaces for transdisciplinary co-creation. Transdisciplinary approaches to student–staff partnerships and curriculum co-creation can inform mutual learning and the unsettling of worldviews, norms, and values (Baumber et al. 2020). In doing so, curriculum co-creation initiatives should re-imagine the knowledge and spaces necessary for students to think and act differently, in coalition with staff and other collaborators. Knowledge is produced not only in relation to learning and teaching and its contribution to their immediate lives and contexts, but also how pedagogy interrelates more broadly with interconnected communities and society. In doing so, curriculum-making as a social practice (Priestley and Philippou 2018) transgresses human and non-human entities – making the curriculum not only personal, but public and planetary as well. This co-creation process aligns with the notion of ‘sociotechnical imaginaries’ (Jasanoff and Kim 2015): collectively imagined visions of science and technology imbued by values of ‘how life ought, or ought not, to be lived’ (4). A focus on transdisciplinary co-creation towards a common purpose encourages students, academics, and professionals to imagine and improvise technologies across everyday contexts, which innovates ‘the practices of who we are becoming’ (Swirski 2013b).

Practices of transdisciplinary co-creation also resonate with a ‘skunkworks’ process: operating within, yet transgressing, the limits of traditional curriculum-making. This ‘skunkworks’ approach was developed in Lockheed Martin, an advanced technologies company in the United States, and describes a project that is ‘typically developed by a small and loosely structured group of people who research and develop a project primarily for the sake of innovation’ (Connor 2016, 96). While common to business, engineering, and technology contexts – a skunkworks approach is gaining traction in HE as a ‘third space’ of co-creation for projects between staff and students which push the boundaries of traditional approaches to teaching and research (Connor 2016). This ongoing, curricula experimentation differs from hackathons (which have a limited timeframe), or accelerators and incubators (largely driven by business development). Transdisciplinary co-creation can help shift everyday curriculum-making towards ‘post-capitalist’ worlds and imaginaries (Chatterton and Pickerill 2010; Gibson-Graham 2006) as it unsettles traditional divisions between students and staff, as well as hierarchical modes of knowledge production.

Aspect 4: deliberate networked capabilities in HE

This final aspect invites curriculum-makers to deliberate networked capabilities in HE. The evolution of a capability approach is discussed first, followed by its link to critical deliberation. Informed by the theories of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, Walker (2006) proposes that a capability approach can orient HE toward ‘valued ways of living and being’ (43) by framing education as having both intrinsic and instrumental value; recognising diversity and redistributing resources; examining agency, dis/advantage, and the role of social and institutional arrangements; and, the need to achieve educational/pedagogical rights. In light of increasingly advanced and networked technologies across society, the notion of a ‘networked capability approach’ (Swist and Collin 2017) focuses upon ‘the interrelationship between platforms, people and places (digital, social and spatial intermediaries) that influence our freedom to achieve agency and wellbeing (functioning and capability)’ (678). Adapted to the HE context, we propose that these networked capabilities can help to surface how digitally-mediated stakeholders, technologies, and sites can constrain and enable the agency and opportunities of university students and staff. For example, through surfacing the complex interplay between political issues, social groups, and institutional processes, and the rise of private actors, market logics, private accreditation agencies, and EdTech companies (Barrier, Quéré, and Vanneuville 2019). These networked conditions of curriculum-making demonstrate, for instance, the capabilities that are realised (or not) for learning, and the ways digital tools are designed and co-created (see for instance Condie et al. 2018; Hanckel 2016). In doing so, awareness can be raised about the broader set of digital, social, and spatial intermediaries which influence how everyday activism (aspect 1), student-staff coalitions (aspect 2), and transdisciplinary co-creation spaces (aspect 3) do (and don’t) emerge.

In addition, we propose that deliberation about these networked capabilities in HE can help explore the idea of justice, and its relationality, within HE and beyond. That is, to ‘be in the presence of – and even more to contribute to – argument’ is to ‘open oneself up to being taught, to advance one’s thinking and, thereby, to move one’s being into a slightly different position’ (Barnett 2021, 6). If universities are spaces for reasons, arguments, claims, and debates, then curriculum-making by extension should also be considered a site for deliberation. Deliberation which is ‘care(full)’ requires spaces that accept and learn from students’ disagreements which is at the heart of decision-making and democracy (McGregor 2004; Gutmann and Thompson 1996). Such networked deliberation and care can guide student-staff coalitions to strive for curriculum-making as everyday activism. In doing so, this re-orients the university away from neoliberal tendencies and towards the university ‘as critical training for democratic criticism’ (Braidotti 2019, 91). We therefore propose that a socio-technically just pedagogies stance, demands careful deliberation of the interconnections between education, technology, and society not only in the present, or ‘now’ – but also in light of what it is becoming as historical and new crises emerge and intersect in complex ways.

Our curriculum-making composite vignette

Next, we apply the socio-technically just pedagogies framework to our experience of co-creating a short unit of study at an Australian university. To do so, we frame our experiences in the form of a ‘composite vignette’: which seeks to ‘capture the most representative aspects of a phenomenon under investigation, even if the events or insights did not come from a single individual’ (Jasinski, Nokkala, and Juusola 2021, 527). We first provide a brief contextual description of this unit, followed by a composite vignette response to each of the critical questions identified in our framework (Figure 1).

Our curriculum-making process began in 2019 when Western Sydney University launched the 21C Curriculum Project. The project is underpinned by ‘partnership pedagogies’ (Barrie and Pizzica 2019) which involves working in partnership with students, external partners, and academics across schools to develop transdisciplinary, cross-school curriculum for students orientated towards the future of work and society. As part of this initiative, ‘Curiosity Pods' (C-Pods) were proposed: smaller intensive modules of learning that are designed to stand alone as a ‘taster’ to onboard students into an existing subject. The C-Pods work in conjunction with subjects to comprise new transdisciplinary minors (sub majors) on offer to students across the university. The 21C Transforming Curriculum Project commenced in October 2019 but was downsized due to university sector uncertainty during the beginning of the pandemic. During that time, the pandemic-responsive brief for developing curriculum was to create C-Pods for students in lockdown conditions, stuck at home and unable to attend campus. During this time we co-created a C-Pod called Ctrl-Alt Shift Identity that focused on digital media use and digital identities, and invited students to explore ‘who am I in times of pandemics, protests and platforms?’

i)	What is the purpose and process of your curriculum-making?

The overall purpose of our C-Pod was to engage learners in understanding the interrelationship between identity, social change, and digital technologies. The Ctrl-Alt Shift Identity C-Pod co-design team was led by a ‘Curriculum Champion’ (a full-time academic/curriculum designer) in collaboration with three students employed by the University as Student Curriculum Partners (SCPs), two additional academics, and an internal partner – the Young and Resilient Research Centre. Over the course of three months, the team and our dialogic processes enacted two key aims: the pragmatic aim of developing a short module within a compact time-frame, alongside the political aim of how to challenge and/or disrupt neoliberal approaches to pedagogy (with a focus on curriculum innovation based on the resources we had access to). Our collective commitment to curriculum-making as a form of everyday activism meant bringing multiple voices into the process, which was oriented towards a socio-technically just pedagogies approach. For example, student curriculum partners (SCPs) gave significance to the ways of approaching knowledge from different cultural and social backgrounds (such as European and Asian backgrounds) plus career trajectories. Co-developing curriculum with students can have a valuable impact on curriculum-making, creating relatable learning experiences for students that would otherwise not be possible. However, students can only insert themselves into the heart of the curriculum if they are positioned as professionals with expertise and compensated for their time. The students-as-partners initiative paid and enabled students to work as casual staff members in the development and delivery of the C-Pod.

ii)	What are the challenges and opportunities of nurturing student-staff coalitions?

Our impetus for nurturing student-staff coalitions operated across two levels: first, the expectation that students work with academics toward a common goal of co-creating a curriculum; and second, it affords students opportunities to engage with everyday activism so as to shape socio-technically just pedagogies. To enact this approach, we focused on creating and maintaining safe and trusting spaces for students to centre their voices and make curricula that represented their values and concerns across a range of learning, community, and global contexts. This process involved ‘passing the mic’ to students and active attempts to increase their visibility in the curriculum-making process. Ownership and agency in the curriculum were encouraged by SCPs co-developing the C-Pod learning outcomes and content with meaningful and relevant learning experiences in mind. An example of this was SCPs creating a YouTube video of students doing ‘a social experiment on Instagram’, where they discussed their first impressions of one another based on their Instagram profiles. Accompanying learning activities were co-designed around the Instagram experiment in response to the learning outcome ‘critically reflect upon your identities and subjectivities in increasingly digital times’. We sought to flatten hierarchies between students and academics, through the process of creating meetings where everyone was given an opportunity to input and share, and students were also given the same access to the internal digital system that housed the C-Pod content. We sought to ensure everyone felt autonomous and properly mentored to bring themselves and their interests and perspectives into curriculum-making.

During C-Pod delivery, the central role of SCPs within the curriculum supported the student learners to share their personal experiences during the weekly hangouts, where students could ask questions and discuss key issues. SCPs and students reiterated the rarity and the absolute need for more online, dialogic spaces in the university. Another key concern which informed our everyday activism was to ensure that contemporary societal conditions affecting students unequally were identified so as to co-design a more equitable unit offering. For example, this meant being cognisant that not all students could go online in the same way, a commitment to designing a curriculum for those who need it most, and creating a safe space for students from marginalised groups. While the SCPs did not have expertise, or previous experience, in designing and delivering curriculum in dialogical and community building ways, over time, the expertise and confidence acquired by the SCPs became a result of connecting their capabilities with the academics and other C-Pod partners involved. It is important to note that members of the academic C-Pod team had co-design experience, which enabled collaborative processes to be implemented, due to knowledge about the type of rapport and support required to enhance knowledge sharing between diverse people. There was a shift within this particular staff-student coalition in terms of moving from the uncertainty of co-designing a unit, towards collective creativity and control, that has since advanced in the co-writing of this journal publication.

iii)	How can transdisciplinary practices inform everyday activism and student-staff coalitions?

Our transdisciplinary practices produced knowledge in collaboration with multiple groups of people who have diverse backgrounds, knowledge, and expertise: this entailed coming from differing disciplines and bringing that knowledge together across the team. Not just integrating, but transgressing, ingrained disciplinary ideas and student-staff perspectives towards the common goal of socio-technically just pedagogies was key to our transdisciplinary process. Our C-Pod nurtured a coalition where both staff and students could co-create the unit’s intent, structure, and content. Staff and student values combined to encourage conversations within and across the C-Pod about the identity markers of race, gender, class, sexuality as they manifest with digital technologies. For example: a task for students to explore identities across social media spaces; an activity where students curate identity artefacts; an open-source platform for students to advocate their chosen social issue. Podcasts, hashtags, and petitions were also identified and incorporated into the design and facilitation of the C-Pod.

The transdisciplinary nature of the work was enacted via the everyday activist positions and diverse disciplinary expertise of the team. This expertise spanned a range of disciplines, such as digital sociology, health sociology, youth studies, media, health, and education. The need for digital justice was also integrated into the unit through selecting readings from a range of disciplines (such as digital media, Indigenous studies, youth studies), as well as inviting guest scholars and presenters of colour and from marginalised groups. There is growing recognition that ‘citation matters’ (Mott and Cockayne 2017) in publishing, so citing diverse disciplines and scholars for this C-Pod was a significant part of our everyday activism in curriculum design. Everyday activism, which we argue can contest neoliberal forms of curriculum-making, was evident in terms of how the SCPs helped to amplify our transdisciplinary goal: towards socio-technically just pedagogies.

iv)	How do existing networked capabilities enable, or constrain, your curriculum-making purpose and process?

Our curriculum-making experience surfaced opportunities for our student–staff coalition to deliberate the varying networked capabilities that can enable, and constrain, socio-technically just pedagogies. Yet this pressure, and plethora, of technologies also enabled our student–staff coalition to expand our agency and opportunities for the unit across a variety of settings. This included: online conferencing and communication e.g., Zoom and Slack (proprietary systems), collaborative writing e.g., Google docs (proprietary system), organisational administration e.g., Blackboard (university learning management system), knowledge sharing e.g., Carrd (open-source). These technologies supported dialogue and connection to extend our student–staff coalition and networked capabilities across multiple levels, for instance: learning from a School Strikes for Climate (SS4C) representative about digital advocacy, or students creating their own digital content using open access tools to advocate about an issue they were passionate about.

A focus on networked capabilities in HE, draws particular attention to the socio-technically interconnected systems that impact university students and staff – such as the complexity of benefits and harms associated with institutional change and evolving technologies. This opens up opportunities for focused dialogue about the design and purpose of curriculum-making, involving both human and nonhuman actors, which can then shape action. Our student-staff coalition discussed how this instrumental pressure can potentially steer curriculum-making toward high-profile external partners aligned with narrow employability prospects – instead of surfacing and addressing values committed to socio-technically just pedagogies. This tension illustrates how networked capabilities can be constrained by particular university agendas and broader societal pressures, such as employability agendas. The student-staff coalition further reflected upon how increasingly sophisticated and affordable technologies are making it easier to produce videos and other online resources; however, the reuse and permissions of these artefacts for future use does not seem to be commonly discussed in standard curriculum-making processes. Building upon this, our application of this approach draws attention to the increasingly complex, evolving socio-technical conditions of HE which can benefit, and harm, valued ways of being and doing.

Discussion

The curriculum-making framework and composite vignette described in this paper enabled us to collectively reflect upon, and learn, from our experience of co-creating the Ctrl-Alt Shift Identity C-Pod. In doing so, this illuminates the potential of the framework across multiple scales. At our local institutional level, this framework has since been used at Western Sydney University to centre the creation of new learning module units. More broadly, we invite other curriculum-makers to utilise the framework so as to illustrate their own commitments, coalitions, co-creation, and capabilities in relation to their specific contexts.

1. Reframing curriculum-making with a commitment to everyday activism. This commitment becomes a way to situate, and address, the politics of learning, teaching, and assessment in HE. Pedagogical stances that recognise the power of individual and collective agency to unlock capabilities, confront prejudices, and (re)assert the rights of communities are central to such social change and transformation (Osman, Ojo, and Hornsby 2018). The intent to move away from limiting the identities of students and universities as simply about promoting job-ready and employable subjects may often seem like a macro-level obstacle. Yet establishing curriculum-making as a site of everyday activism is a practical way to instil socio-technically just pedagogies. In doing so, the conflicting logics, ideologies, and interests which shape curriculum development in HE can be identified – and challenged or advanced – within the context of everyday discourses and practices. We propose that this can be achieved by curriculum-makers asking this critical question: What is the purpose and process of your curriculum-making?

2. Expanding pedagogical partnerships by nurturing student-staff coalitions. We propose that assumptions and stereotypes about the roles of scholars and students can be avoided if a student–staff coalition is nurtured. This extends upon a partnership approach that prioritises conversation, dialogue, and mutual learning between scholars and students, so as to break down power imbalances. Building collaborative teams of people holding differing statuses within the university requires a strong ‘ethics of care’ (Gilligan 1995) in the ways we interact, make decisions, and enact a socially just curriculum. What is distinct about a student-staff coalition approach is that it offers a more explicit commitment to curriculum-making as a form of everyday activism – with the specific goal of aligning with a socio-technically just pedagogies approach (both within and beyond HE). In reflecting upon our framework and case study, two key learnings are raised. First, such coalitions are open to interpretation and built/adapt in different ways in different contexts to be useful. Second, such reconfigurations of power relations are influenced by staff and student agency, resources (e.g., training workshops), time, and broader institutional and societal logics. Advancing socio-technically just pedagogies is difficult at the individual educator level, which is why student–staff coalitions are so important, so as to expand partnership movements that enact systemic change for the public good. We propose that this can be achieved by curriculum-makers asking this critical question: What are the challenges and opportunities of nurturing student-staff coalitions?

3. Reorienting knowledge production by generating spaces for transdisciplinary co-creation. Transdisciplinary co-creation focuses upon producing knowledge that is not only pluralistic, but also situated across multiple spaces and places with diverse stakeholders towards a common goal, such as socio-technically just pedagogies. From this perspective, curriculum-making is a political exercise in understanding knowledge as dynamic: how it can be privileged, and ignored – alongside the multiple sectors and disciplines in which knowledge production emerges. We propose that this can be achieved by curriculum-makers asking this critical question: How can transdisciplinary practices inform everyday activism and student-staff coalitions?

4. Transforming HE through deliberating networked capabilities. Digitally-networked capabilities can enable, or constrain, the agency and opportunities of university students and staff within, and beyond, the university. With a focus on deliberation and justice, a capability approach offers ‘a vision of what ought to be in teaching and learning in HE, providing a normative framework to orient educational development in universities’ (Walker and Wilson-Strydom 2016, 142). Identifying the broader spectrum of digital, social, and spatial intermediaries (human and nonhuman) across HE can potentially promote awareness of and encouragement to think and act in more socio-technically just ways: and not simply design curriculum for instrumental ends. Macro and micro scales of automated pressures associated with a ‘hyper-industrial digital economy’ (Stiegler 2016) places new demands upon universities and forms of intergenerational relations and care (Stiegler 2016). University-wide and cross-sectoral policies are also critical for redistributing resources and recognising diversity to support a socio-technically just pedagogies approach that supports the valued doings and beings of the university community. We propose that this can be achieved by curriculum-makers asking this critical question: How do existing networked capabilities enable, or constrain, your curriculum-making purpose and process – and how could they be transformed?

Conclusion

The notion of ‘planetary edtech’ invites multi-scalar relational critical inquiry: not only zooming out to the globally-networked scale of cloud computing and technologies, but also zooming in to the local contexts of lived experiences, media, and practices (Macgilchrist, Potter, and Williamson 2021). Reimagining the future university therefore demands novel conceptual tools to collectively explore: the proclaimed purpose of education; the organisation of pedagogic relations between students and educators; the types of knowledge and skills that can or should be learnt within HE settings; and, the actors that have the authority to settle these emerging tensions (Williamson and Hogan 2021).

Attuned to these relational and conceptual needs, we generated the socio-technically just pedagogies framework: a theoretically-informed, practical heuristic for curriculum-makers to critically reflect upon their commitments, coalitions, co-creation, and capabilities. Such a networked learning and engagement approach is vital for ‘curriculum co-creation in a postdigital world’ (Lubicz-Nawrocka and Owen 2022). Our framework offers multi-scalar features and questions for curriculum-makers to utilise, and experiment with, a socio-technically just pedagogies approach towards this collective vision. Learning together about new models of university life, work, cooperation, and mutual learning between students and staff can potentially inspire ‘remaking universities’ (Connell 2022) in an age of intersecting crises.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Western Sydney University and our 21C Project colleagues for supporting this project and our teaching and learning scholarship. Thank you to students who participated in the C-Pod, and thank you to the participants of the National Students as Partners Roundtable (November 2021) for your valued discussions of our work.

Disclosure statement

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