2024/05/09 by Buck, Marc Fabian, Willatt, Carlos
#analogizing #anti-pedagogy #digitalization #education #gamification #study
paper · doi:10.34813/08coll2024
The purpose of this essay is to address digitalization of educational practices from the perspective of continuity by critically examining two practices that shape (new) digital education based on (old) anti-pedagogical ideas: gamification and digital study. We argue that these practices, in their current state, show anti-pedagogical features as they implicitly, or explicitly undermine educational experiences regarding students and teachers and their relation to one another, and to the world. On the one hand, gamification calls for activity, proximity to the lifeworld and naïve enjoyment of nature, ideas already found in old and problematic models of progressive and anti-authoritarian education. On the other hand, digital study reinforces a traditional and dominant idea of studying in Western cultures as a cognitive, solitary and elitist practice. Thus, both practices take a form that not only aims to replace conventional pedagogical forms and spaces, but even threatens the very possibility of teaching itself. Against this backdrop, we introduce and discuss the figure of analogizing (what remains and/or becomes analog), which asks which parts of the educational system should be excluded from digitalization, where it should be reversed, or where there are good reasons to at least approach it with doubts, or skepticism.