Exploring the postdigital through our learning spaces Lucila Carvalho (Massey University) & James Lamb (University of Edinburgh)
Especially for the benefit of those new to the concept of the postdigital, this chapter will provide an introduction to its central assumptions, and in particular how they relate to the idea of learning space. The principal ideas of postdigital thinking will be explored through photographic representations of learning spaces (generated by authors as they prepare chapters for this book project) alongside a written commentary (prepared by the editors). This approach will provide an accessible introduction to postdigital thinking, while at the same time recognizing the importance of visuality within learning spaces research.
Digital and material manifestations of schooling: entrenching the old or enabling the new? Pamela Woolner (Newcastle University), Anneli Frelin (University of Gävle) & Jan Grannäs (University of Gävle)
Drawing on the authors’ different approaches to researching learning spaces within Swedish schools, this chapter will call for a better appreciation of the entanglement of the human and physical. Within the postdigital schools contexts, the presence of digital technologies is recognised, however their impact remains under-investigated. When school-based educators consider the design of a school, they typically use tools to mediate their understandings about design, tools that tend to focus on the physical instead of the digital space and, in fact, are often presented in a very physical way, using paper, printed images and schools visits. In response, this chapter will propose ways to mediate conversations amongst practitioners, which might better contribute to their understandings, but also about how school learning spaces might be used, designed and redesigned in a postdigital world.
Archives, memories and spaces of children’s play: Pre-digital and postdigital places of affective possibility John Potter (University College London)
Drawing across 15 years of projects exploring children’s play and media, this chapter will position children as agentive co-producers of research within a range of spaces inside and outside the school and home. These activities have involved a range of digital and analogue technologies, including tablet screens, voice recorders, go-pro cameras, hidden computers, red phone boxes, and pencil-on-paper. This chapter will discuss agentive and affective ‘learning’ involving play, and its place in children’s lives in pre-digital and postdigital times.
Nomadic cultures & dynamic practices. A case study towards reconfiguring the post-digital school space Maureen Finn (University of Edinburgh)
Nomadic communities are recognised to be some of the most excluded of all minority ethnic groups within Scotland. Among other ways, this manifests in the challenges that traveler children encounter around education, for instance as they struggle to make sense of the school environment and its associated cultural practices. This chapter will report on a study that explored the digital and spatial practices and experiences of children from nomadic communities attending three Scottish primary schools. The chapter will propose and argue for new and more inclusive ways of problematising the norms of school spaces of exclusion.
Belonging: The role of a multimedia project in expressing and connecting migrant communities’ discourses Aline Frey (Independent Researcher)
This chapter will report on a diasporic multimedia project that was simultaneously staged in a public theatre while also published as part of an online heritage website collection. Drawing on interviews with migrant and refugee women in Aotearoa New Zealand, and what these multimedia artefacts encapsulate, this chapter will explore how convivial and non-traditional learning spaces can be transformative in contributing towards social and cultural change. In this way, it will contribute to debates on the use of digital technologies to produce and disseminate diasporic media inside interdisciplinary contexts, creating a dialogue between education, cultural and screen media professionals, as well as the general public, including migrant communities.
The postdigital learning spaces of Anglophone Sub Saharan Africa John Traxler (University of Wolverhampton)
Although digital technologies are woven into the fabric of our everyday surroundings, they are accessed and experienced unevenly and unfairly. In particular, the postdigital condition plays out differently in the heartlands of affluent urban Western Europe and similar ‘developed’ contexts, compared to other parts of the world. Outside Western Europe and at the margins we see education systems that are the consequences of colonialism or nationalism overlaying informal, indigenous or local knowledge systems and themselves, now overlain by the manifestations of digital educational neo-colonialism. Marginal, indigenous, oppressed, nomadic and disenfranchised communities and cultures are all different and distinct. This chapter will direct the postdigital purview beyond spaces of global privilege as it asks how learning spaces can be more convivial, equitable or sustainable, considering the challenges our world is facing.
Postdigital learning spaces in rural Peru: a case study of a remote diploma aimed at hard-to-reach teachers from low-resource schools Javier Tejera (Alma Children’s Education Foundation)
Taking an empirical approach, this chapter will argue that in low-resource, low-tech environments, postdigital learning spaces are amplified, not diminished, as digital technologies, or non-humans, have a profound impact on how the participants, or humans, navigate the learning space, and vice versa. The chapter will report on a qualitative study focusing on the experiences of the facilitators of an online diploma aimed at rural teachers situated in the mountains of Peru, including the practical strategies and digital technologies that were deployed to deliver teaching and learning in a rural context. The focus on a remote and low-resource context will make an original contribution to postdigital education research, which to date has mostly been firmly rooted in economically privileged and tech-rich environments.
Beyond campuses and across cultures: engaging Brazilian and New Zealand learners in postdigital times Genaro Oliveira (Massey University), Rita Gallego (University of São Paulo), Paula Vicentini (University of São Paulo) & Lucila Carvalho (Massey University)
In this chapter, ‘learning space’ will take the shape of an exchange programme involving education students from Brazil and New Zealand, designed to promote intercultural learning opportunities. The perceptions and experiences of students will be investigated through multimodal artefacts, peer surveys and self-evaluation. This will be done with the purpose of examining the web of elements that came together to compose the postdigital learning space of the exchange programme, and how these elements extended and enriched the experiences of this group of future educators in Aotearoa New Zealand and Brazil.
‘Loose Ends and Missing Links’: Strategies for learning in the postdigital city David Overend, Suzanne Ewing & Dan Swanton (University of Edinburgh)
Taking the city as a site for learning, this chapter will enact an intervention where postgraduate students respond to, and remake, urban space through a series of experiments that provoke reflection around their digital, material and embodied environment. Reimagining the learning activities undertaken by students participating in the course Cities as Creative Sites: Urban Studio at the University of Edinburgh, this chapter will present a series of creative prompts for the reader to use as they make their way through the postdigital environment of an urban field site. This chapter will invite the reader to undertake a journey through the physical and virtual spaces of a city, including for example the performance of a series of actions and exercises, to the point that they become a part of their own postdigital urban surroundings, and contribute to its ongoing construction.
An attempt at exhausting the train journey as a postdigital learning space James Lamb (University of Edinburgh)
During February 2023, the author this chapter undertook an extended train journey from Edinburgh in Scotland, to Brig in the Swiss mountains. The purpose of the journey was to deliver learning space-themed workshops with researchers and practitioners. Meanwhile the mode of transit was chosen with the purpose of exploring whether and how the train carriage could provide a productive learning and working space across 17 hours of travel. The field notes recorded across the journey will provide the point of departure for this chapter, which will explore how some of the central ideas of postdigital thinking are enacted and experienced within a transitory space. At the same time, the chapter will also reflect on whether, as researchers and educational organisations reckon with their responsibilities amid the existential threat of climate crisis, the train journey offers a viable alternative to the aeroplane as a means of travelling to academic conferences and comparable events.
Knowledge, knowing, and the knower: A patient’s perspective of learning to live with Long COVID in the Postdigital era Pippa Yeoman (University of Sydney)
Educational research involving the postdigital usually acknowledges that a web of digital and material infrastructure contributes to our teaching and learning practice, in ways that also attends to the physical and social. For the very great part, however, the discourse has been concerned with formal learning spaces, and particularly those associated with higher education. This chapter will take an original approach by adopting an autoethnographic methodology to explore the informal learning spaces and practices of a researcher who is learning to live with Long COVID. Taking a postdigital sensibility, the researcher will foreground the presence of a multitude of digital resources, drawing on experiences over a 12-month period, to discuss the changing relationship between patient and practitioner. The chapter will then offer insights into designing for learning that honours diversity, accommodates difference, and anticipates change and uncertainty.
“We Live in Their Shade”: Towards a Plant-Based Civic Imagination Henry Jenkins, Paulina Lanz & Sangita Shresthova
As society survives pandemic-induced confinement and pivots to thinking about longer term futures, we need to engage with our surroundings in new ways. We need to tap into the collective emotions that power the imagination to recognize our boundedness with the natural world. In this chapter, the authors will draw on their work around civic imagination to explore plants, and the stories they inspire, and importantly, how these stories become portals for noticing, reflecting, creating, connecting, and charting collective paths forward. The authors ask what we can learn about the emotional relationships we form with plants, and how these connect to other areas of our lives to become powerful entry points into mobilizing around climate change. Civic Imagination is the practice of visualizing any social change that supports us in the movement towards a better world and is also a framework to guide the process of such radical change.
Music in the composition of postdigital writing spaces James Lamb (University of Edinburgh) and other authors
Through the undertaking of a short study, this chapter will explore how digitally-mediated music-listening can nurture convivial learning spaces and conditions that are conducive to academic writing. Several of the authors contributing towards this book project will document the music they listen to while composing their chapters. They will then report and reflect upon the ways that music, mediated via analogue and/or digital technologies, created ambient conditions that influenced their writing. Among other ways, this chapter will make an original contribution to existing scholarship by exploring the experiences and spaces of academic staff, whereas existing learning spaces work has been heavily swayed towards the experiences and environments of the student.
