A Pedagogy of Machines: Making Tools for Education

The Covid-19 crisis has seen the acceleration of the use of digital platforms also in the field of higher education. Far from being neutral “digital tools”, platforms such as Zoom, BBB, Skype, Youtube, DeepL, etc. are complex socio-technical architectures shaping the interactions among society, corporations, and institutions, which all together are in the process of redesigning the educational sector as it has never happened before.

In response to the rise of the so-called platform education, the course addresses the key role played educational tools in shaping and framing our knowledge system and the practices of learning and teaching. The debate on the tools for education has a long history that is not just about the digital divide, but crosses also class, gender and race lines of discrimination. It suffices to recall Audre Lorde’s dictum “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”, or Chakanetsa Mavhunga’s research on the “mobile workshops” in the African continent as an alternative to the immobile “Western laboratory.”

The course engages with the works of pedagogues and thinkers who address, from a variety of perspectives, the urgency of alternative knowledge models, starting from the idea of crafting new tools and technologies for education. These authors include: Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, bell hooks, Paulo Freire, Peter Damerow, Naoki Sakai, Noliwe M Rooks, George Maciunas, Gayatri Spivak, McKenzie Wark, among others.

The course’s outcome will be the proposal for the design of an unlearning machine (an object or practice whose form will be collectively investigated, discovered and discussed during the semester).

This is a reference to both Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’ concept of “unlearning one’s privilege as one’s loss”: the understanding that our privileges, whatever they may be in terms of race, class, nationality, gender, “represent a closing down of creative possibility, a loss of other options, other knowledge.”

As well as a reference to the charts “Learning Machines” created by Fluxus artist George Maciunas to contrast fragmentation of knowledge in the university curricula, and traditional linear-narrative methods of source of information such as books.