Entangled Pedagogy Applied to Learning Spaces and Hyflex Teaching

Twice in the past week alone, I’ve found myself referring to “that model that Tim Fawns made, where it’s neither tech before pedagogy nor pedagogy before technology, but actually, you need to think about both together”. And I kept forgetting what it’s called, though I’ve talked about it a lot on Twitter with him and others. I figured writing a blogpost with it in the title, reminding myself it’s called “Entangled pedagogy” and including the image in the post will help me remember the term – and I’m going to use this space to apply it to two things on campus I’m involved in: Innovative Learning Spaces and Hyflex (on our campus we are calling the low-tech version of it Dual Delivery). The idea is that of course you should never ever let the tech drive your pedagogy. Never. We used to always suggest to let the pedagogy drive the tech, which is good, because at least you do the pedagogy, but it tends to ignore the possible affordances of limitations of technology. This is problematic because sometimes you could do something that takes your pedagogy to the next level if you realize what the technology could possibly do, and it might be a hack of the tech and not what it was intended for, even… and second of all, because sometimes the tech can have limitations that can really thwart your pedagogy and if you don’t realize this, you’ll fail at both. I also think you always need a plan A and plan B and you need to be really clear on what various pedagogy/technology combinations can do for you to help you meet your goals. Here is Tim’s model v3 (originally shared on his blog here; and then v3 shared here).

For Innovative Learning Spaces

It is really difficult, in a learning space that has technology that can do so many different things, to just start with your pedagogy, because your pedagogy has probably not had this kind of space to work with before. The space and its technology has both affordances and limitations. It’s a combination of what you can imagine doing, and how it works in practice, and how it can help you imagine more. I see it as an experimental relationship, an iterative one (I keep thinking of this word iterative, and I don’t know if Tim uses it… I’ll check, because the image of entanglement makes me see things that mix together, weaving in and out, but do not fuse into one thing, if that makes sense, like a messy braid, or something messier like wires entangled together, but this does also mean that there are sort of ins and outs and stuff. This means to me that at first, your imagination is limited probably by your pedagogical choices, and you start to add on some tech as you learn how the tech works (this is pedagogy driving technology). But then as you get more comfortable with the tech, it becomes maybe like a chair or a whiteboard or a table, something that you’re used to as part of your environment and your ability to imagine weaving it in and out and how it might result in totally new pedagogical ideas might change. It’s like maybe when you first learn to drive a car and you have to think about it step by step, but eventually it becomes natural that you use it in the best possible way at the right time, maybe doing things you weren’t originally trained to do.

For Hyflex/Dual Delivery

The application of Entangled pedagogy came up (but I forgot the term unfortunately) in a podcast recording for the Teaching Here and There (THAT) podcast with Dom Pates, James Rutherford and Ivan Sikora with Alexandra Mihai and I as guests. I will link to it when it’s out (update: it is episode 4, it just came out at 1200 UTC today). But basically, if you enter this kind of hyflex mode of people joining your class virtually via something like Zoom, and you’re only thinking of your pedagogy and not recognizing both the affordances and limitations of the tech available to you, you’re unlikely to make the most of this environment – and the pitfalls are so many. You can also burn yourself out trying to achieve pedagogical goals that might be achievable in easier ways if you understood your tech better – and you may have intentions that get thwarted by tech realities if you’re not careful. I don’t remember if I talked about it at length in the podcast or just more generally, but in very high tech environments like that, you have to be aware of how the tech dovetails into your pedagogy and not how it “follows” it. Because it does not follow it. And again, you need plan B for when tech fails or when the plan you had fails to help you reach your goals, something does not work this time with these students, and I think it gets better with time as it becomes more natural for you to think of both together in an entangled way, and for your students to do that as well, making the most of what they can achieve with what’s there – or what can be potentially added on to enhance the experience. I am always looking for low-investment (money/time) options for things like this, so that we can invest more in people. People tend to think that investing in good quality tech is what makes the hyflex type of thing work, whereas I feel with Virtually Connecting we realized that investing in people online and virtual who know how to use the tech well to provide human connection – those are the ones worth investing in, and they’re what make this kind of thing work. The people who get the pedagogy and technology together and make them work smoothly for a purpose and outcome not achievable one without the other.

Featured image from Pixabay: https://pixabay.com/illustrations/network-wattle-yarn-tissue-440738/