“Digital pedagogy is becoming, for me, coterminous with critical pedagogy, given the degree to which the digital can function both as a tool for and an obstacle to liberation.”
~ Jesse Stommel, “Decoding Digital Pedagogy, pt. 2: (Un)Mapping the Terrain”

Click here to read the articles that responded to this CFP.

Hybrid Pedagogy is not ideologically neutral. The threads of our discussions and the underlying philosophy of the journal are grounded in critical pedagogy — an approach to teaching and learning predicated on fostering agency and empowering learners (implicitly and explicitly critiquing oppressive power structures). As a digital journal, our work is further nuanced by a consideration of technologies and cultures — how the digital changes the way we work, think, and create, and how we as humans can use tools (like chalkboards and computers) to form critically engaged communities.

Pete Rorabaugh writes in “Occupy the Digital: Critical Pedagogy and New Media”: “Critical pedagogy, no matter how we define it, has a central place in the discussion of how learning is changing in the 21st century because critical pedagogy is primarily concerned with an equitable distribution of power. If students live in a culture that digitizes and educates them through a screen, they require an education that empowers them in that sphere, teaches them that language, and offers new opportunities of human connectivity.”

And so, Hybrid Pedagogy is working together with its community to define the field of critical digital pedagogy. Our work demands we consider that:

  • critical digital pedagogy centers its practice on community and collaboration in order to foster products and processes that are sometimes co-authored but always uniquely contextual;

  • critical digital pedagogy must remain open to diverse, international voices, and thus requires invention to reimagine the ways that communication and collaboration happen across cultural and political boundaries;

  • critical digital pedagogy will not, cannot, be defined by a single voice but must gather together a cacophony of voices;

  • perhaps most radically, because the digital is inevitably, irresistibly public, critical digital pedagogy must have use and application outside traditional institutions of education.

Therefore, we are issuing this call for participation for articles on critical digital pedagogy. Submissions should help to map (or represent) the terrain of the field, while considering the following questions:

  1. How can digital technologies and cultures interrogate and/or deconstruct the roles of student and teacher?

  2. How does critical pedagogy change the way we see teachers and students as socially, economically, politically, and emotionally situated in a learning space? How is this changed in the wake of online and hybrid education?

  3. What must we know about existing and invisible obstacles to learner agency in order to disrupt them?

  4. What is the role of interactivity, engagement, and critical contribution in the digital or digitally-enhanced classroom?

  5. How can we make something valuable — something ethical — from the collective intelligence of the web, and not merely be swept along by its numbing flow?

  6. How do we make our classrooms sites of intrinsic motivation, networked learning, and critical practice?

  7. How can the work of writers and educators like Paulo Freire, bell hooks, Henry Giroux, and John Dewey help us navigate our new educational terrain? And how are educators like Cathy Davidson and Howard Rheingold helping to further reimagine learning that happens in digital space.

  8. What is digital agency? What are its incumbent privileges and responsibilities?

John Dewey writes in Schools of To-Morrow, “Unless the mass of workers are to be blind cogs and pinions in the apparatus they employ, they must have some understanding of the physical and social facts behind and ahead of the material and appliances with which they are dealing.”

And so, this CFP wonders at the questions: How can critical pedagogy help to examine, dismantle, or rebuild the structures, hierarchies, institutions, and technologies of education? And how can we gather together generously to bring critical digital pedagogy more fully into the conversation about the changing landscape of education?

Hybrid Pedagogy has evolved through the contributions of its community, so we highly recommend that anyone interested in submitting start by looking at one or more of the articles the journal has published on these and related topics:

“The Pleasures, the Perils, and the Pursuit of Pedagogical Intimacy” by Danielle Paradis
“A Pedagogy for Cross-cultural Digital Learning Environments” by Bernardo Trejos
“Beyond Rigor” by Sean Michael Morris, Pete Rorabaugh, and Jesse Stommel
“Bonds of Difference: Participation as Inclusion” by Maha Bali and Shyam Sharma
“The Political Power of Play” by Adeline Koh
“Correctional Pedagogy: Prison Reform and Life-or-Death Learning” by Joe Stommel
“We may need to amputate: MOOCs, Resistance, #FutureEd” by Sean Michael Morris
“The Critical Textbook” by Kris Shaffer

Articles should be approximately 1,000 – 2,500 words and work in some way toward the purpose of this call. We also encourage multimedia experimentation. This is a rolling call. To submit an article or multimodal response, visit Hybrid Pedagogy’s submissions page. All articles on Hybrid Pedagogy are collaboratively peer-reviewed.

[Photo, The uprising by 55Laney69, licensed under CC BY 2.0]