CHEF Talk (webinar): Rewiring the research-teaching nexus: exploring technologies as points of connection between disciplines and curricula
The idea that technology mediates our relationships with the world gives rise to many questions; in this talk, I will focus on two that seem particularly relevant for universities. Firstly, how should we understand the mediating role material cultures play in disciplinary research? And secondly, how might our students engage with these material cultures as part of their curricula?
I will start by introducing some ways of approaching these questions, which I am using as a starting point for a small-scale project. I draw on philosophical ideas, such as Ihde’s phenomenology of human-technology relations (Ihde, 1990), and on work from science and technology studies, such as Latour’s discussion of ‘centres of calculation’ (1987). Then, I will sketch the implications of these ideas for theories of the curriculum in Higher Education (E.g. Barnett & Coate, 2005; Mishra & Koehler, 2006). These will be illustrated using examples from a project that explored the experiences of university staff during the Covid lockdowns (Littlejohn et al, 2021), where the challenges were not just limited to ‘moving online’, but to redistributing people and things, places and times in ways that would continue to support students’ engagement with the technologies of their discipline.
Speaker: Professor Martin Oliver, Institute of Education, University College London.
Chair: Dr. Søren S.E. Bengtsen, Co-Director of CHEF, Aarhus University, Denmark
Place: A Zoom-link will be shared with the participants closer to the event