What will we be?
by Marie Heath and Dan Krutka
Earlier this week, Real Life Magazine announced that they were “ceasing publication indefinitely” due to a lack of funding. For the past 6 years, the magazine had published articles that focused on “living with technology. The emphasis was more on living.” Some of our favorite articles include Chris Gilliard and David Golumbia’s “Luxury Surveillance” and, Civics of Technology contributor, Autumm Caines’ “The Zoom Gaze.” It’s sad to see such a quality outlet shutter its doors, but it is a reminder of the fragility and failures of many of our systems for knowledge work.
An Initial Vision
We started the Civics of Technology project, in part, because we were frustrated by our dissatisfaction with the lack of criticality in educational technology conferences and the pay walls of academic journals. We sought to create online spaces around which we might grow with other scholars, educators, and people interested in thinking deeper and more critically about the role of technology in our lives. In our attempt to convey our desires with the opening lines of our homepage:
Technologies are not neutral and neither are the societies into which they are introduced. As technology continues encroaching in our lives, how can we advance technology education for just futures?
Since launching this site in January of this year, the project has been everything to which we dreamed… initially. We’ve met new people, thought deeply through book clubs and blog posts, and held our first (free) online conference on August 4th and 5th. But, as more people join us, we hope our dreams and possibilities grow too.
Along with Ryan Smits, we recently published the article, Toward a Civics of Technology, in an open access special issue of the Journal of Technology and Teacher Education (JTATE) that called for new visions of teacher and technology education. In our piece we contend that a civics of technology means rejecting the role of passive users of technology, and instead acting as citizens who make informed decisions for more humane and just classrooms and communities. In response to the special issue call, we laid out our vision for the Civics of Technology project through 2025, which we’re sharing here as well.
Grow a community of critical scholars investigating technology and education. Sometimes we joke that we started the project so that we could find more scholar friends with similar, critical, takes on technology. That’s only about 95% accurate though ;-) In truth, we wanted to create space for the people doing the emerging critical work in the field of educational technology to create community and help this work flourish.
Encourage growth in scholarly research in technology and education that focuses on ecological and critical perspectives in technology education. Following on our homepage call, “technology is not neutral, and neither are the societies into which it is introduced,” we have been particularly influenced by theoretical lenses such as media ecology and critical theory. We want to put those ways of seeing human relationships with technology into conversation in order to examine the ways technologies and education influence each other and society. We’d like to see technoskeptical and critical questions normalized in educational technology scholarship and practice.
Learn from scholars who have created programs with critical curriculum that center students and advance justice. This was particularly evident in our first conference where we were inspired by the work of our two keynote speakers: Dr. Ruha Benjamin’s students in the Ida B. Wells Data Justice Lab and Dr. Sepehr Vakil’s Young People’s Race Power and Technology project (YPRPT). In our first year we have worked to cultivate a scholarly community, but could our next steps be to turn this into critical, collaborative work with young people?
Collaborate with our community of scholars to increase the number of curricular approaches, activities, and lessons available for practitioner use. We were both classroom teachers who work as teacher educators to prepare teacher candidates to be classroom teachers. We know that teachers’ lives are busy and the demands on their professional lives are immense. We know the value of providing approaches, activities, and lessons that they can use, modify, and remix for their classroom contexts.
Our Emerging Visions
When Real Life Magazine made their announcement earlier this week, we were saddened to lose this outlet, but didn’t immediately think it was relevant to our project. However, Civics of Technology contributor Charles Logan suggested that our weekly blog posts could fill some of the scholarly void:
We are a bit different from Real Life Magazine. Real Life Magazine paid its authors and we agree that authors should be paid for their labor. We have never had funding, we serve as editors to any blog posts, and we have a particular focus on education. However, we believe that the articles published in Real Life Magazine do fit our larger purpose. We even referenced Autumm Caines’ “The Zoom Gaze” in our JTATE article. So, yes, we invite those who saw Real Life Magazine as an outlet for their work to contact and write for us. We also welcome suggestions for how we might make this work equitable. Should we encourage donations for individual blog posts? Should we create an optional membership option to pay bloggers for their work? Or, should we continue as we have without pay? This is new to us so we welcome suggestions for what it means to write for Civics of Technology.
While we set forth a vision in our article, we love that Charles’ tweet opened new directions. We welcome the shift. We never wanted to own a site, we always have wanted to build a community rooted in support, learning, and justice. What will we be?
Please share your ideas and vision in the comments and contact us if you want to write for us. We hope your vision becomes part of our vision.