The Future of Education

New and emerging digital media environments have been theorized in terms of broad and profound social and cultural transformations.  Popular media and culture have been significantly redefined in the dynamism of digital communication—new media, new platforms, and new social communicative capacities.  The emergent social dimensions of media have arisen with multiple and networked media sources and sites, highly malleable and accessible platforms and content, and above all, with participatory media practices.  What do these popular cultural transformations mean for pedagogy?  Simply stated, students now talk back, and rather forcefully and digitally, and have the potential in new media environments to co-create their own learning.

The consequences and influences of a rapidly changing popular culture demand that our understandings and practices of pedagogy need both conceptual and practical reform to be resonant and critically engaged with the possibilities of contemporary popular culture.  Arguments and recommendations offered in this paper proceed from two key principles of pedagogy in the digital age: first, the irrefutability of participatory culture (the fulsome and everyday engagement of students with media technologies); and second, prevailing digital culture should direct us to pedagogies that put students into action, that is, situate students in a position of agency.

The conceptualization and activation of new pedagogies are informed by seminal and progressive stages along key intellectual trajectories in education: from Dewey’s advancement of educational reform in terms of student-focused theory and practice; to Friere’s foundational theories in the movement to “critical pedagogy” and the emphasis on learning as a civic and moral project of social change; to current and prevailing notions of participatory culture in which students recognize and assert their responsibilities in learning, and in the active transformation of knowledge.

The arguments presented will be grounded in a specific case study of a course designed around “students in action”.  Applied Communication for Social Issues involves the research, design, and implementation of media/communication interventions in pressing and complex social issues.  The course design eschews instrumentalist pedagogies, and static and template methodologies, and instead, emphasizes learning conditions of self-reflection, autonomy, and critical agency.