Written by: Hong-An Wu University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, United States of America
Abstract: In this article, I explore the lines of inquiry opened by moments of technological troubles encountered during teaching and learning. Instead of assuming that these moments are obstacles to be overcome, I delve into what these moments imply for educational research on teaching and learning through a posthuman approach. Troubling the figure of the posthuman with regard to the ethos that technologies are revolutionizing education, I argue that we need to pay attention to the labor of caring for technologies, particularly during moments of technological troubles, in order to address the uneven proximity to humanness, subjecthood, and emerging technologies based on intersectional embodiments. With this understanding, I propose a posthumanist methodological approach centered on tracing the care-giving labor for emerging technologies performed by teachers along with students during moments of technological troubles as a potential direction for educational research grappling with the posthuman. Furthermore, I provide an initial foray into using this methodology to count, recount, and account for the labor of caring for emerging technologies during moments of technological troubles across my teaching experiences at a Fab Lab and public library. In so doing, I suggest that we need to further trace the labor of caring for technological troubles to better understand our socio-material co-configurations with our nonhuman companions toward more sustainable and equitable futures in education.
Keywords: care, emerging technologies, technological troubles, pedagogy