Resumen de Teaching the Unteachable: Networked Media, Simulation and Community Research/Activism
Judith Faifman, Brian Goldfarb
This chapter considers opportunities that digital media culture presents for educators to engage pedagogical approaches and take on subject matter that within the current educational context has become increasingly “unteachable”; edged out of the curriculum by mandates that have taken hold during the transnational rise of the standards-based education reform movement. What we mean by this is twofold: first, unteachable in the sense of modes of knowledge that educational institutions have deemed illegitimate or unworthy of attention because they can’t be measured; and second, discursive practices that fall afield of the authorized conception of schooling as a neutral space of learning rather than a site of intellectual debate and forum for discussion of public issues. These formulations of the “unteachable,” have played a formative role in limiting the potential for participation in knowledge creation and democratic processes on local, regional and global scales. Our intention is to urge educators to consider how networked and digital technology/culture might be employed to activate dimensions of subjectivity truncated by this form of education. While there numerous fronts to take on this responsibility, here we zero in on digital practices that forward two particular goals: first, allowing active participation in the politics of knowledge through a broad conception of inquiry in contexts extending beyond the school and embedded in networks of life-impacting scientific research, and second, embracing the affective dimensions of communication that are crucial to how knowledge is negotiated in the spaces that connect intimate/personal and public experience.
