Curation and collaboration as activism: emerging critical practices of #FemEdTech

Abstract

The inequities rooted in our education systems and wider societies have been thrown into relief by responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper presents four situational studies of the FemEdTech network, asking how we characterise activities of the network, what they tell us about the nature of diffuse, convivial networks, and what opportunities they provide for challenging inequities in the field of technology and/in education. The study draws on practices and materials produced through FemEdTech activities from 2017 to 2020. Data and its analysis are presented as a spiral of 'turns' which fold back on each other to create connections between lines of research, moving fluidly between the objective and subjective. The four studies present shared curation, collaborative writing and purposeful reflection as contested fields of action. On one hand they build solidarity and shared resources -'holding up' the flow of knowledge in networks, potentially redistributing the capital of attention and connectivity. At the same time, they underscore the costs of shared work which are different in open networks from those that operate in the reified, accelerated production cycles of academic roles -yet connected with them, not least because they always involve investments of care.

Graphically Speaking: Expanding Landscapes of Scholarly Writing Using Sketchnotes

“…This is especially beneficial when collaborating. In my work with the #FemEdTech network, I engaged with co-authors to co-create a "Thinking Environment" (Beetham et al, 2022;Bell et al, 2023). A thinking environment involves careful listening and turn-taking to speak without interrupting; therefore, I sketchnoted the recording of the conversations to facilitate careful listening and the collaborative writing process of an academic paper on the #FemEdTech experiences of care and justice in an OEPr (Forsythe 2023a(Forsythe , 2023b.…”

“…In my work with the #FemEdTech network, I engaged with co-authors to co-create a "Thinking Environment" (Beetham et al, 2022;Bell et al, 2023). A thinking environment involves careful listening and turn-taking to speak without interrupting; therefore, I sketchnoted the recording of the conversations to facilitate careful listening and the collaborative writing process of an academic paper on the #FemEdTech experiences of care and justice in an OEPr (Forsythe 2023a(Forsythe , 2023b. I create sketchnotes from sources other than listening, for example, summarizing a reading or my thoughts, as seen in Figure 3, although that is not my preferred method because I tend to overthink and overwork the notes.…”

10. HE4Good assemblages

“…Assemblages are a process of becoming. Beetham et al (2022) characterise the FemEdTech quilt as emerging from entanglements (in physical and virtual spaces) that include thinking together, stitching separately, and values development:…”

“…In this chapter, we articulate the lives and purposes of the quilt that became four quilts, using makers' stories of their quilt squares, images, and Markov Chain poetry, alongside "unseen" contributions such as the thoughts, feelings, readings, and memories we shared as authors during "Thinking Environment" conversations (Kline, 2020). This is a posthuman account, in that it uses posthuman thinking as an analytic lens, drawing on a genealogy which brings together five years within a slow ontology of FemEdTech feminist praxis (Beetham et al, 2022), and the process of creating material and digital quilts. Posthumanism 3 OER20 Conference website, https://oer20.oerconf.org/ 4…”

Calendar Connections

“…In this paper we describe how we used bricolage as a research method to understand bricolage as a practice and the bricoleur as practitioner. We look at how curation acts as a form of relational agency to make visible our thinking together (Beetham et al, 2022).…”