Postdigital Possibilities and Impossibilities Behind the Screen: Visual Arts Educators in Conversation about Online Learning and Real-world Experiences

Abstract

Through an ethnomethodological and dialogical encounter with Australian classrooms in the lived experience of two visual art (va) educators, the authors seek to learn how working between online and studio learning approaches shaped teacher perceptions of student learning during the outbreak of covid-19 in 2020 and 2021. The research has two phases. Phase 1 sees the two va educators create learning narratives. These narratives, reported in summary in the article, through both material and digital form became the baseline data. In Phase 2 these themes were reworked as conversational questions. These questions then became the stimulus for a critical reflective online video conversation between the two va educators. The resulting discussion around the borderlines looks beyond specific apps, platforms, or products that the teachers used, their successes and failures and examines the digital, non-digital, material, social relations and pedagogical realities and futures that may or may be possible in the context of the postdigital va secondary classroom. These educators have had little time to assess the shift from a strong and well researched studio-pedagogy to their virtual creative learning futures. The challenges of this shift are revealed through their personal experiences.

Education Research and Audiovisual Production: The Emergence of Minor Stories in Postmedia Society

“…In addition, the notion of machinic autopoiesis, recovered by the postdigital education theory (Grushka et al, 2022), serves to analyze becoming and subjectivity in education within a set of machines, social relations and communication energies. All this leads to an approach that seeks to go beyond pedagogical techno-optimism (Armella & Grinberg, 2023) and technological solutionism (Morozov, 2015), exploring instead the possibilities available in the intersection between technology-specifically, audiovisual production-and the school.…”