IN-PERSON MADRID FOCUS ON PEDAGOGY. SECTION A

Abstract

This abstract offers reflections from my dual role (Eames, 1995; Rogers, 2012) as a community educator and ‘Researcher-in-Residence’ embedded in a community space addressing the digital divide (Lythreatis et al., 2022). Drawing on the pragmatic philosophy of Dewey, I argue that this educational experience has revealed significant philosophical problems that necessitate broader inquiry (Dewey, 1929, 1938). Specifically, when teaching technology, I must first ‘unteach’ learners, helping them to collaboratively and critically unpack their prior social construction of technology and the subsequent self-alienation that arises from it. Learners view technology as an impenetrable semantic totality (Latour, 1993), a conceptual edifice reinforced by promotional communication (Deleuze & Guattari, 1991; Mager & Katzenbach, 2021; Sriprakash et al., 2025). In response, it is not surprising that learners often fatalistically declare themselves ‘not a computer person’, fundamentally incapable of using computers in some essentialist way. Thus, learners and I must critically challenge this self-alienation (Coeckelbergh, 2012) and navigate economically driven normative prescriptions of what ‘good’ use of technology looks like (Dander et al., 2021; Eynon, 2021; Foucault, 1977; Sualehi, 2023). Finally, technology must be critically reconstituted as a socio-technical system driven by a capitalist logic. Teaching activities that do not include critical scaffolding are, therefore, simply newly minting digital consumers who are ill-equipped to navigate digital worlds populated by anti-consumer business practices, dark design patterns, and aggressive data extraction. My argument is that technology must, by default, be taught with sufficient critical scaffolding to develop learners’ digital resilience (Eynon, 2021; Macgilchrist et al., 2025).