An exploration of human and platform intra-actions in a digital teaching and learning environment

Abstract

This study uses a sociomaterial critical posthuman paradigm to examine possibilities, constraints, and tensions that come into view in the ‘intra-action’ between teachers and a digital environment. It considers how teacher subjectivities may be reimagined in new digitised visuospatial environments. This qualitative study utilises reflective interviews with things to illuminate general issues of subjectivities in human/digital contexts in a newly adopted Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) at a university in the Middle East. The interviews reveal several diffractions from the new entanglement created by introducing the new VLE. This highlights what it means to be a higher education educator in the digital age. This study contributes to critical research on digital assemblages to counteract the wholly positivist and non-problematized discourse of instrumentalization of technology use in education that often accompanies them. It also creates more openings for discussing posthuman subjectivities in sociomaterial contexts.