AN INTIMATE SCIENCE FOR TEACHING’S BEAUTIFUL ART: A (POST)DIGITAL SPECULATION

Abstract

A conventional view of K-12 education is that it is a system for delivering the latest and most important knowledge for students to learn so they can become good or useful citizens as well as the most effective ways that it can be imparted to them by teachers. The role of education research, therefore, is to improve methods for extracting, organizing, delivering and imparting this knowledge – and educational technology is a means to expedite improvements. If, however, education is viewed, not as a way to make students into something better through better knowledge, but as a promise for their better living in desirable futures, then an entirely different model for education research is necessary that will, in turn, expose other purposes for educational technology as helpmate in that work. This dissertation research takes up the latter idea and speculates that the promise can only be fulfilled at the point of intimate contact between teachers and children and through teaching’s art. Thinking with John Dewey’s speculations on an educational science and Thomas Kuhn’s analysis for scientific revolutions, this research is an invention of a new model for science, a teacher’s science, that supports its art with resources, organization and connections for the making of better living in the places children learn so they can make desirable futures. Because this research must develop its new model from within the existing one, it uses speculative fiction to fabulate a world where a teacher, imagining with and through the beauty of her art, is authorized to invent a model of science for it and to test it through thought experiments: education fictions that provoke the seeing/feeling of what is not yet but could be. This invention, however, is not an argument for an improvement of the conventional model, but is, rather, an invitation to envision – and thereby enact – a world where dreams of renewal and revivification of education for better futures are not only possible but made plausible through intimate and equitable relations between teachings’ art and a science of its own and with the affordances of educational technology in a (post)digital present.