SPECIAL ISSUE

 

Building Dwelling Caring - Some reflections on the future of learning

 

 

Mary Zournazi

University of New South Wales

 

 

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ABSTRACT

This paper opens out some philosophical questions on the accelerated use of technology in our teaching environments as a result of the global pandemic and it considers the ongoing implications for education. Revisiting some of the work of Martin Heidegger and his questions concerning technology in conjunction with what I call a dialogical approach to teaching and learning, this paper explores how we can create and think with technologies to consider the possibilities and limitations of technological use in our educational contexts. Furthermore, it reflects on some questions that we may need to address for pedagogical care and responsibility as we move toward a future of learning.

Keywords: Educational thinking, technology, care, dialogue, experience, future, phenomenology, questioning, teckne

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Building Caring Dwelling - some reflections on the future of learning

... the essence of technology is nothing technological, essential reflection upon technology and decisive confrontation with it must happen in a realm, that is, one the one hand, akin to the essence of technology and on the other, fundamentally different from it.

Such a realm is art. But certainly only if reflection upon art, for its part, does not shut its eyes to the constellation of truth, concerning which we are questioning . ..

Yet the more questioningly we ponder the essence of technology, the more mysterious the essence of art becomes.

The closer we come to the danger, the more brightly do the ways into the saving power begin to shine and the more questioning we become. For questioning is the piety of thought. (Heidegger, 1993: 340-341)

As part of my research for this paper, I was reading the philosopher Martin Heidegger's The Question Concerning Technology (1993a [1954]); unexpectedly, I recalled a dream from the previous night. A friend had given me a book, or maybe it was a photocopy of a chapter, regardless, it felt like a sacred gift, a special text I had not read before. I cannot remember the exact words, but I had a pen in my hand, and I slowly began to read the pages and take notes, jotting down my thoughts here and there in the margins of the text. I was thoroughly engrossed. In the dream, my friend suddenly became larger and larger, and started yelling at me to stop writing and destroying the pages. I was surprised by the force of their anger.

The dream fragment seemed to bring together some of the issues I have been grappling with in this paper, how the pleasures and wonder of doodling in a more classical sense of technology - the use of the hand, pen, and paper - the awe and wonder of reading and taking time to be with a text was transformed into my friend's threatening figure of surveillance. It reminded me of the perils and confrontations of navigating different styles of teaching and learning that have been accelerated by the use of technology in response to COVID-19, and the newly formed social behaviours and worlds we have found ourselves living in. It these concerns that haunt this essay and my dream: How do we navigate and create spaces of genuine learning that are not reduced to a form of 'calculative thinking' and the often-unchallenged use of technology in the educational context? How do we open out the questioning of technology in our learning environments? What are the implications for pedagogical care?

As a philosopher by training, a teacher of sociology in the classroom, and a film maker by trade, this paper emerges out of the context of thinking through technology precipitated by COVID 10 pandemic, but more fundamentally, it is an attempt to open out some philosophical questions and reflections on the use of technology and the care for learning. As the philosopher Martin Heidegger has carefully argued, the questions concerning technology are complex - there is the co-evolution of technologies and humanness, but often in this co-creation we miss the essential question of how to respond to the changing face of technological progress. Heidegger wrote his text on technology in the 1950s after the development of the atomic bomb and in shadow of nuclear war, and his approach provides a way to continually diagnose and question the usurpation of technological advancement. As Jeff Malpas notes, 'Heidegger does not focus merely on any technological device or set of devices, but rather on technological modernity as a mode of ordering the world (2016: 15)¹.

What Heidegger argues is uncanny about technological development is not that world is becoming entirely technological but rather that we are 'unprepared' for its transformation, that is, its potential danger as well as recognising its 'saving power'. The challenge posed, then, is not with technology itself (especially in times of crisis), but rather the means in which it 'enframes' or reduces the world and our capacity to adequately perceive it. This enframing, as Heidegger calls it, turns humans and the world itself into a 'resource' to be organised, used, and exploited and it involves a form of calculative thinking. As Heidegger writes: 'Calculative thinking computes. It computes ever new, ever more promising and at the same time more economical possibilities. Calculative thinking races from one prospect to the next. Calculative thinking never stops, never collects itself' (1969: 46).

Today what can be called neo-liberal governance and practice continue what Heidegger identified as calculative thinking, as Malpas suggests, 'one might argue that technological modernity, as Heidegger understands it, is thus identical with the form taken by modern corporatized, globalized capitalism (2016: 16). In this sense, it could be argued that market forces and economic imperatives have become the guiding principles for how pedagogy is often understood and practiced. For example, technological use and its advancement has become part of the organisation of flexibility and choice for the individual user; and efficiency has become the mantra of how to organise learning rather than the timeneeded to develop pedagogical principles that are transformative and meaningful for teachers and students, and the co-creative power of thinking with technology.

In the context of this paper and its concerns, there is a danger that teaching, and learning become 'objects' of calculative thinking and resource making rather than meaningful experience. In this scenario, teaching and learning become instrumental tools rather than a basis for 'educational thinking', and as such the experience of learning is diminished. Heidegger's questions concerning technology and what I call a dialogical approach to teaching and learning, provide a means to diagnose the formation of our attitudes and thinking around technology, and in this paper, I use this philosophical method to indicate the importance of 'thinking with technology' as a necessary step in pedagogical practice and care². Through this correlative thinking, I consider questions around how learning can involve wonder, creativity, and curiosity in the age of technological interpolation of our bodies, selves and practices and I will provide some reflections on pedagogical care for a newly fathomed world. As Joan Tronto has previously noted, 'We need now to stop being dazzled by neoliberal forms of resilience and, instead, have the courage ourselves to return to a forestalled alternative future, one in which care truly matters' (2017: 39).

Dialogical encounters - setting the scene

Over the last thirty years or so, I have been increasingly interested in the philosophical underpinnings of teaching that involve what I call a dialogical approach or method. I understand a dialogic approach as a method that emerges between teachers and students in their response and awareness of each other and that is embedded in the inextricable and entangled relationships that they develop through the learning environment³. Depending on the course and context, this dialogue involves a combination of elements and skill formation but most importantly it is attuned to the needs of students as they become involved in the exchange of ideas, knowledge, and the learning process itself. In this sense, educational 'thinking' is relational in that it involves thinking with) and experimenting with ideas. It encourages a process of learning that is both rigorous and open ended, and at the same time attuned to the different capacities and backgrounds of students.

I borrow the principles of dialogue from Martin Buber's (2004[1923]) book, I and Thiou. His work might be considered as philosophical anthropology, but it has specific implications in the classroom. The fundamental principles of the I-Thou relation consist of the primacy of our response to others, and it becomes a paradigm for ethical relations. For Buber every encounter provides the opportunity for grace or openness to the world. In this regard, the greatest tragedy of modern life is the alienation experienced when we live in the realm of the I-It (Ich-Es) - the world of the ego and illusion, where people and things are turned into objects. For Buber, genuine experience exists in the realm of I-Thou (Ich-Du). The I-Thou relation is the primary word spoken between humans, but this dialogue maybe silent and without words, for genuine dialogue is a response to what is addressed to us.

Applied to the classroom, the task of the learning is to encourage dialogical principles that involve trust, responsibility, and care in the learning process. In particular, I have found that this dialogic encounter involves responsibility that can be broken into 'response' and 'ability' where the unpredictable nature of learning can have the time and space to take shape as well the commitment and trust that this space is open to be shared. Philosophers, such as Emmanuel Levinas, have posited the ethical principles of responsibility which builds on this fundamental tenant of Buber's dialogical encounter and addresses the ways in which otherness is part of the very formation of any encounter education or otherwise⁴. In a different vein, Donna Haraway's (2016) important work on 'response-ability' brings together ethical domains of science, technologies, and post human identities. In this paper, my work on responsibility develops a dialogical framework for pedagogical care as experienced and understood in the context of the pandemic, but also ways to render new approaches to how we can think through the very practical elements of teaching, and what I consider as 'building' and dwelling.

Specifically, then, the phenomenologist and philosopher Gaston Bachelard's reflections on Buber's I-Thou extends how we might understand the dialogical relation for the classroom. Following from Buber, he argues that it is in the 'in-between' space of the question and response that new vectors of meaning can take place. He writes,

Martin Buber's entire philosophy of the person must reside in this mutual questioning--The philosophy endows the spoken word with a particular tonality composed of trust and astonishment. That philosophy multiplies, as in a thousand-faceted mirror, the delicious and often elusive nuance that plays within the ambiguity of questioning and exclamation. We really feel that we need a sign midway between ?and ! We really feel that from ? to ! there is room for an entire psychology that would tonalize all spoken words, capable of interpreting silences and sounds, viva ces and lentos - all resonances and arpeggios of sympathy. (Bachelard, 2003: 89-90)

The encounter creates us: we were nothing - or nothing but things - before being united. As Bachelard presents to us, it is the deep capacity for listening and nuance in a dialogic encounter that 'tonalizes' the experience and it is this sensibility towards learning that allows a teacher to 'listen' and not rush into answers but rather to stay with) what emerges in a classroom⁵. This listening or 'attunement' is capable of interpreting the silences and spaces that may arise to enable new meaning and learning to be generated⁶. This type of awareness may require the space for teachers and students to rest in the awkward gaps and silences that can emerge in a classroom. I often think about the long and uncomfortable pauses that can emerge in a teaching experience when a question hangs in the air and when no-one has found a way to respond to it, yet sometimes it is resting in the awkwardness that can enable new ideas to take shape and new relationships to be formed and developed. Without this attunement to learning, it can become a process of calculative thinking in Heidegger's sense, in that there is no ability to take time, respond to or be open toward the unexpected in a classroom. This listening requires patience and what Heidegger (1993b [1954]) might call to 'let learn'. Genuine learning, then, has the characteristic of attunement and taking time that opens out to a more 'meditative' thinking or response to the world.

Translated in the context of technology, it requires us to think and to mediate on what questions are arising from the new modes of learning that have emerged as we continue to navigate COVID-19 and a post COVID world. In my own experience, online learning and dialogue involves the rethinking of our teaching skill set and methodological practice (with all of the necessary time and labour involved in this process). This is a real challenge: how do we create genuine dialogue and the form of attunement forementioned - the spaces that can emerge spontaneously and that can cultivate aliveness in a virtual classroom? I would suggest this experience involves rethinking dialogue as form of buildingin the virtual realm as well as a form of dwelling within it. In the context of transforming learning environments, it might also mean considering what we value in learning - the potential to learn from and derive meaning through the building of online platforms and sites that facilitate curiosity between different bodies of learners. I will now turn my attention to the concept and practice of building.

Building

In his essay 'Building Dwelling Thinking' (1993c [1954]), Heidegger argues that thinking compromises the need to build anddwell. These are not separate entities nor abstractions but rather co-extensive of our experience and our place in the world. Heidegger elaborates that there is a distinction between building as edifice and building as cultivating, he argues that we dwell not because we build, but because we are 'dwellers'. I connect this building to a phenomenological sense of learning as it helps to extend a vision of the dialogical method in relation to online experience. That is, how the cultivation of technology can shape learning experience when it opens out a pathway to facilitate and create new possibilities to learn.

If we consider learning as a form of building, how do we address what is essential and meaningful to the process of educational thinking with) technology? The short answer involves a rich correlation of the body and mind in concert. But as Heidegger has argued technology can enslave us when we attempt to see it as something to master and when technology is perceived as the only available option. For Heidegger, this enframing of culture driven by the focus on operationality, calculation and the acceleration of thought has the tendency to dematerialise the world, and while it may appear to offer us more efficiency and choice, it does not necessarily give us more depth to any encounter nor the any time to digest it. However, if we consider technology not as a means to an end or anthromorphised as human consumption, but rather as a way of building and thereby creating that accords with the environments that we are embedded within, then there is a potential to establish new ways of thinking and dwelling with technology.

In his essay, 'What calls for thinking?' (1993b [1954]) Heidegger gives a sense of the corresponding relationship of different forms of building, creativity and thinking through the example of a cabinet maker's apprentice, and how teaching involves the principle to 'let learn' - in other words to build and dwell are necessary components of the learning experience and technological craft. It is this learning that opens out thinking and is the imperative for the potential and possibility of engaging with both the conceptual and material apparatus of the world that we inhabit. In other words, building is thinking, it provides the 'tools' for learning. He writes:

... [for the cabinet maker] learning is not mere practice to gain facility in the use of tools. Nor does he [she] merely gather knowledge about the customary forms of the things he is to build. If he is to become a true cabinet maker, he makes himself answer and respond above all to the different kinds of wood and to the shapes slumbering within the wood - to wood as it enters into man's dwelling with all the hidden riches of its essence. In fact, the relatedness to wood is what maintains the whole craft. (1993b[1954]: 379)

What this example provides is way to consider how learning evolves through the wonder and astonishment of the 'lessons' that we are engaged in. This might also be considered as a dialogical method insofar as the experience calls us to respond and address ourselves to an encounter. It is here some of the links between a dialogical approach and Heidegger's relationship to learning may coalesce, as he states: 'To learn means to make everything we do answer to whatever addresses us as essential' (1993b: 379). Simultaneously the 'teacher lets nothing else be learned than - learning' (380). In this relation, learning becomes an encounter with and through what we are engaged with, and in the case of technology it becomes a question of how to cultivate experiences in which the 'apprentice' has the opportunity to take the time needed to learn and develop their craft.

In this respect, the co-evolution of method and praxis of thinking is rooted in an agile and embodied mind. In the cabinet maker's example, it is the 'craft of the hand' that involves a journey beyond what could be measured or calculated. The cabinet maker's response to the wood opens out the relationship between experience and thinking, the wood 'that addresses him' also extends beyond what the apprentice could imagine. This is what Heidegger might refer to as meditative thinking as opposed to calculative thinking that never stops to 'collect itself'. This type of meditative thinking enables the attunement to the reality we encounter, and it is an antidote to calculative and instrumental thought. There are many elements to 'what calls' us to any educational setting, but essentially what we are seeking is open out an experience that derives from the conditions that may enable an authentic response to the learning environment. As Heidegger further notes:

... the craft of the hand is richer than we can commonly imagine. The hand does not only grasp and catch, or push and pull. The hand reaches and extends, receives and welcomes - and not just things: the hand extends itself, and receives its own welcome in the hands of others. The hand holds. The hand carries. The hand designs and signs, presumably because man is a sign ... The hand is all this, and this is the true handicraft- All the work of the hand is rooted in thinking. (1993b [1954]: 380-381)

In the dream that I recalled earlier, it is the hand that doodles and plays in a most elementary form of technology, and it is in this relationship of having the time to 'doodle' that provides the embodied sense of learning and experience. As Heidegger writes 'we must ever learn to dwell' (1993c [1954]: 363). Thus, in relationship to technology, there is a need to recognise that learning does not occur in an abstracted void or solely through the interface of a screen, but rather in co-creative experience and imagination that is activated through technology in a learning environment not determined by it. In other words, it is the thinking that is done through and with the 'doodling' - the moments of space and wonder that may be activated by the different ways of engaging the learning environment through the 'hand that is rooted in thinking'.

To give a small example: in my building of online platforms the question that perplexed me was how to develop learning spaces in which dialogic encounters could emerge and at the same time, how I could creatively work with the technological tools available; tools such as Zoom and its breakout rooms or other platforms to enhance and provide the opportunity for new forms of learning and activity design. In response to this dilemma, I taught a course entitled Media, Culture and Power and I converted a group lead facilitation assessment which I run in the face-to-face class to a small presentational group experience in the virtual classroom. This new assessment involved students presenting a theme or topic from the course based on their own area of inspiration and interest. It involved posing a question to their peers based on their presentation and thus enabling a more direct sense of connection and discussion in a smaller group experience. This presentation was designed for the Zoom Break out rooms. Each student had up to 10 minutes for their presentation and discussion. Each group had a chair and timekeeper.

Although I had carefully worked through the activity, it did make me nervous. How was I going to monitor the discussion? How would I be able to be in dialoguewith the students without 'popping' in and out unexpectedly into their breakout rooms, and potentially interrupting their flow and rhythm. Thinking it through, I came up with the idea of having 'highlights' from their presentations to be discussed at the end and in the main room. But something still seemed to be missing in this approach and it was the 'live' element of dialogue, that is, the building of co-creative meaning and spontaneity that is part of a dialogic experience that flows much more successfully in the face-to-face classroom. Through consultation with other colleagues, I developed 'live power point slides' - where students could respond to their presentational highlights live and simultaneously: they could write up their highlights on slides, each group could see and read each other's highlights and I could monitor and respond as well.

This approach made me feel more confident about the activity and I felt more of sense of 'trust' that students would know the 'teacher' was present, interested and in dialogue with them. I saw it as an opportunity to build and create a dialogue in the virtual space in which 'speaking' is not always apparent or possible. It provided a way to monitor what was happening in the breakout rooms, ask questions to them and respond where necessary. It also became a good record of the 'content' and discussion that went on live throughout the activity.

In this sense, the virtual learning became a question of how to imagine the ways that different platforms whether it was through Zoom or Moodle, or other online systems could perform and enable different modes of communication not just as out of necessity because we were in the middle of a pandemic, but rather trying to work through what the 'technology' can offer by way of creative design to further the potential for educational thinking. However, it takes timeto work through the pedagogical aims and the technological apparatus to find the creative solutions necessary to the classroom practice.

Heidegger often quotes a line from the German poet Friedrich Holderlin: 'poetically man dwells' to capture a sense of how thinking and technology belong together whether it is the hand that holds or grasps, or in the contemporary context, we could add the hand that imagines and extends and types through different virtual screens. This thinking corresponds to Heidegger's use of the Greek word and philosophical concept of poiesis, which means making/creating, and teckne, which suggests art or skill. He saw the implications of technology as both creative and artful in orientation just like the human capacity for thought. It is this 'creativity' that Heidegger often sites as the 'mystery' or potential for technology; and it is premised on this idea of teckne - the art or craft of making, and for me, it this conceptual sense of building that becomes part of how we may approach the task of technological thinking and learning in the classroom. As such, this conceptual framework of building can be applied to different disciplinary perspectives and creative practices, in other words, it becomes a model for opening out the potential for a variety of learning experiences and design.

This notion of teckne, then, enables us to consider technology not as 'means' or resource that we have to master but rather how technology becomes a means to create the space to dwell, to think, to care, to create. From this perspective, it is the creative play and imagination that we can bring to building online spaces and sites that can generate a form of thinking that opens out to the world rather than enslaves us to it. Of course, this does not always easily take place in the virtual or face to face classroom and it is even more difficult when challenged by new hybrid modes of teaching, and yet, there is still the potential to try and build these small steps toward thinking. As Heidegger notes real learning can take place 'when they build out of dwelling, and think for the sake of dwelling' (1993c[1954]: 363). But, as he asks, "What is the state of dwelling in our precarious age?" (363) For me, this is an essential question linked to how we can care and cultivate experiences where learning can become meaningful again.

Dwelling

So far, I have put forward that the use of technology involves different methodological questions and practices. In the face-to-face classroom a dialogical method is easier to evoke and how to 'dwell' is a much more obvious instance of reading body language and the signs or expression of interest in a topic or theme, but in the virtual space it is often difficult to gauge how learning is experienced and understood. If we consider Heidegger's questions regarding technology, it is not necessarily the 'differentiation' of space that is at stake in whether we teach online or face to face, but rather how we exist in the relationship between the 'locale' in which we inhabit and the learning that takes place. As Jeff Malpas (2022) notes what distinguishes Heidegger and his relevance to contemporary thought is this understanding of spatiality. He argues:

Heidegger is explicit in connecting technological modernity with certain modes of spatiality and spatialization in a way that has no real parallel elsewhere. Perhaps the only other thinker who makes a similar connection is Paul Virilio, but, in Virilio's case, space and spatiality are less directly taken up, being either tied to more specific contexts (as in the work on architecture and territory) or secondary to the focus on movement, speed, and acceleration. (2022: 149)

What technology does is collapse our sense of time and distance and therefore can flatten out our experiences and universalise differences, but, at the same time, it can enfold us to experience. What this 'flattening' out means is that we have no sense of the time and distance involved in our connections and so the ability to dwellin our respective locations has become an important consideration in my own working through and building platforms to communicate and develop students' capacity for collaborative discussion and writing online in real time and in asynchronous learning. This involves the ability to understand the interruptions that can take place in online learning - the problems with internet connections, students' own resistance to the learning environment and how to build ongoing relationships. Again, this takes time as well attention, a form of listening and attunement to different learning practices, and our own teaching and reflective engagement with the changing face of technological impact on learning experiences.

In some of Heidegger's later writing, especially in his book Discourse on Thinking (1969 [1959]), he discusses the need to consider 'moving-into-nearness' as a mindful way in which we can dwell in relationship to technologies. This process of thinking can help to reveal itself through the resting, patience or waiting of thought and our relatedness to others. This approach to dwelling or what he calls 'in-dwelling' might correspond to Martin Buber's notion of 'between' human-to-human and Bachelard's approach to the 'tonalization' of our encounters in the world. It is here that all thinkers would endorse the 'spontaneity' of thought that is brought about through the direct response and call of the world and our encounters with it. In a technological sense, the same application of 'in-dwelling' can be conceived as a reminder that humans are meditative beings not just calculative bodies. It is here that the characteristics of meditative thinking - rest, patience, waiting - are necessary components of any learning process. And it is especially essential for enabling the space for 'awkward' silences that can arise whether in the face to face or online classroom. As I discussed in my example of building online platforms, this meditative thinking involves designing activities and learning practices that enable the ability to create and communicate through a language or design that produces a sense of belongingness and connection, not isolation and individuation which are the products of neoliberal logic that rests on calculative thinking and instrumental learning.

In this fashion, if we consider the necessary relationship between building and dwelling, there is another factor or element that becomes crucial to how this can unfold in new forms of online learning and connectivity. As Heidegger notes 'cultivating and caring are a kind of building'. Exploring the German etymological connection of the word building to care, he writes,

... The way in which you are and I am, the manner in which we humans are on the earth, is buan, dwelling ... The old word bauen, which says that man is insofar as he dwells, this word bauen, however, alsomeans at the same time to cherish and protect, to preserve and care for, specifically to till the soil, to cultivate the vine. Such building only takes care - it tends to the growth that ripens into fruit of its own accord. (1993c [1954]: 349)

What is essential to this dwelling is care in its intrinsic sense - it can be activated through the 'concern' for others. For Heidegger, essentially 'care' is concern for the world and our relationships to it. In his book Being and Time (2010 [1927]), Heidegger draws on the fable of the goddess of Cura (care) to discuss the various elements of care that he sees as fundamental to existence (Dasein)⁷. In the myth, Cura created humans out of clay and although challenged by other gods, she takes charge of her creation until the end of time. For Heidegger, this 'care' involves a concern for living and creation that underpins all of our lives and experience. For him, care is what activates our being in the world. It is the foundational element of what makes us human and provides the sense of interconnectedness that emerges out of our daily encounters. Without care we cannot flourish as individuals nor experience ourselves in relation to others.

Drawing on Heidegger's interpretation, it is Cura's creativity and skill that I would suggest provides the opportunity to think of learning as an ongoing process of caring. That is, the cultivation of thinking that is built through and around the capacity to create environments for students to inhabit the spaces in which to learn. If we think of care in the virtual context as well as the face-to-face classroom, a sense of belonging can be built through the co-creation of how we engage with and encourage different learning experiences - whether it is through the hand using the mouse that the extends and writes, draws, and creates or the hand that doodles with the pen - there is imaginative potential for the embodied mind in action. This sense of care, then, takes a different turn - it provides a way to imagine, build and perform in correlation with others - as opposed or rather in contradistinction to the pathologising of care in our cultures where care can become a site of inscribing and perpetuating forms of gender inequities and cultural violence⁸. Potentially, this the correlation of care that I am positing here is co-extensive with Joan Tronto's (2017) proposition of homines curans (caring people) as an alternative to the logics of neo-liberalism⁹.

Caring - conclusionary reflections

Bringing together some conclusionary remarks, I return to another fragment of my dream that I recalled while reading Heidegger's essay on technology: I am sitting in a bathtub with very little water, and I am facing a fellow film maker friend and his wife who are seated as well. We are all fully clothed: my friend is in a tuxedo and his wife in a beautiful white evening gown. They both live in Germany which is on the other side of the world from me, but in my dream, they are conveniently with me in the bathtub. The spatial dimensions of the bathtub seem uncanny: we are all relatively tall people but somehow, we all fit. At some point we are handed a crumpled-up note. The note contains some vital information that neither of us can decipher, but we know it is important. It poses a question to us.

For me, the collapsing of time and space and the strangeness of three tall people in bathtub reminded me that the potential for technology lies in its astonishing ability to bring the world closer to us and to open out new ways to create, learn and inhabit it. Yet, it also activated how virtual relationships can be strange and that we need to take care in our thinking around teaching and technology. In other words, we need a courageous and radical approach to how we work with technologies into the future to avoid the dangers of calculative thinking and the enframing power of technological advancement. The question posed to us in my dream was both troubling and open-ended.

What I am arguing for in this paper is that the question concerning technology in educational contexts involves building dwelling caring as the ontological basis for a future of learning. That is, how we might engage in developing sites of experience through technology that can tap into the curiosity and creativity of teachers and learners. This requires patience and practice as we navigate the multidimensionality of our experience and the necessity of care. For me, this involves the cultivation of care and its 'incessant practice' so as us to think, dwell and build new teaching relationships and learning experiences. It these experiences which may provide an alternative future, a future that embraces caring as a fundamental principle for learning.

 

Author Biography

Mary Zournazi is an Australian film maker, author, and cultural philosopher. Her multi-awarding winning documentary Dogs of Democracy (2017) was screened worldwide. Her most recent documentary film, My Rembetika Bluesis a film about life, love, and Greek music. She is the author of several books including Hope - New Philosophies for Change, Inventing Peace with the German filmmaker Wim Wenders and most recently Justice and Lovewith Rowan Williams.

 

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Tronto, J. 2013. Caring Democracy: Markets, Equality and Justice. New York, NY: New York University Press.         [ Links ]

Tronto, J. 2015. Who Cares?How to Reshape a Democratic Politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.         [ Links ]

Tronto, J. 2017. 'There is an alternative: homines curans and the limits of Neoliberalism', International Journal of Care and Caring, 1(1): 27-43.         [ Links ]

Veck, W. 2014. 'Inclusive pedagogy: ideas from the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas', Cambridge Journal of Education, 44(4): 451-464.         [ Links ]

Wrathall, M. (ed.) 2018. Heidegger on Technology. London: Routledge.         [ Links ]

 

 

Submitted: 24 March 2022
Accepted: 5 July 2022

 

 

Corresponding Author: m.zournazi@unsw.edu.au
  Mary Zournazi
1 See Jeff Malpas and Ingo Farin's (2016) edited collection Reading Heidegger's Black Notebooks 19311941 for an important analysis of Heidegger's role in philosophical thinking, controversies surrounding his work, and without a doubt he's continual and substantive influence on contemporary thought. In particular, see Malpas's chapter 'On the Reading of Heidegger: Situating the Black Notebooks'.
2 In the context of this paper, it is the Heideggerian and dialogical approaches to what I call 'thinking with' that I am concerned to develop and consider in the classroom. I would suggest that Heidegger's work sheds light on approaches to thinking that often underpin many contemporary arguments and philosophical approaches to identity, language and thought. For instance, Jacques Derrida's thinking -including his ideas on différance - are often inspired by or are a response to Heidegger's approach to 'thinking'. See Derrida's (2016) Heidegger: Thie Question of Being and History. Other writers have developed different approaches to 'thinking' and 'technology', most importantly in relation to technology see the exemplary works of authors such as Donna Haraway (1991, 2016).
3 See also Karen Barad's (2007) influential work on questions of entanglement and ethical relations in Meeting thie Universe Halfway: Quantum Phiysics and thie Entanglement of Matter and Meaning.
4 There have been some very important engagements with Levinas's (1985) work and the questions of otherness evoking this dialogical sense of responsibility in the educational context. See Wayne Veck's (2014) article on 'Inclusive pedagogy: ideas from the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas'.
5 It is here that we can also extend this thinking through some of Gaston Bachelard's work on imagination and phenomenological dwelling.This aspect of the phenomenology of learning I seek to develop elsewhere. See Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space (2014 [1958]).
6 I understand Bachelard's 'tonalization' as a kind of attunement, the invitation to new forms of worldly consciousness that evoke relations to place, time, and memory - and, as I have argued elsewhere, how to recognise the continual systems of transformation and change that evolve in the world, and which provide the diversity of experience (Bennett & Zournazi, 2019).
7 See the Cura myth in Hyginus, Fabulae 200-277. The myths of Hyginus, publications in Humanistic Studies, no. 34. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1960. https://www.theoi.com/Text/HyginusFabulae1.html
8 See Julia Kristeva's (2018) rendering of the Cura myth. Her work provides some interesting accounts of how care involves rethinking of the dominant bio-medical approaches to health.
9 See also the key writers and thinkers around the politics of care including the early work of Carol Gilligan (1982) and more recent texts on around care Nel Noddings (1984), Joan Tronto (1993, 2013, 2015, 2017) and Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2017). Puig de la Bellacasa's work on speculative ethics and care provides a different perspective on the questions of 'concern'; she provides an important account of how to approach non-human, interspecies and planetary diversity. I address some of the different contexts of care in my introduction to this Special Issue on 'Care and the Future of Learning'.