How do you go about a partnership project that intends to develop ideas bottom up? In the project “Hacking Innovative Pedagogies: Digital Education Rewilded” our intention is to “rewild” higher education, by focusing on just and fair pedagogies using bottom-up approaches. By “rewilding” higher education pedagogy we understand the rediscovery of ways that support the complexity of human learning, that take note of inequalities generated through human/digital technology relationships (Waller, 2007), with the overall aim to reduce the negative impacts of industry driven digital environment building (Bowers, 2014). This means that we want to return to the nested ingenuities communities of teachers and students carry with them. Instead of managing education from the top down, that can lead to monocultures of education, we want to set up processes and opportunities that include stakeholders and support the experimenting, (co-) creating and sharing of nested digi-tech solutions from the bottom up, that are more diverse and sensitive to local contexts. However, such an ambition requires a special approach and a consideration of what “partnership” means in this context.

In this presentation we will share our “pedagogy of methodology” (Otrel-Cass, 2022), and describe an approach to a partnership project where we want to identify people’s experiences, articulations and reflections about teaching and learning with digital technologies in different ways. As partners we want to focus on aspects of well-being, and the importance of taking nested teaching and learning cultures seriously but acknowledge that doing so requires a deep understanding of different institutional practices. While our focus on hacking and rewilding may give the impression of fast paced, technology-driven approaches, our partnership approach is underpinned by an ethic of care. This includes responsibility and respect for others and the motivation and willingness to protect the other, above all however, it means to listen (Noddings, 2012). The presentation will focus on how such an approach can support professional/teacher/student agency and what tools we are considering that might widen the possibilities for teachers and students to share their ideas and experiences to imagine new futures of teaching.

The “Hacking Innovative Pedagogies is an Erasmus+ funded partnership project that involves partners from 3 countries (Austria, Ireland, and Denmark). This project only started in the middle of 2022. In the short time since the team has worked together to refine our project plans, prepare a synthesis report and co-designed methods to ask teachers and students at our institutions about their experiences and ideas on how to rewild higher education pedagogies. In this presentation we will introduce the project and share our approaches and early insights.

Our methodology is based on “radical relationalism” (Barad, 2007). Subject-object, mind-body, nature-culture, emotion-cognition, are entangled in a performative “dance”. Barad emphasizes that: “meaning is not a property of individual words or groups of words but an ongoing performance of the world in its differential dance of intelligibility and unintelligibility” (p. 149). In our joint work, we started with a synthesis report on the topic of rewilding higher education pedagogy that was prepared through a multi-step process. A systematic literature search paved the beginning to map the key literature we needed to consider in this project. This search was interrupted by frequent exchanges and discussions. We then continued to turn this information into a map. The map was divided into four core areas and these themes were then summarised. These production cycles were iterative and characterised by our reflections and culminated in a partner meeting where we decided that we did not want to present definitions but questions. In order to open a dialogue, we asked team members of this project to briefly/spontaneously comment on those ideas in order to further develop ideas around “hacking innovative pedagogies” and move towards a “community definition”. We will share the evolution of this process and the unfolding results.

Each university in this partnership brings with it unique teaching and learning cultures. Amongst our objectives are to create active and unbounded learning spaces where teachers, students and digital education experts meet physically and virtually to reimagine traditional university habitats, formats, practices and infrastructures and ‘hack’ existing pedagogies by finding creative ways of overcoming known barriers and obstacles to more innovative and transformative pedagogies. As partners the outcomes of our interactions such as the synthesis report depict our process of becoming, a partnership characterized through a process of change, flight, or movement (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). In the synthesis report we show that this partnership journey so far resulted in us choosing not to provide definitive answers to what we mean by “hacking innovative pedagogy” in order to remain open to what is “out there” in the messy everyday of those actually engaged in innovative pedagogical practices. Also “hacking innovative pedagogy” is entangled with the social-historical context in which the concrete practices take place and therefore contains a sea of historical meaning – as any historical concept does (Adorno 2003, p.53). We will present the central ideas that for us fall under the umbrella of “hacking innovative pedagogy” to share the process of caring about each other’s differences and experiences.

Adorno, Theodor W. (2003). Einleitung in die Soziologie. [Vorlesung 1968]. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. duke university Press. Bowers, C. A. (2014). The false promises of the digital revolution: how computers transform education, work, and international development in ways that are ecologically unsustainable. New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1988). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Bloomsbury Publishing. Otrel-Cass, K. (2022). Presenting a students’ tale: The smartphone manifesto. International Journal of Educational Research, 114, 101999. Waller, T. (2007). ICT and social justice: educational technology, global capital and digital divides. Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, 5(1), 288-315.