Critical Digital Pedagogy: A Collection

The work of teachers is not just to teach. We are also responsible for the basic needs of students — helping students eat and live, and also helping them find the tools they need to reflect on the present moment. This is in keeping with Freire’s insistence that critical pedagogy be focused on helping students read their world; but more and more, we must together reckon with that world. Teaching must be an act of imagination, hope, and possibility. Education must be a practice done with hearts as much as heads, with hands as much as books. Care has to be at the center of this work. For the past ten years, the journal Hybrid Pedagogy has worked to help craft a theory of teaching and learning in and around digital spaces, not by imagining what that work might look like, but by doing, asking after, changing, and doing again. Since 2011, Hybrid Pedagogy has published over 400 articles from more than 200 authors focused in and around the emerging field of critical digital pedagogy. A selection of those articles are gathered here. This is the first peer-reviewed publication centered on the theory and practice of critical digital pedagogy. The collection represents a wide cross-section of both academic and non-academic culture and features articles by women, Black people, indigenous people, Chicanx and Latinx writers, disabled people, queer people, and other underrepresented populations. The goal is to provide evidence for the extraordinary work being done by teachers, librarians, instructional designers, graduate students, technologists, and more — work which advances the study and the praxis of critical digital pedagogy.

Jesse Stommel is co-founder of Digital Pedagogy Lab and Hybrid Pedagogy: the journal of critical digital pedagogy. He is co-author of An Urgency of Teachers: the Work of Critical Digital Pedagogy. Jesse is a documentary filmmaker and teaches courses about pedagogy, film, and new media. Jesse experiments relentlessly with learning interfaces, both digital and analog, and his research focuses on higher education pedagogy, critical digital pedagogy, and assessment. He's online at jessestommel.com and on Twitter @Jessifer.

Chris Friend welcomes people to new ways of thinking. He teaches first-year writing courses, helping students see writing as rhetoricians. He also teaches pedagogy courses, introducing educators to empowering and liberatory praxis. He feels most at home building courses that trick students into achieving more than they thought they could. Being an obsessive fan of Apple software, Tesla hardware, Asimov fiction, Star Trek utopias, Pixar storytelling, and NASA spaceflight makes him a special kind of nerd, but his cat doesn't seem to mind.

Sean Michael Morris is the Director of Digital Pedagogy Lab and Senior Instructor in Learning, Design, and Technology at the University of Colorado Denver. He tweets @slamteacher and blogs at seanmichaelmorris.com.