My frequent partner in crime Pekka Ihanainen and I wrote a short piece on the need for an auditory pedagogy, one that extends beyond the dialogue inherent to many socialized pedagogies. We believe in dialogue as well, of course, but value the staccato rhythms, slowness, and stillness that digital technologies provide, particularly at such distance (geographically). From Seoul to Jyväskylä, Pekka and I have been trading short recordings on emergent topics. The citation is here as is the link to the article itself.

SeOppi

Need

Rapid movement and change challenges human interactions and environments, but it also makes experiential evolutionary resistance. We learn through repeated interactions with our lived environments, methodically building capacity and resilience in the face of motion and change. As with many processes in nature, learning takes time, yet it is this perceived slowness that becomes the pejorative in education with allusions to a lack of intelligence or capacity.

There is a need to reclaim the aspects of pedagogy that have been backgrounded in the era of foregrounded educational automation, standardized assessments, and granular learning objectives, where progress is measured in quantitative increments and minutiae. We look to interject aspects of stillness, silence, and (relative) slowness into our pedagogies, to build upon the pedagogy of composure (Noble & Watkins, 2009), the embodied pedagogy (Irwin, 1999), slow learning movements, and to a lesser extent the pedagogy of the psyche (Athanasou, 2003). Ultimately, pedagogy needs elements of slowness, stillness, and patience embedded into its structure to balance the foregrounded elements of immediacy, urgency, and a trend towards the avoidance of abstraction in societies accustomed to regimes of efficiency, accountability, and performance. In this short work, we demonstrate how this can be done with one particular mode, a mode prone to measurable and assessable elusiveness: audio.

By Michael Gallagher

My name is Michael Sean Gallagher. I am a Lecturer in Digital Education at the Centre for Research in Digital Education at the University of Edinburgh. I am Co-Founder and Director of Panoply Digital, a consultancy dedicated to ICT and mobile for development (M4D); we have worked with USAID, GSMA, UN Habitat, Cambridge University and more on education and development projects. I was a researcher on the Near Futures Teaching project, a project that explores how teaching at The University of Edinburgh unfold over the coming decades, as technology, social trends, patterns of mobility, new methods and new media continue to shift what it means to be at university. Previously, I was the Research Associate on the NERC, ESRC, and AHRC Global Challenges Research Fund sponsored GCRF Research for Emergency Aftershock Forecasting (REAR) project. I was an Assistant Professor at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies (한국외국어대학교) in Seoul, Korea. I have also completed a doctorate at University College London (formerly the independent Institute of Education, University of London) on mobile learning in the humanities in Korea.

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