Teacher Im/material: Challenging the new pedagogies of instructional

design

Erica McWilliam and Peter G.Taylor

Correspondence to: Erica McWilliam

School of Cultural and Policy Studies

Faculty of Education

Queensland University of Technology

Locked Bag No.2, Red Hill, Queensland, 4059.

Ph. (07) 8643412 (W), (07) 2164106 (H).

FAX (07) 8643728

e-mail: e.mcwilliam@qut.edu.au

p.taylor@gih.gu.edu.au

Teacher Im/material: Challenging the new pedagogies of instructional

design

Abstract

The authors critique the increasingly technologized teaching and

learning environment of higher education. They argue that fresh

pedagogical understandings are needed to inform thinking about

instructional design. While the imperative to use communication

technologies to increase learner access is laudable, the question of

'access to what' should also be addressed in all its complexity.

Disparate terrains of new literature about teaching and learning,

technology and corporeality can bring fresh perspectives to bear on the

nature of pedagogical work. However such literatures are rarely brought

together. In this paper the authors work across aspects of learning

theory, critical theory and post-structuralism to explore the question

'access to what'. In so doing they raise important questions about the

embodied nature of teaching and learning, and the potential of both

'embodied' and 'disembodied' teaching to produce and counter

marginalization. The argument is that all decisions about the

appropriateness of particular pedagogical practices must engage with

such questions.

As we enter the new millennium, educational researchers and teachers

are being hailed to a powerful vision of 'life-long' student learning

made possible by new technologies and the related forms of

instructional design they enable (Morrison, 1995). Somewhat ironically

for traditionalists, this literature often frames the teacher's

material presence in the learning context as an impediment to learning,

a stumbling block in the path of access to information, facilitated by

new forms of communication technology. At the same time as the material

is being displaced by the digital, an emerging area of educational

scholarship cautions us to re/member what bodies contribute to

pedagogical work (McWilliam, 1995, 1996; Shapiro, 1994). Indeed, we

have been told that inquiry into human capability as embodied is one of

the most precious new concepts of social theory in postmodern times

(Eagleton, 1990).

The status of the teacher at all levels of education is already

seriously weakened by the prevailing climate of client-centred

educational provision, the seductions of the Internet, and the idea of

self-managed learning, however this might be understood or interpreted

(Newson, 1994; Talbott, 1995). Furthermore, teachers generally do not

have the means to redress this weakness that other sorts of power might

make possible (McWilliam, 1995). In psychoanalytic terms, we have

increasingly been unable to 'occupy the symbolic position of subject

supposed to know' (Deutscher, 1994, p. 40). We have not yet begun to

understand what differences new forms of delivery are making to

pedagogy itself.

Because information technology is a terrain of academic endeavour quite

separate from the work in cultural studies and new sociologies which

focuses on theorizing the body, imperatives coming from these disparate

literatures are rarely if ever brought together. However, as work that

is currently mobilizing many academics in education and related

disciplines, they signal jointly that the material presence of the

teacher, as both the site and sight of pedagogical authority (Angel,

1994, p. 63), is ripe for interrogation. Are teachers becoming the

no/bodies of pedagogical work? What might be gained or lost in this

process?

For better and for worse, the embodied teacher is no longer considered

indispensable to learning in higher education. At the very least, we

are witnessing in the burgeoning academic work on 'open learning' a

preference for substituting the term 'delivery' for teaching, and/or

the substitution of 'instructional designer' for 'teacher'. The

following excerpt from a recent article on open learning is a case in

point:

Currently much attention is being paid to the pedagogical issues

related to the delivery of telematics-based distance education, such as

the context within which learning takes place and the role that the

course and learning environment design has in encouraging effective

learning...the principle issues are now becoming those of the

organisation and management of these virtual learning environments so

that effective learning, and course delivery, can take place. (our

italics) (Jennings, 1995, p. 30)

What is significant about this description of pedagogy is that teaching

is never a part of it. In this quote, 'teaching' has been displaced as

part of the normal binary system of talking about educational practice

ie, teaching-and-learning. This displacement has been made possible

through the bifurcation of teaching into design-and-delivery. In turn,

both design and delivery are held to be the outcomes of particular

organizational and management processes and strategies. The stress here

is on constructing a more efficient loop from academic manager to

instructional designer to 'deliverer' to learner, and (feed)back to

academic manager. The embodied teacher is unnecessary to this process.

Promotional material being used to push new learning technologies has

celebrated the vision of the de-peopled or virtual campus in ways which

are deeply troubling to many academics (Newson, 1994; Taylor, 1996,

1997). Traditionally, the work of the academic teacher has required the

presence of fleshly bodies to lecture and tutor at certain times and at

certain venues on a 'real' campus. In blurring the spatial and temporal

boundaries of pedagogical work, the stand-alone academic package and

World-Wide Web based interactivity represent a real threat to the job

security of the academic-as- teacher. Their pedagogical skills as

on-campus workers can quickly be rendered redundant. Virtual university

offerings require quite different sorts of skills from those who are

employed to support learning (eg, Thach & Murphy, 1995).

While academics see a threat inherent in such developments, little has

been done to mount cogent pedagogical arguments to counter such moves.

The claim that a human face is essential to an effective learning

environment is just as romantic and unconvincing as the romance which

has been built around high technology as the universal educational

panacea. Whatever arguments might be mounted in favour of the former

and against the latter, neither techno-paranoia nor nostalgia for

(g)olden times will suffice. It is time to consider carefully what

difference a teacher's material body can make. This means pushing

beyond simplistic notions of the human need for social interaction on a

'real' campus, by coming to grips with some fundamental

epistemological concerns about corporeality, knowing and pedagogy.

In the following discussion, we will consider the importance of the

issue of access as the dominant rationale for the shift to new

dis-embodied teaching technologies. We will then trace the way in which

psychological and social analyses of education frame marginality in

relation to teaching and learning. Finally, we will consider what new

theories of the body add to pedagogical thinking about marginalization.

Access, open learning and the disappearing teacher

There are many references to the issue of access in the instructional

design and open learning literature. Rarely is the meaning of access

made explicit. Nevertheless, there is a commonly held view that access

refers to participation, and that therefore any discussion of access is

a discussion of the move from an elite to a mass higher education

system (Smith, Scott & Mackay, 1993). Discussion is focused on

increasing the participation of marginalized students - ie,

'non-traditional students...mature age and part-time students, those

form disadvantaged and/or ethnic backgrounds, and, in some course

areas, women' (p. 319). Others focus more specifically on the issue of

geographical location as the compelling imperative. Latchem and

Pritchard (1994) for example, in discussing the establishment of the

Open Learning Agency of Australia, speak of access in terms of 'the use

of modern communication technologies and innovative means to complement

and expand the reach of traditional

print-based communication and education' (p. 18), that is, to provide

opportunities for participation at remote sites. Irrespective of the

particular interpretation given to the term access, these discussions

tend to locate access as an issue of entry - to have access is to have

the right and opportunity to gain entry to higher education as a formal

system for credentialling learning.

However, some have argued that advocacy of access needs to push beyond

entry to question what it is that is being accessed (Taylor, 1997).

Access is always access to something. An example of the value of asking

'access to what?' can be seen in the work of Milone and Salpeter

(1996), who, in focusing on computers in American schools, extended

the issue of access to ask how computers were being used differently by

students (p. 40). They found several promising trends, including an

increasing use of computers to support 'higher order activities' in low

socio-economic communities, and that these communities were just as

likely to have exemplary computer-using teachers in their schools as

any other community. However, not all researchers who look beyond entry

are as sanguine about their findings. Judi Walker (1994), for example,

in researching the impact of open learning on people with disabilities,

identified the inaccessibility of support/advice services, library

research facilities and isolation from academic support as major

barriers for her respondents once they had entered the academy.

Clearly access in the sense of 'right of entry' is a necessary but not

sufficient condition to achieve equity in terms of learning outcomes.

In the open learning literature there is also a notion that access

tends to be focused on the delivery of something - with the implicit

assumption that information can and should be seen as a object -

tangible and portable. In the virtual classroom all is digital, and

most textual. The assumption that pedagogy works mind-to-mind, produces

a silence about the informers and the knowers in terms of 'the language

of the body, the world we carry on weight-bearing joints, the world we

hear in sudden hums and giggles' (Grumet, 1988, p. xv). Certainly there

is no space for considering the possibility of a corporeal dimension to

knowing, nor information beyond what can be digitalised. That access

might need to include, at times, access to the literal body of the

teacher and that this, in turn, might have particular importance for

particular learners, remains unaddressed.

Universities should work to promote the entry of those marginalized by

issues of gender, ethnicity, culture, class, age, disability or

geography. In terms of these issues, new technologies have much to

offer. For example, the explicitness that these new communication

technologies demand can make visible and therefore unacceptable much of

the prejudice and stereotyping which is still pervasive in more

traditional course materials and academic discourses. What is being

ignored is the potential to create new categories of marginality or to

re-work and thereby exacerbate old ones.

Teacher-based pedagogy as marginalizing practice

There is now quite an extensive literature within the psychology and

sociology of education expressing concern about who gets access to

shared cultural knowledge. The idea that the citizen should, as the

learner, be the centre of the pedagogical process, or that the

citizen-as-learner should be inclusive of an entire spectrum of class,

race, gender, age and disability is nevertheless a relatively recent

historical development. The importance of privileging learning over

teaching is a legacy of the concerns of the predecessors of

contemporary educational psychology - Rogers, Maslow, Kelly, Erickson,

Piaget and others - that pedagogical studies were too teacher-focused.

Education was fundamentally ignorant about what learners themselves

brought to the educational experience.

'I taught them but they did not learn' continued to be recognised as a

central dilemma of educational practice. It was the perspective of the

learner, not prescriptions of good teaching practice, that demanded

elaboration. This position has also been adopted in more recent work

conducted within the framework of phenomenography (see Marton, 1981),

which has resulted in the elaboration of students' approaches to

learning, often represented in the distinction between deep and surface

approaches (Ramsden, 1992).

However, discussions of the learner's perspective and of good teaching

practices have been brought together in the conceptual frameworks

associated with constructivism. These frameworks address issues of the

epistemological understandings underlying the (cognitive) activities of

learners (Prawat and Floden, 1994), continuing the focus on the

knowledge that learners bring to the educational experience.

Constructivist perspectives also involve quite specific elaborations of

the pedagogical implications of those understandings, exemplified by

Martin Simon's (1995) work in developing a model of teacher

decision-making with respect to the teaching of mathematics. Other

constructivist work has a decidedly social, rather than individualist,

perspective. For example, Stella Vosniadou (1996) has called for a new

conception of the mind 'not as an individual information processor, but

as a biological, developing system that exists equally well within the

individual brain and in the tools, artifacts, and symbolic systems used

to facilitate social and cultural interaction' (p. 95). Thus the

boundaries of educational psychology are also moving.

Critical educational sociologists have also worked to reconceive

notions of the individual learner as a separate entity and teachers as

purveyors of neutral knowledge. They have denounced teacher-centred and

euro-centric pedagogy as practices which render learners already made

vulnerable by the politico-social realities of capitalist societies

more vulnerable still. Their framing of issues of access is therefore

quite different in many respects from that of educational psychologists

and instructional designers. For example, where educational

psychologists speak of 'teaching and learning', critical sociologists

are more likely to opt for the term 'pedagogy' as more inclusive of the

totality of classroom events as cultural and social productions. Since

the publication of Michael Young's Knowledge and Control (1971), the

new sociology of education has expressed a preference for the term

critical pedagogy, with 'critical' being more closely aligned with

conceptions of critical thinking which derive from Jurgen Habermas's

analysis of the power relations of capitalism than with John Dewey's

understanding of the term. Critical pedagogy has insisted on the moral

and political dimensions of education, drawing attention to the link

between marginalisation in pedagogical work and minoritarian issues as

a broader social politics.

While sharing this critical agenda, a number of feminists have argued

the need to address the lived experience of both students and teachers

in a way that an earlier radical sociology, with its macro political

agendas, tended to overlook. For example, in Bitter Milk: Women and

Teaching (1988), an inquiry into the pedagogical roles played by women

in the last two centuries, Madeleine Grumet documents the challenge of

reclaiming 'the work of women' by transforming a pedagogical role which

has been stigmatised as 'women's work' (p. 58). Grumet points to

contradictions in the ways in which women teachers have enacted

pedagogical work in modern schooling culture. At the same time,

feminists have drawn attention to the power relationships which exist

within traditional classrooms, by drawing attention to abusive pedagogy

in all its forms, including sexual harassment, and its effects on the

at-risk learner. They highlight the fact that abusive pedagogy still

occurs all too frequently in educational settings, with very negative

consequences for learners already marginalized by their social identity

(see Culley and Portuges, 1985).

Other pedagogical analyses have been less insistent in their analyses

of 'the truth' about education and access. In recent writing, there has

been a retreat from the somewhat evangelical tone which has

characterised much of the alternative or avant garde writing in the

1980s. With poststructuralism's insistence that 'all Holy Wars require

casualties and infidels, all utopias come wrapped in barbed wire'

(Hebdige, 1988, p.196), calls to liberation in the classroom have been

themselves made problematic. A more sceptical post-critical turn in

critical pedagogy is evidenced in a new generation of feminist analyses

(Gore, 1993; Lather, 1991; McWilliam, 1994).

Critical and poststructural thinking about pedagogy have come together

in postcolonial scholarship to produce some very interesting analyses

of the way that bodies play a role in the marginalisation of learners.

We learn from postcolonial scholars that Western schooling has

privileged the written text over oral and performative texts within a

larger economy of communication. In this way local texts which are more

likely to depend on the physical presence of the communicator become

reduced to an alter/native (and inferior) discursive and inscriptive

economy. With writing hierarchically placed over and above utterance or

bodily enactment, the printed page of literature is privileged as the

prime site of knowledge production. Postcolonial writers note the

importance of literary education in 'the progressive rarefication of

the rapacious, exploitative and ruthless actor of history into the

reflective subject of literature' (Viswanathan, cited in Ashcroft,

Griffiths & Tiffin, 1995, p. 425). Viswanathan shares with other

postcolonial writers a concern to show how techniques of teaching such

as requiring the recitation of set pieces of poetry, prose and drama

reinforce such textual representations, and thus provide an effective

mode of moral, political and spiritual inculcation. Recitation allows

the written text as the 'tongue' of the colonizer to enter the body of

the colonized. In reciting literary texts, the colonial subject speaks

as if s/he were the imperial speaker/master rather than the

subjectified colonial.

Clearly the privileging of print technologies over oral transmission

has done something to change power relationships in learning

communities. Uttering words in the material presence of the teacher

does something to re/form the identity of learner and teacher. And

there are political consequences which go beyond the boundaries of

classroom practice. Material access of teacher to student allowed a

particular sort of re-inscription of the colonized body as an

educational subject. At the same time, particular embodied cultural

traditions (eg, story-telling, dance) have been de-legitimated as an

effect of technological progress. Given that these are some of the

corpor/realities of education to date, how might new disembodied

pedagogical events be producing new positive and repressive effects in

terms of how they work as systems of cultural exchange?

Re-thinking access to the teacher's body

Whether scholars come to blame Descartes or Rousseau for the prevalence

of a mind/body dualisms in Western scholarship, the fact remains that,

in the history of Western thought, a mind/body dichotomy has privileged

the mind as that which defines human 'being', while the corpus has been

interrogated as the excess baggage of human capability. This is an

epistemology that works across the entire spectrum of the educational

disciplines, from cognitive science to radical sociology.

This standpoint about human capability is an outcome of an

understanding of the body as a 'fixed system of muscle, bone, nerves

and organs' which transcends history and culture, and thus is 'amenable

to scientific examination ... a site of established fact' (Kirk, 1993,

p. 3). Until relatively recently, such an understanding went

unchallenged as bio-medical and academic orthodoxy. Thus research which

purports to focus on bodies in educational settings tends to speak of

body language rather than wrestle with thornier issues of carnal

knowledge.

For more than a decade, however, a project of re-covering the

importance of the body as a field of political and cultural activity

has been under way (Grosz, 1994; Leder, 1990; Shilling, 1993). This

project does not reject the body as the bio-medical korper out of hand,

but distinguishes this from the idea of the body as leib, a 'lived body'

by drawing attention to corporeality or embodiment as a generative

principle (Leder, 1990, p. 5). The body becomes integral to a

learner's constituted subjectivity, a social and cultural production as

well as an object of external gaze. This literature argues that the

body is emphatically not merely a presence.

The teacher's body, therefore, is neither simply innocent nor simply

profane in pedagogical work (McWilliam, 1996). It should therefore not

be celebrated as the source of pedagogical inspiration nor dismissed

as an increasingly unnecessary and even unwelcome piece of the

pedagogical furniture. We know from the increased surveillance of

teachers through many policy initiatives in recent years that the

teacher's body is no thoroughly benign maternal, nurturing entity -

good reason, some may argue, to move to its eradication. We therefore

want to take a careful look at the role bodies play in understanding

what it means to know things, how utterance differs from printed

notes, how pleasure in learning and the desire to know (and to teach)

are differently performed as textual images or embodied engagements.

Any teacher who takes part in pedagogical events is forced to confront

the limits of her/his own anatomical body as well as her disciplinary

'bodies' of knowledge. Roland Barthes (1978) points to this as a

difficulty for many academics:

I can do everything with my language but not with my body. What I hide

by my language, my body utters. I can deliberately mould my message,

not my voice. It is by my voice, whatever it says, that another will

recognize that 'something is wrong with me'... My body is a stubborn

child, my language is a very civilized adult. (p. 45)

This in itself may be good reason for instructional designers to

by-pass or override the material bodies of academic teachers. Our own

experience tells us that there is much more seductiveness in the texts

some colleagues produce on the screen or in scholarly articles than is

apparent in their physical presence and utterance as they deliver

conference papers or mass lectures. Other colleagues tell about being

somehow let down when brought face-to-face with an external student

whose work they admired but whom they had not seen.

Yet we have also shared with our colleagues the experience of students'

saying 'I need to see you', and refusing the idea that e-mail, phone,

fax or letter would do. We need to take into account, therefore, that

the teacher's body can come to stand for a body of knowledge and that

engagement with this body can at times have positive outcomes for

learners. Accounts provided in Jill Kerr Conway's anthology of

autobiographies, Written by Herself (1992) illustrate this point. These

accounts of the lives of successful women indicate that an elating and

elated teaching body is often the sight/site out of which future

scholars are propelled into an on-going scholastic or creative career

in a particular disciplinary field. They show that the teacher's

performance can be enacted and observed as an encounter with knowing

which is profoundly engaging, even erotic. Zora Neale Hurston, for

example, writes of her experience at a night school in Baltimore:

There I met a man who was to give me the key to certain things. ..There

is no more dynamic teacher anywhere under any skin. He radiates newness

and nerve ... Something about his face killed the drabness and the

discouragement in me ... He is not a pretty man, but he has the face of

a scholar, not dry and set like, but fire flashes from his deep-set

eyes. His high-bridged, but sort of bent nose over his thin-lipped

mouth ... Caesar or Virgil in tan skin.

That night, he liquefied the immortal brains of Coleridge and let the

fountain flow. I do not know whether something in my attitude attracted

his attention, or whether what I had done previously made him direct

the stream at me. Certainly every time he lifted his eyes from the

page, he looked right into my eyes. It did not make me see him

particularly, but it made me see the poem ...

But he did something more positive than that. He stopped me after class

and complimented me on my work. He never asked me anything about myself

but he looked at me and toned his voice in such a way that I felt he

knew all about me. (Kerr Conway, 1992, pp. 44-45)

There are a number of points that could be made here in relation to the

materiality of the pedagogical event. The first is that the student's

interest is not an overtly sexual interest, but it is physical, a

recognition of the teacher as 'a body of knowledge'. Importantly for

our exploration of pedagogy and access, the teacher's desire to teach

appears to converge with the student's desire to learn, to be

instructed, as mutual, embodied self-interest. The teacher did not

'seduce' his student by overtly flattering her, but rather by

performing his scholarship with his body ('he has the face of a

scholar') and by acknowledging her approximation to his pose, his love

of the discipline. Importantly, the student here does not mis/take the

teacher's erotic performance as an invitation into a relationship with

him ('it did not make me see him particularly') but experiences it as a

irresistible invitation into the love of poetry.

Of course, such manifestations of a teacher's desire to instruct and a

student's desire to be instructed are always ambiguous, at times

threatening to collapse into a very overt sexual politics. However, we

also know too that the World Wide Web has its own problematic sexual

politics - the virtual space cannot be relied upon to be a more

virtuous space.

Utterance, too, can be a very seductive part of a teacher's material

classroom presence. The pleasure of classification and order is

strongly identified with the utterance of such a teaching body by

another of the women writers in the Kerr Conway anthology, Mary Floy

Washburn:

Professor LeRoy Cooley taught Chemistry and Physics in crystal-clear

lectures: his favourite word was 'accurate' which he pronounced

'ackerate', and I have loved, though by no means always attained

'ackeracy' ever since. Particularly delightful was quantitative

analysis, with the excitement of adding up the percentages of the

different ingredients in the hope that their sum might approach one

hundred ... (pp. 132-133)

The kinds of pleasure teachers may take in their work is, of course, a

sticking point for feminists and other critical writers who point to

the fact that this pleasure is all too often at the expense of the

student-as-prey. For psychoanalytic feminists, there is concern that

the teacher's exhilaration may result in 'a spectacular missing by each

of the other' as the teacher as ego-ideal appropriates and effaces the

student as Other (Deutscher, 1994, p. 37). As a psychoanalytic

feminist, Penelope Deutscher argues for an ethics of mediation in this

'love-of-teaching-self' (p. 36). While she acknowledges 'the elating

sensation of a physical carnation of one's body as teacher ... the

overt pleasure produced by the possibility of one's own performance as

empowered subject of knowledge, the seductive effect of instantaneity

between teaching and learning body' (p. 36), she also, appropriately,

points to the need to interrupt many such seductions on ethical

grounds.

There are other ways of understanding how the teacher's body can work

on behalf of marginalized social groups. A case in point is the

'exploration of the difference that difference makes for the complex

dynamics of pedagogy' (Simon, 1995, p. 92, his italics) that Roger

Simon provides in his article, Face to Face with Alterity: postmodern

Jewish identity and the eros of pedagogy. Simon considers the way in

which 'teaching as a Jew' focuses his attention on how the performative

invocation of his own embodied identity is both valuable and troubling

as an enactment of a politics of difference (p. 93). He notes the

importance of the 'feudal-like economy' of the university as the frame

for a pedagogy 'in which symbolic and material capital are dispensed,

and filiation and fidelity returned' (p. 96). Importantly, as he goes

on to say, such structures are not lived in abstract but are

experienced as palpable:

Embodied differently in relation to factors such as age, gender,

sexuality, or racialization, these structures are manifest in such

recognizable forms as sexual desire, respect, affection, deep

admiration, projection of parental or progenitive figures, and the

sublation of institutional hierarchy in the quest for personal

intimacy. (p. 96)

Simon argues that the face-to-face encounter matters inasmuch as it

allows the display of how he performs with his body and utterance a

Jewish identity with the purpose of rupturing those totalizing

categories like 'Jew' which produce the effects of marginalization (p.

102).

This is not to argue that only face-to-face encounters can produce

truly subversive pedagogical effects on behalf of marginalized groups,

or even that they are the best means of doing so. Patrick Palmer's

Queer Theory, homosexual teaching bodies, and an infecting pedagogy

(1996) proceeds from a similar marginal politics, but his enactment of

a subversive pedagogy on behalf of homosexual bodies involves

technology that removes the teacher's material body from the

pedagogical event. He considers how insisting on the homosexual

teaching body, as a viral transmitter within the virtual realities of

cyberspace, can open up spaces of radical pedagogical possibility. He

pushes 'the essentialist and homophobic notion of homosexual =

infection = virus = ?' to serve the cause of 'an effective and

infective pedagogy' (p. 87). Palmer states his purpose thus:

Using the metaphor, and the literalness, of the infectious homosexual

body allows us to locate a body that is conscious of its own

manufacture... By insisting on the need for a corporeal pedagogy for

emergent orders in tertiary teaching, I hope to stimulate educators to

look for more flexible and disparate pedagogies for open learning. (p.

87)

This type of work draws heavily on new theorizing of technology and the

body being provided by feminist and gay and lesbian writers who 'look

... for the trickster figures [in science and technology] that might

turn a stacked deck into a potential set of wild cards for refiguring

possible worlds' (Haraway, 1991, p. 4).

However, as Zoe Sofia (1993) points out, it is important to do more in

analyses of technologies and their applications to pedagogy than to

track 'progress'. It is necessary also to track 'regress', to seek to

understand forms of technology such as computer technology in a broad

context of technological formations and non-technological 'causes' (pp.

1-2). Like Haraway, Sofia commits herself to exploring the irrational

dimensions of information systems, to fingering the lived

contradictions of a high-tech information age by concentrating not on

boundaries (eg, nature or artifice) but on the importance of the

blurring of such distinctions (p. 10). She argues:

[O]ur pleasurable and seemingly life-enhancing technologies can also

have nasty histories and devastating side effects; the 'greater good'

of the life force may be served by criticism that bears this in mind,

even as it is open to the possibilities for enjoyment technologies

afford. (p. 4)

Implications for instructional design

Clearly access is not merely a matter of more technology or higher

technology, but of getting the pedagogical rationale right in the light

of more compelling theories of the body and of technology. This is

unlikely to happen in a techno-culture which celebrates high technology

as the solution to matters of student access, narrowly understood as

entry and cost-effective packaging and delivery of information. The

principal shapers of this emergent techno-culture for university

teaching have themselves found rewards in a particular pedagogical

environment - delivered primarily through the computer screen. Thus the

site/sight of satisfaction of their education desires has been

characterised by digital rather than corporeal communication. It is not

that this should be seen as a deficient pedagogical model, but simply

that it militates against other forms of knowledge production. Of

course, this is not to suggest that these individuals would not

acknowledge the fact that the performing arts, for example, demand

embodied teaching. Rather, our point is that there are pedagogical

judgements to be made in a host of disciplines that need more that

either-or logic about digitality or corporeality. While information is

conflated with knowledge, and while minds are divorced from bodies as

the site of knowing, we should remain sceptical about the capacity of a

techno-culture to make the sorts of pedagogical judgements which

maximise access and minimise marginalization.

And this will not happen when the epistemological frame assumes that

the teacher's body is simply im/material to issues of access. Rather

than declaring the disappearing teacher as a necessary stage in the

move to increasing access, we would be better served by examining the

state of impoverishment of the pedagogical principles that underlie

such simplistic thinking. Then perhaps we can start bringing new

thinking tools to bear on learner marginalization, and this will

include new thinking about how the teacher's body matters.

References

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We note that the move at the University of Maine to create a ''video

campus without teachers or buildings' where students 'would no longer

need to attend lectures, but could tune into their chosen subjects on

TV screens either from home or other campuses, and then 'interact' with

a teacher hundreds of kilometres away' was reported in the Australian

press as having 'prompted outrage' among academics in the USA (The

Australian, 19/4/95, p. 26).