Exploring Silences in the Field of Computer Assisted Language Learning 303106500X, 9783031065002

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Exploring Silences in the Field of Computer Assisted Language Learning Anwar Ahmed

Exploring Silences in the Field of Computer Assisted Language Learning

Anwar Ahmed

Exploring Silences in the Field of Computer Assisted Language Learning

Anwar Ahmed Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics York University Toronto, Canada

ISBN 978-3-031-06500-2 ISBN 978-3-031-06501-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06501-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Harvey Loake This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To my family

Contents

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Introduction: Technology, Language Education, and a Geography of Silence

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Technological Determinism Versus Teacher Agency in CALL

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Blue Sky Utopias Versus Capitalist Motives: A Critical Theory of Technology for CALL

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Interrogating the Promise of Temporal Flexibility in CALL

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Emotions in Technology-Mediated Pedagogical Spaces

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Social Media Echo Chambers and Unfulfilled Promises of Democratic Education

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Conclusion: Toward a Critical Hermeneutics of Technology for Language Teacher Education

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Afterword

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Index

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Technology, Language Education, and a Geography of Silence

Abstract This chapter introduces the main purpose of the book, i.e., to pay attention to some areas of inquiry that have remained silent in the field of Computer Assisted Language Learning. First, I present a brief historical overview of the field. Then I discuss how technology is conceptualized in this book. Following Michel de Certeau, I make a case why silence analysis is important to understand the current state of the field. Then I describe my method of silence analysis, which is followed by brief overviews of the subsequent chapters. I close the chapter with an invitation to a dialogic reading of the book. Keywords CALL · Silence · Technology · Language · Education · De Certeau

This book is about technology and language education. It is not against technology. It is not thoughtlessly pro-technology, either. The book aims to interrogate what technology does to whom, under what circumstances, and with what effect. Here, I agree with the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer (2013) that “It’s not an either/or—being ‘anti-technology’ is perhaps the only thing more foolish than being unquestioningly ‘pro-technology’— but a question of balance that our lives hang upon” (Foer, 2013, para. 15). I pursue this “question of balance” through a method that I would © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Ahmed, Exploring Silences in the Field of Computer Assisted Language Learning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06501-9_1

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like to call silence analysis. This method begins with a position that what is not said is not less important than what is said. In the preceding two decades, much has been said about the roles of technology in language education. However, the question I am interested in is: what is not said about technology and language education that could have been said? Silence is never silent. Contrary to its traditional portrayals as passive and less-than-meaningful, silence performs various communicative functions. Although interpretations of the functions of silence may vary across cultural contexts, I argue that silence not only adds new meanings to speech communications, but it also is a mode of communication on its own. When applied to a field of study, silence appears to be particularly significant. All fields of scholarly study go through certain historical periods marking shifts in thinking and practice regarding theories, methods, and areas of investigation. This means that some theories and methods become more popular than others. Consequently, a general classification emerges: some theories, methods, and concepts occupy the center stage; others struggle to come to the center but remain at the periphery; and yet some others remain silent. For a scholarly, rigorous, and honest inquiry of a field, what remains silent is no less important than the voices loudly occupying the center stage. This book is a deliberate attempt to shed light on some theories, ideas, and practices that have remained silent in the field of Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL).

CALL: An Overview of the Field Computers have been used for teaching and learning languages since the late 1960s (Bax, 2003; Warschauer & Healey, 1998). This means that the field of Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) is roughly a half-century old now. Writing in the late 1990s, Warschauer and Healey (1998) divided the historical development of the CALL field into three stages: behaviouristic CALL, communicative CALL, and integrative CALL. The first stage was influenced by behaviorist learning theories and it viewed computers as “a mechanical tutor which never grew tired or judgmental and allowed students to work at an individual pace” (p. 57). Repetitive drill-and-practice activities were a characteristic feature of CALL pedagogy at this stage. With the development of personal computers and the weakening influence of behaviorist learning

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theories, CALL gradually gravitated to the communicative stage in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Teaching and learning activities focused more on language use than on language itself. Thus, the communicative stage of CALL “corresponded to cognitive theories which stressed that learning was a process of discovery, expression, and development” (p. 57). In the early 1990s, some critics pointed to the old-fashioned ways of computer use, for example, taking students to computer labs once in a week. At the same time, the field of second language acquisition experienced a growing concern about communicative approaches to teaching and learning. Many teachers and researchers started to depart from a cognitive approach to a sociocultural approach to communicative language teaching (CLT). This led to the integrative stage of CALL, which sought “both to integrate various skills (e.g., listening, speaking, reading, and writing) and also integrate technology more fully into the language learning process” (Warschauer and Healey (1998, p. 58). The three stages of CALL briefly described have generated many debates and discussions. For example, Bax (2003) raised concerns about the CALL stages in terms of inconsistencies, ambiguities, and unclear criteria. To remedy these problems, he proposed three new categories: Restricted, Open, and Integrated CALL. For Restricted CALL, the computer is not integrated into the curriculum; it is something extra or optional. In Open CALL, students interact with the computer and occasionally with other students. For an Integrated CALL, both teachers and students view the computer as a normal part of the lesson. The ultimate aim of an Integrated CALL, according to Bax (2003), should be the normalization of technology, i.e., a stage when the computer will be so embedded in everyday practice that it will become “invisible.” While the historical periodization and classification of CALL stages is an interesting area of work, it is not my main goal here (see Davies, Otto, & Rüschoff, 2013 for more details about the history of CALL). What is important for my purpose is an understanding that the field has progressed with remarkable speed since the 1960s. Its progression has been influenced by new developments in second language acquisition (SLA) theories as well as by technological innovations. I would like to conclude this brief overview of the field by noting two important points about CALL. First, the name of the field is based on the assumption that the computer always “assists” language learning. Therefore, the field has a positive tendency in terms of research and practice.

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For the most part, researchers and practitioners begin with the presumption that the use of the computer will assist language learners. As a result, very little is known about if, how, and to what extent the computer might have a negative impact on language learning. Second, although at the beginning of the field’s journey, the computer was the most important technological tool, very soon a variety of digital tools were integrated into the teaching and learning of languages. This led to an attempt in the 1980s to rename the field as Technology Enhanced Language Learning (TELL). This renaming acknowledged that the computer was no longer the center of attention, and that the role of technologies was not merely to “assist” but to “enhance” language learning. Along this line of thinking, Kern (2006) asked if CALL should still be called CALL. He believed that “the rapid convergence of functionality across digital devices, and our growing reliance on such devices for communication, means we may soon need to refer broadly to information and communication technologies rather than specifically to computers in our research” (p. 185). While I agree with Kern’s suggestion, in keeping with the vast body of literature developed under the banner of CALL, I continue to use this acronym. In my use, the acronym CALL refers broadly to the utilization of various types of information and communication technology in teaching and learning second/additional languages.

Understanding Technology The word technology has become so pervasive in contemporary discourses that we sometimes forget to take the time to discuss its meanings. If we look back, we will see that the history of technology is as old as the history of humanity itself. Humans have always used technology to meet their needs. In ancient times (e.g., during the stone age), people used various tools for hunting animals and protecting themselves against human and natural forces. Over the millennia, the notion of technology has evolved from tools and practices of survival to those of improvement and enhancement. As Rudi Volti (2006) put it, “Technologies are developed and applied so that we can do things not otherwise possible, or so that we can do them cheaper, faster, and easier” (p. 4). Although the key function of modern technologies is to improve the conditions of living, their success depends on how people use them. This leads to a general consensus among many contemporary scholars that technology is more than machine (Selwyn, 2017).

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A good starting point is Val Dusek’s (2006) discussion of the three characterizations of technology: (1) technology as hardwire, (2) technology as rules, and (3) technology as system. Similarly, Lievrouw and Livingstone (2002) described three interconnected aspects of technology: artefacts and devices, activities and practices, and context. In this conceptualization, technology involves hardwire and people’s knowledge and activities with the hardwire in specific contexts of use. While Dusek’s three characterizations and Lievrouw and Livingstone’s three aspects of technology are significant and will be alluded to later in the book, in this introductory chapter I draw particularly upon Stephen Kline’s (1985) notion of technology. Kline’s work was instrumental in the early days of the discipline which is now widely known as Science and Technology Studies (STS). He noted that the term technology was being used with little care. It was often used as an epithet to symbolize progress. So, he discussed four usages of the term to unpack its meaning. First, technology denotes manufactured hardwire or artifacts. In this usage, technology is things that do not occur naturally, for example, cars and computers. Second, technology refers to the process of manufacturing hardwire. This process involves much more than the machinery and the people. For this reason, Kline calls it sociotechnical system of manufacture, which involves “all the elements needed to manufacture a particular kind of hardwire, the complete working system including its inputs: people; machinery; resources; processes; and legal, economic, political and physical environment” (p. 216). Third, technology refers to “the information, skills, processes, and procedures for accomplishing tasks” (p. 216)—collectively called sociotechnical system. This system denotes knowledge, technique, know-how, or methodology of achieving certain goals. Kline believed that these three usages provide a good understanding of the term technology. Yet, he added a fourth usage, which he believed was “essential to understanding the human implications of ‘technology’” (p. 216). He called it sociotechnical systems of use, which “form the basis of what we do with the hardwire after we have manufactured it” (p. 216). By discussing these four usages, Kline showed how technology works as various systems and may support extensions of human capacities. His work pointed to how “we have learned to vastly extend our muscular, sensing, and mental capacities through the use of sociotechnical systems of manufacture and use” (p. 217). In light of Kline’s work, technology may be conceptualized as human-made artifacts,

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processes of their manufacture, and their uses in specific contexts in order to achieve specific outcomes.

A Geography of the Forgotten in Technology and Language Education The ways silence speaks to us have always been marginalized in discussions about voice and agency. This is not to say that the concept of silence has not received scholarly attention. In fact, in the mid-twentieth century, a small group of scholars reinvigorated discussions about silence. Max Picard’s, 1952 book The World of Silence was a notable contribution. Picard weaved the phenomenological tradition with a subtle analysis of the human experience in a world of noise. Along this line of work, R. P. Blackmur (1955) wrote that “It is silence that tries to speak, and it is the language of silence which we translate into our words” (p. 382). This growing interest in silence was partly based on the belief that silence contributes to speech. Some scholars set out to identify the functions of silence in human communications. For example, Richard Johannesen (1974) discussed the functioning of silence in four contexts: human thought process and cultural development, people’s everyday interpersonal encounters, political and civic activities, and pathological settings such as counseling and psychotherapy. Further studies have documented how various cultural groups have developed non-oral modes of communication, which shed light not only on their ways of being in places and societies, but also on their development and transmission of knowledge systems. Keith Basso’s (1996) exploration of the Western Apache’s uses of silence, and Donal Carbaugh’s (1999) study of nonverbal enactments of the Blackfeet people are noteworthy. Silence has also been discussed in terms of its role in people’s everyday interpersonal communications. As Colum Kenny (2011) wrote, “Silence is not a realm that we access outside everyday experiences and phenomena. It is embedded, relatively, in and between the moments of daily life” (p. xi). In the arena of politics and civic engagement, silence has been examined with much interest. For example, silence becomes a political tactic when leaders refuse to speak in public (Brummett, 1980). In political science literature, silence is primarily viewed as either a signaling of indifference and apathy, or a manifestation of power relations, for example, one is being silenced. Silence also becomes a tool for “control, manipulation, and oppression of others” (Jaworski, 1992, p. xii).

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However, as Vincent Jungkunz (2012) argued, silence can be mobilized as a practice of resistance and empowerment, and thus as a contribution to democratic politics, too. In clinical settings, silence can be used for therapeutic purposes. When used appropriately, silence can facilitate reflections, empower people to take responsibility, and help them express feelings (Hill et al., 2003). In addition to these four contexts, silence has been studied as a mode of expression in the arts. Silence plays a pivotal role in music, for example, when it marks the beginning and ending of a tune. Adam Jaworski’s (1997) work presents the explorations of silence from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. In the classroom context, silence has been examined from a pedagogical vantage point. Ethnographic studies have suggested that silence is instrumental in student–teacher interaction. For example, after asking questions to students, teachers often do not give enough time to students for thinking and articulating their responses. In many classrooms, this continues to be the case, despite evidence of “the relative importance of silence for learning rather than for teaching. Specifically, students believed that they were more silent when learning than their teachers are when teaching” (Jaworski & Sachdev, 1998, p. 273). In the field of English Language Teaching (ELT), both anecdotal experiences and research findings suggest that there is very little patience for silence in the classroom. In teachers’ lunchrooms, I frequently heard complaints about students’ silence. In the ELT literature, silence has been described mainly as an obstacle to learning the target language; therefore, it is treated as a problem to be fixed (as we see in Harumi, 2011). Treating silence as a problem follows a genealogy of dichotomous thinking about silence and speech. Despite some remarkable studies in the communicative functions of silence, it is still viewed by many as a lack of speech. As Johannesen (1974) observed, “Silence takes on meaning only in a surrounding context of verbal and nonverbal symbols. And language becomes meaningful for people partially in contrast to related silences” (p. 26). The primacy of speech over silence promotes the idea that silence is background, field, or frame against which speech should be studied, understood, and practiced. This binary approach is limiting because it denies the complexities of silence in human communications. As Kris Acheson (2008) argued, rather than perceived as a true object, silence is viewed as a field where research aims primarily to understand speech in comparison with silence. However, “restricting silence to field is dangerous in that it reifies the speech–silence binary and the primacy

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of speech within that binary” (p. 537). Such restriction also “promotes the misconception that unlike speech, silence is not actively produced” (p. 537). Agreeing with Acheson (2008), I believe that silence is not simply an absence of speech; it is actively produced with both intended and unintended consequences. For example, when someone considers silence as a lack of speech, this consideration can be a deliberate choice. If silence is viewed as omission, it can still be strategic. As Cheryl Glenn (2004) wrote, “Whether choice or im/position, silence can reveal positive or negative abilities, fulfilling or withholding traits, harmony or disharmony, success or failure. Silence can deploy power; it can defer to power” (p. 18). Thus, silence can be produced and used as a tactic to fulfill a variety of communicative purposes. When applied to a field of scholarly study, silence can lend us an important lens to look at the field. As the French philosopher and cultural critic Michel de Certeau (1986) wrote: Beyond the question of methods and contents, beyond what it says, the measure of a work is what it keeps silent. And we must say that scientific studies—and undoubtedly the works they highlight—include vast and strange expanses of silence. These blank spots outline a geography of the forgotten. They trace the negative silhouette of the problematics displayed black on white in scholarly books. (de Certeau, 1986, p. 131)

de Certeau shows how silences actively shape the boundaries of a scholarly field. Here silence may speak of strategic omissions or the deliberately unspoken. As such, silence often becomes an expressive communicative event. de Certeau encourages us to be prepared for flexible boundaries of scholarly fields. He calls for refusing dogmas of homogeneity in scientific inquiries. Drawing primarily on de Certeau’s works, I argue that “a geography of the forgotten” in the field of CALL undermines the transformative potential of teaching and learning languages by utilizing digital technologies. Since the beginning of its journey, the field of CALL has made noticeable advances in theoretical, empirical, and practical domains (e.g., Farr & Murray, 2016; Thomas, Reinders, & Warschauer, 2013). At the same time, the field has remained remarkably silent about many issues of social, political, and cultural significance. For this reason, in this book, I attempt to pay attention to some of the silences that have remained largely unattended in the field of CALL. de Certeau’s works provide a

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helpful conceptual and analytical framework to explore such silences. Each chapter in this book sheds light on a “blank spot” in CALL.

A Note on My Theoretical Approach Discussions about technology in education have been dominated by two polarizing camps. On one hand, there are technological enthusiasts who treat technology as a panacea for all educational ills. On the other hand, we see technological luddites who have profound suspicion about the educational value of technology use in the classroom. Rather than embracing one of these binary approaches, I adopt a view of technology which suggests that the successful use of technology for educational purposes is complex and contingent. It is dependent on the cultural and material contexts of use, and the existing knowledge and values systems of technology users. Therefore, the usefulness and impact of technology in education warrants methodologically sound inquiries. What I find helpful in this endeavor is a branch of the American philosophy of technology, which some scholars have described as the empirical turn (Achterhuis, 2001). This empirical turn is neither dystopian, nor utopian. It departs from the founding fathers of the philosophical study of technology such as Martin Heidegger and Jacques Ellul for whom Technology was an allencompassing, almost demonic force spelled with a capital T. In contrast, the contemporary American philosophers with an empirical bent prefer to talk about technologies in the plural. They emphasize the social and cultural embeddedness of technologies. Hans Achterhuis (2001) described some characteristics that distinguish the empirical turn from the classical philosophy of technology. For example, the empirical turn refuses to treat technological artifacts as autonomous. Instead, it examines the manufacture, spread, and use of such artifacts through cultural and political lenses. Moreover, the empirical turn does not view technology as monolithic. It argues that technology needs to be broken up into many different technologies and that they should be analyzed separately. Furthermore, the empirical turn is not interested in sustaining the debate about whether society dictates technology or vice versa. Instead, it focuses on the “co-evolution of technology and society” (Achterhuis, 2001, p. 6). Technology is essentially a social process, and we often fail to clearly understand its evolution because

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we are so much part of the process. One more feature of the empirical turn is that it opposes the classical philosophy’s effort to dis-embed technology, in which the cultural rootedness of technology is lost. In addition to the American philosophers of technology such as Don Ihde, Langdon Winner, and Andrew Feenberg; I draw upon the literature on critical studies of educational technology. This body of work advocates “for placing more emphasis on understanding the often uneven, contested and contradictory realities of technology use within educational settings - therefore seeing educational technology as a profoundly social, cultural and political concern” (Selwyn, 2010, p. 67). Besides the critical education technology literature, I also draw on a small but growing body of work known as Critical CALL. It is a relatively recent development within the field of CALL. It draws inspiration from Critical Applied Linguistics (Pennycook, 2001), and focuses on the need to “question the assumptions that lie at the basis of our praxis, ideas that have become ‘naturalized’ and are not called into question” (Helm, Bradley, Guarda, & Thouësny, 2015, p. xiii). Critical CALL is also concerned with “the relationship between the macro and the micro, an engagement with issues of power and inequality and an understanding of how our classrooms and conversations are related to broader social, cultural and political relations” (Helm et al., 2015, p. xiii). Thus, a critical approach to CALL challenges us to explore the intersections of power, in/equality, and language education in diverse sociocultural contexts, not just within the four walls of the classroom (Anwaruddin, 2019). In light of the above discussions, the theoretical approach to understanding technology and language education that I promote in this book is interdisciplinary and emergent. More specifically, my interdisciplinary and critical approach to technology is informed by what Mitcham (1994) described as the humanities philosophy of technology. Mitcham categorized all philosophical studies of technology into two broad types: engineering philosophy of technology and humanities philosophy of technology. The first type attempts to analyze “technology from within, and [is] oriented toward an understanding of the technological way of being-in-the-world” (Mitcham, 1994, p. 39). This tradition of inquiry “uses technological criteria and paradigms to question and to judge other aspects of human affairs, and thus deepen or extend technological consciousness” (Mitcham, 1994, p. 62). The humanities tradition of inquiry, on the other hand, is

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concerned more with general philosophical concerns than with technology per se. Here, technology is examined to develop insights into a variety of ways technology and human life affect each other (Reydon, n.d.). This tradition, which may also be called the hermeneutic philosophy of technology, seeks “insight into the meaning of technology – its relation to the transtechnical: art and literature, ethics and politics, religion. It typically begins with nontechnical aspects of the human world and considers how technology may (or may not) fit in or correspond” (Mitcham, 1994, pp. 62–63). The empirical, critical, and interpretive approaches to technology that I have briefly discussed above and will be referring to throughout the book fall under this humanities tradition of the philosophy of technology.

A Note on Method One of the ways of understanding the aims, scope, and boundaries of a field of study is to look at its peer-reviewed journals. Journal editors and reviewers play a crucial role in knowledge production by ensuring the rigor of methodology and potential contributions of research findings published in these journals. The publications are then read, interpreted, and utilized in various manners by researchers and practitioners in the field. Scholarly journals also play a part in directing and shaping the future courses of scientific study by such initiatives as organizing special issues devoted to topics that warrant urgent scholarly attention. Although books, research monographs, and edited collections play significant roles in contributing to the knowledge base of any field of study, in my current project I have chosen to focus on peer-reviewed journals. The reasons are that (1) due to a rigorous peer-review process, journal articles are widely read and trusted as a reliable source of knowledge, and (2) that many journals are now available on the internet, and that’s why it is more convenient to analyze the content of journals than the content of books. To fulfill the objective of this book, i.e., to shed light on some blind spots in CALL, I have selected the following peer-reviewed journals. In my reading of the CALL literature in the last 12 years, these journals have appeared to be the leading peer-reviewed publications in the field. I acknowledge that this list of journals is partial and based solely on my own reading of the literature. I believe that there are other journals that are making important contributions to the knowledge base of the field; however, for the sake of convenience, I limit my focus to these journals:

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1. Computer Assisted Language Learning 2. CALICO Journal 3. System 4. Language Learning & Technology 5. ReCALL 6. The International Journal of Computer-Assisted Language Learning and Teaching (IJCALLT) 7. The JALT CALL Journal 8. The IALLT Journal of Language Learning Technologies I conducted my analysis mainly by reading the tables of content of the journals and abstracts of the articles. Then I tried to identify the content and focus of the articles through a method of keyword search. I used keywords such as “critical,” “gender,” “democracy,” “politics, “culture,” and “context.” In this analysis, I did not want to generate a statistical representation of the content of journal articles. Instead, I aimed at identifying global trends as well as notable silences in the contemporary literature on CALL. As such, my analysis and discussions throughout this book will be evaluative in light of subjective interpretation, and my proposals will look into the future with a call for new programs of research with pedagogical imagination for educational and social transformation. Because the chapters will focus on the absences that I have identified through my content analysis, my discussions will often take readers outside the existing boundaries of the CALL field. Readers should also be prepared for interdisciplinary dialogues throughout the book and this interdisciplinarity will be signaled by frequent referencing to literature in disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, science and technology studies, education, political science, and the philosophy of technology.

Chapter Overviews In Chapter 2, I discuss the theory of technological determinism, which has historically dominated research and practice in the field of CALL. This theory holds that technology is an all-powerful force capable of enacting social changes. To resist the field’s continuing treatment of technology as a deterministic force, I propose an ecological perspective on teacher agency and a relational view of technological affordance.

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In Chapter 3, I turn to capitalist modes of technology integration into language curricula and pedagogy. I argue that a utopian optimism in technology’s positive impact on learning may create pedagogical and ethical blind spots for us. I propose that researchers and educators draw insights from critical theories of technology. Such theories will prove helpful to understand the “technical codes” of contemporary educational contexts and to develop pedagogical frameworks that are not only effective but also empowering for educators and emancipatory for learners. In Chapter 4, I interrogate the promise of temporal flexibility. In recent decades, the notion of temporal flexibility has been used to promote an “anytime, anywhere” mode of learning. However, questions regarding who can utilize time flexibly and under what conditions remain unexplored. In this chapter, I bring to the fore complexities around temporal flexibility by discussing three perspectives on time: clock time, socially constructed time, and virtual/network time. I argue that digital technology can make time more or less flexible, depending on the social, economic, and spatial arrangements of technology use. In Chapter 5, I turn to a recent affective turn in applied linguistics and TESOL. My key argument is that emotions play crucial roles in how technology is understood, utilized, and experienced for teaching and learning languages. I develop an argument that technological affordance is not universal and stable across contexts. Affordance is achieved and diminished by emotional intensities of users. And, their emotions are always mediated by both individual and social factors. Therefore, my key recommendation is for understanding technology in its cultural and affective embeddedness. For pedagogical transformation, we must negotiate technological affordances considering how emotions create closeness and distance—both physically and conceptually. In Chapter 6, I focus on social media’s unfulfilled promises of democratic education. Grounding my discussion in Critical Applied Linguistics and Critical CALL, I identify two major challenges to utilizing social media in language education: technological instrumentalism (i.e., social media as neutral tools) and social media’s echo chambers (i.e., how algorithms align media users with people, content and information that are satisfying to them). As a way forward, I propose that educators draw insights from critical approaches to literacy and media education, and thus strive to achieve democratic goals of critical language education. In the final chapter of the book, I propose a critical hermeneutics of technology for language teaching and learning. This proposal is intended

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for moving the field of CALL beyond the debate between technological determinism and instrumentalism. Drawing from critical theory and an empirical turn within the philosophy of technology, I describe the key tenets of a hermeneutical approach to understanding how technology mediates the relationships between humans and the world. I highlight why the cultural embeddedness of all technological artifacts must be an important consideration in pedagogical contexts. While the proposed critical hermeneutic approach to technology is important for all parties involved in language education, e.g., program administrators, curriculum designers, teachers, teacher-educators, and students, in the interest of space, I zoom in on language teacher education. My hope is that if teacher-educators promote critical and hermeneutical perspectives on technology, then future language teachers will be prepared and motivated to utilize new technologies in more democratic, pedagogically transformative, and socially just ways.

An Invitation to a Dialogic Reading of the Chapters My writing becomes meaningful only when you read and make sense of it. The meanings you will make are not necessarily the meanings that I intend to convey. Since reading is a transactional activity between the reader and the text in a particular context, I invite you to a dialogic reading of the chapters ahead. While you read, I would like you to keep in mind two specific points: why we should take a philosophical approach to technology, and how such an approach may be helpful for applied linguistics and language teaching. First, a philosophy of technology is helpful for a progression from belief to knowledge to wisdom. Here, we can simply think about the literal meaning of the term philosophy, i.e., the love of wisdom. Since technology is closely integrated with our everyday life, we all hold certain beliefs about technology, what it can/cannot do, and how we should use it. However, our beliefs can be mere beliefs and not justified. So, we may want to move toward knowledge, which is often described as justified true belief . Yet, the idea of knowledge is also complicated when it comes to practice. On a broad categorial level, we have theoretical knowledge (knowledge that…) and procedural knowledge (knowledge how…). When a phenomenon such as technology constantly evolves, it keeps unsettling knowledges of both types. Moreover, the advancement of digital

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technology creates new ethical problems, as we have seen in such areas as stem cell research, agriculture, and weapons research (Olson et al., 2012). Therefore, it is not a good idea to turn away from discussions of responsibilities and values of all those designing, promoting, and using technology. This is especially important for educators whose success in professional work depends so much on their good judgment and the context-dependent-ness of their practice. For educators, a philosophy of technology becomes helpful as it aims to provide a deep understanding of tools, their users, and the contexts of use in full complexities. For these reasons—briefly mentioned here and elaborated throughout the book—educators may find it beneficial to take a philosophical approach to understanding and engaging with technology. Second, thinking about (the relationship between) technology and applied linguistics is important because they both are concerned with realworld problems. One historically dominant view of technology is science applied to real-world problems. Similarly, one of the most popular definitions of applied linguistics is “the theoretical and empirical investigation of real-world problems in which language is a central issue” (Brumfit, 1997, p. 93). In other words, applied linguistics is concerned with both language and various contexts in which it is taught, learned, and utilized in myriad and creative ways and for a variety of purposes. Applied linguistics “is interested in language problems for what they reveal about the role of language in people’s daily lives and whether intervention is either possible or desirable” (Davies & Elder, 2004, pp. 11–12). While my thinking is grounded in the broader field of applied linguistics, my specific focus in this book is language teaching from a critical pedagogical perspective (Crookes, 2022; Morgan, 1998, 2009, 2014). More specifically, it is the teaching and learning of English as a second/additional language for academic purposes. Throughout the book, I will look at English language teaching (ELT) from a transdisciplinary perspective and draw from various fields such as linguistics, pedagogy, hermeneutics, sociology, literary studies, and political science. From both points of view mentioned above, discussions of technology and language education are intertwined in this book in ways that point to myriad approaches to everyday practice and how we (should) try to solve the real-world problems.

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References Acheson, K. (2008). Silence as gesture: Rethinking the nature of communicative silences. Communication Theory, 18(4), 535–555. https://doi.org/10.1111/ j.1468-2885.2008.00333.x Achterhuis, H. (Ed.). (2001). American philosophy of technology: The empirical turn. Indiana University Press. Anwaruddin, S. M. (2019). Teaching language, promoting social justice: A dialogic approach to using social media. CALICO Journal, 36(1), 1–18. Basso, K. H. (1996). Wisdom sits in places: Landscape and language among the Western Apache. UNM Press. Bax, S. (2003). CALL—past, present and future. System, 31(1), 13–28. Blackmur, R. (1955). The Language of Silence: A citation. The Sewanee Review, 63(3), 382–404. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/27538460 Brummett, B. (1980). Towards a theory of silence as a political strategy. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 66(3), 289–303. https://doi.org/10.1080/003356 38009383527 Brumfit, C. (1997). How applied linguistics is the same as any other science. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 7 (1), 86–94. Carbaugh, D. (1999). “Just listen”: “Listening” and landscape among the Blackfeet. Western Journal of Communication, 63(3), 250–270. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/10570319909374641 Crookes, G. (2022). Critical language pedagogy. Language Teaching, 55(1), 46– 63. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261444820000609 Davies, A., & Elder, C. (2004). General introduction applied linguistics: Subject to Discipline? In A. Davies & C. Alder (Eds.), The handbook of applied linguistics (pp. 1–15). Wiley Blackwell. Davies, G., Otto, S. E., & Rüschoff, B. (2013). Historical perspectives on CALL. In M. Thomas, H. Reinders, & M. Warschauer (Eds.), Contemporary computer-assisted language learning (pp. 19–38). Bloomsbury. Bloomsbury. de Certeau, M. (1986). Heterologies: Discourse on the other. University of Minnesota Press. Dusek, V. (2006). Philosophy of technology: An introduction. Blackwell. Farr, F., & Murray, L. (2016). The Routledge Handbook of Technology and Language Learning. Routledge. Foer, J. F. (2013). How not to be alone. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/09/opinion/sunday/ how-not-to-be-alone.html Glenn, C. (2004). Unspoken: A rhetoric of silence. Southern Illinois University Press. Harumi, S. (2011). Classroom silence: Voices from Japanese EFL learners. ELT Journal, 65(3), 260–269. https://doi.org/10.1093/elt/ccq046

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Helm, F., Bradley, L., Guarda, M., & Thouësny, S. (2015). Critical CALL: Proceedings of the 2015 EUROCALL Conference. Dublin, Ireland: Researchpublishing.net. Hill, C. E., Thompson, B. J., & Ladany, N. (2003). Therapist use of silence in therapy: A survey. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 59(4), 513–524. https:// doi.org/10.1002/jclp.10155 Johannesen, R. L. (1974). The functions of silence: A plea for communication research. Western Journal of Communication, 38(1), 25–35. Jaworski, A. (1992). The power of silence: Social and pragmatic perspectives. Sage Publications. Jaworski, A. (Ed.). (1997). Silence: Interdisciplinary perspectives. Walter de Gruyter. Jaworski, A., & Sachdev, I. (1998). Beliefs about silence in the classroom. Language and Education, 12(4), 273–292. Jungkunz, V. (2012). The promise of democratic silences. New Political Science, 34(2), 127–150. https://doi.org/10.1080/07393148.2012.676393 Kenny, C. (2011). The power of silence: Silent communication in daily life. Karnac. Kern, R. (2006). Perspectives on technology in learning and teaching languages. TESOL Quarterly, 40(1), 183–210. https://doi.org/10.2307/40264516 Kline, S. J. (1985). What is technology? Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, 5(3), 215–218. Lievrouw, L. A., & Livingstone, S. (Eds.), (2002). Handbook of new media: Social shaping and consequences of ICTs. Sage Publications. Mitcham, C. (1994). Thinking through technology: The path between engineering and philosophy. The University of Chicago Press. Morgan, B. (1998). The ESL classroom: Teaching, critical practice, and community development. The University of Toronto Press. Morgan, B. (2009). Fostering transformative practitioners for critical EAP: Possibilities and challenges. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 8(2), 86–99. Morgan, B. (2014). Becoming a critical language teacher: A reflexive journey. Revista Diálogos Interdisciplinares, 1(1), 21–32. Olsen, J. K. B., Pedersen, S. A., & Hendricks, V. F. (2012). A Companion to the Philosophy of Technology. John Wiley & Sons. Pennycook, A. (2001). Critical applied linguistics: A critical introduction. Lawrence Erlbaum. Picard, M. (1952). The world of silence. Regnery. Selwyn, N. (2010). Looking beyond learning: Notes towards the critical study of educational technology. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 26(1), 65–73. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2729.2009.00338.x Selwyn, N. (2017). Education and technology: Key issues and debates. Bloomsbury.

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Thomas, M., Reinders, H., & Warschauer, M. (Eds.). (2013). Contemporary computer-assisted language learning. Bloomsbury. Volti, R. (2006). Society and technological change. Worth Publishers. Warschauer, M., & Healey, D. (1998). Computers and language learning: An overview. Language Teaching, 31(2), 57–71.

CHAPTER 2

Technological Determinism Versus Teacher Agency in CALL

Abstract This chapter deals with the problem of technological determinism in the field of Computer Assisted Language Learning. I argue that technological determinism curtails teacher agency. I present a brief overview of the theory of technological determinism, which promotes the idea of technology as an autonomous force that drives social changes and thus determines the nature of society. Then I turn to the field of CALL and discuss why teacher agency needs to be re-gained for reconceptualizing and enacting pedagogy in transformative ways. I propose an ecological view of teacher agency, which should be helpful to imagine technological affordances in ways that will resist a dominant tendency to consider technology as an all-powerful social force. Keywords Technological determinism · Deskilling · Teacher agency · Ecological · Affordance

The name of the field “Computer Assisted Language Learning” is based on the assumption that computers (by implication, various kinds of digital tools) assist language learning. This assumption reinforces the theory of technological determinism, which maintains that technology is autonomous and that it has a direct and predetermined impact on the thinking and activities of its users. This view of technological determinism © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Ahmed, Exploring Silences in the Field of Computer Assisted Language Learning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06501-9_2

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has a number of detrimental effects on language education (Anwaruddin, 2018). In this chapter, I focus on one such effect, i.e., how technological determinism attempts to erode teachers’ professional agency. An ecological view of agency is adopted in order to present a critique of technological determinism. This ecological view maintains that agency is not something to be had. It is rather “enacted in a concrete situation; it is both constrained and supported by discursive, material and relational resources available to actors” (Priestley et al., 2015, p. 30). I conclude the chapter with a recommendation that we look at technology as a co-participant in the enactment of teacher agency. This idea of co-participation is based on three dimensions of human agency: influences from the past, orientations toward the future, and engagement with the present (Priestley et al., 2015).

What’s in a Name? The name of the field CALL has significant implications. Like any other names, it tells us something about the internal properties of its referent. It should be noted that not everyone in the fields of applied linguistics, second language acquisition, and language education is happy with this name. There is an ongoing debate about whether “computer” should be replaced with “technology,” and “assisted” with “enhanced.” Alternative names such as “Technology Enhanced Language Learning” have been proposed. Yet, the original name “Computer Assisted Language Learning” has remained as the preferred name for many. Although the word “computer” is in the name, there is now a consensus that the meaning of “computer” should be used in a broad sense to include various types of digital technology to support the teaching and learning of languages. While “computer” may be used as a synonym for “technology,” I have an objection to how the word “assist” is used in the CALL literature. One of the most common denotations of “assist” is to help someone, typically by doing a share of their work (Oxford English Dictionary, 2021). In my assessment, this meaning of the word has dominated the theory, research, and practice in the field of CALL. Most individuals working under the banner of Computer Assisted Language Learning are preoccupied with how the computer helps, and not hinders, learning. I am not saying that it should hinder learning. But my point is that there is so much focus on the helping aspect that it is hard to see how it really helps and under what circumstances. An important question that is seldom asked is: who/what

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assists the computer? In other words, does the computer need assistance to help language learners? If so, then what kind(s) of assistance and from whom? My central argument in this chapter is that an unjustifiable amount of power has been vested on the computer, and consequently, the agency of language teachers has been severely restricted and downplayed in the field of CALL. The computer has been conceptualized in such a way as if it possessed the capacity to make a significant difference in learning languages. In discussions about how technology can maximize learning, the teacher’s role has been reduced to that of a technician who should know how to operate the computer efficiently. This is not a new observation. Every time a new kind of technology is introduced to the education sector, teachers are generally treated as technicians. Education scholars such as Michael Apple and Larry Cuban pointed to this tendency as early as the 1980s. For example, Apple (1987) warned against the potential deskilling of teachers’ work. Deskilling happens when the introduction of new technology is aimed at breaking down and reducing professional skills to atomistic units and channeling them into an automated process to increase productivity, profit, efficiency, and control. Apple’s analysis was not against technology itself. Instead, he argued that “our task as educators is to make sure that when it [technology] enters the classroom it is there for politically, economically, and educationally wise reasons, not because powerful groups may be redefining our major educational goals in their own image” (p. 154). In the field of CALL, computers have been introduced and conceptualized as a powerful machine with so much agency that teachers are forced to the margins of pedagogical contexts. A frequently cited logic is that if computers are used, students will learn effectively. Therefore, teachers need to know how to use computers efficiently. In this argument, teachers’ professional roles are often reduced to being literate in how to operate digital machines by reading and understanding the user manuals that come with them. What is generally overlooked in this kind of proposal is the crucial role of teachers in the education and development of students. Elsewhere, I have discussed how new technologies may erode teachers’ agency (Anwaruddin, 2016). My analysis focused on a technology-integrated teacher development project in Bangladesh. In this ambitious nation-wide project known as “English in Action,” teachers were provided with digital technology such as iPod and mobile phones with preloaded audio and video materials. They were asked to use

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pre-recorded lectures and classroom interactions. For example, a teacher turns on an audio player and asks her students to repeat what they hear in the recording. This kind of use of technology reifies a transmission model of pedagogy where the teacher delivers a prepackaged curriculum without necessary modification and contextualization. Thus, the teacher is interpellated to give up their role and responsibility to revise the official curriculum and meet the needs of specific students in unique contexts.

Why so Much Trust in Technology? Technology is trusted so much because it is seen as efficient, autonomous, and powerful. As Apple (1987) wrote, technology “is set apart and viewed as if it had a life of its own, independent of social intentions, power, and privilege” (p. 136). It is true that technology has enormous power. It can greatly extend our physical and mental power. If we look back in history, we see how technology re-configured power structures centered around the Church (religious authorities) since the beginning of the industrial revolution in Europe. People were amazed at what technology could do. Their long-held beliefs in God and supernatural powers were shaken up by new technologies such as steam engines and telegraph. Since the industrial revolution, there has been a steady increase in people’s reliance on and trust in technology. However, there is a real danger in treating technology as an isolated and autonomous force. The body of scholarly work that warns against such a danger takes an explicit stand against “the commonplace assumption that technology is a primary force that determines the nature of society” and that it “drives social progress and changes in society” (Selwyn, 2017, p. 197). Research on educational uses of technology has been heavily influenced by this commonplace assumption, which many scholars have described as technological determinism. A key goal of those inspired by technological determinism is “to ‘prove’ that technology leads to ‘effective’ learning outcomes” (Selwyn, 2008, p. 83). Hence, a dominant tendency in their research is “to focus only on the positive aspects of education technology use” (Selwyn, 2008, p. 83). This tendency is similarly visible in the field of CALL. From the very beginning of its journey, CALL has treated technology from a determinist perspective. In 1998, Mark Warschauer wrote about CALL’s fascination with the determinist approach. He observed that research on CALL sought “to understand

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the overall effect of the computer, often at the insistence of administrators who demand proof that the computer really works” (p. 758). Two decades later, CALL remains equally attracted to technological determinism. Numerous studies that may be described as “effect studies” clearly reflect this tendency to detail how computers bring about predetermined outcomes in language learning. This kind of study typically focuses on how a particular technological artifact, e.g., iPad, supports students’ learning of a new language. Consequently, in CALL, we see an increasingly abundant supply of studies that document what I have called “happy-ending stories” of technology use in language education (Anwaruddin, 2018).

The Ghost of Technological Determinism The idea that technology dictates social action and innovation has been debunked by many sociologists and philosophers of technology (e.g., Hansen, 2020; Hughes et al., 2012; Selwyn, 2019). Yet, in educational studies, we see increasing reliance on the theory of technological determinism. There are a number of reasons why so many policymakers and researchers are fascinated by this theory. Here, I would like to stress three reasons that I believe are central to this problem. First, there seems to be a conflation of science and technology. Because these two terms are often used together, many see a close relationship between them. However, at a close investigative look, it will be clear that they are remarkably different in terms of meaning and what they can enable us to do in the material world. Most importantly, we need to bear in mind that science is concerned with truth, and technology is concerned with convenience. It is true that scientific knowledge is used to design technological artifacts, but the latter requires normativity and practical wisdom in order to be helpful for people. Therefore, it will be a mistake to treat science and technology in the same manner and with the same expectation. Perhaps for this reason, the field of study in question was named “Computer Assisted Language Learning” due to the belief that the computer always “assists” language learning. Second, there seems to be a fear of complexity in education theory. While the processes of education and development are very complex, there has been a strong tendency to simplify them. We have seen simplifying measures through the determination of educational success by students’ test scores. Test

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scores are also used to determine schools’ overall success, regulate government funding, and measure teachers’ professional performance. All these suggest a tendency to see education as something numerically measurable. Measures of simplification are always afraid of complexity, and they aim to present everything in a plain “understandable” way (for a detailed discussion of how education is inherently complex, see Davis & Sumara, 2006). In short, taking a technological determinist perspective seems to be a better choice when the goal is to simply present how technology assists language learning. Finally, there is a strong push from the Silicon Valleys of the world to publish research results that show “technology works.” Research studies funded by manufacturers of educational technology are often influenced by this kind of expectation. When technology is viewed as a deterministic force, it renders human agency subordinate to tools. In the early twentieth-century world, technology was an inevitable force of social change. This was due mainly to the existing social structures and the nature of new technology. In the Post-War world, people were not only devastated by the killing machines but also their faith in God was starting to lose ground. The huge machines that humans created seemed to take over much of the social and political space, and people seemed to be powerless and unable to resist technology’s influence on their lives. Perhaps for this reason, the philosopher Karl Jaspers, especially in his early writings, lamented the uncontrollable power of technology. He used the notion of technological demonism to refer to how technology had transformed the whole society into a machine which alienated humans from their life and social world. (I should note that in his later writings, Jaspers changed his perspective and viewed technology from a more instrumental point of view.) Charlie Chaplin’s, 1936 film Modern Times was an extraordinary portrayal of technological power and its alienating character. It brilliantly displayed the automatization of not just the production of goods, but also the life of the worker. Although technological determinism was a useful theoretical lens at that time, the nature and function of technology has dramatically changed since Jaspers’ and Chaplin’s times. Technologies of our time in the twenty-first century have extraordinary complexities and nuances. New technological artifacts do not operate in a world where artifacts and humans keep their role, identity, and subjectivity intact during the use of and interaction with technology. An artifact of old technology, for example, a hammer or an axe, exists as an object at its user’s disposal. Although the user may be creative in using the artifact,

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it does not influence the user’s decision in significant ways. On the other hand, artifacts of new digital technology do not remain as mere objects to be used. They influence the ways they are used. For example, the moment we start using digital technologies such as a smartphone or an X-Ray machine, it changes our relationship with the world. We enter domains— both known and unknown. In fact, it is not clear whether we are “users of” or “participants in” this kind of technology. Our life in the twenty-first century has been so deeply embedded in digital technologies that we can hardly understand them as separate entities. It is difficult for us to know if we have a pre-technological self, unlike our ancestors who used technological artifacts as mere extension of their bodily powers. Perhaps for this reason, Albert Borgmann (1992) talked about a paradigmatic change in modern society. Technology is no longer an overwhelmingly determining force; rather, it is “the form of life that is paradigmatic of the modern era” (p. 208). This paradigmatic sense of technology indicates not only the pervasiveness of technological artifacts, but also the mass production and consumption of artifacts. For example, we don’t need to be an expert engineer to operate various devices that we use in our daily life. We don’t need to know what goes on inside a tiny device that requires only a small drop of blood to tell us a lot about diabetes. Unlike our ancestors who would use their hands to sharpen stones and shed sweat to make a weapon and who would know everything about the weapon, we need very little to know about the internal working of a blood sugar monitor. The paradigmatic view of technology also points to the complex and distributed relations between humans, non-human objects, and technological artifacts. We live in a complex world where things, words, and actions are intertwined in such a way that it is often very difficult to parse them out and understand their individual contribution to our life and activities. I would argue that this new paradigm points to a need to re-evaluate our understanding of human agency.

Technology and Teacher Agency It is important to talk about human agency in relational terms. However, in the field of CALL, agency has been understood mainly in the light of traditional structure–agency dualism. Classical sociology’s fascination with the structure–agency division is indicative of faith in human capacity to use various tools to extend bodily powers. A growing consensus among

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many contemporary scholars is that the dichotomous approach to structure and agency is not helpful. Neither structure nor agency is a stable phenomenon. They both are contingent on many factors—both individual and collective, material and ideological. An agent is not capable of exercising agency in the same manner across contexts. Yet, neoliberal discourses of education and development continue to portray agency as self-regulation, freedom of choice, and ability to act efficiently. To move beyond the structure–agency dualism, a relational view of agency may be helpful. Here, agency is neither entirely personal nor completely social. In the relational view, agents operate in contexts that enable and constrain their abilities in different ways depending on the task at hand. Such enabling and constraining also play out differently in different time-spaces. The various kinds of relationships that agents construct, maintain, and abandon play important roles in their agency. This is why the social scientist Ian Burkitt (2016) supported a relational view of agency, according to which “agents are always located in manifold social relations” (p. 322). In this conceptualization, agents are “interactants, ones who are interdependent, vulnerable, intermittently reflexive, possessors of capacities that can only be practised in joint actions, and capable of sensitive responses to others and to the situations of interaction” (p. 322). Thus, agency does not emerge from deliberate reflection on action contexts or mobilizations of personal resources to achieve imagined outcomes. Instead, it originates from the intersection of the personal and the social worlds where multiple agents interact with each other and enable and constrain each other’s abilities to perform certain actions. Agency is an important concept in applied linguistics and second language education because teachers need decision-making capacities in order to teach in transformative ways (e.g., Morgan, 2016). Although the field’s initial focus was on language learners—who were historically viewed from a deficit perspective, in recent years we have witnessed an increasing attention to the agency of language teachers. Today, research in language teacher agency is interdisciplinary and it addresses a variety of personal, social, cultural, and institutional concerns that teachers encounter in their daily professional activities. As Miller et al. (2018) observed, because of the many real and potential negative impacts to language teacher professionalization and agency resulting from historical and contemporary language policies and teacher reform efforts (now also amidst current neonationalist political movements that cannot be ignored) that applied

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linguistics researchers have become more interested in how language teacher agency can be understood, supported and promoted. (p. 2)

Furthermore, Kayi-Aydar (2015) found that teachers often have relational and oppositional positionings, which influence the formation of their identities. These oppositional positionings and identities shape their agency. Additionally, the micro-politics of each educational setting has a significant impact on teachers’ agency. Thus, agency is not a capacity an individual owns; instead, it is a capacity enabled and constrained by contexts and ideologies (Miller, 2016). These findings are in line with a growing awareness among social scientists and philosophers of language that human agency is not located in the individual alone. It is distributed across individuals, bodies, spaces, ideas, and times (see, for example, Enfield & Kockelman, 2017). In my previous work (Anwaruddin, 2015, 2016), I discussed how ICTs are often portrayed as effective tools that can enable teachers to exercise their agency to effect pedagogical change. Large-scale teacher development projects that incorporate ICTs are typically based on this problematic idea of the teacher as an autonomous agent who has powerful technology at their disposal. A dominant view is that if they are able to use technology in competent ways, most educational problems will be solved. This one-dimensional view of agency, however, does not consider agency as distributed capacities. Technology definitely possesses enormous potential to enable or restrict human agency. In the case of teaching languages, it is often seen as an enabling tool. However, the extent to which it is enabling will always depend on other people, ideas, and materials that share agentive power. An example is whether or not a learner is emotionally ready at a given moment to utilize the most useful technology. No matter how hard a teacher tries to utilize technology, if a student does not have the willingness and motivation to learn, the use of the most sophisticated technology will fail to bring about expected outcomes. Therefore, it is logical to view technology as one of the participants that create an optimal condition for teaching and learning. To consider technology as a co-participant, it will be helpful to look at human agency from an ecological perspective.

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An Ecological View of Agency Pedagogy is such a complex activity that it is hard to determine the agency of any one of the actors involved in this activity. One way of decentering the excessive focus on the power of technology is to conceptualize agency from what Priestly, Biesta, and Robinson (2015) described as ecological agency. Although their research was not specifically focused on CALL, it has important implications for our field. These authors showed that agency is not something that an individual has or does not have. It is not an individual capacity to achieve a goal. Agency is “something that is achieved in and through concrete contexts-for-action” (p. 34). Such a context-specific focus on agency does not deny the power of technology, which rightly has its own share. However, the focus on context points to the fluctuating nature of agency of a given actor depending on the context of action. As Priestly, Biesta, and Robinson (2015) wrote, agency can be “constrained and supported by discursive, material and relational resources available to actors” (p. 30). Given the complex, moral, and political nature of teachers’ work, I find Priestly, Biesta, and Robinson’s (2015) model instructive. These authors distinguished three key dimensions of teacher agency: iterational, projective, and practical-evaluative. First, the iterational dimension focuses on the teacher’s life histories—both personal and professional. For example, what does a teacher remember from their own educational experience as a prospective teacher? How does that influence their current action as a teacher? As for the professional history, what does the teacher’s experience—accumulated over the course of their teaching career—ask them to do in a given situation? Second, teaching is always about projection of the future. Teachers work with the goal of preparing students for a particular kind of future. Therefore, they always have both short-term and longterm projections. In other words, the teacher’s “achievement of agency is always oriented towards the future” (p. 30). Finally, the practicalevaluative aspect of agency is about culture, materiality, and structure within which the teacher’s action takes place. Agency is related to cultural aspects such as “ways of speaking and thinking, of values, beliefs and aspirations, and encompass both inner and outer dialogue.” The material aspects of agency are related to “the resources that promote or hinder agency and the wider physical environment in and through which agency is achieved.” And, the structural aspects of agency point to “the social structures and relational resources that contribute to the achievement

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of agency” (p. 30). In summary, Priestly, Biesta, and Robinson’s (2015) model of teacher agency highlights that agency is always informed by past experiences of the actor, it is oriented toward the future, and it is enacted in concrete physical contexts. To make the ecological view of teacher agency (Priestly et al., 2015) relevant for the field of CALL, I bring a nuanced understanding of technological affordance to it. The concept of affordance has a long history in the field of technology studies. However, an overuse of this term has generated much confusion and disagreement about the meaning and implications of the term. In general, the term affordance denotes an artifact’s actual and perceived properties that send messages about how the artifact can be used. A chair affords sitting, for example. One of the reasons for so much confusion about the meaning of affordance is a false binary in which artifacts are seen to either afford or do not (Davis & Chouinard, 2016). One way to avoid such confusion is to think about how artifacts request, demand, allow, encourage, discourage, and refuse certain actions and creative possibilities. As Davis and Chouinard (2016) reminded us, these action-possibilities are relative to the conditions of affordance. The central question here is what can an artifact afford, for whom, and under what conditions ? From a design perspective, a chair affords sitting, but a person can stand on it to replace a light bulb. Therefore, while thinking about technological affordance, we need to keep in mind that “the conditions of affordances vary with subjects’ awareness of the function (perception), their skill and ability to execute the function (dexterity), and social support in executing the function (cultural and institutional legitimacy)” (Davis & Chouinard, 2016, p. 245). In short, affordance is relational and context-dependent, not static and universal. Moreover, I argue that emotions play significant roles in this relational view of affordance. I support Nagy and Neff’s (2015) idea of imagined affordance to encourage “scholars to reflect technological environments’ material qualities that mediate affective experiences” (p. 2). Imagined affordance opposes a fixed and rigid notion of affordance that has dominated studies of technology and communications for a long time. As Nagy and Neff (2015) wrote, “Imagined affordances emerge between users’ perceptions, attitudes, and expectations; between the materiality and functionality of technologies; and between the intentions and perceptions of designers” (p. 5). Here, affordances are mediated by users’ emotions, but technological artifacts and programs also evoke certain emotions in users. This affective approach to affordances is important to highlight

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the roles of imagination and non-rational engagements in understanding what technology can and cannot do. In summary, artifacts “are related to certain emotional experiences of their users. Some features of technological artifacts may serve as ‘emotional clues’ for users” [who] “may experience technologies as having emotions or being ‘social actors’ and interact with technologies as if the tools themselves were social beings” (Nagy & Neff, 2015, p. 7). When affect/emotion is considered for understanding technological affordance, it also provides implications for teacher agency. As discussed above, teacher agency is relational and ecologically linked to many other factors that work together to create contexts for teaching and learning. I argue that it is not possible to understand teachers’ agency without understanding their affective engagement with curricula, artifacts, and their emotional labor that goes into all pedagogical work. For this reason, technological affordance must account for affective contexts and emotional histories of users. When artifacts request, demand, allow, encourage, discourage, or refuse certain actions (Davis & Chouinard, 2016), the future of such actions will depend inevitably on users’ emotional responses to such calls. Thus, the extent of technology’s impact on and usefulness for language pedagogy will be relative to teachers’ agency which is shaped greatly by their emotions. In recent years, we have seen a growing interest in understanding teacher agency from an affective perspective. For example, Sarah Benesch identified a close relationship between emotion and agency and the role of emotions in teachers’ decision-making. Benesch’s (2018) study underscored “emotions as a framework for understanding and supporting teachers’ agency. Rather than reducing emotion labor, as if it were an onerous experience and therefore best avoided, [her work] calls for attention to its agentive aspect, that is, its potential to signal challenges and promote change” (p. 62). Thus, to resist an overreliance on technological determinism in Computer Assisted Language Learning, it will be helpful to include an affective lens in our reconceptualization of teacher agency in a complex ecology of practice. When this relational view of teacher agency is taken into consideration, technology no longer assumes a deterministic role. Historically, educational policy and practice have relied too heavily on technology’s power to shape pedagogical actions and relations. In turn, this has diminished teachers’ agency to make decisions and enact transformative pedagogy. A

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deterministic approach to technology has been manifested in the destructive argument that one day teachers will be replaced by computers. An uncritical view of technology has thus attempted to render the teacher invisible. If technology failed to do its assigned job as expected, then the people who designed and used the technology were blamed. But hope prevailed that next time technology would be improved. Thus, despite technology’s failures, there is always a strong hope for a better future. But in all cases, technology’s capacity is embraced with much trust and willingness to be amazed at technological prowess. In CALL, we have seen a tendency to treat digital technology as powerful enough to enhance teachers’ professional agency. However, the recent research on teacher agency opposes such a simplistic view of technology. Like human agency, technology’s capacity is also distributed and emergent. Any given technology will have significantly varying impacts on student learning in different social and material contexts. Therefore, technology or any other actors for that matter should not assume primacy over other actors in pedagogical situations. Among others, Larsen-Freeman (2020) has shown how learning a second language occurs in complex, dynamic, and nonlinear systems. Thus, we should not hope naively for predetermined positive impacts of technology on the teaching and learning of second/additional languages. The kind of critical approach to technology that I aim to promote in this book must interrogate what Thomas (2017) called the validity of presence, i.e., “the mere presence of educational technologies is treated as unquestionably a good thing” (p. 55). I am not arguing that technological determinism does not exist. It surely does. But its degree and consequences vary according to the context of action and the individuals involved in the action. A point of clarification is in order: the very idea of technological determinism also changes with time. The kind of determinism we see in Charlie Chaplin’s film Modern Times is very different from the view of determinism in our contemporary time. In Chaplin’s time, technology had a stronger form of determinism because it significantly controlled major aspects of people’s life such as professional work at mass-production industries. A difference between technological and non-technological aspects of people’s lived experiences was clearly identifiable. However, in our time in the twentyfirst century, technology has become a paradigmatic form of life. Now it is difficult to demarcate the technological and the non-technological. We do not have methodical precision to know how technology determines

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our thinking and actions. However, it may be safe to conclude that technology is a co-participant in a complex world where we enact agency in conjunction with other human, cultural, and material actors. Thus, the ecological perspective on agency is helpful to de-emphasize technological determinism in CALL and re-emphasize the role of the teacher in using technology in pedagogically meaningful ways. CALL practitioners should, therefore, ask: 1. How will the past experiences of students interact with the new technology that I am using? 2. What kind of a future do I envision for students? 3. How will new technology interact with existing cultural values and material contexts of my work? 4. How do I gain control over what technology can do to me and to my students? 5. Who/what are the non-technological actors that co-shape my agency? How do they empower or disempower me to utilize technology in equitable and just ways? In conclusion, an ecological understanding of teacher agency and a relational view of technological affordance should be helpful to understand and resist the historically dominant theory of technological determinism in language education.

References Anwaruddin, S. M. (2015). ICTs in language and literacy education in Bangladesh: A critical review. Current Issues in Education, 18(1), 1–13. Anwaruddin, S. M. (2016). ICT and language teacher development in the global south: A new materialist discourse analysis. Educational Studies, 52(3), 260– 278. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131946.2016.1169183 Anwaruddin, S. M. (2017). Methodism versus teacher agency in TESOL. In D. Rivers & K. Zotzmann (Eds.), Isms in language education: Oppression, intersectionality and emancipation (pp. 144–164). De Gruyter. Anwaruddin, S. M. (2018). Beyond determinism and instrumentalism: Reconceptualizing technology for CALL. In J. Perren, K. Kelch, J. Byun, S. Cervantes, & S. Safavi (Eds.), Applications of CALL theory in ESL and EFL environments (pp. 22–35). IGI Global.

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Benesch, S. (2018). Emotions as agency: Feeling rules, emotion labor, and English language teachers’ decision-making. System, 79, 60–69. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.system.2018.03.015 Borgmann A. (1992) The moral assessment of technology. In L. Winner (Ed.), Democracy in a technological society (pp. 207–213). Dordrecht: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1219-4_13 Burkitt, I. (2016). Relational agency: Relational sociology, agency and interaction. European Journal of Social Theory, 19(3), 322–339. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/1368431015591426 Chaplin, C. (1936). Modern Times. United Artists. Davis, B., & Sumara, D. (2006). Complexity and education: Inquiries into learning, teaching, and research. Lawrence Erlbaum. Davis, J. L., & Chouinard, J. B. (2016). Theorizing affordances: From request to refuse. Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, 36(4), 241–248. Enfield, N. J., & Kockelman, P. (2017). Distributed agency. Oxford University Press. Hansen, S. B. (2020). Philosophers of technology. De Gruyter. Hershey, PA: IGI Global. Apple, M. W. (1987). Teaching and technology the hidden effects of computers on teachers and students. Educational Policy, 1(1), 135–157. Hughes, T. P., Pinch, T., & Bijker, W. E. (2012). The social construction of technological systems. MIT Press. Kayi-Aydar, H. (2015). Teacher agency, positioning, and English language learners: Voices of pre-service classroom teachers. Teaching and Teacher Education, 45, 94–103. Larsen-Freeman, D. (2020). Complex dynamic systems theory. In B. VanPatten, G. D. Keating, & S. Wulff (Eds.), Theories in second language acquisition (pp. 248–270). Routledge. Miller, E. (2016). The ideology of learner agency and the neoliberal self. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 26(3), 348–365. https://doi.org/10. 1111/ijal.12129 Miller, E. R., Kayi-Aydar, H., Varghese, M., & Vitanova, G. (2018). Editors’ introduction to interdisciplinarity in language teacher agency: Theoretical and analytical explorations. System, 79, 1–6. Morgan, B. (2016). Language teacher education and the developing world: Exploring ‘horizons of possibility’ for identity and agency. Linguistics and the Human Sciences, 11(1), 89–106. https://doi.org/10.1558/lhs.v11i1.20508 Nagy, P., & Neff, G. (2015). Imagined affordance: Reconstructing a keyword for communication theory. Social Media + Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 2056305115603385 Oxford English Dictionary. (2021). Assist. Retrieved from https://en.oxforddic tionaries.com/definition/assist

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Priestley, M., Biesta, G., & Robinson, S. (2015). Teacher agency: An ecological approach. Bloomsbury. Selwyn, N. (2008). From state-of-the-art to state-of-the-actual? Introduction to a special issue. Technology, Pedagogy and Education, 17 (2), 83–87. https:// doi.org/10.1080/14759390802098573 Selwyn, N. (2017). Education and technology: Key issues and debates. Bloomsbury. Selwyn, N. (2019). What is digital sociology? Wiley. Thomas, M. K. (2017). Globalization, ironic binaries, and instructional technology: Toward the emergence of a robust critical theory of technology. In A. D. Benson, R. Joseph, & J. L. Moore (Eds.), Culture, learning, and technology: Research and practice (pp. 44–57). Routledge. Warschauer, M. (1998). Researching technology in TESOL: Determinist, instrumental, and critical approaches. TESOL Quarterly, 32(4), 757–761. https:// doi.org/10.2307/3588010

CHAPTER 3

Blue Sky Utopias Versus Capitalist Motives: A Critical Theory of Technology for CALL

Abstract In this chapter, I argue that technology is often used as a tool to create a utopian vision of educational development. What is forgotten in the discussions of technology and (language) education is the capitalist motive that drives technology integration into the curriculum. I underscore the importance of interrogating neoliberal and capitalist framings of technology in sociolinguistic practices and language education. Then I develop a critical theory of technology for a transformative approach to CALL. Drawing primarily on Andrew Feenberg’s works, I discuss how a critical theory of technology may help language educators to understand the interests, assumptions, and values of those who design, manufacture, and promote various digital tools to be used in educational contexts. Keywords Capitalism · Technology · Feenberg · Utopia · Critical theory · Critical CALL

Digital technology is often prescribed as a panacea for all educational ills. Organizations such as the Gates Foundation continue to promise an educational revolution by incorporating technology, and governments are investing huge amounts of resources to integrate new technologies into school curricula. Yet, we have very slim evidence that the use of new technologies significantly improves students’ learning outcomes (Macaro © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Ahmed, Exploring Silences in the Field of Computer Assisted Language Learning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06501-9_3

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et al., 2012; See et al., 2021). In this chapter, I discuss how technology is often used to fulfill certain requirements of capitalism, e.g., control, competition, and profit. I also highlight how such fulfillment inevitably results in inequality in school and society. I focus specifically on Andrew Feenberg’s notion of “technical code of capitalism” to illustrate my argument. Feenberg’s critical theory “shows how these [technical] codes invisibly sediment values and interests in rules and procedures, devices and artifacts that routinize the pursuit of power and advantage by a dominant hegemony” (Feenberg, 2002, p. 15). In this way, the chapter serves as a conceptual intervention to explore ways of breaking the technical codes of capitalism and to promote the interests and values that these codes have long suppressed. The chapter experiments with the idea of freeing educational uses of technology from capitalist social forces, and bringing them toward more humane social forces (Beira & Feenberg, 2018; Marcuse, 1964). In other words, a critical theory of technology is brought to a dialogue with a critical approach to applied linguistics. In recent decades, we have seen a massification of education. More people wanting to achieve more educational credentials is not a bad thing. Quite the contrary. Greater access to education has made significant and positive changes in various personal, social, and political spheres. B. F. Skinner (1968), one of the prominent supporters of teaching with machines, wrote: There are more people in the world than ever before, and a far greater part of them want an education. The demand cannot be met simply by building more schools and training more teachers. Education must become more efficient. To this end curricula must be revised and simplified, and textbooks and classroom techniques improved. In any other field a demand for increased production would have led at once to the invention of laborsaving capital equipment. Education has reached this stage very late, possibly through a misconception of its task. Thanks to the advent of television, however, the so-called audio-visual aids are being re-examined. Film projectors, television sets, photographs, and tape recorders are finding their way into American schools and colleges. (p. 29)

Although Skinner warned against using equipment to deliver materials and making students a “passive receiver of instruction” (p. 30), his overall project was to technologize education with the help of modern equipment. One of his principal goals was to save labor. Today, we see

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overwhelming reliance on technology to save labor. The way new technologies are being used to educate students is not without problems. To solve old problems, it is creating new ones. As I will discuss below, labor-saving technology is a double-edged sword in educational contexts. Historical analysis of human progress shows that whenever people tried to solve existing problems, they ended up creating some new problems. In the case of (language) education, we have seen that digital technology is utilized to reach students in remote places. While this idea of “remoteness” is contested, my intention here is to refer to places that are far from a particular place of delivering instruction to students. In general, we have seen that technology is helpful to reach students who would otherwise stay outside the realm of formal education. It is also used to help teachers create, organize, and curate instructional materials. This kind of use in itself is not a problem. It actually solves some crucial problems. More recently, we have seen that digital technology has been the sole mechanism to continue formal education after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the new kinds of problems that have arisen as a result of technological intervention deserve our attention, too. For example, the school closure after the COVID-19 pandemic has provided many opportunities for private companies to enter the public education sector and capitalize on the widespread use of technology in education. As Williamson (2020) wrote, the pandemic created contexts for two major disruptions in education: “The first was the disruption to schooling for millions of students worldwide, and a rapid shift to remote learning online. The second, closely related disruption was the entry of the commercial education technology sector into public education at worldwide scale, and its attempts to profit from the shock of the pandemic” (para. 1). I observe that most discussions in educational circles are about the first type of disruption, i.e., how best to utilize digital technologies to support remote teaching. While issues of access and equity are important considerations in these discussions, we cannot turn away from the second kind of disruption. As educators rely increasingly on technology, questions need to be asked about how education can resist the neoliberal capitalist ideologies and the commercialization of education.

Capitalism and Education with Technology What does capitalism have to do with the educational use of technology? What is a capitalist motive in this context? It may be too simplistic to

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understand the notion of capitalism as the maximization of profit. As one author puts it, “Capitalism is essentially the investment of money in the expectation of making a profit” (Fulcher, 2015, p. 2). However, capitalism is more than investing money to make a profit. It is a mode of thinking and being. It organizes our actions, behaviors, and motivation in a specific way. And, that way is often alienating, cruel, and destructive. In capitalist systems, there is a particular kind of relationship between the means of production, those who carry out the means, and those who control the means. In this relationship, “the mass of the population (the proletariat) have to make a living by selling their labor to the owners of the means of production (the capitalists), who pay them only a proportion of the value they create.” In this way, capitalism becomes a system of “alienation and exploitation of the masses, by the dominance of the mentality of the market, and by the constant cycle of the creation and destruction of economic and social structures in pursuit of profit” (Morley, 2020, n.p.). Capitalism puts profit over people, society, and the environment. The engine of capitalism takes its fuel from the market. While all exchanges of goods and services are based on the basic principle of profit, the exchanges are always dependent on the market. It’s not only the labor-power of the working class that is on sale in the globe-spanning market, but it is also the owner-class, the capitalists, that “depend on the market to buy their inputs, including labour-power, and to sell their output for profit.” Thus, the capitalist apparatus depends solely on the market. In this marketplace, “competition and profit-maximization are the fundamental rules of life. Because of those rules, capitalism is a system uniquely driven to improve the productivity of labour by technical means” (Wood, 2002, p. 3). Thus, modern technology has profound implications for the promotion and sustainability of capitalism. Another important characteristic of capitalism is that it is performative and constantly changing. Nigel Thrift (2005), for example, wrote about capitalism’s experimental nature because it is a “perpetually unfinished” project (p. 3). Capitalism is always adaptive and mutating. In other words, it is “a set of networks which, though they may link in many ways, form not a total system but rather a project that is permanently ‘under construction’” (Thrift, 2005, p. 3). Understanding the demands of time is also very crucial in the capitalist mode of thinking. The bourgeoisie knows how “to surf the right side of the constant change” in society (Thrift, 2005, p. 3). With the sharp rise of digital technology, the

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silicon valleys of the world shifted their experimental focus from the earlier factory model of industrial capitalism to a new model aimed at making emerging technologies relevant for people. The field for the extraction of value has changed from laborers’ alienating time at the factory to people’s ubiquitous engagement with digital technology round the clock. This has led to technocapitalism (Suarez-Villa, 2009), i.e., new mechanisms for profit-maximization from technological creativity. Like the industrial mode of capitalism, contemporary technocapitalism forces workers to use technology to increase productivity. But it also wants workers to continue to use technology beyond their working shifts, for leisure and entertainment. For example, when workers scroll through their smartphone during lunch breaks, companies such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram make millions of dollars. Corporations are now competing for our attention, which is considered a scarce commodity in the contemporary attention economy (Lankshear & Knobel, 2005). It is, therefore, important for sociolinguists and educators to examine how capitalist imaginaries and realities are created, embodied, and challenged by people’s everyday language practices (Chun, 2021). This technocapitalism is closely linked to what Haskel and Westlake (2017) described as the intangible economy that deploys assets that one can neither see nor touch. There are four fundamental features of this technocapitalist intangible economy: scalability, sunkenness, synergies, and spillovers. As a matter of concern, these features of the intangible economy “tend towards heightened levels of economic centralization and economic inequality as compared to those experienced under industrial capitalism” (Stubbs, 2020, p. 32). There is another form of capitalism that is relevant for my discussion here. Jodi Dean described this as communicative capitalism, which promotes a number of fantasies, for example, abundance of information and ease of participation are inherently good. Communicative capitalism valorizes communications but undermines democracy. As Dean (2005) wrote: Ideals of access, inclusion, discussion and participation come to be realized in and through expansions, intensifications and interconnections of global telecommunications. But instead of leading to more equitable distributions of wealth and influence, instead of enabling the emergence of a richer variety in modes of living and practices of freedom, the deluge of screens and spectacles undermines political opportunity and efficacy for most of the world’s peoples. (p. 55)

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This kind of capitalism enables consumption of information at a massive scale, but fails to bring about real change for political efficacy and democratic participation. Both technocapitalism and communicative capitalism are antithetical to democratic education. A dominantly capitalist mode of technology use in language and literacy education has been a barrier to the emancipatory possibilities of digital technology as envisioned by critical scholars such as the New London Group. We have seen how English language teaching is being implicated in capitalist labor monopoly in the name of digital communicative efficiency (see, e.g., Morgan & Ramanathan, 2009). Neoliberal capitalist discourses often describe the use of digital technology in language education as a tool to enhance national competitiveness on a global marketplace (Hellmich, 2019). It is not surprising that after reflecting on the past two decades of work in critical and multiliteracies education, Allan Luke—a member of the New London Group—wrote: Unfortunately, digital technology hasn’t fundamentally altered the inequities of print-based, industrial-era schooling. For many communities, economic inequality, social injustice, and cultural marginalization have worsened. (Garcia et al., 2018, p. 73)

Thus, continuous efforts are needed for critical language education so that it can help learners redesign their social futures. A critical theory of technology holds considerable pedagogical promise in this context. It will help us understand how political-economic issues such as inequality and social class intersect with sociolinguistic issues and language education (e.g., Block, 2018).

Critical Theory The origin of critical theory is generally attributed to the Institute for Social Research, which was founded in 1923. The institute was attached to Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany. Founding members of the institute were dissatisfied with existing theories and methods of social research. Theorists such as Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Erich Fromm aimed to establish new methods of inquiry that would not only describe social phenomena, but also transform those phenomena. Human emancipation was at the center

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of their transformative inquiry and theory-building. The concept of critical theory found its first succinct expression in a landmark essay of Max Horkheimer by the title “Traditional and Critical Theory.” Horkheimer conceptualized critical theory as a meeting of empirical research and philosophical analysis where normative bases of society should foreground informed critique so that conditions of oppression can be transformed into more equitable and just conditions. In contrast to traditional theory, critical theory uses historical analysis to shed light on concerns of the proletariat. As Horkheimer (1972) wrote, Because of its situation in modern society the proletariat experiences the connection between work which puts ever more powerful instruments into men’s hands in their struggle with nature, and the continuous renewal of an outmoded social organization. Unemployment, economic crises, militarization, terrorist regimes - in a word, the whole condition of the masses - are not due, for example, to limited technological possibilities, as might have been the case in earlier periods, but to the circumstances of production which are no longer suitable to our time. (p. 213)

Thus, critical theory from the very beginning of its journey endeavored to transform the conditions of oppression and work toward human emancipation. Today, we can look at critical theory in a narrow sense and a broad sense. In the narrow sense, critical theory is a long tradition of social inquiry based on the Frankfurt School and Western Marxism that seeks human emancipation (Moisio, 2013). In the broad sense, critical theory is inherently expansive. Because the principal goal of critical theory is “to explain and transform all the circumstances that enslave human beings, many ‘critical theories’… have been developed. They have emerged in connection with the many social movements that identify different dimensions of the domination of human beings in modern societies” (Moisio, 2013, p. 559). Some examples of these theories are feminism, postcolonial criticism, ecocriticism, and critical race theory. In short, a theory can be called critical if it meets the criteria of sufficient explanation, practicality, and normativity. In both the narrow and the broad senses of critical theory, “it is the task of the critical theoretician to reduce the tension between his [sic] own insight and oppressed humanity in whose service he thinks” (Horkheimer, 1972, p. 221). In the context of this chapter,

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the critical theoretician must interrogate assumptions about interpellatory powers of digital objects in our social and semiotic practices.

Critical Theory Applied to Technology Critical approaches to the study of technology are not new. This tradition extends from Marx to the Frankfurt School to Foucault. This is why Andrew Feenberg suggests that we use theory in the plural and say “critical theories of technology.” A general goal of these theories is to argue and demonstrate that technologies are not separate from society but are adapted to specific social and political systems. Technologies are thus not neutral tools, because they are implicated in the socio-political order they serve and contribute to shaping, nor can they be characterized by a singular “essence of technology” because they evolve historically along with other aspects of society. (Feenberg, 2009, p. 146)

Because a full exposition of various critical theories is clearly beyond the scope of this chapter, I focus specifically on Feenberg’s critical theory of technology. Feenberg laid the foundation of this theory in his 1991 book entitled Critical Theory of Technology (Oxford University Press). His project was concerned with particular applications of a general theory of technology. He was heavily influenced by Herbert Marcuse. One of Marcuse’s central arguments was that “the existing modern technology forms a quasi-dystopian system that might be changed through political action” (Feenberg, 2009, p. 147). In his own critical theory, Feenberg attempted to concretize Marcuse’s ideas “through a constructivist approach to the analysis of specific technologies, such as computer-mediated communication and experimentation on human subjects” (p. 147). It should be noted that while Feenberg is influenced by the Frankfurt School, he also draws ideas from contemporary science and technology studies. Feenberg discussed a few alternative perspectives on technology. First, many modern thinkers have portrayed technology as value-neutral. In this conceptualization, means and ends are completely separate. When understood this way, technology can be viewed as either autonomous or humanly controlled. Two major theories have emerged to study

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technology from this perspective. These theories are technological determinism and instrumentalism. While the first one has found its supporters in the modernization project, the latter has a liberal fanbase with an optimistic faith in human progress. Second, technology is value-laden. Feenberg uses the example of bank-notes and says that “no scientific study will find money in a $100 bill. Not everything is a physical or chemical property of matter. Perhaps technologies, like bank-notes, have a way of containing value in themselves as social entities” (Beira & Feenberg, 2018, p. 60). With regard to agency, the value-laden perspective on technology may be approached from two angles mentioned above: autonomy and human control. To view technology as autonomous is not to say that it acts alone. Humans are actively involved. However, the question is whether technology itself decides its next phases of development, or humans are in charge. This question of autonomy and the value-laden nature of technology has been discussed in detail in works carried out under the banner of substantivism. Finally, we confront the question of human control and the value-laden character of technology. For Feenberg, “technology would be humanly controllable if we could determine the next step in its evolution in accordance with intentions elaborated without reference to the imperatives of technology” (Beira & Feenberg, 2018, p. 60). In his wide-ranging works, Feenberg has elaborated on this perspective through his critical theory of technology. In summary, his critical theory is not about whether technology is good or bad. Instead, it is about the tensions between the technological possibilities and human agency for more democratic futures because technologies are encoded with specific socio-economic values and interests. Feenberg’s project aims to explore how these values and interests can be developed and adapted for more or less democratic purposes. In this light, technologies and their encoded values and interests are always subject to social action, negotiation, and (re)interpretation (Beira & Feenberg, 2018).

Teachers and Technology: Questioning Utopian Optimism Technological innovation has always influenced educational policy and practice. In the last 100 years, we have seen a strong relationship between various technologies (such as motion pictures, radio, television, and computer) and education. The key goal of educational policymakers and administrators has been to achieve greater efficiency and effectiveness. In

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general, most individuals concerned with educational improvement have been impressed by technology’s power of reaching out to a great number of individuals. They have also been impressed by technology’s ability to perform complex tasks with greater precision and accuracy. Consequently, the education sector has seen the integration of various kinds of new technology into the curricula. Because school and society are so intricately connected, it is hard for the school to resist or avoid major changes taking place in the larger society. The school actually wants to embrace societal changes and technological advancements because a key mandate of formal education has been to prepare children as full members of the society. Therefore, schools cannot but accept new technologies that become pervasive in society and in various industries. However, because pedagogy is a complex and context-dependent process, technology often fails to deliver on its promises, as expected by educational policymakers and teachers. For this reason, I describe the technological enthusiasm in the field of education as utopian optimism. It is true that teaching and learning always involve some degree of utopian ambition. We remain optimistic that our students will learn, at least most of, what we teach. Students, too, overcome various obstacles to attend lectures and remain optimistic that they will learn something that will increase the possibility of obtaining desired employment and thus change their life-situations. However, if our optimism moves unreasonably away from the reality of life, then it may become a source of disappointment and suffering. As Daniel Kahneman (2011) wrote, “Because optimistic bias can be both a blessing and a risk, you should be both happy and wary if you are temperamentally optimistic” (p. 255). For Kahneman, this kind of bias occurs when we “view the world as more benign than it really is, our own attributes as more favorable than they truly are, and the goals we adopt as more achievable than they are likely to be” (p. 255). Another reason, Kahneman believes, is our tendency “to exaggerate our ability to forecast the future” (p. 255). Following Kahneman’s nuanced understanding of optimism, I believe that we need to be realistic in our technological optimism. Many members of the education community have been too optimistic about technology’s positive impact on education. Some have gone as far as arguing for a total replacement of teachers with technology. This was anticipated in Skinner’s (1968) notion of teaching machine. And now we have teaching robots. Technology’s effectiveness and efficiency arguments are now sold on the basis of discourses that could be pedagogically

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harmful and socially oppressive. One dominant discourse is what Selwyn (2017) described as “rock-star teachers.” This discourse promotes “the idea that lessons, lectures and tutorials from one ‘rock-star teacher’ can be consumed by hundreds of thousands of students. The role of the local ‘teacher’ in making use of this content is, therefore, one of technician” (p. 113). In this role, the local teacher works as a “proctor” without the power of curricular decision-making and pedagogical agency. Such automation of teaching finds its extreme form in the use of robotic technologies in schools and universities. Designers of these “coded teachers” use artificial intelligence (AI) to ensure that the robot teachers provide students with necessary advice and pedagogical support. This idea of coded teachers—utilizing artificial intelligence and robotics—has already made inroads into the field of second/foreign language education (see, e.g., Pokrivˇcáková, 2019). I would like to believe that researchers and educators pushing for the development of robot teachers have good intentions. For example, robots can be useful for rural areas with fewer qualified teachers capable of providing effective instruction. It makes sense to assume that “robots may be particularly useful in rural schools, due to the challenges rural areas face with low student numbers, low funding, a lack of specialist teachers, and isolation” (Broadbent et al., 2018, p. 295). While robot teachers, or what is often referred to as Teacherbots, solve some problems such as reaching out to students in rural areas, they also create new problems. For example, the uses of artificial intelligence, robots, and online education may promote automation of teaching and deskilling of teachers. As Feenberg (2003) argued, “corporate strategists, state legislators, top university administrators, and ‘futurologists’ have lined up behind” a utopian optimism with the “goal is to replace (at least for the masses) face-to-face teaching by professional faculty with an industrial product, infinitely reproducible at decreasing unit cost” (p. 100). What Feenberg predicted two decades ago has recently materialized due to emergency online teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic. Education administrators are now looking for ways to justify greater automation and more reliance on technology. Therefore, it is important for teachers and education researchers to critically analyze how technological optimism can be helpful, for whom, and under what circumstances.

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Understanding “Coded Teachers” and the “Technical Code” Many supporters of educational technology argue that robots—especially the ones designed for interaction with people, known as “social robots”— have some advantages over other forms of technology. They argue that social robots allow students to interact in their real-life learning environments. They also argue that robots support naturalistic interaction because of their humanoid appearance. In recent years, we have seen an increasing use of robots in language teaching and learning (see, e.g., Vogt et al., 2019). Reviewing the literature on the use of social robots in language education, van den Berghe et al. (2019) found that robotassisted language learning (RALL) can be useful for language learning. For example, they reported that children found it very effective to learn new words using social robots. These authors also wrote that “a robot may be beneficial in assisting the teaching of reading skills, either in the function of an assistant or as a tutor” (p. 273). Additionally, RALL studies found “positive effects of the robot on children’s learning” of second language grammar (p. 273). These authors went on to claim that “robots not only affect language-learning gains but may also affect students’ learning strategies and motivation to learn” (p. 276). The authors of this review also believed that RALL has a “novelty effect” on learners, who enjoy the new technology so much that their excitement leads to higher learning outcomes. Clearly, technology-integrated pedagogy such as RALL puts students in the driver’s seat. This is a characteristic feature of a neoliberal consumerist approach to education. There is no question that some, perhaps most, students will like the integration of technology into the curriculum. After all, all new forms of technology will have the “novelty effect” to some degree. However, a more important question is who benefits from such technology integration and at the expense of who/what? How does the issue of access play out in an unequal world where many students remain hungry while attending schools? What are some “technical codes” of the new technologies being used in language education? Technical code is an important concept in Feenberg’s critical theory of technology. The design, construction, and interpretation of technology are generally aligned with systems of domination. We see social codes of

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technology that also work as technical codes of capitalism. From a sociological perspective, “the term ‘code’ has at least two different meanings. First, it may signify a rule that simultaneously (1) classifies activities as permitted or forbidden and (2) associates them with a certain meaning or purpose that explains (1)” (Feenberg, 2002, p. 6). For example, technical manuals contain codes that define what is permitted and what is not. Traffic codes distinguish between safe and unsafe driving practices. However, there are other kinds of codes that are not written in manuals. These codes, for example, the prestige hierarchy between Mercedes and Toyota are not written in a manual. This kind of code requires active interpretations from social actors. Technical codes combine both the overt and the covert of what is possible and desirable. The code works as a communicative event. In Feenberg’s (2002) words, “the technical code has (social) ontological significance in a society where domination is based on control of technology. It is not merely the rule under which means are chosen. Much more than that, it is the principle of organizational identity and survival” (p. 77). Technical codes operate between technical specifications and the social demands. They define frameworks that render some choices more rational than others. These choices are made and concretized in relative terms. For example, “The technical code of online education is relative … to the interests, assumptions, and values of the actors who are engaged in the design and development process, and who are thus positioned as powerful interpreters of the technology and the social forms it mediates” (Hamilton & Feenberg, 2005, p. 112). When various forms of digital technology are utilized in (language) education, the interpretive aspects of technology are often left out of discussions. Like user manuals, most writings about technology contain codes about how to use the technology in educational contexts. But they do not invite diverse interpretations of how technology integration may create conditions for un/equal educational and employment opportunities. For example, when technologies are introduced as a labor-saving tool, thousands of teachers become irrelevant. They lose their jobs to the same technologies that are used to control them. Technologies are also said to deskill teachers’ pedagogic and moral abilities, while teachers are often asked to learn new skills to operate newly introduced technologies. As critical language educators, we need to be cautious about the promises and pitfalls of technology integration into the curriculum. Critical theories of technology should be helpful to interrogate utopian optimism in technology when it comes to language education. When Big

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Tech offers help to the education sector, we need to be careful of not only the pedagogical, but also the social, economic, and political dimensions of technology. Paying attention to Ben Williamson’s (2017) observations of Silicon Valley’s educational intervention may be a good way to conclude this chapter on the importance of taking a critical approach to technology in language education. Following are a selection from Willianson’s observations of Silicon Valley’s approach to education: • trust in markets to provide a competitive alternative to existing educational provision; • commitment to measurement and metrics in the assessment and evaluation of the performance of institutions; • faith in data analytics and constant classroom surveillance to provide insights into student learning; • belief that philanthropy and venture capital investment (and hybrid combinations of philanthrocapital) can provide the means to fix failing educational systems; • view that education constitutes a valuable market with high financial returns for investors in successful adaptive learning platforms; and • subscription to the idea that humans are sub-optimal computing machines that can be analyzed for their psychological bugs and fixed through training and rational self-analysis. (p. 284) It is, therefore, important that researchers and practitioners in the fields of critical language teaching and Computer Assisted Language Learning raise questions about who benefits from technology integration and how contexts for oppression and emancipation are created with the help of new technologies. In language education, silences about these questions are reflected in the preoccupation with instrumentally achieved efficiencies and outcomes, which disguise the underlying beliefs, rationalities, and epistemologies involved. As I have argued, critical theories are necessary to analyze technical codes and transform them for the empowerment of teachers and for emancipatory pedagogy. As Horkheimer (1972) suggested, suffering of people is not due mainly to a lack of advanced technology, but to oppressive circumstances of production that govern their social, economic, and political relationships. Educators and researchers may draw inspiration for equity-oriented pedagogical actions

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from critical theory, but one must always work with one’s responsibility for the betterment of the other. A critical theory of technology offers important insights into the pedagogical problems of our time when the push for technology integration into language curricula is gaining strength every day.

References Beira, E., & Feenberg, A. (2018). Technology, modernity, and democracy: Essays by Andrew Feenberg. Rowman & Littlefield. Block, D. (2018). Political economy and sociolinguistics: Neoliberalism, inequality and social class. Bloomsbury. Broadbent, E., Feerst, D. A., Lee, S. H., Robinson, H., Albo-Canals, J., Ahn, H. S., & MacDonald, B. A. (2018). How could companion robots be useful in rural schools? International Journal of Social Robotics, 10(3), 295–307. Chun, C. W. (2021). A world without capitalism?: Alternative discourses, spaces, and imaginaries. Routledge. Dean, J. (2005). Communicative capitalism: Circulation and the foreclosure of politics. Cultural Politics, 1(1), 51–74. Feenberg, A. (1991). Critical theory of technology. Oxford University Press. Feenberg, A. (2002). Transforming technology: A critical theory revisited. Oxford University Press. Feenberg, A. (2003). Modernity theory and technology studies: Reflections on bridging the gap. In T. J. Misa, P. Brey, & A. Feenberg (Eds.), Modernity and technology (pp. 73–104). MIT Press. Feenberg, A. (2009). Critical theory of technology. In J. K. B. Olsen, S. A. Pedersen, & V. F. Hendricks (Eds.), A companion to the philosophy of technology (pp. 146–153). Wiley-Blackwell. Fulcher, J. (2015). Capitalism: A very short introduction. Oxford University Press. Garcia, A., Luke, A., & Seglem, R. (2018). Looking at the next 20 years of multiliteracies: A discussion with Allan Luke. Theory into Practice, 57 (1), 72– 78. https://doi.org/10.1080/00405841.2017.1390330 Hamilton, E., & Feenberg, A. (2005). The technical codes of online education. E-Learning and Digital Media, 2(2), 104–121. Haskel, J., & Westlake, S. (2017). Capitalism without capital: The rise of the intangible economy. Princeton University Press. Hellmich, E. A. (2019). A critical look at the bigger picture: Macro-level discourses of language and technology in the United States. CALICO Journal, 36(1), 39–58.

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Horkheimer, M. (1972). Critical theory: Selected essays (M. J. O’Connell & others, Trans.). Continuum. Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Penguin Books. Lankshear, C., & Knobel, M. (2005). Do we have your attention? New literacies, digital technologies, and the education adolescents. In D. E. Alvermann (Ed.), Adolescents and literacies in a digital world (pp. 19–39). Peter Lang. Macaro, E., Handley, Z., & Walter, C. (2012). A systematic review of CALL in English as a second language: Focus on primary and secondary education. Language Teaching, 45(1), 1–43. Marcuse, H. (1964). One-dimensional man: Studies in the ideology of advanced industrial society. Beacon Press. Moisio, O.-P. (2013). Critical theory. In A. L. C. Runehov & L. Oviedo (Eds.), Encyclopedia of sciences and religions. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/ 978-1-4020-8265-8_1642 Morgan, B., & Ramanathan, V. (2009). Outsourcing, globalizing economics, and shifting language policies: Issues in managing Indian call centres. Language Policy, 8, 69–80. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10993-008-9111-x Morley, N. (2020). Capitalism. Oxford Classical Dictionary. Retrieved 5 May. 2021, from https://oxfordre.com/classics/view/10.1093/acrefore/978019 9381135.001.0001/acrefore-9780199381135-e-1351 Pokrivˇcáková, S. (2019). Preparing teachers for the application of AI-powered technologies in foreign language education. Journal of Language and Cultural Education, 7 (3), 135–153. See, B. H., Gorard, S., Lu, B., Dong, L., & Siddiqui, N. (2021). Is technology always helpful? A critical review of the impact on learning outcomes of education technology in supporting formative assessment in schools. Research Papers in Education. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 02671522.2021.1907778 Selwyn, N. (2017). Education and technology: Key issues and debates. Bloomsbury. Skinner, B. F. (1968). The technology of teaching. Meredith Corporation. Stubbs, A. (2020). Technocapitalism, the intangible economy, and economic centralization. Perspectives on Global Development and Technology, 19(1–2), 32–44. https://doi.org/10.1163/15691497-12341538 Suarez-Villa, L. (2009). Technocapitalism: A critical perspective on technological innovation and corporatism. Temple University press. Thrift, N. (2005). Knowing capitalism. Sage. van den Berghe, R., Verhagen, J., Oudgenoeg-Paz, O., Van der Ven, S., & Leseman, P. (2019). Social robots for language learning: A review. Review of Educational Research, 89(2), 259–295. Vogt, P., van den Berghe, R., de Haas, M., Hoffman, L., Kanero, J., Mamus, E., Montanier, J. M., Oranç, C., Oudgenoeg-Paz, O., García, D. H. Papadopoulos, F., Schodde, T., Verhagen, J., Wallbridgell, C. D., Willemsen,

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B., de Wit, J., Belpaeme, T., Göksun, T., Kopp, S., ... Pandey, A. K. (2019, March). Second language tutoring using social robots: A large-scale study. 2019 14th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), pp. 497–505. IEEE. Williamson, B. (2017). Educating Silicon Valley: Corporate education reform and the reproduction of the techno-economic revolution. Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 39(3), 265–288. Williamson, B. (2020). The edtech pandemic shock. Retrieved from https://www. ei-ie.org/en/item/23423:the-edtech-pandemic-shock-by-ben-williamsonanna-hogan Wood, E. M. (2002). The origin of capitalism: A longer view. Verso.

CHAPTER 4

Interrogating the Promise of Temporal Flexibility in CALL

Abstract We often hear an argument that technology gives greater temporal flexibility to educators and learners. In this chapter, I challenge the idea of temporal flexibility in Computer Assisted Language Learning. First, I discuss the commodification of time, which has been on the rise since the Industrial Revolution. Then I present three temporal perspectives—clock time, socially constructed time, and virtual time—to shed light on the complex relationships between time and education. To reconceptualize temporality for Critical CALL, I make a case for understanding time as a social practice implicated in such factors as power, race, class, and gender. Based on contemporary literature on social and political analyses of time and technology, I propose five pedagogical implications for critical language education. Keywords Time · Technology · Temporal flexibility · Clock time · Social time · Virtual time

We often use technology to save time, but increasingly, it either takes the saved time along with it, or makes the saved time less present, intimate and rich. (Foer, 2013, para. 15)

Rich bodies of theoretical and empirical work in disciplines such as philosophy, physics, sociology, and psychology have made it clear that © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Ahmed, Exploring Silences in the Field of Computer Assisted Language Learning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06501-9_4

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individuals’ temporal experiences differ in qualitatively significant ways (Adam, 2004; Callender, 2011; Hassard, 1990; Ogle, 2015; Simpson, 1995). A two-hour duration is not experienced and felt the same way, for example, in a theater hall and in a prison cell. The experience of duration is also tied to human emotionality (Flaherty, 1999). In the field of education, time is an essential concept because learning and knowledge development are often “measured” from a temporal perspective. In language education, discussions of time have traditionally focused on psychological processes of learning and other factors such as learners’ age (as we see in the critical period hypothesis ). However, the field is yet to fully embrace the complexities of temporal experience. The kinds of criticalinterpretive analysis needed to understand temporal complexities are rare, with some exceptions such as the special issue on time that the journal Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching published in 2017. In this special issue, Feryok and Mercer (2017) attempted “to foreground time as a construct worthy of attention in its own right” and took “a critical stance on the nature of ‘time’ as a construct, reflecting on how our perspectives on time inform our understanding of research and language learning and teaching processes” (p. 203). The field of Computer Assisted Language Learning takes pride in its ability to provide learners with temporal flexibility, which is popularized through such notions as distance education and asynchronous learning. However, I would like to argue that the concept of temporal flexibility is based on a modernist quest for segmenting, measuring, and regulating time. This view of time may be described as “clock time,” i.e., time is a fixed entity, and accurate metrics can be developed to measure it (Gray, 2017). In this chapter, I discuss how this modernist view of clock time may be conceptually harmful and pedagogically unproductive for language learners and teachers in diverse contexts. My critique is informed largely by the notion of time as a social practice, which implies that time is not singular, stretching over a uniform space (May & Thrift, 2001). I also explore how the notion of social time may offer multiple alternative perspectives on understanding the limits of clock time in language education. Drawing from Stein (2001), I highlight two such perspectives. First, accounts of temporal flexibility often come from privileged observers; therefore, they are inherently elitist and discriminatory. Second, the narratives of flexibility are sold on the basis of technological determinism, which ignores the fact that technology is always implicated in multiple and complex social processes. I conclude the chapter by arguing for a

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dialogue between virtual/network time and social time. Such a dialogue may prove helpful to disrupt technological determinism’s promise for liberating people from the burden of waiting. Time is often understood as a valuable commodity in educational contexts. Those who succeed in academia are said to have a better control over time, compared to those who fail to be successful. Yet, time or temporality does not usually receive enough scholarly attention from education researchers, policymakers, and teachers. How should we think about time in pedagogical activities? How do we know when we have more or less time? Can we quantify time in the context of teaching and learning? How do we know the quality of time? Some argue that academia is too fast; therefore, they want us to slow down. But who can afford to slow down? When and for whom is the ability to slow down a special privilege? These are some questions that deserve serious sociological and pedagogical investigations. One specific question that I would like to pose in this chapter is: does technology afford temporal flexibility to language learners? If so, for whom and under what conditions? This question is important because the advancements in communication and automation technology did not result in increased free time as they had promised. Recent studies have indicated that there is severe “time poverty” in contemporary societies (Giurge et al., 2020). Additionally, questions are being raised about the quality of time that we are able to save by using digital technology. There are myriad social, economic, and political factors that influence the relative quality of “saved time.” Therefore, it is important to look not only at quantifiable clock time, but also at qualitative social time. The broader field of education has recently witnessed some interest in the concept of time. Both sociological and philosophical inquiries have enriched educational research on time. Research on education and time offers interesting avenues of inquiry for technology and language education. Some of these avenues may be articulated in a series of dualisms: qualitative vs. quantitative time, linear vs. circular time, subjective vs. objective time, lived vs. lost time, clock time vs. internet time, calendar-based time vs. event-based time. The list can go on. However, what is more important for my purpose in this chapter is a recognition that educational change requires a temporal perspective that does not simply measure durations, but instead complexifies our understanding of how time is experienced, interpreted, and utilized. I believe that an interpretive approach to temporality is important to understand the

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diverse contexts of English language education as a global field and how teachers and students may exercise their agency for pedagogical improvement. For example, in a recent article in TESOL Quarterly, Liddicoat, Murray, Mosavian, and Zhen (2021) reported on how conceptions of time influence English language teachers’ ability to change practice. The participants of their study—nine tertiary level teachers of English from China’s Yunnan province—discussed how culturally constructed meanings of time and local institutional chronotopes interacted with their academic work, family responsibilities, and gender roles, and thus impacted their changing practice in teaching. The authors of this article conclude that “what is important about time is not just the amount of time needed or available to make changes but also how time is constructed as a cultural object within a particular spatial context” (p. 28). Such observation has important implications for the CALL field, which promises temporal flexibility and effectiveness through the utilization of a variety of digital technologies.

Three Perspectives on Time In light of the above discussion, it is pertinent to ask: how do technological objects interact with time-as-a-cultural-object? As a point of departure, I briefly summarize three perspectives on time that are relevant for education researchers and language teachers. Duncheon and Tierney (2013) have discussed these perspectives as clock time, socially constructed time, and virtual time. Clock time: The development of modern science, the Industrial Revolution, and the popularity of capitalism gave rise to “clock time.” In this conception, time is measurable, linear, and quantifiable. It is calculated by using clocks and calendars, and it has an exchange value. This view of time is also an attempt to secularize time. For example, a God-centric view of time, as seen in early religious traditions, was brought down to earth and people were given power to control time. This understanding of time as a scientifically measurable and secular construct has dominated not only scholarly literature but also people’s everyday practices. Philosophers such as Karl Marx have written about how this view of time takes away people’s freedom to enjoy life and their agency to change their circumstances. In many ways, clock time is an attempt to commodify the notion of time itself. Duncheon and Tierney (2013) identified three assumptions that run through the critical literature on clock time:

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• The first assumption is that clock time is a universal construct to which all peoples and cultures subscribe. • The second assumption of the clock time paradigm is that people are willing and able to allocate their time according to the economic principle of scarcity. • The third assumption inherent in clock time is that quantifying time allocations provides adequate understanding of an individual’s relationship with time. (pp. 242–243). These assumptions suggest how clocks and calendars have been used to measure time and control people’s choices and activities. Socially constructed time: The view of time as socially constructed challenges the paradigm of clock time mentioned above. Instead of looking at time as objective and measurable, the socially constructed notion of time points to how temporal experiences vary according to sociocultural contexts. This view gained prominence at the beginning of the twentieth century when many Western social scientists realized that people in diverse societies construct temporal realities in different ways. For example, the presence of ancestral spirits in the life and activities of many indigenous communities gives them a different way of orienting to what we generally call the past. Similarly, a person in prison may not experience the duration of a day in the same way another person may experience the day at home or at work. Thus, “while clock time focuses on time quantity, socially constructed time explores temporal diversity, quality, and meaning” (Duncheon & Tierney, 2013, p. 249). In sum, socially constructed notions of time are concerned with meanings of time and actors’ temporal experiences. Virtual time: The idea of virtual time has emerged with the advancement of digital technologies of information sharing and communication. The extraordinary speed and ease of electronic communications such as email and social media not only transformed the ways we communicate but also altered our perceptions of time. Some contemporary thinkers have developed novel concepts to understand the nature of virtual time. For example, Robert Hassan has written extensively to theorize the notion of network time. This notion of time denotes “the online experience of time where the time of the clock becomes either secondary or irrelevant” (Hassan, 2017, p. 76). Network time is different from clock time because

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Its rhythms, like the digital logic that creates them, are febrile and discontinuous. Network time is the experience of time when we are connected: by smartphone, or wireless computer, or app, or any networkable device or program. Our experience of network time can be short or long or discontinuous; it may be felt to slow down or speed up; it can span the planet or reach only to the next room; and it can encompass one individual or a limitless number. (Hassan, 2017, p. 76)

A notable characteristic of network time is its call for efficiency. It orients us toward a more accelerated pace of life. Of the three perspectives on time, the network or virtual time is more relevant for CALL’s promise of temporal flexibility. Duncheon and Tierney (2013) discussed three applications of virtual time: blurred boundaries, temporal flexibility, and multitasking. First, people can complete various tasks from anywhere as long as they have an electronic device and an internet connection. Thus, the boundaries between spaces such as the workplace, home, or vacation resorts are blurring. Second, due to the increasing use of mobile technologies, people are believed to have more control over time. The nature of organizing, coordinating, and completing tasks is now fluid and flexible. The third application of virtual time is the ubiquitous phenomenon of multitasking at an unprecedented speed. While there is much enthusiasm about virtual time, we have research evidence showing that there is a wide gap between those who can utilize virtual time to their advantage and those who don’t have the resources to utilize such time (Gray, 2017; Manathunga, 2019; Streamas, 2020). Similarly, the boundaries between spaces are not equally flexible for everyone. Already existing social and economic inequalities have a significant impact on people’s abilities to conceptualize, experience, and utilize various forms of time. In the context of formal education, the notion of virtual/network time is frequently used to promise temporal flexibility for educators and students. A familiar “selling pitch” for online education is that the temporal flexibility provides learners with personal learning experiences catered to the temporal rhythms of their personal life and spatial arrangements. I argue that we need a fundamental shift in thinking if we want to understand how temporal flexibility can be beneficial, for whom, and under what conditions. A shift in thinking is now more important than ever before because the COVID-19 pandemic has altered so many people’s sense of time. It also requires an analysis of virtual time in light

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of socially constructed time (or what we may call “social time” for short). We cannot isolate virtual time from social time because, as I will illustrate below, virtual time is socially engineered for specific purposes. What do I mean by socially engineered time? Humans have always tried to conquer the temporal rhythms set by nature. Harvesting at the right time, shepherding cattle home before sundown, and having children before the end of fertility age are just a few examples. What I am trying to illustrate through these examples is that human history has always been a history of competition with nature’s temporal rhythms. The measurement of time—epitomized by the invention of the modern clock—was a deliberate endeavor to conquer time. It is important to note that any attempt to gain control over temporal rhythms has specific personal, social, and economic interests. In recent decades, we have seen a strong desire to overcome temporal barriers as the global economy needs activities round the clock. The invention of electric light enabled factory managers to force workers to work at night. With the invention of electronic mail, the duration for sending and receiving communications has shrunk to a degree, which was unimaginable a few decades ago. A drive toward instantaneity—encapsulated in the notion of “realtime”—is tied to global capitalism (see, e.g., Hope 2006, 2016). Due to the power imbalances in the neoliberal economic and technological order, the experience of real-time is heterogeneous and conflictual. In this order, time is of central importance, but an equitable reorganization of temporal experience does not seem to be possible within existing inequalities of resources. As Hope (2006) wrote, The real-time formations of global capitalism generate temporal dimensions of structural power. Worldwide, the richest elites benefit from networked systems of immiseration, exploitation and excommunication. They have the capacity to enter or exit from real-time environments (for the purposes of work, travel, leisure, entertainment or knowledge acquisition). These insular webs of social activity effectively produce a bifurcation of temporal experience. (p. 297)

It is noteworthy that everyone is not equally able to control the natural and artificial rhythms of time. While a large group of people—say, international students at Canadian universities or garment-factory workers in Bangladesh—seem to have a similar need or goal for competing with time, there is likely to be an unequal distribution of resources among the

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members of the same group and such inequality is a barrier to utilizing time in a favorable way. Thus, any attempt to conquer time, e.g., a drive to instantaneity, is always motivated by economic, social, or other needs that already exist. This is why it is not possible to separate virtual time from social time. Thus, the socially engineered time may be understood as an attempt to control natural temporal rhythms mediated by emerging needs and existing resources available to actors.

Socially Engineered Time and Critical CALL The socially engineered time has important implications for education in general and for language education in particular. How certain conceptualizations and practices of time are programmed and promoted should be investigated to understand how the quality of education may be enhanced. Promises such as temporal flexibility may not bring about desired goals if we fail to account for existing and emerging socioeconomic forces that shape various concepts of time. For example, racialized communities often have conflictual relationships with the dominant forms of temporality promoted by institutions such as schools and universities. Streamas (2020), for example, talked about how students from racialized backgrounds found it challenging to work within the “school time.” Based on his observation, Streamas developed the concept of “Colored People’s Time” to shed light on “racialized temporalities” and to better address “the learning needs of students of color” (p. 710). I would like to extend Streamas’s observation to say that all marginalized groups—not only racialized communities—experience temporalities differently from socio-economically dominant groups. With a growing call for reconceptualizing temporality, we need to understand how individuals—administrators, teachers, and students— experience time in educational contexts. There is no shortage of talks about time-scarcity in academia. While we often hear complaints about a lack of time, busy-ness is also branded as a badge of honor. Depending on institutional power and privilege, individuals may reap certain benefits by being busy. We also have social expectations for being busy. Due to the increasing acceleration in all domains of society, many people feel the pressure to keep themselves busy—perhaps competitively busier than others. In such contexts that valorize busy-ness, technology is referred to as a convenient tool to overcome the limitations of time and space. In other words, we are tempted, and at times, forced to do more than

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what was possible before the advent of modern digital era, and to do so without having to physically travel to different locations. Along this line, online education is often marketed on the premise of student empowerment, self-paced learning, life-long learning opportunities, and temporal flexibility. Another trend that depends heavily on the temporal dimension is the increasing offerings of short-term online courses of study at the post-secondary level (i.e., a spiking trend of micro-credentials). While all these changes have a close connection to the temporal aspect of academic life, the concept of time is something that is still under-studied in the literature on educational uses of technology. For example, Barbera, Gros, and Kirschner (2015) carried out a systematic literature review to understand how educational research deals with time as a factor in learning. They analyzed 966 articles that have the presence of time and that have been published across a period of 11 years. In their analysis, “the most important result … was that ‘time’ played almost no role as a variable in research on education and educational technology” (p. 96). It is, therefore, important to recognize how various notions of temporality intersect with pedagogy. When I say “pedagogy,” I do not mean “teaching” as a one-way transmission of information and knowledge from the teacher to the student. Instead, I use the term pedagogy to suggest a particular type of relationship between teachers and learners. This relationship is situated at the intersection of co-teaching and co-learning. It is context-dependent and context-transformative. In other words, pedagogy transforms the experiences of both teachers and learners, where both parties learn from each other. Furthermore, pedagogy is oriented toward an ethical commitment to the other. It challenges the self to understand the perspectives that are seemingly contradictory. When students and learners are engaged in pedagogical thinking and activities, they are aware of how to move forward with a progressive vision that is beneficial for all and harmful to none. In this way, the work of pedagogues is always guided by the principles of equity and fairness and a commitment to social justice. If we conceptualize pedagogy in light of the above statement, then we should not lose sight of how time becomes a factor in pedagogy. Recent research in various fields of social sciences suggests how a politics of time (chronopolitics) is implicated with identities and material conditions of actors. For example, authors such as Mills (2020) discussed how the temporal structures of modernity have been harmful

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for racialized groups. Hence, there is a “call for the resetting of the Eurochronometer, whose oppressive temporality has historically come in both left and right versions” (Mills, 2020, p. 298). The modern Euro-chronometer is now more complicated by the tendencies of acceleration in contemporary societies shaped by technological sophistication, growing economic inequality, catastrophic environmental degradation, and growing intolerance for alternative perspectives. In academic contexts, a decolonization of the Euro-chronometer is necessary (Shahjahan, 2015). However, it may not be possible without an intersectional approach that accounts for all factors that influence how time is conceptualized and experienced. As mentioned above, in education research there is a lack of attention to the intersection of time and technology. This lack is particularly visible in language education. A dominant tendency in research on second/foreign language education is to document the “impact” of specific digital tools on language learning. While teachers’ skills to use these new tools are emphasized, we often see strong reliance on tools as if they had sufficient agency to enhance language learning. We know from research in fields such as Science and Technology Studies that tools do have certain kinds of agency. However, their agency is relational and is variably limited and strengthened by other actors in the wider context of education. The cultural and material circumstances of technology use determine, to a great extent, the kind of agency a tool may exert (Turner, 2005). In other words, while there is a technological promise to make time flexible, not all learners are equally able to use digital tools to disrupt the clock time (the Euro-chronometer). The intersectionality of race, class, gender, and geography will always play a role in students’ agency to challenge the clock time. Therefore, both educators and learners need to reconceptualize the intersection of time and technology.

Moving Forward: Some Proposals While my proposals below are intended mainly for language education, they may be creatively adapted to all sub-fields of education. The key message in my proposals is that time and technology shape each other, and such co-shaping is always context-dependent. Digital technologies certainly help us overcome some temporal barriers. On the other hand, time shapes how we utilize technology. For example, the “anytime anywhere” motto of online learning does not apply equally to various

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groups of learners who suffer from a lack of access to necessary social and economic resources. There is research evidence suggesting many challenges that female students and academics encounter while balancing work and family responsibility and still remaining productive in a culture of speed (Aiston & Jung, 2015). Furthermore, Veletsianos et al. (2021) investigated the temporal dimensions of flexible learning by analyzing data from 380,000 students participating in two massive open online courses. Their study “suggest[ed] that temporal flexibility may especially benefit women” (p. 22). They found that consistent study schedules may not be helpful for women who “face challenges and environments that prevent such time allocation” (p. 32). Gender is a major factor in technology— not only in contemporary time but it has been the case throughout human history. Anthropological research has revealed, for example, the image of womanly skill as basket-maker and manly skill as hunters. As a result of gendered ways of looking at technology, men have been wrongly portrayed “as having a natural affinity with technology, whereas women supposedly fear or dislike it” (Bray, 2007, p. 38). In addition to gender as a factor, we should examine how a neoliberal ideology shapes various temporal perspectives. For instance, when time is presented as flexible, this is often based on the idea of the individual as an autonomous agent. One of the problems with this ideology about the individual is that it holds people accountable for their failure and forgives socio-economic factors that set them up for failure. When so much trust is placed on digital tools and the user is viewed as a fully capable agent, there is an attempt to isolate the user from the social, cultural, and material contexts of tool use. We see this tendency in many discussions about temporal flexibility in online and distance education. This discourse assumes that all learners, regardless of their social-economic conditions, health, or family responsibilities, will benefit equally from the digital tools used to deliver content and establish communication between educators and students. Therefore, it is important that we view the individual as part of a greater ecology where social status, cultural context, and access to non-technology-related resources may restrict and support individual agency to utilize tools in different ways. Some observers have recently put the notion of flexible learning under the microscope. I believe that a critical interrogation of flexible learning is warranted as we face a growing push toward more online remote models of education. While flexibility is a helpful notion for many learners, we cannot take it for granted that it will always fulfill the democratizing

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aim of education. In their critique of flexible learning, Houlden and Veletsianos (2019) reminded us to “consider what forms of flexibility are worthwhile and for whom, and what remains, or becomes inflexible, in relation to flexibility as we generally understand it” (p. 1008). In their critical analysis, Houlden and Veletsianos (2019) developed five key understandings: • • • • •

Flexibility is neither universal nor neutral. Some students benefit more than others from flexibility. Flexibility assumes students are self-reliant and individualistic. Flexibility adoption is imbricated in power and privilege. Flexibility should be seen in relational and relative terms. (p. 1006)

These understandings—developed in a pre-pandemic world—are now more relevant as we depend increasingly on digital technologies for teaching and learning. The COVID-19 pandemic has not only taken several million lives and disrupted the known structures of societies, but it has also revealed existing social and economic inequalities. In some cases, the pandemic has widened the gaps between the poor and the rich, between the global north and the global south, between the technologically literate and illiterate. Therefore, we need to think deeply about how the notion of flexible learning may help or harm students and educators. While flexible learning should be investigated from multiple vantage points, in this chapter I have been interested in flexibility from a temporal perspective. This perspective is important for Computer Assisted Language Learning because temporal flexibility is usually linked to digital technologies of information and communication. When we use digital technology to overcome temporal barriers and to extend the biological capacities of our body, we do not work only with our tools. Instead, we interact with a multitude of factors—personal, social, economic, political, and pedagogical. Some of these factors are already existing while others are emergent as we engage with tools for pedagogical purposes. For example, individuals with physical disability or with responsibility to care for vulnerable family members may experience all forms of time (clock, social, virtual) in qualitatively different ways than those with no such disability or responsibility. In this sense, I agree with Kahu, Stephens, Zepke, and Leach (2014) that “distance study has not overcome the barriers of space and time; it has merely changed the nature

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of those barriers” (p. 525). Therefore, promoting an apolitical vision of temporal flexibility in this age of advanced technology is antithetical to a transformative vision of education aimed at social justice for all. To de-construct the familiar discourses of temporal flexibility in Computer Assisted Language Learning, I propose that we consider the five principles that Houlden and Veletsianos (2019) have proposed. If we extend the implications of these principles to our discussions and understanding of technology-enhanced language learning, we should be able to see that • Technology is not a collection of neutral tools. It comes with cultural and political meanings and it transforms users’ relationships with others in multiple, and sometimes conflictual, ways. • Technology may or may not support temporal flexibility. Some users always benefit more from technology than other users. Social inequality and access to non-technological resources are important factors in this regard. • A neoliberal worldview that sees individuals as autonomous, capable, and responsible users of technology is not helpful in educational contexts where learners negotiate their priorities with other actors such as instructors, official curricula, institutional policies, family needs and supports, and market forces that influence their imagination of possible futures. • Structures of power permeating all domains of social life never leave the individual learners alone. The nature and amount of power and privilege determine the degree of temporal flexibility an individual can enjoy. • When we think about temporal flexibility, we must see individuals as parts of a larger ecology. This ecology of relationships and actions extends beyond the classroom. We use technology in partnership with other individuals and existing cultural norms and expectations. While technology encourages innovative cultural practices, such innovations and their success are always relative to users’ prior knowledge, relationships with others, various forms of capital, and interpretive imaginations.

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These five implications that I have developed, following the work of Houlden and Veletsianos (2019), should inform much needed chronopolitics for critical language education. We cannot simply assume that integrating “cutting edge” technology into the curriculum and pedagogy will enable students to overcome temporal barriers and attain educational goals. As I mentioned earlier, the digital/virtual time that we often talk about these days is not fully separable from socially constructed time. Instead, virtual time is always socially engineered for specific purposes. These purposes are fulfilled in varying degrees by individuals, depending on their socio-economic and cultural resources. In this context, May and Thrift’s (2001) observation proves instructive: the ways we construct a particular sense of time and how such construction frames our understandings and actions are multiple and dynamic. As researchers, curriculum designers, and teachers of languages, we must not ignore the social contexts of teaching and learning. It will be a mistake to assume that a digital tool proved effective in one context will be equally effective in another context. This kind of nuanced attention to contexts is now more crucial than any other historical time because not only our classrooms are becoming more culturally and linguistically diverse, but also students of a given class may be in diverse and distant geographical locations across the world. The arrangements of sociality in these diverse locations have a strong influence on how temporal conceptions are developed and experienced. While tools and instruments are critical in people’s race with time, social structures, norms, and expectations are equally important, too. As May and Thrift (2001) wrote: A sense of time is thus both shaped by and enacted through various systems of social discipline – be they broadly secular or religious. Each such system takes shape within particular settings and achieves purchase according to the spatial arrangements evident within those settings. (p. 4, emphasis original)

Thus, if we look at temporal flexibility as gaining control over clock time, we would be better off recognizing mutually shaping relationships between digital technology and the social and spatial arrangements of our being, teaching, and learning. I began this chapter with a quote from Foer (2013), and to conclude the chapter I would like to return to the quote. We need to explore how best we can utilize the time that technology helps us to save. Otherwise, the idea of temporal flexibility will remain as

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an unattainable goal implicated in power hierarchies, social inequalities, and economic disparities.

References Adam, B. (2004). Time. Polity. Aiston, S. J., & Jung, J. (2015). Women academics and research productivity: An international comparison. Gender and Education, 27 (3), 205–220. Barbera, E., Gros, B., & Kirschner, P. A. (2015). Paradox of time in research on educational technology. Time & Society, 24(1), 96–108. Bray, F. (2007). Gender and technology. Annual Review of Anthropology, 36, 37–53. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.36.081406.094328 Callender, C. (Ed.). (2011). The Oxford handbook of philosophy of time. Oxford University Press. Duncheon, J. C., & Tierney, W. G. (2013). Changing conceptions of time: Implications for educational research and practice. Review of Educational Research, 83(2), 236–272. Feryok, A., & Mercer, S. (2017). Introduction to the special issue on time. Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching, 11(3), 203–206. https:// doi.org/10.1080/17501229.2017.1317255 Flaherty, M. G. (1999). A watched pot: how we experience time. New York University Press. Foer, J. F. (2013). How not to be alone. The New York Times. https://www.nyt imes.com/2013/06/09/opinion/sunday/how-not-to-be-alone.html Giurge, L. M., Whillans, A. V., & West, C. (2020). Why time poverty matters for individuals, organisations and nations. Nature Human Behaviour, 4(10), 993–1003. Gray, S. L. (2017). The social construction of time in contemporary education: Implications for technology, equality and Bernstein’s ‘conditions for democracy.’ British Journal of Sociology of Education, 38(1), 60–71. https://doi. org/10.1080/01425692.2016.1234366 Hassan, R. (2017). The worldly space: The digital university in network time. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 38(1), 72–82. https://doi.org/10. 1080/01425692.2016.1234364 Hassard, J. (Ed.). (1990). The sociology of time. Palgrave Macmillan. Hope, W. (2006). Global capitalism and the critique of real time. Time & Society, 15(2–3), 275–302. Hope, W. (2016). Time, communication and global capitalism. Springer. Houlden, S., & Veletsianos, G. (2019). A posthumanist critique of flexible online learning and its “anytime anyplace” claims. British Journal of Educational Technology, 50(3), 1005–1018. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.12779

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Kahu, E., Stephens, C., Zepke, N., & Leach, L. (2014). Space and time to engage: Mature-aged distance students learn to fit study into their lives. International Journal of Lifelong Education, 33(4), 523–540. https://doi.org/10. 1080/02601370.2014.884177 Liddicoat, A. J., Murray, N., Mosavian, P., and Zhen, F. (2021). Changing practice in university English language teaching: The influence of the chronotope on teachers’ action. TESOL Quarterly. Advance online publication. https:// doi.org/10.1002/tesq.3026 Manathunga, C. (2019). ‘Timescapes’ in doctoral education: The politics of temporal equity in higher education. Higher Education Research & Development, 38(6), 1227–1239. May, J., & Thrift, N. (2001). TimeSpace: Geographies of temporality. Routledge. Mills, C. W. (2020). The chronopolitics of racial time. Time & Society, 29(2), 297–317. https://doi.org/10.1177/0961463X20903650 Ogle, V. (2015). The global transformation of time: 1870–1950. Harvard University Press. Shahjahan, R. A. (2015). Being ‘lazy’ and slowing down: Toward decolonizing time, our body, and pedagogy. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 47 (5), 488–501. Simpson, L. C. (1995). Technology, time, and the conversations of modernity. Routledge. Stein, J. (2001). Reflections on time, time-space compression and technology in the nineteenth century. In J. May & N. Thrift, (Eds.), Timespace: Geographies of temporality (pp. 106–119). Routledge. Streamas, J. (2020). The war between ‘School Time’ and ‘Colored People’s Time.’ Teaching in Higher Education, 25(6), 709–721. https://doi.org/10. 1080/13562517.2020.1782882 Turner, P. (2005). Affordance as context. Interacting with Computers, 17 (6), 787–800. Veletsianos, G., Kimmons, R., Larsen, R., & Rogers, J. (2021). Temporal flexibility, gender, and online learning completion. Distance Education, 42(1), 22–36. https://doi.org/10.1080/01587919.2020.1869523

CHAPTER 5

Emotions in Technology-Mediated Pedagogical Spaces

Abstract In this chapter, I look at the meeting of technology and pedagogy through a lens of affect/emotion. I discuss how a sudden and worldwide move to online teaching emphasized the need to talk about emotionality in technology-mediated pedagogical spaces. Then I turn to the problems of disembodiment and anonymity in virtual learning environments. To develop a broader understanding of technological affordance, I propose that we draw insights from the recent affective turn, which wants us to take emotions seriously in all personal, social, and political domains. Building on recent scholarship on affect studies, I develop a nuanced understanding of human emotionality, which rejects the idea of emotion as an individual’s internal property. I close the chapter with a call for treating emotions as complex, socially constructed, and distributed across bodies. Keywords Emotion · Affect · Technology · Pedagogy · Space · Disembodiment · Anonymity · Affordance

Historically, there was so much focus on cognition and reason that emotion has been pushed toward the margins of pedagogical discussions. However, in the last two decades, we have seen considerable scholarly attention to emotions. A significant development of research © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Ahmed, Exploring Silences in the Field of Computer Assisted Language Learning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06501-9_5

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on emotion and corporeality in humanities and the social sciences has given emotion some space in the classroom and in pedagogical thinking (e.g., Boler, 1999; Zembylas, 2007). The pandemic of COVID-19 has further reinforced the importance of emotions in teaching and learning. A sudden break of daily routine and academic rhythm resulted in a disruption in the emotional life of many individuals. Leaving the classroom as a familiar pedagogical space and staying at home for teaching and learning was a major factor in many individuals’ emotional health. The intersection of emotion and technology has appeared with new urgency of scholarly attention. In the pre-pandemic world, using technology was not something new in the field of language education. But the extent and magnitude of usage and a complete reliance on technology was unprecedented. The remote modes of pedagogy forced educators and researchers—regardless of their identification with CALL—to think deeply about the meeting of technology and pedagogy. In this chapter, I focus on the topic of emotion in technology-mediated pedagogical spaces. When technology is utilized for efficiency and increased productivity, nonquantifiable aspects of human behavior and practice such as emotions are not usually discussed. However, in social and psychological studies of technology, there is an increasing interest in the emotions of users. My goal, therefore, is to bring to the fore some questions that may be relevant for language education research, especially when we rely on technology for pedagogical purposes.

Social and Physical Distancing In the beginning phases of the COVID-19 pandemic, we heard public health and medical professionals urging people to maintain social distancing. Let us clarify the meaning of this term. The Oxford English Dictionary (2020, n. p.) defines social distancing as “the action or practice of maintaining a degree of remoteness or emotional separation from another person or social group.” This term was first used in 1957 to denote “an attitude rather than a physical term, referring to an aloofness or deliberate attempt to distance oneself from others socially” (para. 4). In contemporary usage during the COVID-19 pandemic, the term’s original meaning is somewhat revised to suggest maintaining a physical distance between individuals to avoid infections and contagious diseases. Most people began to rely more on digital technology to maintain and strengthen social relationships. Public health professionals encouraged

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people to maintain their social interactions, but from a safe physical distance. Then we saw an increasing trend of using the term “physical distancing” instead of “social distancing.” Regardless of one’s preference for one of these terms, the core idea is that we should maintain safe physical distancing and at the same time strengthen our social relationships. In the context of (language) education, the question we need to ponder is: how does social/physical distancing affect the pedagogical spaces and the participants’ interactions in such spaces? A critical examination of teaching and learning from a distance is important because it requires a reconceptualization of education as an embodied practice. For this reason, I aim to shed some light on this problem of dis/embodiment in online spaces from an affective perspective. As a way of providing some background to my discussion, I now briefly turn to two key concepts: pedagogy and space.

Pedagogy Pedagogy is a term that enjoys much currency and popularity in educational circles. It is often used as a synonym for teaching, which I believe is misleading. When used as synonymous with teaching, pedagogy is misinterpreted as a method of transmitting information. But pedagogy is much more than that. It involves complex interactions and exchanges of ideas between the educator and the learner in a particular context. These contextualized interactions result in a particular kind of relationship that influences how knowledge is constructed at the present moment and how the current relationships may also influence knowledge construction in the future. Thus, I agree with Loughran (2013) that pedagogy is “embedded in the relationship between teaching and learning” (p. 118). This view of pedagogy encourages us to create conditions in which students and teachers become aware of their own and others’ learning, engage in meaningful and transformational learning experiences, and reflect upon those experiences. Yet, pedagogy should not be a valuefree project. Both educators and students need to be aware of various epistemological and social factors as they pursue new knowledge. A relevant question is: who benefits from new knowledge, how, and at the cost of what? As Hamilton (2009) wrote: “pedagogy entails a political orientation towards the good life, towards using a moral compass…. To characterize pedagogy as relating merely to ways or methods of instruction is, therefore, reductionist” (p. 14). Therefore, by using the term

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“pedagogy,” I intend to mean an interrelationship between teaching and learning, and this interrelationship must be directed toward the collective good.

Space Like pedagogy versus teaching, a distinction between place and space is in order. Certain kinds of endeavor are necessary to turn a place into a space because space is inherently social wherein self is put in a dialogue with others. Michel de Certeau’s (1984) work is particularly helpful in this regard. A place is characterized by its essence. People and objects situated in a place have their proper location in it. Their location says something of their roles and actions in that place. Thus, a place “implies an indication of stability” (de Certeau, 1984, p. 117). On the other hand, a space is known for ambiguity in its transformation. It is “composed of intersections of mobile elements” and “actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it” (p. 117). de Certeau further clarifies that “space occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximities” (p. 117). For example, if a written text is “a place constituted by a system of signs,” then the act of reading the text becomes a space (p. 117). Therefore, as educators and researchers, we will benefit from an inquiry into the places we are situated in, and whether or how these places transform into spaces for pedagogy.

Going Online: Technology and Its Affordances To bring teachers and students together and to bridge physical distances among them, all levels of educational institutions have turned to digital technologies. During and after this transformation of instructional methods, it is important to pay attention to how individuals interact with each other from a distance. What happens when we move our (language) pedagogy from an onsite to an online environment? In the growing body of literature on online language instruction, there is an argument about “migration,” that is, instructors should think about how best they can migrate to an online environment. This argument is based on the belief that the theory and methodology of language instruction have been developed over many decades of research in onsite teaching. Therefore, teachers should focus on what they do well in the classroom and then

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move those practices online (e.g., Warnock, 2009). But, how can we transfer the affective atmosphere of an onsite classroom to a virtual classroom? Can we understand the emotional repertoires of students when we do not even see their faces?1 In online language instruction, it is difficult to know students’ responses to and engagement with instruction and materials. More importantly, an absence of physical proximity and body language makes it hard for both students and teachers to feel the emotional atmosphere of pedagogy. Perhaps, this is why some commentators have described online language classrooms as “sterile” and “disorienting for both students and the instructor” (Ruefman & Scheg, 2016, pp. ix–x). In face-to-face classrooms, teachers and students get numerous opportunities to observe each other’s body language, facial expressions, and nonverbal responses to ideas, activities, and feedback. However, the same is not true in online classrooms (see, e.g., Laflen, 2016). While moving instructional practice to an online mode has significant implications for all areas of education, it has been particularly challenging to English as a Second Language (ESL) students. As Marisa Crabtree, an ESL teacher, has said, “It’s almost like the screen makes the students feel more anonymous and isolated” (quoted in Richards, 2020, n.p.). Perhaps, one of the reasons for this feeling of anonymity and isolation is the cognitive load to process their learning of content and, at the same time, learning a language to describe the content.

Disembodiment and Anonymity The century-old, familiar image of pupils learning from masters in the close proximity of a physical space has been altered by the emergence of digital technologies and their use in educational contexts. The old and the new are characterized by some fundamental differences. In the past, the processes of acquiring information and developing knowledge were slow and spatially rooted. At present, these processes seem to be speedier and spatially malleable. Despite changes in technology, education remains to be an inherently embodied practice. In many ways, the new technology-mediated contexts do not seem to support the

1 Anecdotally, I know that, due to privacy concerns, many instructors do not require students to turn their camera on.

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embodied learning practices. Growing amounts of literature in education, psychology, and neuroscience suggest a central role of the body in learning. This new understanding rejects the Cartesian idea of a mind–body dualism. In educational domains such as second language acquisition and mathematics, the bodily presence and gestures play very significant roles in teaching and learning (see, e.g., Macedonia, 2019). Some observers, however, argue that the online spaces of the present age do not lack embodiment. Rather, there is a different kind of embodiment. They further argue that because we cannot possibly go back to the pretechnological era, it is important that we try to understand what kind of embodiment there is in the digital space. I believe that one way to understand embodiment, however different it may be in the current technology era, is to focus on emotions. As Serrano-Puche (2020) wrote, there is a different spatiotemporal regime in the online spaces, which corresponds to a different kind of emotional regime. In other words, the emotional regime of the online world is about “the set of norms, rituals, styles, and collective modes that frame which emotions are relevant to a social group and how they should be expressed and managed” (Serrano-Puche, 2020, p. 531). The emotional practices vary across online and offline spaces. Authors such as Bensky and Fisher (2014) noted that with the emergence of new communication tools come new ways of emotional expressions and management. Emotions become mediated. Questions about feedback loops, the roles of emotion in anonymous and disembodied spaces, and affective meaning-making warrant greater attention. Bensky and Fisher (2014) argued that emotions are bound with embodiment in at least two ways: “First, emotions are felt and ‘run’ through the body…Second, emotions are perceived as reactions to external events, particularly actions by others, which affect the person and mostly involve social interactions in embodied face-to-face situations” (p. 2). Both of these ways are important because “emotions are perceived as interactional and embodied” (p. 2). Social interactions involve individuals who already have, or are in process of making, relations of emotional contact with each other. Yet, the online presence does not seem to allow a close reading of the emotional language of the interlocutors. Therefore, it is important to ask questions about how mediated and disembodied spaces such as Zoom meetings support and/or hinder pedagogical rituals and practices. Our challenge at this time is to know how an absence of bodily presence online may create

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conditions for new modes of dis/embodiment in technology-enhanced educational contexts. The problem of disembodiment becomes more complicated when the issue of anonymity is considered. Dreyfus (2003) presented a very pointed and constructive critique of online education and the problem of anonymity. He probably did not anticipate the COVID-19 pandemic and our complete reliance on the internet to carry out formal education. Yet, what he said two decades ago is very relevant today. Dreyfus (2003) believed that education in cyberspace does not provide an opportunity to develop strong identities that are necessary to take risks and make long-lasting commitments. The tendency of the internet is to distract users and overwhelm them with an endless stream of information. To turn the information into knowledge and practical wisdom, one needs to develop strong identities. In the current context of remote education, due to concerns for privacy and equity, most institutions have decided to give students a choice to keep their camera on or off. Based on my own teaching experience as well as conversations with colleagues, I know that many students choose to keep their camera off. Whether or not this lack of visual presence is a barrier to transforming information into knowledge and wisdom is a question of empirical investigation. My provisional understanding is that this anonymity may hinder students from challenging their existing knowledge and participating in dialogic exchanges of ideas. Furthermore, this kind of anonymity undermines the apprenticeship model of education. As Dreyfus (2003) wrote, “where worldly expertise is concerned, one can only learn by imitation of the style and day-to-day responses to specific local situations of someone who already has the relevant mastery” (p. 583). Again, anecdotally speaking, the internet and teleconferences have been very effective in delivering information to students. However, the remote delivery model of education, while the best available option during the pandemic, has been challenged by participants’ disembodied presence and anonymity.

How Much Can Technology “Afford”? Digital technologies are very effective at sharing information, but they do not automatically create a virtual environment conducive to pedagogical enrichment. In the literature on educational uses of technology, there is a surprising absence of discussions about pedagogy, and a “lack of pedagogic insight fundamentally limits what can be said about digital

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technology in an educational sense” (Castañeda & Selwyn, 2018, p. 3). I would like to propose that the first step toward discussions of technology and pedagogy should be an acknowledgment that pedagogical emergence is complex and often unpredictable. Using technology to contain the complexity and predict and control behaviors has been a tempting project in educational discourse and policy. However, contemporary digital technology, like all other technologies of previous eras, are neither a neutral tool, nor an all-powerful deterministic force. Technology always interacts with existing and emergent cultural norms and practices. What kind of technology is the most effective for a given purpose is a decision-in-themaking, which is influenced by the available tools, willingness and agency of users, the material context, and the cultural norms of tool use. Thus, I agree with Castañeda and Selwyn (2018) that “any educational use of technology is a complex process that is shaped, conditioned, and modified by a range of pedagogic actors and influences” (p. 3). Because pedagogical actors are dis/empowered by a variety of existing and emerging affective relations, it is imperative that we pay attention to technological affordance for an (re)embodied mode of learning and being. Technological affordance must be an important consideration. We often see a list of action-possibilities that each type of technology offers; however, scholars such as Aagaard (2018) argued that affordance should not be understood as a list of such possibilities. What is possible in a given context is fundamentally relational and mediated by multiple actors in that context. For example, “while the laptop surely provides a wealth of technical ‘action possibilities’, decontextualized analyses that treat affordances as quasi-objectivist features of the world cannot tell us which of these affordances will be utilized in practice or how” (Aagaard, 2018, p. 8). Therefore, we cannot possibly understand what online technologies can and cannot do in pedagogical contexts without paying attention to the cultural, material, and emotional aspects of everyday life.

Body as “A Tool of Learning” I argue that one way of understanding technological affordance is to pay attention to how digital tools spatialize bodies and emotions of students and teachers. I acknowledge that this kind of attention is rare in the studies of technology in education. As Castañeda and Selwyn (2018) wrote, “there is a pronounced trend in many discussions of education and technology to discount (or even deny) affective aspects of the

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higher education experience.” These researchers, therefore, suggest that we explore “the interplay between the use of digital technology and people’s emotions, feelings and affect” (p. 4). To shed light on the interplay between technology, emotion, and L2 learning, I like to view the body as a “tool” of learning. By utilizing this expression as a heuristic, I intend to highlight that the body simultaneously learns a language and composes the space for materializing that learned language. To understand the body’s capacity to be (in) the learning space, I draw insights from the growing body of work, popularly known as the affective turn. This turn was a result of a strong scholarly interest in affect and emotions. Patricia Clough (2007) defined the affective turn as “critical theory’s turn to affect” (p. 1). In the face of ongoing wars, social injustice, unbridled capitalism, and climate catastrophe, critical scholarship renewed its interest in understanding what the body can do. The starting point for many affect scholars was Spinoza’s concept of affectus, i.e., body’s capacity to affect and be affected (Seigworth & Gregg, 2010). When a body interacts with another body, this interaction may strengthen or diminish the body’s capacity to act. The “other” body is not necessarily the human body. It can be tools, places, or forms of knowledge. One of the important goals of this new wave of affect studies is to better understand the human body in connection with many other bodies—material and non-material. Some argue that previous generations of scholars could not fully understand the human body. This is why they “invented” the idea of mind. As Richard Rorty (2009) said, “If the body had been easier to understand, nobody would have thought that we had a mind” (p. 239).

Affect, Emotion, and Pedagogy There is a strong connection between affect and pedagogy. For example, Michalinos Zembylas (2016) has discussed two ways in which pedagogical research can benefit from the affective turn. First, the affective turn wants us to rethink “how we conceptualize the relationship between private and public sphere in understanding pedagogy” (p. 548). Second, it wants us to ask new questions about how pedagogy can “become strategic sites of ethical and political transformation that pay attention both to nonverbally articulated and embodied elements and to cultural norms that are perceived corporeally” (p. 548). Thus, the affective turn has much to offer the field of language education. It is encouraging to see that some researchers of applied linguistics and critical language teaching are turning

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to affect/emotion to better understand how the teaching and learning of languages are entangled with complex affective practices (e.g., Ahmed & Morgan, 2021; Benesch, 2012; Prior, 2019; Swain, 2013; White, 2018). Emotion and pedagogy are inseparable because emotions work as a force of movement and attachment. This conceptualization of emotions is helpful to understand physical distancing because moving away does not necessarily “cut the body off from the ‘where’ of its inhabitance” (Ahmed, 2004, p. 27). Proximity and distance form spatial relationships that affect how we feel about ourselves and others and how we perform our activities. I should note that the question regarding the location of emotions has been a bone of contention for centuries. Historically, psychologists and philosophers have looked inward to find emotions in individuals. On the other hand, sociologists and anthropologists have pointed to the social and cultural character of emotions, and they have looked outside the individual to find emotions. Sara Ahmed called the former approach an “inside-out” model in which one owns an emotion, feels it, and then communicates it with social others. The latter approach, which Ahmed called an “outside in” model, shows how emotions originate in the social realm (for example, crowd feelings in a funerals) and then move toward individuals. Ahmed (2014) found both models problematic because the distinction between psychological and social, between individual and collective is neither possible, nor desirable. Therefore, she concludes that “emotions are not ‘in’ either the individual or the social, but produce the very surfaces and boundaries that allow the individual and the social to be delineated as if they are objects” (p. 10). If we return to the field of second language education, the affective lens should figure prominently in pedagogical thinking and action. Let us focus on one specific area: second language writing. Despite emotion’s tremendous influence on writers and writing (Micciche, 2007), many monolingual speakers “don’t realize the emotional labour of writing academic papers that non-native speakers go through” (Morgan & Mattos, 2018, p. 217). In most contexts, the teaching of academic writing is done “through the eradication of emotion” (Vandenberg et al., 2006, p. 16). Perhaps, this is due to the fact that writing pedagogy has focused predominantly on cognitive dimensions. Most researchers start with the belief that writing in a second language is a complex and difficult process requiring “a robust framework and precise execution in order to produce text that is linguistically accurate” (Nawal, 2018, p. 385). Therefore, the traditional focus has been on how best to

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support learners who are often cognitively overwhelmed by the writing task at hand. However, there is ample evidence that writing is a deeply emotional process (Jacobs & Micciche, 2003; Knaller, 2017; McLeod, 1997; Micciche, 2007). Unfortunately, when emotions are mentioned as a passing reference in discussions of L2 writing, an individualistic “insideout” model of emotions is usually adopted. Students are held responsible for managing their emotions in ways that are believed to support their learning of the target language. This regulatory view of emotions ignores the complex, ambivalent, and context-specific forces that strengthen or weaken the body’s capacity to do certain things. A tentative conclusion in the literature that I draw from is that emotions are neither an individual nor a collective property. They are produced as a result of interactions among multiple bodies. Complex ways of embodying emotions have a direct impact on our agency to act. Such agency is achieved in response to specific contexts. Therefore, we need to explore how pedagogical spaces may be created where the human body, digital tools, and cultural practices interact and support students’ learning. This is particularly important in a time when any given class of students may live in and study from diverse geographical locations. It is also important to stress that space is not something we inherit. Individuals actively create the spaces in which they live, study, play, and perform various activities. Each constructed space has its own relational force that supports or restricts our ability to think and act. Importantly, the human body plays crucial mediating roles in the space where it inhabits. As Lefebvre (1992) put it, “each living body is space and has its space: it produces itself in space and it also produces that space” (p. 170). When teachers and students participate in online teaching/learning activities, their locations play critical roles in their engagement with the activities. Sophisticated communication technologies may come with a list of “affordances,” but the extent to which they help participants transform their places cannot be predicted with certainty. For example, when an instructor uses a particular tool to transmit information, the tool cannot guarantee how the information will be interpreted and utilized by students. Not only the students’ prior experiences, but also their current contexts of living and cultural understandings will shape how they utilize the received information. This kind of unpredictability in pedagogical exchanges is a challenge to instructional design because students mobilize their cognitive and affective resources in different ways. For this reason,

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techno-optimism about affordances is a misleading pursuit when it comes to the pedagogical uses of technology. If we want to support students’ learning and development of a second/additional language, attention to emotion (in its various forms and intensities) and how it affects individuals’ capacity to do things is necessary. Two points require some clarification here. First, the human body needs to be viewed as a producer, receiver, and mediator of emotions. We feel our “own” emotions, but we are also affected by the emotions of others. Emotions are contagious; they have direct bearing upon our ability to transform the places into personal spaces. Any given place has no internal properties that make it a specific kind of space. Prior to our presence in a place, we do not know enough about it. We can certainly remember our previous experiences in that place (if we have any), but the place is not the same when we occupy it again. The moment we occupy the place, it becomes a new space. For example, a “sweet” home can quickly turn into a toxic and unlivable place. As we have learned in recent months, the spread of COVID-19 has resulted in an increase of domestic violence (Bradbury-Jones & Isham, 2020). Being close to each other can be pleasant or hurtful, or it can produce a combination of multiple feelings. This is why we may benefit from the concept of emotional geography, which helps us “identify the supports for and threats to the basic emotional bonds and understandings of schooling that arise from forms of distance or closeness in people’s interactions or relationships” (Hargreaves, 2001, p. 1061). Scholars have used this concept to locate emotion in bodies and places, to understand relations between people and their environment, and to explore ways of representing emotions. In pedagogical thinking and practice, Andy Hargreaves’ (2001) view of emotional geography is productive to understand “the patterns of closeness and distance in human interactions that shape the emotions we experience about relationships to ourselves, each other, and the world around us” (p. 1056). In the current social context of COVID-19 and technology-mediated remote education, the concept is particularly relevant because it provides us with a lens to look at closeness and distance in how we relate to each other. As Davidson and Milligan (2004) wrote, “After all, our first and foremost, most immediate and intimately felt geography is the body, the site of emotional experience and expression par excellence” (p. 523). The

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spaces where we live out our lives have complex and interconnected relationships with how we feel and understand emotions in our body. Spaces also afford us interpretive lenses to embody and communicate emotional experiences. For example, “in attempts to articulate emotion—to embody it linguistically—we speak of the ‘heights’ of joy and the ‘depths’ of despair, significant others are comfortingly close or distressingly distant. The articulation of emotion is, thus, spatially mediated in a manner that is not simply metaphorical” (Davidson & Milligan, 2004, p. 523). When we move our pedagogy online, the educator and the students participate in academic work from diverse geographical locations. In this new educational context, the concept of emotional geography may help us understand how places mediate individuals’ emotion and agency and what kinds of pedagogical spaces may be produced as a result of such mediation. Second, technology needs to be understood as complex and multistable2 (see, e.g., Ihde, 1990). There are multiple and unanticipated ways for a tool/technological innovation to be used, but there are contingent, “essential” characteristics that modify or shape the innovative uses that may arise. Any technology can be used in multiple ways beyond the one(s) anticipated at the time of design. A pen can be used for writing, backscratching, or even for stabbing. The multistable character of technology points to the fact that “a technological object, whatever else it is, becomes what it ‘is’ through its uses” (Ihde, 1990, p. 70). Thus, for some students, Google Doc can be a helpful tool to engage in collaborative writing, but for others it can be a distraction. Therefore, teachers can identify the “most effective” tools for online teaching, but they cannot guarantee their use and uptake by a diverse body of students in different geographical locations. These locations are filled with emotions that are ambivalent, complex, and contagious. Moreover, the cultural norms and expectations of these locations will influence what technological objects and tools can and cannot do. In other words, actors’ emotions, prior experience, and spatial affordances will influence how they utilize technologies and interpret the information obtained through them. This suggests that, as educators, we always pay attention to the cultural embeddedness of technology in pedagogical thinking and action. 2 In neuroscience, multistability denotes different ways of processing a perceptual phenomenon depending on changes in subjective perception but independent of changes in sensory input or stimulus.

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Conclusion There is a growing call for attending to emotions in technology-enhanced language education. For example, Ungureanu (2013) challenged teachers not only “to complement and conciliate face-to-face learning with online learning through managing new technologies, curricula, online resources and methods of delivery,” but also to ensure that “the emotional needs of the students are not overlooked, but catered for” (p. 91). However, this kind of call has focused more on managing students’ positive emotions so that they feel good in the classroom (both brick-and-mortar and virtual classrooms). Unfortunately, this call tends to promote the idea of “edutainment” (education + entertainment); and it does not complicate our understanding of how emotions circulate and how best to prepare students to deal with difficult emotions that may be instrumental to effective learning and practical wisdom. Again, Ungureanu’s (2013) recommendation is illustrative here: “Another blended option would be the idea of “Edutainment”, that is, educational games, which some teachers have already tried. The next step is to invent digital games, with the help of tutorials, to serve the educational purposes and aims they set within the area of their subject” (p. 94). This kind of recommendation ignores the complex pedagogical relationships among teachers, students, materials, and contexts that are mediated by emotions. As teachers and researchers of second/additional language education, we need to keep in mind that “teaching is evolutionary and ecological—a deeply evolved ability enabling adaptive action by learners vis-à-vis their environments” (Atkinson, 2017, p. 532). This view of teaching is particularly important in the time of a pandemic when all of us are trying to adapt to changing situations. Emotional intensity and tool use are two crucial aspects of our adaptive behavior and action. First, our emotions always have complex trajectories, and they influence how we relate to self and others. Emotions also influence our abilities to interact with and adapt to the environment in which we live and learn. Such influences may not always be transparent and representable through language. Therefore, I recommend that educators and researchers pay attention to the relational, ambivalent, and distributed natures of students’ emotions. This recommendation is in line with the “emotional turn” in the field of Applied Linguistics and TESOL. As Cynthia White (2018) wrote, our field has recently “recognized the limitations of purely cognitive approaches to language learning and teaching, first with more socially

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informed approaches and then by a related turn to emotion” (p. 19). Pioneering works by researchers such as Benesch (2012, 2018) and Gkonou and Miller (2021) have made it sufficiently clear why language pedagogy must take emotions seriously. Second, teachers and researchers of L2 education need to abstain from treating online technology either as a neutral tool or as a deterministic force. Instead, adopting a perspective of mediation, we should view technology in its cultural embeddedness. We also need to be cognizant of our perceived understandings of technological affordance and how to interrogate such understandings in the light of cultural contexts of technology use. As Atkinson (2017) reminds us, people “have innate skills for environment building – evolved skills for tool use, for instance – but most of our environmental adaptations are cultural, not genetic” (p. 531). When we use digital tools to teach students from a distance, we should not begin with an unwavering faith in students’ ability to act and use tools in ways anticipated at the time of design. Humans are agentive yet vulnerable, and they possess both ability and inability to act. Thus, a pedagogical perspective on technology in L2 education must enrich our understanding of bodies in emergent spaces—both onsite and online. In other words, we would be better off if we looked at student bodies in their capacity to both affect and be affected—in their emotional contagion and ambivalence—in diverse geographical locations.

References Aagaard, J. (2018). Magnetic and multistable: Reinterpreting the affordances of educational technology. International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 15(4), 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-0170088-4 Ahmed, S. (2004). Collective feelings: Or, the impressions left by others. Theory, Culture & Society, 21(2), 25–42. Ahmed, S. (2014). The cultural politics of emotion. Routledge. Ahmed, A., & Morgan, B. (2021). Postmemory and multilingual identities in English language teaching: A duoethnography. The Language Learning Journal, 49(4), 483–498. https://doi.org/10.1080/09571736.2021.190 6301 Atkinson, D. (2017). Homo Pedagogicus: The evolutionary nature of second language teaching. Language Teaching, 50(4), 527–543. Benesch, S. (2012). Considering emotions in critical English language teaching. Routledge.

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Benesch, S. (2018). Emotions as agency: Feeling rules, emotion labor, and English language teachers’ decision-making. System, 79, 60–69. Bensky, T., & Fisher, E. (Eds.). (2014). Internet and emotions. Routledge. Boler, M. (1999). Feeling power: Emotions and education. Routledge. Bradbury-Jones, C., & Isham, L. (2020). The pandemic paradox: The consequences of COVID-19 on domestic violence. Journal of Clinical Nursing, 29, 2047–2049. https://doi.org/10.1111/jocn.15296 Castañeda, L., & Selwyn, N. (2018). More than tools? Making sense of the ongoing digitizations of higher education. International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 15(22), 1–10. https://doi.org/10. 1186/s41239-018-0109-y Clough, P. (2007). Introduction. In P. Clough & J. Halley (Eds.), The affective turn: Theorizing the social (pp. 1–33). Duke University Press. Davidson, J., & Milligan, C. (2004). Embodying emotion sensing space: Introducing emotional geographies. Social & Cultural Geography, 5(4), 523–532. https://doi.org/10.1080/1464936042000317677 de Certeau, M. (1984). The practice of everyday life. University of California Press. Dreyfus. (2003). Anonymity versus commitment: The dangers of education on the internet. In R. C. Scharff & V. Dusek (Eds.), Philosophy of technology: The technological condition: An anthology (pp. 578–584). Blackwell. Gkonou, C., & Miller, E. R. (2021). An exploration of language teacher reflection, emotion labor, and emotional capital. TESOL Quarterly, 55(1), 134–155. Hamilton, D. (2009). Blurred in translation: Reflections on pedagogy in public education. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 17 (1), 5–16. Hargreaves, A. (2001). Emotional geographies of teaching. Teachers College Record, 103(6), 1056–1080. Ihde, D. (1990). Technology and the lifeworld. Indiana University Press. Jacobs, D., & Micciche, L. R. (2003). A way to move: Rhetorics of emotion and composition studies. Boynton. Knaller, S. (2017). Emotions and the process of writing. In I. Jandl, S. Knaller, S. Schönfellner, & G. Tockner (Eds.), Writing emotions: Theoretical concepts and selected case studies in literature (pp. 17–28). Transcript. Laflen, A. (2016). Taking the temperature of the (virtual) room: Emotion in the online writing class. In D. Ruefman & A. G. Scheg (Eds.), Applied Pedagogies: Strategies for online writing instruction (pp. 106–120). University Press of Colorado. Lefebvre, H. (1992). The production of space (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). Blackwell. Loughran, J. (2013). Pedagogy: Making sense of the complex relationship between teaching and learning. Curriculum Inquiry, 43(1), 118–141.

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Macedonia, M. (2019). Embodied learning: Why at school the mind needs the body. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 2098. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg. 2019.02098 McLeod, S. H. (1997). Notes on the heart: Affective issues in the writing classroom. Southern Illinois University Press. Micciche, L. R. (2007). Doing emotion: Rhetoric, writing, teaching. Boynton. Morgan, B., & Mattos, A. (2018). Theories and practices in critical language teaching: A dialogic introduction. Revista Brasileira De Linguística Aplicada, 18(2), 213–226. Nawal, A. F. (2018). Cognitive load theory in the context of second language academic writing. Higher Education Pedagogies, 3(1), 385–402. https://doi. org/10.1080/23752696.2018.1513812 Oxford English Dictionary. (2020). Social distancing. Retrieved from www.oed. com/view/Entry/88377097 Prior, M. T. (2019). Elephants in the room: An “affective turn”, or just feeling our way? The Modern Language Journal, 103(2), 516–527. Richards, E. (2020). Coronavirus’ online school is hard enough: What if you’re still learning to speak English? The USA Today. https://www.usatoday.com/ in-depth/news/education/2020/05/14/coronavirus-online-classes-schoolclosures-esl-students-learn-english/5178145002/ Rorty, R. (2009). Philosophy and the mirror of nature. Princeton University Press. Ruefman, D., & Scheg, A. G. (2016). Introduction. In D. Ruefman & A. G. Scheg (Eds.), Applied pedagogies: Strategies for online writing instruction (pp. vii–xi). University Press of Colorado. Seigworth, G. J., & Gregg, M. (2010). An inventory of shimmers. In M. Gregg & G. J. Seigworth (Eds.), The affect theory reader (pp. 1–25). Duke University Press. Serrano-Puche, J. (2020). Affect and the expression of emotions on the internet: An overview of current research. In J. Hunsinger, M. Allen, & L. Klastrup (Eds.), Second international handbook of internet research (pp. 529–547). Springer. Swain, M. (2013). The inseparability of cognition and emotion in second language learning. Language Teaching, 46(2), 195–207. Ungureanu, R. (2013). The internet and ELT: Costs, gains and compromises. Linguaculture, 4(2), 82–96. Vandenberg, P., Hum, S., & Clary-Lemon, J. (2006). Relations, locations, positions: Composition theory for writing teachers. National Council of Teachers of English. Warnock, S. (2009). Teaching writing online: How and why. National Council of Teachers of English. White, C. J. (2018). The emotional turn in applied linguistics and TESOL: Significance, challenges and prospects. In J. de D. Martínez Agudo (Ed.),

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Emotions in second language teaching (pp. 19–34). Springer. https://doi.org/ 10.1007/978-3-319-75438-3_2 Zembylas, M. (2007). Theory and methodology in researching emotions in education. International Journal of Research & Method in Education, 30(1), 57–72. Zembylas, M. (2016). Making sense of the complex entanglement between emotion and pedagogy: Contributions of the affective turn. Cultural Studies of Science Education, 11(3), 539–550.

CHAPTER 6

Social Media Echo Chambers and Unfulfilled Promises of Democratic Education

Abstract This chapter focuses on the enthusiasm for using social media for language teaching and learning. It interrogates the promise of democratic education that the supporters of social media usually make. With a reference to both technological determinism and instrumentalism, I discuss how the algorithms of social media help users evade uncomfortable truths and difficult knowledge, and thus encourage them to avoid open dialogues that are necessary for strong forms of democracy. In order to overcome the challenges of contemporary social media, I propose that CALL researchers and practitioners adopt a critical media literacy (CML) approach to research and pedagogy. CML has the potential to enable educators and students to step out of the echo chambers of social media and to interpret information as text that is constructed in specific ways and for specific purposes. Keywords Social media · Echo chamber · Democratic education · Technology · Critical pedagogy · Critical Media literacy

There is a strong interest in using social media for teaching and learning second/additional languages. There is also a growing body of literature on how best to utilize social media for pedagogical effectiveness (e.g., Barrot, 2021; Meskill & Quah, 2013; Reinhardt, 2019; Zourou, 2012). © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Ahmed, Exploring Silences in the Field of Computer Assisted Language Learning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06501-9_6

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While this is a promising line of research, I argue that much work in this area has been heavily influenced by technological determinism. It portrays technology as a powerful tool and avoids questions about human agency to act in ethical and transformative ways. It also avoids questions about how social media technology works in coordination with a greater ecology of technological and non-technological factors. In this chapter, I focus on the “echo chamber” character of social media and argue that second/foreign language education must address this issue as a way of adopting a democratic approach to language education. My argument is illustrated through examples from contemporary political discourses where social media users join groups of like-minded people and receive one-dimensional opinions and worldviews. I discuss how the tendency of echo chambers points to a utopian promise that new technologies would promote a stronger and more participatory democracy. Drawing from current research, I show how online social spheres lead to political fragmentation and how a handful of voices receive a disproportionate amount of attention.

Social Media The term “social media” is often used as a blanket concept to mean internet-based communication platforms that connect users across the world where the platform may be accessed. The design of social media is based on the second-generation internet technology, according to which users should be able to not only consume but also create and share media content. In recent years, social media have evolved in many ways to facilitate users’ abilities to share materials and connect to other users. It is important to note that some critics object to the use of the word “social” before “media.” They argue that all media are already social. Media are designed and used to establish social relations among people. As soon as one uses/consumes media (be it newspaper, radio, or Twitter), they enter into a social relation with others. From this perspective, authors such as Jensen (2015) would say that “no medium is more social than any other medium” (p. 1). I agree that all media—old or new—are social, but not to the same degree. So, my opinion in this chapter is that some media are more social than others and the design principles of each media may support or restrict certain tendencies that may have different implications for sociality (I will return to this point later in the chapter). In

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short, I view social media in terms of its ability to facilitate “many-tomany” communication with the possibility of forming communities and supporting collaborative and cooperative work. Therefore, we may agree with Fuchs (2014) that: Media are not technologies, but techno-social systems. They have a technological level of artefacts that enable and constrain a social level of human activities that create knowledge that is produced, diffused and consumed with the help of the artefacts of the technological level. (p. 37)

This view suggests that social media are always entangled with the question of human agency. It also begs questions concerning how we perform various forms of sociality by using social media that may help or hinder the formation of democratic communities. The emergence of social media was greeted with much optimism for a more democratic future. Many saw an unprecedented opportunity for the historically marginalized individuals and groups to voice their concerns and opinions. Yet, the brief history of social media is already full of contradictory attitudes toward this digital medium. For example, in 2010, Time magazine named Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, person of the year. This was one of many recognitions Facebook received for its ability to mobilize people for bringing positive changes. Then, we saw how this popular social media platform was used by people across the world—e.g., the protest movements across Africa and the Middle East that were collectively known as the Arab Spring—to organize mass movements and to speak truth to power. Social media played pivotal roles in overthrowing some powerful dictators. After only 6 years, we saw how social media platforms were abused during the presidential election in the United States. Social media’s roles in the election campaign were so questionable that the US government had to launch an investigation into Russian bots. Then Facebook and Twitter faced allegations for not doing enough to curb the spread of misinformation. In 2018, Dictionary.com chose “misinformation” as word of the year. Two years later both Twitter and Facebook had to remove Donald Trump from their platform. This quick and partial view of the complex history of social media shows how its relationship with (democratic) politics is very complicated. Let us look at social media from a theoretical perspective. Tucker et al. (2017) sketched a framework for understanding social media and democracy. They begin with the most obvious claim that social media gives a

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voice to those whose opinions have historically been marginalized. While this is true for the most part, I think we still need to talk about the issues of access and media literacy that hinder full participation in information flow on the internet. Tucker et al.’s (2017) second observation is that the open spaces of social media are often exploited by antidemocratic and authoritarian forces to impose censorship and suppress dissent. Highlighting this “double reality” of social media, Tucker et al. (2017) wrote: The heart of the matter is that, while freedom of information online is an inherently democratic principle, social media are neither inherently democratic nor inherently undemocratic. Rather, social media constitute a space in which political interests battle for influence, and not all these interests are liberal or democratic. (p. 48)

This observation suggests that social media can be a technology of liberation (giving voice to the voiceless for democratic ends), a technology of control (promoting censorship and suppressing dissent), and a technology of antidemocracy (empowering those who aim to challenge democratic systems). While Tucker et al.’s (2017) theoretical discussions are helpful in many ways, the authors did not pay due attention to technological affordance of social media and how best to understand the complex relationship between democracy and social media. Instead, they presented social media as neutral tools, which may be used for democratic or antidemocratic purposes. I propose that we ask questions about whether or not social media have some inherent design features that may favor antidemocratic thinking and activities. Let me use a classic example from an argument put forward by the gun lobby in the United States. They argue that guns don’t kill people; people kill people. Therefore, gun control is not a solution to the problem of gun violence and mass killing. By making this argument, they hold gun owners—not the guns —responsible for violence. There is some truth to this argument. However, this argument ignores the design features of guns. First, guns are designed to kill. They invite users to kill. Of course, a user can ignore that invitation, but the invitation is always there. In a similar vein, a fork can possibly be used to kill a person, but the fork was primarily designed to eat foods. Here is the difference between a gun and a fork: they have two different functions envisioned at the

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time of design. While they may not be used in the same way, as anticipated by the designers, they do not cease to invite users to pre-specified uses. It is also important to note that if a bad actor has an intention to kill as many people as possible before the police arrive, then a gun and a fork will make a big difference in terms of casualty. This is because of the affordance of these two tools in question. They afford people to do certain things to a variable degree. Furthermore, there are certain tools that are designed to be used for multiple purposes. However, guns have very few secondary uses, except for intimidating others (not killing them). Perhaps, another use can be to feel a sense of security and empowerment while possessing/carrying a gun. Therefore, the argument of the gun lobby—guns don’t kill people—is fundamentally flawed. There are many design features of social media that have important implications for democracy and education. In the interest of time, I focus on three of them in this chapter. First, social media such as Facebook and Twitter use algorithms to align users with certain types of people, ideas, and information. Due to a lack of human judgment and contextual awareness, the artificial intelligence of these platforms creates a mechanism to select, order, and present ideas that may not reflect users’ evolving interests and changing contexts. The algorithmic ordering of ideas and information does not seem to be helpful for democratic deliberation and decision-making. Second, social media platforms enable users to follow other users of their choice. They can also block specific users and certain kinds of ideas. The users’ increasing ability to filter information and choose to see what pleases them is a hallmark feature of contemporary social media. This has been extensively discussed by using the metaphor of echo chamber, i.e., social media users hear the voice of those who are already in agreement with them (see Anwaruddin, 2019 for details). Thus, social media tends to reinforce people’s pre-established ideas and foreclose possibilities of dialogue with those with different worldviews. Third, social media tend to focus on the present moment and the jokes, scandals, and gossip of the day. The visibility of what users share and financial profits oozing from swiftly shareable materials often undermine posts and comments that require critical and “slow” engagement with materials and ideas. This is one of the reasons why social media benefits from fake news and harmful materials that circulate faster than serious and authentic materials. In currents of information, what is usually lost is an opportunity to engage with past knowledge and wisdom that can be

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crucial for better futures, democratic citizenship, and a nuanced understanding of controversial topics. The effect of engaging too much with the joke, scandal, and gossip of the day “may be particularly profound for younger generations, who have had less opportunity to acquire older ideas and information before plugging themselves into the social-media stream” (Haidt & Rose-Stockwell, 2019, para. 22). In other words, social media has a strong tendency to blur the boundary between the important and the trivial. By ignoring past wisdom and by focusing too much on the present, social media may foreclose or limit users’ imaginations for alternative and socially just futures.

Social Media and Language Education A growing number of education researchers are now writing about the potential benefit of social media use for teaching and learning. Let me give you an example of the kinds of claims made in favor of using Facebook. Shaw (2017) wrote about “a wide number of potential benefits to using Facebook as an educational tool. There are four interrelated potential benefits: creating a sense of community and promoting collaboration, enhancing communication between instructors and students, developing computer literacy and language skills, and incorporating current student culture into the learning environment” (p. 1). These kinds of arguments are not uncommon in the field of language education. The past decade has produced considerable research into social media use and language education. A familiar argument in this growing area of research is that “because social media is increasingly everyday and omnipresent, it should be used by learners and teachers as a tool for experiential, situated learning, and as social practices deserving of critical attention” (Reinhardt, 2019, p. 31). Enthusiasm for social media in language education partly stems from the fact that the majority of learners and teachers nowadays use social media in their personal lives. So, it is naturally tempting to think about how everyday media practice can be leveraged for pedagogical purposes. The growing body of literature—based on both empirical and speculative work—suggests this interest in social media and language pedagogy. Meskill and Quah (2013) have categorized this body of research into three areas: the online environment and its affordances, online social and affective dimensions, and pedagogical processes. The first area is interested in “the design, tools and resources of a given online social media

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environment” (Meskill & Quah, 2013, p. 43). The second area focuses on a variety of techniques to elicit “learners’ reactions and reflections.” The third area of research examines “teaching practices with social media technologies” (Meskill & Quah, 2013, p. 43). In general, this area of research treats social media as a neutral tool useful to support learners’ motivation, confidence, and self-efficacy. A study illustrating this trend would be the one that investigates social media’s role in developing second language writing. For instance, Dizon (2016) worked with two groups of Japanese students: the experimental group used Facebook while the control group used paper-and-pencil for writing. Dizon (2016) concluded that “the experimental group made more significant gains in terms of writing fluency” (p. 1249). While there are a number of aspects of the literature on social media and language education that warrant critical inquiries, here I would like to zoom in on user agency. Some researchers have acknowledged the need to teach students how to use media and placed much emphasis on learner agency. For example, Reinhardt’s (2019) review finds that in social media-integrated spaces, “users employ agency through strategic self-presentation, deployment of multilingual resources, negotiation for supportive space, engagement in play, and management of learning processes” (p. 20). Discussions of user agency are usually linked to the concepts of choice and control. In other words, learners enjoy greater freedom to choose materials and people they want to interact with on social media and to control their self-presentation online. This agency of learners is, and should be, an important consideration for researchers and educators interested in social media and language pedagogy. While the notion of agency generally enjoys a positive connotation in social sciences, in the context of this chapter, it presents two problematics. First, it runs the risk of inadvertently promoting technological instrumentalism. Second, it may encourage learners to avoid uncomfortable truths and difficult knowledge. Technological instrumentalism is based on the belief that technology is neutral: it is neither good nor bad. Its effects depend on how it is used. This theory highlights the intersection of human control and value neutrality. As Feenberg (2003) wrote, “This is the standard modern view, according to which technology is simply a tool or instrument of the human species through which we satisfy our needs….this view corresponds to the liberal faith in progress which was such a prominent feature of mainstream Western thought until fairly recently” (p. 6). In the field of

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CALL, technological instrumentalism finds its expression in the literature that supports the use of digital technology to raise students’ motivation level, support peer-to-peer communication, and get immediate feedback from teachers. Instrumentalism is adopted when teachers’ and students’ role and agency are emphasized to achieve predetermined goals. As Zheng et al. (2018) wrote, “potential benefits [of social media] do not entirely or even principally flow from the technological tools themselves, but rather rely on teachers’ skillful integration of the tools into language teaching tailored to the given needs and contexts” (p. 3). Here technology is viewed as a convenient tool in the hands of a skillful craftsperson (see Anwaruddin, 2018 for a critique of instrumentalism). The second problem is that social media empowers users to control what they encounter, and thus to avoid uncomfortable truth and difficult knowledge. A foundational design principle of social media is to keep users engaged. The more time users spend on clicking and viewing media content, the more revenue the media companies make. This is why the designers feed users with the kind of materials they like. People feel good when they see materials or information that confirms what they already believe. Therefore, social media uses algorithms to match users with certain kinds of materials. In order to attract users and keep them on the media platforms, the media companies give users freedom and agency to create their online self and choose what kind of materials they want to engage with. Because of this increased agency, the users are able to create what many commentators have described as “echo chambers” of social media. By following like-minded individuals and reading/viewing materials that reinforce their pre-existing worldviews, users live in an echo chamber where they essentially hear their own voice. Living in such echo chambers is gratifying for users because they see their mirror image and strengthen their worldviews with the moral and polemic support from fellow users. However, as Sunstein (2017) argues, “in a well-functioning democracy, people do not live in echo chambers or information cocoons” (p. ix). These two problems pose a significant challenge to the democratic goals of critical language education in general and critical CALL in particular. A critical approach to language education is concerned with a broader significance of teaching and learning. Its concerns are not limited to the four walls of the classroom or the language testing center. It aims to shed light on power structures that govern pedagogical, social, economic, and political lives of educators and students. This shedding of light is done

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primarily through and on the question of language. As Pennycook (2021) said, a critical approach to applied linguistics and language teaching is not about devising a set of skills to make learning more “effective,” but to make the practice of language more “politically accountable.” Thus, a key principle of critical language education is a pedagogical commitment to democratic citizenship. Critical language education is also open to new challenges as they emerge in a constantly changing world where the oppression of the poor and the weak is on the rise. It not only envisions a world built upon the principles of justice and equity, but also devises actionable pedagogies to achieve such a vision (see, e.g., Ahmed & Morgan, 2021). In short, critical language education does not “take for granted the status quo, but subjects it to critique, creates alternative forms of practice,” and this is done “on the basis of radical theories of language, the individual, and society that take seriously our hopes for improvement in the direction of goals such as liberty, equality, and justice for all” (Crookes, 2013, p. 1). A critical approach to CALL builds on the principles of critical applied linguistics and language education. It is a relatively recent scholarly advancement and, perhaps, it will be safe to attribute the beginning of Critical CALL to the 22nd EuroCALL Conference held in 2015 at the University of Padova in Italy. Drawing inspiration from Critical Applied Linguistics (Pennycook, 2001), the conference focused on the need to “question the assumptions that lie at the basis of our praxis, ideas that have become ‘naturalized’ and are not called into question” (Helm et al., 2015, p. xiii). The conference was also concerned about “the relationship between the macro and the micro, an engagement with issues of power and inequality and an understanding of how our classrooms and conversations are related to broader social, cultural and political relations” (Helm et al., 2015, p. xiii). In most discussions of technology and language teaching, critical questions such as who benefits from introducing new technology, how technology interacts with particular sociocultural and economic contexts, how teachers and students interpret new technologies, and how technology really “assists” language learning, are often avoided. Critical CALL tackles these kinds of questions and challenges us to explore the intersections of power, in/equality, and language education in diverse sociocultural contexts, not just within the classroom (Anwaruddin, 2019). Practitioners of this critical approach to CALL “not only explore the interplay between technology-mediated language learning and problems of inequity of power, but also develop

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constructive solutions to such inequities” (Gleason & Suvorov, 2019, p. ii). Thus, Critical CALL is interested in both effective and equitable uses of technology in teaching and learning of languages.

Addressing the Challenges The theoretical position of technological instrumentalism and the design principles that help construct echo chambers are two major challenges to achieving the goals of critical language education. One of these goals which this chapter is concerned with is the establishment of a pedagogical culture for democratic politics. Democracy and education have been linked together for a long time. Since the publication of John Dewey’s (1916) Democracy and Education, we have a solid theoretical foundation to talk about democratic education. For Dewey, democracy was not simply a system of political governance; it was also about an ethical disposition and conduct of citizens. From this perspective, education has important social functions. Educators’ key role is to create conditions of growth for students so that they can become capable trustees of society’s resources and ideals. However, education has never been able to completely fulfill this democratic goal. With the rise of neoliberal educational agenda, there has been a sharp decline in democratic pedagogical culture (Apple, 2011). The market-ideology of neoliberalism, i.e., the principles of competition, profitability, and managerialism, has inspired educational institutions to operate just like any other business enterprises. The rise of micro-credential courses based on industry needs is a good example of how the focus has shifted from education as holistic development to education as training for jobs. While democratic education can be understood from a number of different perspectives, the use of social media is specifically relevant for participatory democratic education. In this tradition of education, participation is the key to democratic cultures in school and society. A good citizen is a participating citizen. For example, Sant (2019) discussed four functions of participation. First, action is epistemologically and ontologically important because “through action—interacting with others and the environment—we become who we are” (p. 673). Second, participation is what makes us human. When we lead more private lives, we become less human. Third, we can change the outside world only by actively engaging with it. Finally, participation is inherently educational because through participation we experience and learn about the world. In the

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context of critical language education, a relevant question is: What does our participation in social media say about participatory democracy? The two problems of social media that I mentioned above have the potential to undermine participatory democratic education. First, technological instrumentalism promotes the idea of user agency in a way that portrays social media as neutral and innocent. However, social media has its own agency and affordances. Like other tools, it has an invitational character. For example, the speed bump on the street asks drivers to slow down. A driver may or may not slow down, but that decision does not eradicate or diminish the purpose for which the speed bump was created in the first place. Of course, it will be a fallacy to assume that digital tools will be used in the same way they were envisioned by the designers at the time of design and manufacture. Users always modify the “user guide” and use tools in various and creative ways that suit their purposes in different contexts. Yet, there is always some degree of design impact on the users. Similarly, social media is designed to facilitate certain kinds of activities, e.g., being connected to a large number of individuals in realtime and creating content with minimum technological knowledge and expertise, and sharing a large amount of information with unprecedented ease. At the same time, social media is not designed to do certain things, e.g., have a detailed discussion of a complex topic. For example, Twitter will limit how much you can say. Thus, Twitter’s design principles force you to say something briefly (in 280 characters) without delving into the complexity of the topic in question. Similarly, the algorithms of social media that match users with specific kinds of information have meaning and significance for users’ activities with social media. Let’s take COVID-19 vaccine as an example. As I write this paragraph, many people across the world are dying of COVID-19. While governments are desperate to secure vaccine shipments, people are lining up overnight to get a shot from a very limited supply. At the same time, “One in four Americans says they don’t plan to take the COVID19 vaccine, and about half of Republicans under 50 say they won’t get a vaccine. This partisan vaccine gap is already playing out in the real world. The average number of daily shots has declined 20 percent in the past two weeks, largely because states with larger Trump vote shares are falling off the pace” (Thompson, 2021, n.p.). There is a link between this anti-vaccine position and social media use. A recent study finds that “particularly those who obtain information from relatively unregulated social media sources such as YouTube that have recommendations tailored

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by watch history are less likely to be willing to become vaccinated” (Jennings et al., 2021, p. 1). Social media helps these anti-vaxxers to spread misinformation and amplify their voice within their echo chambers. As another study finds, “users adopted different terms and hashtags to express their beliefs regarding the COVID-19 vaccine. Further, findings revealed that users used certain hashtags such as ‘echo’ to encourage likeminded people to reinforce their existing beliefs on COVID-19 vaccine efficacy and vaccine acceptance” (Baines et al., 2021, p. 1). Thus, social media’s echo chambers help users find and amplify voices that reinforce their pre-existing beliefs. Both the idea of user agency promoted by technological instrumentalism and the algorithmic design principles that create echo chambers are major barriers to participation in democratic deliberation. Living in echo chambers, users can hardly carry out actions that challenge harmful beliefs and enable them to engage with the reality of their environment. Social media echo chambers are also detrimental to leading a public life as an ethics of participation. When people turn away from public life, they may ultimately withdraw from transformative praxis. Social media gives a false impression that users have agency to participate in critical dialogues, but in actuality it creates information cocoons and echo chambers for them. Thus, users are deprived of the educational opportunities of participation in public life and the creation of knowledge that is necessary for critical democratic praxis. In this situation, I would like to recommend that educators turn to critical media literacy and prepare students for democratic citizenship in a post-technological world.

Critical Media Literacy In a time when media users are puzzled by the question of which source of information to trust, critical media literacy can be a helpful pedagogical tool for both educators and students. Critical media literacy (CML) “brings an understanding of ideology, power, and domination that challenges relativist and apolitical notions of much media education in order to guide teachers and students in their explorations of how power, media, and information are linked” (Kellner & Share, 2007, p. 8). CML sheds light on why and how information is a kind of text that is produced, shared, and interpreted in myriad ways, and these ways are strongly mediated by power relations between the creators and users of information. Here, users’ literacy to understand information is “a social process that

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involves multiple dimensions and interactions with multiple technologies and that is connected with the transformation of education and democratization of society” (Kellner & Share, 2007, p. 9). As social media users find it easier and satisfying to gather information from the database of what their “friends” or followers have shared (Alvermann, 2017), they need a critical literacy to understand the social, political, and textual practices that go into the creation, sharing, and consumption of such information. For this reason, educators who utilize social media in their pedagogical practice will likely benefit from CML. One way to better understand CML is that it is critical literacy practiced on and with new media. What is, then, critical literacy? It begins with an awareness that: Through words and other actions, we build ourselves in a world that is building us. That world addresses us to produce the different identities we carry forward in life….Yet, though language is fateful in teaching us what kind of people to become and what kind of society to make, discourse is not destiny. We can redefine ourselves and remake society, if we choose, through alternative rhetoric and dissident projects. This is where critical literacy begins, for questioning power relations, discourses, and identities in a world not yet finished, just, or humane. (Shor, 1999, p. 2)

One of the key tenets of critical literacy is that it views texts as a social practice. As Vasquez et al. (2019) wrote, “Texts are socially constructed from particular perspectives; they are never neutral. All texts are created from a particular perspective with the intention of conveying particular messages” (p. 306). This tenet about text as social practice must be applied to critical pedagogical work involving digital technology. If we consider technology as text and “read” it from a critical literacy perspective, then we will see how technology creates certain meanings for us to consume, believe, and act upon. Since the beginning of its journey as a transformative pedagogical approach, critical literacy has inspired educators to reconceptualize literacy from alternative perspectives so that the practices of marginalization and oppression become visible. Once made visible, persons engaged in critical literacy work together to find democratic ways to resist oppressive practices that are harmful to individuals and groups. As Luke (2012) stated, “critical literacy has an explicit aim of the critique and transformation of dominant ideologies, cultures and economies, and institutions and

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political systems. As a practical approach to curriculum, it melds social, political, and cultural debate and discussion with the analysis of how texts and discourses work, where, with what consequences, and in whose interests” (p. 5). Critical literacy has inspired educators in various contexts to teach for social justice and equity. Critical literacy is helpful not only to read the words and the world, but also to write the social and political codes that govern our life and society (for an example of how critical literacy may be applied to writing pedagogy, see Ahmed & Van Viegen, 2021). In an age when accessing a sea of information is a matter of a click or a tap, teachers have very important roles to play. A critical literacy approach to using media technology in language education is necessary to dismantle an illusion of democracy that participation in social media promotes. As Jodi Dean (2005) argued, networking technologies are profoundly depoliticizing, and they produce a communicative capitalism. This kind of capitalism produces fantasies of democratic participation that are materialized through technology fetishism. While there is much enthusiasm for and celebration of communications, there is very little change in terms of democratic practice. To counter this communicative capitalism, a critical literacy approach to language education holds much potential. Thanks to the internet, students now have access to a variety of oppositional texts that need to be interrogated and interpreted with anti-colonial, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist visions. Commenting on critical literacy’s relevance to critical language education, Morgan and Ramanathan (2005) wrote that “through various synchronous and asynchronous environments, students/citizens also gain access to virtual discourse communities mobilized in service of global environmental and social justice initiatives” (p. 159). Along this line, Janks (2014) has underscored critical literacy’s ongoing importance in today’s world of education, and she offered the following five moves for educators: 1. Make connections between something that is going on in the world and their students’ lives, where the world can be as small as the classroom or as large as the international stage. 2. Consider what students will need to know and where they can find the information. 3. Explore how the problematic is instantiated in texts and practices by a careful examination of design choices and people’s behavior.

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4. Examine who benefits and who is disadvantaged by imagining the social effects of what is going on and of its representation/s. 5. Imagine possibilities for making a positive difference (p. 350). These moves point to an ethical and interpretive approach to pedagogies informed by critical literacy. As Luke (2018) wrote, “The ethical imperative is not only to enable all citizens and young people to assert and protect their rights and those of others, but it is also to enable them to engage with how their societies and economies are shaped and governed…” (p. xii). Thus, critical literacy holds enormous potential for democratic education. When we extend this pedagogical tradition to Critical CALL, we may call it an education with critical media literacies. It is important that we take critical approaches to our work involving social media because “new technologies have further contributed to changing definitions of literacy. Young people are grappling with the traditional demands of academic literacies while simultaneously interrogating ‘fake news’ and managing their everyday life worlds, which are increasingly crowded with dynamic digital doings” (Vasquez et al., 2019, p. 300). As students rely heavily on social media for personal and educational purposes, teachers are challenged with “finding new ways to engage with multimodalities and new technologies” (Vasquez et al., 2019, p. 308). Among others, Alford (2021) shows how critical literacy can be a transformative pedagogical tool for English language learners. Thus, my recommendation for resisting the influence of technological instrumentalism and social media’s “echo chamber” in critical language education is to teach and encourage students to read information as text that is constructed in specific ways with specific purposes. To interrogate those ways and purposes is necessary for the future of democracy and social justice. As I have demonstrated in this chapter, a critical approach to CALL will be helpful for such interrogative work.

References Ahmed, A., & Morgan, B. (2021). Postmemory and multilingual identities in English language teaching: A duoethnography. The Language Learning Journal, 49(4), 483–498. https://doi.org/10.1080/09571736.2021.190 6301

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Ahmed, A., & Van Viegen, S. (2021). Critical literacy and writing pedagogy. In J. Z. Pandya, R. A. Mora, J. H. Alford, N. A. Golden, & R. S. de Roock (Eds.), The handbook of critical literacies (pp. 94–104). Routledge. Alford, J. (2021). Critical literacy with Adolescent English language learners: Exploring policy and practice in global contexts. Routledge. Alvermann, D. E. (2017). Social media texts and critical inquiry in a post-factual era. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 61(3), 335–338. https://doi. org/10.1002/jaal.694 Anwaruddin, S. M. (2018). Beyond determinism and instrumentalism: Reconceptualizing technology for CALL. In J. Perren, K. Kelch, J. Byun, S. Cervantes, & S. Safavi (Eds.), Applications of CALL theory in ESL and EFL environments (pp. 22–35). IGI Global. Anwaruddin, S. M. (2019). Teaching language, promoting social justice: A dialogic approach to using social media. CALICO Journal, 36(1), 1–18. Apple, M. W. (2011). Democratic education in neoliberal and neoconservative times. International Studies in Sociology of Education, 21(1), 21–31. Baines, A., Ittefaq, M., & Abwao, M. (2021). #Scamdemic, #Plandemic, or #Scaredemic: What parler social media platform tells us about COVID-19 vaccine. Vaccines , 9(421), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.3390/vaccines9050421 Barrot, J. S. (2021). Social media as a language learning environment: a systematic review of the literature (2008–2019). Computer Assisted Language Learning. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/09588221. 2021.1883673 Crookes, G. (2013). Critical ELT in action: Foundations, promises, and praxis. Routledge. Dean, J. (2005). Communicative capitalism: Circulation and the foreclosure of politics. Cultural Politics, 1(1), 51–74. https://doi.org/10.2752/174321 905778054845 Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and education. Macmillan. Dizon, G. (2016). A comparative study of Facebook vs. paper-and-pencil writing to improve L2 writing skills. Computer Assisted Language Learning, 29(8), 1249–1258. https://doi.org/10.1080/09588221.2016.1266369 Feenberg, A. (2003). What is philosophy of technology? http://www.sfu.ca/~and rewf/komaba.htm Fuchs, C. (2014). Social media: A critical introduction. Sage. Gleason, J., & Suvorov, R. (2019). Promoting social justice with CALL. CALICO Journal, 36(1), i–vii. https://doi.org/10.1558/cj.37162 Haidt, J., & Rose-Stockwell, T. (2019). The dark psychology of social networks. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/12/soc ial-media-democracy/600763/ Helm, F., Bradley, L., Guarda, M., & Thouësny, S. (2015). Critical CALL: Proceedings of the 2015 EUROCALL conference. Research-publishing.net.

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Janks, H. (2014). Critical literacy’s ongoing importance for education. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 57 (5), 349–356. Jennings, W., Stoker, G., Willis, H., Valgardsson, V., Gaskell, J., Devine, D., ... & Mills, M. C. (2021). Lack of trust and social media echo chambers predict COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy. medRxiv. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/ 10.1101/2021.01.26.21250246v1 Jensen, K. B. (2015). What’s social about social media? Social Media + Society, 1(1), 1–2. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115578874 Kellner, D., & Share, J. (2007). Critical media literacy, democracy, and the reconstruction of education. In D. Macedo & S. R. Steinberg (Eds.), Media literacy: A reader (pp. 3–23). Peter Lang. Luke, A. (2012). Critical literacy: Foundational notes. Theory into Practice, 51(1), 4–11. Luke, A. (2018). Critical literacy, schooling, and social justice: The selected works of Allan Luke. Routledge. Meskill, C., & Quah, J. (2013). Researching language learning in the age of social media. In M. Thomas, H. Reinders, & M. Warschauer (Eds.), Contemporary computer-assisted language learning (pp. 39–54). Bloomsbury. Morgan, B., & Ramanathan, V. (2005). Critical literacies and language education: Global and local perspectives. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 25, 151–169. Pennycook, A. (2001). Critical applied linguistics: A critical introduction. Lawrence Erlbaum. Pennycook, A. (2021). Critical applied linguistics: A critical re-introduction. Routledge. Reinhardt, J. (2019). Social media in second and foreign language teaching and learning: Blogs, wikis, and social networking. Language Teaching, 52(1), 1– 39. Sant, E. (2019). Democratic education: A theoretical review (2006–2017). Review of Educational Research, 89(5), 655–696. Shaw, C. (2017, November 20). Using Facebook as an educational resource in the classroom. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of International Studies. Retrieved May 5, 2021, from https://oxfordre.com/internationalstudies/view/10. 1093/acrefore/9780190846626.001.0001/acrefore-9780190846626-e-114 Shor, I. (1999). What is critical literacy? Journal of Pedagogy, Pluralism, and Practice, 1(4), Article 2. https://digitalcommons.lesley.edu/jppp/vol1/ iss4/2 Sunstein, C. R. (2017). #republic: Divided democracy in the age of social media. Princeton University Press.

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Thompson, D. (2021, May 3). Millions are saying no to the vaccines. What are they thinking? Feelings about the vaccine are intertwined with feelings about the pandemic. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/arc hive/2021/05/the-people-who-wont-get-the-vaccine/618765/?utm_con tent=edit-promo&utm_medium=social&utm_term=2021-05-03T10%3A31% 3A57&utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwAR14 pE2AnIq7GYHSgprlm_MDhdNanr6k1py7Vy5s_bk3aYbyL5SetOe71BY Tucker, J. A., Theocharis, Y., Roberts, M. E., & Barberá, P. (2017). From liberation to turmoil: Social media and democracy. Journal of Democracy, 28(4), 46–59. Vasquez, V. M., Janks, H., & Comber, B. (2019). Critical literacy as a way of being and doing. Language Arts, 96(5), 300–311. Zheng, B., Yim, S., & Warschauer, M. (2018). Social media in the writing classroom and beyond. The TESOL Encyclopedia of English Language Teaching, 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118784235.eelt0555 Zourou, K. (2012). On the attractiveness of social media for language learning: A look at the state of the art. Alsic. Apprentissage des Langues et Systèmes d’Information et de Communication, 15(1).

CHAPTER 7

Conclusion: Toward a Critical Hermeneutics of Technology for Language Teacher Education

Abstract In this concluding chapter, I reiterate the importance of taking a critical approach to technology in language education. To support transformative and emancipatory ways of utilizing technology and to achieve viable alternatives to oppressive pedagogies, I propose that the field of language teacher education (LTE) promote a critical and philosophical understanding of technology. To prepare future language teachers for an increasingly digitized world, I believe that teacher education programs will benefit from a critical hermeneutics of technology. Such an approach should view technology in its cultural embeddedness and oppose both deterministic and instrumentalist perspectives on technology. A critical hermeneutics of technology will likely enable teacher-educators and future language teachers to interrogate the design, manufacture and promotion of digital artifacts, to develop a total vision of their pedagogical context, and to imagine alternative uses of digital tools. Keywords Critical hermeneutics · Technology · Language teacher education · Emancipation · Pedagogy · Culture

We can look at technology either from an absolute or a relative perspective. An absolute view of technology promotes the learning of a discrete set of skills and competencies. Technological literacy will be measured © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Ahmed, Exploring Silences in the Field of Computer Assisted Language Learning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06501-9_7

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against such predefined skills and competencies. On the other hand, a relative view of technology sees skills and competencies as relational and evolving alongside societal needs and changes. In the constantly changing global contexts, if we adopt an absolute view of technology, we will not have much to talk about. Teaching and learning languages with the help of technology will be similar to one’s ability to read the user guide of an appliance. However, if we choose a relative view of technology, then we will have much to think and talk about. Take social media as an example. The ease with which we can now stay in touch with family, friends, and acquaintances was unimaginable twenty years ago. It has been a blessing for most of us during the COVID-19 pandemic. At the same time, think about social media’s contribution to the global spread of lies, misinformation, and fake news. The echo chambers that social media creates have far-reaching consequences for political participation and social justice. In the preceding chapters, I have adopted a relative view of technology and endeavored to shed some light on how technology may be re-thought in the spirit of critical applied linguistics. As Alastair Pennycook (2021) wrote, We cannot engage with social questions or with the implementation of ideas and practices without confronting the world around us. If globalization and neoliberal economic ideologies and politics have fragmented older class structures and produced instead a mobile, insecure, workforce, then applied linguistics surely needs to engage with this. If there are deep seated inequalities in the ways knowledge is produced, affirmed and distributed, then surely we have to seek ways to change this. To do so, however, we need new ways of thinking and doing applied linguistics. (p. 10)

Thus, reconceptualization and continuing re-evaluations of technology are necessary for all parties involved in language education, e.g., administrators, curriculum designers, teachers, teacher-educators, and students. Below I zoom in on language teacher education with a hope that teacher-educators will promote critical perspectives on technology and thus prepare and encourage future teachers to utilize new technologies in democratic, transformative, and socially just ways. In this way, my proposal aims to contribute to an equity-oriented approach to English language teacher education (Ahmed, 2020; Hawkins & Norton, 2009; Morgan, 2016a; Qin, 2021).

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There have been calls for bringing a stronger focus on technology into language teacher education programs. For example, Hubbard and Levy (2006) underscored “the need for both technical and pedagogical training in CALL,” and recommended that “the value of having CALL permeate the language teacher education curriculum rather than appear solely in a standalone course” (p. ix). Interest in integrating CALL components into the curriculum of language teacher education has been growing since the 1980s. Yet, there have been many barriers to such integration. Hubbard (2008) identified seven reasons why teacher education programs were not meeting the CALL needs: inertia, ignorance, insufficient time, insufficient infrastructure, insufficient standards, lack of established methodology, and lack of experienced, knowledgeable educators. While three of these problems—lack of standards, lack of established methodology, and insufficient infrastructure—have been addressed in some settings through the efforts of teacher-educators, “many language teachers are still graduating without having received sufficient formal preparation and there continues to be a general lack of autonomy among teachers when using technology” (Kessler & Hubbard, 2017, p. 285). In many contexts, formal teacher preparation in the domain of CALL is still inadequate (Schmid, 2017). Some commentators have observed that due to a lack of formal preparation, most teachers feel that it is their own responsibility to develop knowledge and expertise in CALL. Stockwell (2009), for instance, suggested five strategies for undertaking self-directed CALL education: (1) critically examine the environment, (2) seek sources of information, (3) keep up with technological developments, (4) set and adhere to learning goals, and (5) track your progress. In sum, today there are many opportunities, although insufficient in some contexts, for teacher learning in the area of CALL. These opportunities can range from formal pre-service programs to in-service training courses to professional development workshops. While there is no shortage of advice for pre-service and in-service language teachers interested in CALL, one area that has received little to no attention is a philosophical treatment of the nature of technology. A philosophical perspective is important not only for a deep understanding of how new technologies interact with existing cultural practices, but also for a critical insight into technology’s relation with pedagogy. Literature on CALL teacher education generally provides various recommendations for teachers’ skills development, i.e., how best to utilize relevant digital technologies for effective student learning. For example, Kessler (2013)

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discussed two levels of CALL skills for classroom teachers: basic level and advanced level. As Kessler puts it, “at the basic level a teacher is able to locate, evaluate, select, distribute, and integrate digital materials for instruction” (p. 3). At the advanced level, “teachers are able to create, customize, and convert these materials for enhanced instruction” (p. 4). Kessler added that with these advanced skills, teachers enjoy greater control over the digital tools that they use. Yet, the primary focus of these recommendations for skills development is on how to use tools—not to interrogate their uses through a critical lens. What is left out of discussions is how to understand and utilize technology for social and pedagogical transformation. The silence analyses that I presented in the preceding chapters shed some light on the nature of contemporary forms of digital technology and some challenges to utilizing them in pedagogical contexts. A specific thread of inquiry has been to explore technology’s differentiated affordances. In other words, the focus has been not only on technology itself, but on what technology does to whom, with what kind of effect, and under what conditions. The “silence analysis” that I have conducted following the French cultural theorist Michel de Certeau has led me to a conclusion that silences that exist in CALL are not less important than the voices that are heard. Listening to these silences can tell us a lot about how the previous generations of scholars thought about the CALL field and what new visions the contemporary scholars should develop for a better, more equitable, and just future. My critique of educational uses of technology in language education has been informed by an emancipatory approach to social science. I drew inspiration from Erik Olin Wright’s (2010) theorization of emancipatory social science. Let me briefly unpack the three key words here: science, social, and emancipatory. First, the word science, as opposed to social criticism, highlights the importance of generating systematic and rigorous knowledge about how the world works. Second, the word social suggests that positive changes require the transformation of the social world, not just the psychological world of people. Finally, the word emancipatory points to a key moral purpose in the production and utilization of knowledge in ways that would support the elimination of all forms of oppression and the creation of conditions for human flourishing and happiness. Thus, Wright’s (2010) view of emancipatory social science has three basic tasks: “elaborating a systematic diagnosis and critique of the world as it exists;

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envisioning viable alternatives; and understanding the obstacles, possibilities, and dilemmas of transformation” (p. 10). In summary, we can look at “emancipatory social science as a theory of a journey from the present to a possible future: the diagnosis and critique of society tells us why we want to leave the world in which we live; the theory of alternatives tells us where we want to go; and the theory of transformation tells us how to get from here to there – how to make viable alternatives achievable” (pp. 25–26).

Emancipatory Social Science and the Philosophy of Technology The history of the philosophy of technology is filled with tensions between technological determinism and instrumentalism. These two theories have dominated both scholarly and popular discussions about technology for a long time. As Van Den Eede (2019) summarized, a key goal of the contemporary philosophy of technology is to find a middle ground between instrumentalism and determinism. Instrumentalism “sees technology as merely a means to an end: an instrument with which we aim to accomplish certain goals” (p. xix). In this theory, “technology is goal-neutral,” and “the goal-setting is up to us, humans” (p. xix). Van Den Eede (2019) used the motto of the National Rifle Association of the United States to illustrate this theory: “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people” (p. xix). On the other hand, the theory of determinism suggests that “guns harbor an intrinsic orientation toward violence” and “a world with guns differs completely from one without them” (p. xix). For supporters of determinism, “technology takes on an all-encompassing character, becomes something that pierces through to every realm of life and society—a force, power, or principle with its own agenda” (p. xix). Van Den Eede (2019) believes that “contemporary philosophers of technologies find flaws in both arguments. Technologies are not goal-neutral: they push us toward specific uses…. But they cannot be identified with plain, linear causes of social effects either” (p. xix). In short, “technologies ‘do’ things, but their effects are not completely beyond our power. Interestingly, this makes both instrumentalism and determinism true up to a point” (p. xix). In other words, “technologies have effects” but we “retain at least some control over what technology does” (p. xix). I believe that an emancipatory social science approach holds much potential to deal with these tensions, especially in pedagogical contexts.

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One way of thinking about technology and pedagogical emancipation is to adopt a perspective developed by Paulo Freire (1970). Freire was opposed to a dominant method of education of his time, and he described it as a banking method of education. In this method of education, knowledge is seen as a possession of teachers who bestow it upon, or bank into, students. Here, students are seen as inherently vulnerable, ignorant, and oppressed. Dissatisfied with this kind of education, Freire proposed a problem-posing approach to education. It should be noted that Freire’s conceptualization was different from what is known as problem-solving education. Freire’s approach to education begins with the belief that both teachers and students have valuable knowledge, perspectives, and agency to transform the status quo. His concern was both pedagogical and epistemological in the sense that he endeavored to understand human beings, their world, and how they come to understand it. Active construction of knowledge was deemed a priority for both educators and learners. At the heart of Freire’s problem-posing education was the goal of human emancipation. In Freire’s (1970) own words: Problem-posing education, as a humanist and liberating praxis, posits as fundamental that the people subjected to domination must fight for their emancipation. To that end, it enables teachers and students to become Subjects of the educational process by overcoming authoritarianism and an alienating intellectualism; it also enables people to overcome their false perception of reality. The world—no longer something to be described with deceptive words—becomes the object of that transforming action by men and women which results in their humanization. (p. 86)

Here, Freire’s pedagogical praxis is about critical reflection on the world in order to transform it. My particular interest, especially in this book, is in Freire’s warning against an alienating intellectualism. I extend this warning to the educational uses of digital technology. My argument has been that both determinist and instrumentalist approaches to technology can be alienating in educational contexts. When teachers and students are engaged in a problem-posing education, they must be critically aware of how technology conditions the parameters of their lives in a broad ecology of social, economic, and political realities and aspirations. They should neither let technology determine their actions and relations nor look at technology as a neutral, apolitical tool at their disposal.

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My stance is not against technology. At no point in human history, people lived without technology. So, I find it utterly unproductive to argue against technology. What I have been arguing for is that we need a critical and interpretive approach to understanding how we shape technology and how technology shapes us. This co-shaping is important for complex human interactions that happen in pedagogy. To better understand the complexities involved in pedagogy, we need to pay attention to what is heard and what is silent in educational discussions. In Chapter 1 of this book, I underscored the need to be attentive to silences in CALL and identified five specific areas of silence to be analyzed in the subsequent chapters. In Chapter 2, I discussed the danger of educators’ unwavering faith in technological determinism. To counter deterministic forces, I proposed an ecological and relational view of teacher agency. In Chapter 3, I underlined the importance of guarding against capitalist motives that often underlie enthusiastic applications of new technology to solve educational problems. While technology is helpful for providing greater access to education, a demystification is necessary to understand how technology perpetuates long-existing inequalities in terms of social, economic, and cultural resources. In Chapter 4, my main goal was to shed light on the promises of temporal flexibility. The “anytime anywhere” slogan of online, technology-enhanced language education warrants critical analysis of how socially constructed notions of temporality support as well as restrict educational opportunities of people living in diverse communities with differentiated access to resources. In Chapter 5, I turned to critical roles of emotions in technology-mediated pedagogical spaces. Drawing on affect theory and critical studies of emotion, I highlighted a distributed nature of emotions and how they orient us toward and away from certain pedagogical encounters and possibilities. In Chapter 6, my primary concern was social media’s challenges to democratic educational practices. Without conscious and sustained efforts from educators, students are always at risk of living in social media echo chambers that foreclose the possibilities of dialogue with those having different worldviews. Thus, I focused on five specific areas of silence in the field of CALL and attempted to find a middle ground between technological determinism and instrumentalism. Below I summarize this middle ground and its future outlook by articulating my view of a critical hermeneutics of technology.

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A Critical Hermeneutics of Technology Our understanding of technology needs to be critical, i.e., continuously interrogating how technology shapes our relationship with it, with other human beings, and with the world. Any effort to achieve such understanding also needs to be hermeneutic, i.e., interpreting technology as text and how it mediates trans-semiotic practices and relationships between subjects and objects in specific time-spaces. My view of this critical hermeneutics is an extension of ideas initially expressed in an earlier publication (Anwaruddin, 2018). My conceptualization of a critical hermeneutics of technology (CHT) is my response to some observers’ dissatisfaction with determinism and instrumentalism. In recent years, the autonomous and deterministic character of technology has been “criticized on the basis of studies that showed the contingent and socially constructed nature of technological developments” (Gerola, 2020, p. 212). These studies, emerging mainly from such disciplines as Science and Technology Studies and the Social Studies of Technology, show how technologies could be conceptualized, designed, and utilized in alternative ways that are aligned with current sociocultural realities. However, pedagogical inquiries in language education are yet to embrace such a nuanced view of technology. Dissatisfaction with determinism and instrumentalism has important implications for understanding the complexities involved in pedagogy. By pedagogy, I do not mean a simple and linear way of transmitting information from the teacher to the student. Instead, I intend to suggest a particular kind of relationship and thoughtfulness that permeates the interactions that go on in various settings of education and development. Here, the works of Max van Manen should be instructive. For him, pedagogy involves a thoughtfulness of how we speak and listen to each other; a thoughtfulness of the way of our being in the world, and a thoughtfulness of the principles that guide our actions in personal, social, and political spaces (van Manen, 2015). This kind of phenomenological thoughtfulness is opposed to an instrumentalist view of pedagogy as a method of transmitting facts and information. Unfortunately, an instrumentalist view of pedagogy has been on the rise since education’s turn to neoliberalism—as manifested in various mechanisms of profit-making, curriculum control, “measurable” learning outcomes, ranking of schools, and the commercialization of knowledge.

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Against the forces of neoliberalism that attempt to render education as a profitable enterprise, it is important to (re)conceptualize pedagogy in light of cultural politics. This is important because pedagogy is not a value-free method or technique of knowledge transfer. As Hamilton (2009) wrote: Pedagogy entails a political orientation towards the good life, towards using a moral compass, and towards following prescribed courses. To characterize pedagogy as relating merely to ways or methods of instruction is, therefore, reductionist. It misses the point that teaching (including selfinstruction) is a goal-directed activity where the goals and the means of reaching such goals are defined in terms of social values. (p. 14)

From this perspective, pedagogy points to the complexities that characterize the relationships between teaching and learning. In my reconceptualization of pedagogy, such relationships must be directed to an ethics of a good life, which is only possible through dialogical openness and collective efforts aimed at social justice. Yet, in much of the literature, pedagogy is seen as a synonym for teaching, i.e., the delivery of content. When it is understood in a narrow sense and as a way of transmitting prepackaged information, we lose pedagogy’s potential for educational and social transformation. Uncritical adoption of new technology may perpetuate the view of pedagogy as a method of transmission where teachers and students are recipients of information selected by those in power. This will strengthen what Freire (1970) described as the banking method of education, not his vision for a problem-posing education. van Manen’s (2008) observation also points to the possibility of strengthening the banking concept of education if technology is used as an instrument to achieve predefined educational goals. As he argued: The dominance of technological and calculative thought is so strong and deeply embedded that it seems well-nigh impossible to offer acceptable alternatives to the technocratic ideologies and the inherently instrumental pre-suppositional structures of teaching practice. The roots of this technologizing of curriculum and teaching knowledge have grown deeply into the metaphysical sensibilities of western cultures. (p. 4)

Although van Manen’s writing was not directed specifically to the field of CALL, it has important lessons for CALL researchers and practitioners.

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The technocratic ideologies that van Manen discussed are clearly visible in the literature on CALL (see, e.g., a special issue on critical CALL edited by Gleason & Suvorov, 2019). For this reason, I argue that the curricula and pedagogy of CALL need to move beyond the deterministic and instrumental views of technology. Such a movement is urgently needed because three decades of enthusiasm for computer-based technologies has yielded little change in language education. After years of research, we did not get sufficient reliable evidence about technology’s positive impact on the language development of second/foreign language learners. A review of studies of technology in L2 learning found that: The evidence that technology has a direct beneficial impact on linguistic outcomes is slight and inconclusive, but it may impact indirectly and positively on learner attitudes and behaviours and may promote collaboration. On the whole, the research reviewed lacked the quality that would reassure practitioners and policy-makers that technological investment is warranted. (Macaro et al., 2012, p. 1)

Therefore, we need a serious re-thinking of the uses and abuses of new technologies in the curriculum and pedagogy of second/foreign language education. To initiate such a re-thinking and to avoid the deterministic and instrumental tendencies in the CALL field, I propose an alternative view of technology, which I describe as a critical hermeneutics of technology. This proposal is influenced by critical hermeneutics (e.g., Habermas, 1986) and an empirical turn in the philosophy of technology (Achterhuis, 2001). In general, hermeneutics denotes the study of interpretation. It uses a variety of theories and methods to shed light on how meanings are constructed. There are a number of branches of this field of interpretation studies. Examples of some major branches include conservative, moderate, radical, and critical hermeneutics. In this book, I have drawn inspiration from the critical tradition of hermeneutics, which suggests that interpretation may be performed to shed light on a power–language nexus, to develop a nuanced understanding of meaning and action, and to emancipate individuals from political and economic exploitations (Gallagher, 1992). Critical hermeneutics may be used as an innovative approach to understanding various problems in contemporary educational, linguistic, and social sciences. It is also useful to analyze the problems of ideology in post-technological societies. As Roberge (2011)

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wrote, successful deployment of critical hermeneutics can “explain how cultural messages ‘show and hide’; that is, how the ambiguity of meaning always allows for a group to represent itself while opening the door for distortion and domination” (p. 5). Thus, a critical hermeneutic approach must treat technology as “text” so that users of technology can interpret the meanings that technology creates, hides, and reveals. Hermeneutic awareness is also necessary to see how technology not only transmits messages but also creates new meanings of the messages during transmission. In other words, technology is both medium and message. With this hermeneutic approach to understanding how technology works in and with the world of users, I now turn to the philosophy of technology. To develop an understanding of technology and language pedagogy, we may draw insights from an empirical turn in the American philosophy of technology. This tradition of inquiry rejected both classical and modernist views of technology, which tended to view technology as a means to an end. It also rejected the dualism between nature and culture that has existed in Western thought for centuries. In summary, the empirical turn refuses the nostalgic Heideggerian move of rejecting technology in favor of a purportedly more idyllic and premodern relationship between culture and nature. Instead, though it necessarily assumes a critical stance toward technological practices, American philosophy of technology seeks to understand contemporary technological culture so that more primordial human meanings can be derived from within it. (Koukal, 2003, p. 226)

Rather than treating technology as a powerful and autonomous tool, this empirical philosophy points to the social and cultural forces on technology. In other words, it sheds light on “the co-evolution of technology and society” (Achterhuis, 2001, p. 6). Among the contemporary philosophers of technology, Don Ihde is particularly important for a critical hermeneutics of technology. Ihde (1990) illustrated the role of tools and artifacts in people’s relationship to the world, the diversity of human–technology relations, and the non-neutrality of technology. A central theme of his philosophy is that technologies are always culturally embedded. To put it another way, Ihde (1990) has shown how “cultures embed technologies” (p. 124). Summarizing Ihde’s core arguments, Feenberg (2012) wrote that:

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Human beings have always already left the Garden of Eden for a technically mediated world of some sort. We are homo technologicus by our very nature. Technology is not something added on after the fact…. Technology is as natural to human beings as language and culture; its specific content is historically contingent but it will always be found wherever there are human beings. (p. 1)

Thus, technology is not external to people’s survival mechanisms and cultural practices. It is always a part of our lifeworld. Ihde illustrated this through his notion of technological mediation. He showed that technology is not simply a tool that connects people and their world; it also affects the nature of that connection. Technological mediation is concerned primarily with “the role of technology in human action (conceived as the ways in which human beings are present in their world) and human experience (conceived as the ways in which their world is present to them)” (Verbeek, 2006, p. 363). The key tenet of technological mediation is that technologies are always culturally embedded. Elaborating on this argument, Ihde (1990) discussed a number of relationships that we can possibly establish with and through technology. Two of these relationships are particularly relevant for my proposal for a critical hermeneutics of technology. The first one is the embodiment relation. An example of this kind of relationship is when a person uses a pair of glasses to look at the world. The world is perceived in a different way. In Ihde’s (1990) words, one is “aware of the glasses, but the focal phenomenon is the perceptual transparency that the glasses allow” (p. 94). Here, technology (the glasses) becomes an extension of one’s physical body. The second relation is hermeneutical. In this relation, technology provides us with a particular representation of the world, which always requires interpretation. For instance, “reading off a thermometer does not result in a direct sensation of heat or cold but gives a value that requires interpretation to tell something about reality” (Verbeek, 2006, p. 365). A subject’s cultural knowledge is very important for such interpretation. Cultural knowledge, e.g., what degree of temperature is considered fever and when to seek medical assistance, is essential for a meaningful reading of the thermometer and thus for establishing a hermeneutical relation in/with a technology-mediated world. The concept of technological mediation has the potential to resist the CALL field’s overreliance on technological determinism and instrumentalism. We can summarize technological mediation by saying: if the

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embodiment relation is about perception, the hermeneutical relation is about interpretation. Technology does not simply present the world to us. Instead, it mediates our experience of the world. We use our own interpretive lenses to make sense of what is presented to us through technological artifacts. However, the notion of mediation does not suggest that technological artifacts simply mediate the subject and the object in their original states of being. Instead, they shape and redefine the very ideas of the subject and the object. As Verbeek (2001) summarized: Mediating artifacts shape not only the way a predefined subject relates to a predefined object or the way a predefined object can appear to a predefined subject. They shape the interrelation itself between subject and object, from which both are constituted. Mediation does not simply take place between a subject and an object, but rather co-shapes subjectivity and objectivity. (p. 131)

In this light, technology does not provide simple “access” to a world: both the human and the world are transformed as part of the mediation. It is also important to note that, in any form of technological mediation, culture and ideologies play important roles. In this context, the idea of culture is used in broad terms to encompass artifacts, beliefs, and practices. In short, technological artifacts always function in a broad cultural ecology. Cultural knowledge helps us understand how artifacts co-shape our relationships with the world around us. It also normalizes these relationships and our experiences with them. Technological artifacts gain or lose meaning and significance in relation to specific use-contexts. A good example is how Indian prayer wheels became windmills in the West. In a similar way, a mobile phone can become a tool for foreign language learning. However, the use of this tool and the kind of relation it may foster between the language learner and the object of learning will be significantly influenced by the cultural context of its use. A number of factors such as the learner’s prior knowledge, existing culture of technology use, availability of material resources, and a supporting environment of pedagogical practice will strengthen the user’s agency to utilize the phone in productive ways. We can turn again to Ihde (1990) for a summary:

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Technologies are non-neutral and essentially, but structurally, ambiguous. In the relationship with humans and humans-in-culture, technologies transform experience and its variations….at the complex level of a cultural hermeneutics, technologies may be variantly embedded; the ‘same’ technology in another cultural context becomes quite a ‘different’ technology. (p. 144)

From this vantage point, teachers, learners, and researchers in CALL need to pay attention to how new technologies interact with existing cultural norms and practices. Unquestioning trust in technology’s capacity to support language learning will likely reinforce a corporatist agenda, which aims at more sale of technological tools and for more monetary profits for the “Silicon Valleys” of the world. On the other hand, too much trust in the agency of individual users may ignore the situated, relational, and distributed nature of human agency. It will put undue emphasis on the individual, who is only a part of a bigger whole that makes successful language learning possible. From a critical and emancipatory perspective, the mutually shaping relationships between the parts and the whole must inform the curriculum and pedagogy of CALL. Educators and researchers need to know how a particular digital tool functions, but they also need a thorough understanding of how that tool interacts with the broader context of manufacture, distribution, and use. Here, Freire’s (1970) observation may be instructive: When people lack a critical understanding of their reality, apprehending it in fragments which they do not perceive as interacting constituent elements of the whole, they cannot truly know that reality. To truly know it, they would have to reverse their starting point: they would need to have a total vision of the context in order subsequently to separate and isolate its constituent elements and by means of this analysis achieve a clearer perception of the whole. (p. 104)

A total vision of the context is necessary for CALL practitioners to utilize technology in emancipatory ways so that students do not remain ignorant of social, cultural, and economic implications of technology use. In a technologically mediated world with unequal distribution of resources, students need to develop a critical consciousness, in addition to skills for operating new and emerging technologies. For such consciousness, they need to treat technology as text and interpret its role, as a

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constituent part, in the making of a whole of pedagogical context. As the hermeneutical tradition of text interpretation suggests, understanding the whole and understanding its parts are interdependent and necessary for the grasp of the meaning of a text/event/phenomenon. In Weinsheimer’s (1989) words, “the hermeneutic circle is distinct from linear induction because not only do the parts lead to understanding the whole but also there must be an understanding of the whole prior to examining the parts” (p. 126). Thus, a critical hermeneutics of technology should provide interpretive lenses to those engaged in pedagogy and research in language teaching and language teacher education utilizing digital technologies. In conclusion, throughout this book I have attempted to shine light on Computer Assisted Language Learning by discussing five areas of silence. I have argued that the field of CALL has been heavily influenced by two dominant views of technology: determinism and instrumentalism. I have discussed why both of these views are limiting. In general, there is a tendency in the CALL literature to focus more on technology itself than on pedagogy. As Huh and Hu (2005) complained, “some studies focus on the technology used in the study rather than on what happens through, with, or around the technology, making the technocentric results of limited use to researchers and practitioners” (p. 10). To move the field of CALL beyond this focus on technology itself, I have proposed a critical hermeneutics of technology for language teaching and language teacher education. By addressing the five silences, I have endeavored to expand the boundaries of CALL as a scholarly field. In addition to appreciating what has been achieved in the field, I have underscored what remains to be done. It is now a challenge for the new generation of researchers to go beyond the familiar approaches to examining how a particular technological artifact may or may not support language learning and use. Moving away from the traditional focus on the teaching of the four skills (reading, writing, speaking, & listening), I urge readers to explore alternative perspectives and innovative ideas for integrating digital technologies into the curricula and pedagogy of second/foreign language education. One specific area where a critical and hermeneutic approach to technology is important is language teacher education. In order to prepare future teachers for equity-oriented teaching practices, teacher education programs need a clear focus on teachers’ identity development that will be supportive of their contextsensitive pedagogical decision-making capacities (Morgan, 2016b). The

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kind of “silence analysis” that I have undertaken in this book should be helpful for teacher education programs to shine light on the “hidden curriculum” of teacher knowledge and professional practice (Anwaruddin, 2016). Thus, it will contribute to a critical, equity-oriented approach to language teacher education (Ahmed, 2020) and help prepare teachers for what Lawrence (2018) described as an increasingly digitalized communicative world. Perspectives and ideas emerging from “silence analyses” must problematize whether or not the computer “assists” language learning, and how such assistance may be implicated in the cultural, social, and political contexts of technology use and language teaching and learning. I have tried to bring such problematization to the fore by giving voice to five areas of silence in CALL. But I am certain that there are other areas—historically marginalized or silenced—that need research attention as we enter a post-pandemic world where technology will likely be more ubiquitous and inevitably implicated in power dynamics.

References Achterhuis, H. (Ed.). (2001). American philosophy of technology: The empirical turn. Indiana University Press. Ahmed, A. (2020). Curriculum of English language teacher education in Bangladesh: Relevance of Morgan’s critical ELT approach. In S. Sultana, M. M. Roshid, M. Z. Haider, M. M. N. Kabir, & M. H. Khan (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of English language education in Bangladesh (pp. 356–368). Routledge. Anwaruddin, S. M. (2016). Contesting the violence of Tylerism: Toward a cosmopolitan approach to the curriculum of second language teacher education. Teaching in Higher Education, 21(4), 429–441. https://doi.org/10. 1080/13562517.2016.1155550 Anwaruddin, S. M. (2018). Beyond determinism and instrumentalism: Reconceptualizing technology for CALL. In J. Perren, K. Kelch, J. Byun, S. Cervantes, & S. Safavi (Eds.), Applications of CALL theory in ESL and EFL environments (pp. 22–35). IGI Global. Feenberg, A. (2012). Making the gestalt switch. Paper presented at the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy Conference, Rochester, NY. Retrieved from https://www.academia.edu/6646265/Making_the_Gestalt_S witch Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Seabury. Gallagher, S. (1992). Hermeneutics and education. State University of New York Press.

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Gerola, A. (2020). Technologies and technique: philosophy of technology before and after the empirical turn. Mechane, 209–218. https://www.mimesisjourn als.com/ojs/index.php/mechane/article/view/335 Gleason, J., & Suvorov, R. (2019). Promoting social justice with CALL. CALICO Journal, 36(1), i–vii. Habermas, J. (1986). The theory of communicative action. Polity. Hamilton, D. (2009). Blurred in translation: Reflections on pedagogy in public education. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 17 (1), 5–16. Hawkins, M., & Norton, B. (2009). Critical language teacher education. In A. Burns & J. Richards (Eds.), Cambridge guide to second language teacher education (pp. 30–39). Cambridge University Press. Hubbard, P. (2008). CALL and the future of language teacher education. CALICO Journal, 25(2), 175–188. Hubbard, P., & Levy, K. (Eds.). (2006). Teacher education in CALL. John Benjamins Publishing Company. Huh, K., & Hu, W.-C. (2005). Criteria for effective CALL research. In J. L. Egbert & G. M. Petrie (Eds.), CALL research perspectives (pp. 9–21). Lawrence Erlbaum. Ihde, D. (1990). Technology and the lifeworld. Indiana University Press. Kessler, G. (2013). Language teacher training in technology. In C. A. Chapelle (Ed.), The encyclopedia of applied linguistics. Wiley Blackwell. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1002/9781405198431.wbeal0659 Kessler, G., & Hubbard, P. (2017). Language teacher education and technology. In C. A. Chapelle & S. Sauro (Eds.), The handbook of technology and second language teaching and learning (pp. 278–292). Wiley Blackwell. Koukal, D. R. (2003). Review of the book American philosophy of technology: The empirical turn (H. Achterhuis, Ed.). Technology and Culture, 44(1), 225–226. Lawrence, G. (2018). The role of language teacher beliefs in an increasingly digitalized communicative world. In B. Zou & M. Thomas (Eds.), Handbook of research on integrating technology into contemporary language learning and teaching (pp. 140–160). IGI Global. Macaro, E., Handley, Z., & Walter, C. (2012). A systematic review of CALL in English as a second language: Focus on primary and secondary education. Language Teaching, 45(1), 1–43. Morgan, B. (2016a). Language teacher identity and the domestication of dissent: An exploratory account. TESOL Quarterly, 50(3), 708–734. Morgan, B. (2016b). Language teacher education and the developing world: Exploring ‘horizons of possibility’ for identity and agency. Linguistics and the Human Sciences, 11(1), 89–106. https://doi.org/10.1558/lhs.v11i1.20508 Pennycook, A. (2021). Critical applied linguistics: A critical re-introduction. Routledge.

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CHAPTER 8

Afterword Brian Morgan

I am thrilled and honored to be writing the afterword to Anwar Ahmed’s latest book, Exploring Silences in the Field of Computer Assisted Language Learning. In the relatively short time that I have known Anwar, I have often found myself describing his recent research in terms I rarely use such as brilliant or visionary. The sheer volume and consistency of his high-quality work is also remarkable. Knowing him also as a friend and recent collaborator (Ahmed & Morgan, 2021; Ahmed et al., 2021), I suspect he may be a touch uncomfortable with this public praise though it’s well earned by my measure of such things. Anwar is one of the most insightful transdisciplinary scholars I have encountered. He brings an extraordinary depth of philosophical and sociological insight to his work. His extensive theoretical understanding is on clear display throughout this important book, giving voice, as the title indicates, to the silenced historical and ideological underpinnings of Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL).

B. Morgan (B) Glendon College, York University, Toronto, Canada e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Ahmed, Exploring Silences in the Field of Computer Assisted Language Learning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06501-9_8

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Still, it’s the field-internal place from which Anwar writes that makes this study so vital and relevant. As someone who has worked closely with Anwar in a content-based English for Academic Purposes (EAP) program, I have witnessed first-hand his ability to design and deliver EAP instruction of the highest quality and often in times of program duress. In short, Anwar intimately knows where the CALL silences reside and how best to amplify them in ways that invigorate the knowledge base of additional language teaching and language teacher education (LTE). This is the best approach to Critical English Language Teaching or Critical Applied Linguistics, in my opinion. It makes or demands a set of critical theories responsive to the unique online/offline spaces (see Anwar’s Ch. 5 discussion of de Certeau’s distinction of place and space, for detail), textual/semiotic practices, forms of (dis)embodiment and interculturality that facilitate additional language learning and greater respect for social justice. It is a criticality that supports the unique experiences and knowledge generation of additional language teachers and sees them as equal partners and not simply as technicians or consumers of conceptual models imported from more prestigious disciplines within university hierarchies. Anwar’s body of critical work exemplifies what Cummins (2021) has recently termed “consequential validity,” a prioritization of situated conditions in the appraisal of theory for bi/multilingual language teaching. In this regard, Anwar provides a grounded criticality tightly interwoven with pedagogical experience, reminding me of Kumaravadivelu’s (2012) parameters of particularity, practicality, and possibility in his post-method approach to LTE, or Benesch’s (2001) Needs and Rights Analyses in critical EAP. I would also include here Vandrick’s approach to social class in EAP (see e.g., her 2011 discussion of Students of the New Global Elite, or SONGEs), as well as Chun’s (2017) impressive work on common-sense beliefs and passivity around the dominant discourses of capitalism. A grounded criticality in ELT or LTE seeks to move teachers and recognizes the value of field-external theories to do so, but it also recognizes the possibility for new understandings or critical synergies emerging from pedagogical experience when genuine transdisciplinary dialogue and reflexivity are enabled. Speaking of reflexivity, I must admit to a bit of hesitation when first asked to provide this afterword. My own personal and work encounters with technology would appear to be unlikely sources of reliable, contemporary judgment on CALL issues. I seem to have spent my entire adult life using digital devices that were a minimum four to five generations too

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old. Whenever software malfunctioned at home, my wife would come to the rescue. At work, fully developed online course components were rare, clearly diminishing my competency in the eyes of many students. Indeed, my current status as a Senior Scholar, while denoting a productive, postretirement affiliation with the university, could easily imply a “best before” date now expired when the application and operation of new educational technologies are considered (with apologies to more adept contemporaries). Fortunately for me (and us), Anwar hasn’t written that kind of book. He has instead written one that helps us understand our relationships to CALL and to technology, more generally, within broader contexts and longer timeframes. He describes his own understanding as a critical hermeneutics and philosophy of technology by which to guide our pedagogical activities and relationships on more principled and potentially transformative terms. The framing of the book and chapters around the idea of silence is an innovative and productive metaphor for teaching. We don’t know what we can’t hear until the inaudible is amplified and brought into harmony or productive discord with existing beliefs or frames of reference. What once seemed immediate—the urgency felt to teach or learn the latest device or software, for example—thus becomes recontextualized through a “silence analysis” as an emotion socially generated in the service of restless/endless consumption and the built-in obsolescence of manufactured goods that have sustained capitalism since the onset of the Industrial Revolution. Paul Simon’s prophetic lyrics in the Sounds of Silence come to mind: “And the people bowed and prayed to the neon gods they made.” Anwar provides a much less reverent perspective on our technological obsessions. He rightly rejects the inevitability and predictability of technological determinism (whether utopian or dystopian) but also of the value-free instrumentality promoted by vested interests who algorithmically measure and condition our digital movement. Instead, as Anwar advises in Ch. 7, we should examine how technology mediates our worldly experiences in dynamic and recursive ways: “Technology does not provide simple ‘access’ to a world: both the human and the world are transformed as part of the mediation.” We have the options of detached observation or active participation as this transformation unfolds within and beyond our schools and communities. Anwar’s new book is ultimately about fostering agency in CALL; but to reiterate a point made above, it is an agency that presumes the capacity

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of language teachers to be knowledge generators and transformative intellectuals rather than technicians or automatons subservient to the coded design features of the latest educational software or information technology imposed from above. Perhaps most important, Anwar emphasizes the distributed and ecological aspects of the agency for which he advocates. The capacity for transformative action does not reside solely in the “heroic individual”—a doubt-inducing precondition for many—but instead develops through the sharing of ideas and the collective exploration of affordances recognized in particular sites of practice (cf. thought collectives, Ramanathan, 2002). The implications for pre-service and inservice approaches to CALL are significant. Rather than a “user manual” emphasis on predefined skills and competencies (what Anwar defines as an “absolute” focus on technology), LTE curricula would be designed to integrate more project-based or experiential learning components in which the development of CALL capacities evolved alongside and in support of community-based and social justice initiatives (i.e., a “relative” focus on technology). In sum, our primary orientation would be to language as a social practice in which information technologies and social media would be conceived as complementary rather than overbearing pedagogical resources. Agency, so conceived, would not lie within the intrinsic, instrumental properties of CALL “tools” but instead in the social imagination of would-be practitioners, an appropriate site of intervention for a critical hermeneutics fostered through LTE curricula. Toward this agentive goal in CALL, Anwar illuminates five forms of relevant silence of which language teachers should be aware: 1. Unwavering faith in technological determinism, 2. Capitalist motives underlying technology, 3. The promise and myths of temporal flexibility and the assumption of equal access, 4. Emotions in technology-mediated spaces and pedagogies, 5. Social media’s challenges to citizenship and democratic participation. Each form of silence is given detailed treatment, in keeping with the impressive transdisciplinary scholarship Anwar brings to his research. Important intersections and overlapping silences are also noted throughout, such as the techno-utopian promise of temporal flexibility and equal access, which fails to account for the socio-economic and racialized barriers involved. The prominence of emotion and its displacement of reason and evidence-based deliberation in democratic politics is another intersection of note in this book, particularly in respect to the role that “echo chambers” play in amplifying collective grievances and circulating

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dis/misinformation on social media platforms. What becomes potentially dangerous is when otherwise marginal voices become emboldened to act publicly—and disruptively, even violently—on the disinformation first circulated online. The recent so-called “freedom train” of truckers opposed to COVID vaccines and intent on blockades and the indefinite occupation of Ottawa comes to mind. Some readers will make similar associations with the January 6th insurrection at the US Capital in Washington. Into this mix, we should also include the evolving characteristics of (late) capitalism as part of our silence analyses. I’m thinking here of new forms of online commodification and monetization enabled by a so-called attention economy, in which reputation, celebrity, and fame (via clicks, likes, legions of devoted followers) serve as “attention capital” (van Krieken, forthcoming) to generate income. It is a form and measure of attention open to potential manipulation (e.g., through the unethical purchase of fake Instagram followers) but it is also an environment that rewards attention-grabbing excess and hyperbole—hence a simmering cauldron for conspiracy theories and populist communities of rage and intolerance. The tentative responses of government and social media owners underscore, again, the profound mediational transformations of society and of citizenship practices that Anwar’s book foregrounds. For example, there are the difficult choices to be made regarding free speech—a foundational democratic principle—versus protection from the real-world consequences of post-truths, alternative “facts” and fake news, which virtual worlds amplify. Does the (self)regulation of social media such as Facebook and Twitter create a slippery slope of acceptance and justification for increased state intervention and censorship, particularly for autocratic governments? For liberal democratic societies, the mediational consequences of an online/offline nexus (Blommaert, 2019) warrant further consideration and concern; that is, to what extent are the insular “echo chambers” of social media exacerbating polarization in the broader society and inhibiting consensus-building on existential challenges such as climate change, which must be addressed collectively? Clearly, we seem to behave in uncivil ways when we can hide under the cover of our virtual personae. And while “hiding,” we might also deceive ourselves into believing that the newfound convenience of online political activities can adequately replace the hard work of public engagement necessary to mobilize effective social action (see e.g., clicktivism and the fantasy of participation, cf. Dean, 2005, and in this book).

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I can imagine Anwar now cautioning me for my overly pessimistic, overly deterministic view of current developments. “Don’t forget about the teacher agency, Brian. It is what we do with technology in our language learning classrooms that is most important.” Yes, absolutely! To inspire and guide such agency, I can think of no better resource than Anwar Ahmed’s Exploring Silences in the Field of Computer Assisted Language Learning. Unlike the built-in obsolescence of our latest software and digital devices, the anticipated shelf-life for this unique exploration promises to be timeless.

References Ahmed, A., Morgan, B., & Maciel, R. F. (2021). Feeling our way: A trioethnography on critical affective literacy for applied linguistics. Calidoscópio, 19(4), 538–552. Ahmed, A., & Morgan, B. (2021). Postmemory and multilingual identities in English language teaching: A duoethnography. Language Learning Journal, 49(4), 483–498. https://doi.org/10.1080/09571736.2021.1906301 Benesch, S. (2001). Critical English for academic purposes. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Blommaert, J. (2019). Political discourse in post-digital societies. Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies. Retrieved from https://alternative-democracy-research. org/2019/12/11/political-discourse-in-post-digital-societies/ Chun, C. (2017). The discourse of capitalism: Everyday economists and the production of common sense. Routledge. Cummins, J. (2021). Rethinking education for multilingual learners: A critical analysis of theoretical concepts. Springer. Dean, J. (2005). Communicative capitalism: Circulation and the foreclosure of politics. Cultural Politics, 1(1), 51–74. Kumaravadivelu, B. (2012). Language teacher education for a global society: A modular model for knowing, analyzing, recognizing, doing, and seeing. Routledge. Ramanathan, V. (2002). The politics of TESOL education: Writing, knowledge, critical pedagogy. Routledge. Vandrick, S. (2011). Students of the new global elite. TESOL Quarterly, 45, 160–169. van Krieken, R. (forthcoming). Economy of attention and attention capital. In G. Ritzer & C. Rojek (Eds.), The Blackwell encyclopedia of sociology. https:// doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.12910.02885

Index

A Adaptive action, 82 Affect, 71, 74, 77, 78, 80, 83 Affective practices, 78 Affective turn, 13, 77 Affordance, 29, 30, 32, 76, 80, 81, 83 Agency, 20, 21, 25–32 Anonymity, 73, 75 Antidemocracy, 90 Apple, M.W., 21, 22 Applied linguistics, 13–15, 106 Attention economy, 39 Autonomous, 63, 65 B Badge of honor, 60 Blank spot, 8, 9 Body, 72–74, 77, 79–81 C Capitalism, 36–40, 47 Chronopolitics, 61, 66 Chronotopes, 56

Clock time, 54–57, 62, 66 Commercialization, 37 Commodity, 55 Communication, 88, 89, 92, 94, 100 Communicative capitalism, 100 Communicative language teaching (CLT), 3 Complex, 23, 25, 28, 30–32 Computer, 3–5 Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL), 2–4, 8, 10–12, 14 Context, 106–110, 117–120 Corporatist agenda, 118 COVID-19, 70, 75, 80 Critical approach, 10 Critical CALL, 10, 13 Critical consciousness, 118 Critical hermeneutics, 111, 112, 114–116, 119 Critical media literacy (CML), 98, 99 Critical pedagogy, 99 Critical theory, 36, 40–43, 46, 49 Cultural practices, 107, 116 Culture, 115–117

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2022 A. Ahmed, Exploring Silences in the Field of Computer Assisted Language Learning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06501-9

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INDEX

D de Certeau, M., 8 Decontextualized, 76 Deliberation, 91, 98 Democracy, 88–91, 94, 96, 100, 101 Democratic education, 96, 97, 101 Demonism, 24 Deskilling, 21 Determinism, 19, 20, 22–24, 30–32 Discursive, 20 Disembodiment, 75 Dualism, 25, 26 Duration, 54, 55, 57, 59 Dynamic, 31

H Hermeneutic circle, 119 Hope, 31 Human experience, 116 Humanization, 110

E Echo chamber, 88, 91, 94, 96, 98, 101 Ecological, 20, 28, 29, 32 Education, 1, 9, 10, 12–15 Edutainment, 82 Emancipation, 110 Emotion, 69, 70, 74, 76–83 Emotional geography, 80, 81 Emotion labor, 30 Empirical turn, 9, 14 English, 20 English Language Teaching (ELT), 7, 15 Euro-chronometer, 62

J Justice, 95, 100, 101

F Fake news, 91, 101 Feenberg, A., 36, 42, 43, 45–47 Freire, P., 110, 113, 118

G Geography, 6, 8

I Ideological, 26 Ihde, D., 115–117 Imagined affordance, 29 Information cocoons, 94 Interpretation, 114, 116, 119 Interpretive imaginations, 65 Intersections, 10

K Knowledge, 106–108, 110, 112, 113, 116, 117, 120

L Labor, 36, 40 Language, 2–4, 6, 7, 10, 13–15 Language teacher education, 106, 107, 119, 120 Liberation, 90

M Managerialism, 96 Market, 38, 48 Material, 20, 21, 23, 26–28, 31, 32 Meaning, 114, 115, 117, 119 Mediation, 116, 117 Misinformation, 89, 98 Modern Times , 24, 31 Multiliteracies, 40

INDEX

N Neoliberal, 26, 59, 63, 65 Neoliberalism, 96 Neutral, 65 Non-rational, 30 O Official curricula, 65 Omissions, 8 Online teaching, 79, 81 Oppressive temporality, 62 Optimism, 44, 45, 47 P Pandemic, 37, 45 Paradigm, 25 Participation, 90, 96, 98, 100 Pedagogy, 70–73, 75, 77, 78, 83, 107, 111–115, 118, 119 Philosophy, 9–12, 14, 15 Physical proximity, 73 Place, 72, 80, 81 Power, 56, 59, 64, 65, 67, 109, 113, 114, 120 Praxis, 10 Proletariat, 41 Public sphere, 77 R Real-time, 59 Relational, 20, 25–30, 32

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S Science and Technology Studies (STS), 5, 12 Second language acquisition (SLA), 3 Silence, 2, 6–9, 12 Silence analysis, 108, 120 Social class, 40 Social inequality, 65 Socially engineered time, 59, 60 Social media, 87–94, 96–101 Social time, 54, 55, 59, 60 Space, 70–72, 74, 77, 79–81, 83

T Teacher development, 21, 27 Technology, 1, 3–5, 9–15, 35–40, 42–49, 54, 55, 60–66, 70, 73–77, 80, 81, 83, 88, 90, 93–95, 99, 100, 105–120 Temporal flexibility, 54–56, 58, 60, 61, 63–66 Time, 106, 107, 109, 110

U Utopia, 9, 13, 44, 45, 47, 88, 125

V Validity of presence, 31 Violence, 90 Virtual time, 56–60, 66