This session will be using a Miro Board at https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_lIqqfBY=/ .

Students’ critical agency might be defined as their capacity to question – from positions they adopt for themselves – the ideas, methods, practices and assumptions they meet. In English universities, many lists of ‘graduate attributes’ as well as subject benchmarks include ‘critical’ (‘thinking’, ‘reasoning’, ‘reflection’, ‘analysis’ etc) as a core value. Educators are tasked with developing subjects who can navigate the contemporary abundance of information and opinion without falling victim to fake news, hate speech or irrational conspiracies (Polizzi 2020). As critical educators we would also hope to challenge the assumptions and data/algorithmic practices of digital platforms themselves (Kahn and Kellner 2005, Pangrazio 2017).

A critical attitude is intrinsic to learning, at least in constructivist accounts. ‘Threshold concepts’ (Meyer & Land 2005) require old habits of thinking to be dismantled so that new ones can be made. Critical pedagogy (hooks 2010, Friere 2009) sees learning or ‘critical consciousness’ arising from attempts to challenge and transform the world. Open pedagogy (de Rosa & Jhangiani 2020) draws on both of these traditions, demanding ‘collaboration, connection, diversity, democracy, and critical assessments of educational tools and structures’.

In the digital classroom, there is no shortage of material on which students can practice their critical judgement, or opportunities to engage in critical conversations. But there are new challenges to the development of critical agency. It can be hard to build the kind of relationships that support students to question, challenge, and transform their perspective – work that is emotionally as well as cognitively demanding. Learning at a screen is for many students a source of passivity, disconnection and low morale. Virtual learning environments may model learning as organised instruction, or as success in particular routines of testing, in ways that make alternative pedagogies difficult to enact.

And perhaps critical agency is more radically compromised in digital spaces? Datafication and surveillance, algorithmic nudges, the automated amplification of the extreme and irrational in human discourse, challenge us all to act with clear intent. These developments may even ‘constrain the notions of freedom which previously seemed part and parcel of our understandings of agency’ (Pangrazio and Sefton-Greene, 2020).

At OER 19, an open space session asked digital educators to ‘open up spaces for critiques of diverse kinds to emerge, supporting students’ critical engagements with, through and about digital technologies’. In this open space (OER21), we will share examples of practice that meet the demand for criticality despite the challenges of the current moment. We will also ask what makes critical agency more difficult to achieve in the digital spaces of the post-pandemic university.