This quilt is the story of how African Americans have struggled to fit in here and grab a piece of the American dream, grab a piece of that pie. And sometimes our ladder to reach that goal has been a tad too short. So this man is trying to grab his piece of the pie. He's trying like hell to grab a piece of the pie.

–Dr. Carolyn Mazloomi (2014) on her quilt “Trying to Grab a Piece of the Pie”

Digital design and technology have long been equated with innovation and advancement. Associated discourse in education continues to promise change and transformation with language around emergent design, breakthroughs, and future innovations. Yet, as educators and learning scientists, we would like to trouble these possibilities of design without attention to social transformation, particularly in educational structures that continue to reproduce inequality. We argue that given the histories and pervasiveness of anti-Black racist ideology and institutional practice, the tech designers have a responsibility to consider technology’s potentially dehumanizing impact on nondominant students and communities. In education in particular, these injustices materialize as rigid institutional structures, hierarchical sorting of achievement, and reductive metrics of learning. Left unchecked, digital tools do nothing to counter the furtherance of deficit-orientations to nondominant students’ cultures, abilities, languages, and everyday practices.

To trouble these risks, we focus on the ways that ideological constructions, such as social constructs, cultural biases, and implicit definitions, are embedded in, and reinforced through educational software-in-use. We define ideology as “mental frameworks—the languages, the concepts, categories, imagery of thought, and the systems of representation—which different classes and social groups deploy in order to make sense of, define, figure out and render intelligible the way society works” (Hall 1986:29). Following Hall’s definition, we highlight the connection between ideology, power, and hegemony - the ways particular ideologies come to dominate the thinking in a particular context that aid in the maintenance of power and material relations, in our case through notions of teaching and learning (Abercrombie and Turner 1978).

We take a twofold approach to address the specifics of ideological design as related to (a) software in education and (b) learning design. Across both domains, we center the role of teachers as designers–those who, drawing from their pedagogical insight and sociocultural knowledge of their contexts, bear expertise that might inform not only the use of technology, but its very design. We illustrate these concepts using examples from our own teaching and scholarship, first offering analysis of dehumanizing proceduralized ideologies within an example of software used in teacher education called simSchool (Aguilera & Chen, in press). We then present our vision for humanizing design in education via analysis of a teacher’s digital quilting design using Padlet educational software, and end with a series of provocations for educators and designers.

Humanizing in an Anti-Black Social Ecology

Our argument is grounded in historicized understandings of anti-Black racism in schools and society. Black freedom scholars especially help us understand the significance of humanization in an anti-Black context. Anti-Blackness is endemic and permanent, reproduced by policies and everyday practices that rely on and enable Black suffering (Dumas and ross 2016). In educational contexts, and schools in particular, such practices diminish the “souls of Black children every day through systemic, institutionalized, anti-Black, state-sanctioned violence,” (Love 2016: 1). These acts of dehumanization become normalized via practices of policing, forced cultural assimilation, and educational redlining–exclusionary practices of place-based mapping that sequester educational opportunities away from poor Black and brown neighborhoods (Holzman 2012).

Humanizing pedagogies, in stark contrast, honor the cultures and linguistic repertoires of students, and distinctly critique and counter the legacy of oppressive systems particularly as perpetuated by schools (Ladson-Billings 1995). Affirming the humanity of learners, Brazilian educator Paolo Freire (1970) foregrounded the development of critical consciousness–offering tools to name and critique oppressive structures in resistance to practices of passivity in education. These strategic efforts to emphasize human dignity, fight injustice, and affirm the interdependence of human relationships inform our critical approach to technology in education.

Responding to the ubiquity of digital technology in society, critical scholars including those in the Critical Race and Digital Studies group (Hamilton 2020), help advance race-conscious understandings of inequality in digital society. Current tech trends in education have been shown to harm BIPOC students in schools, such as algorithmic bias in test proctoring software (Swauger 2020), which has been shown to disproportionately “flag” Black and Brown students for anomalous behavior.

Digital tools that are supposedly race-neutral also have racial implications. For example, police body cameras, as a component of larger technological policing and surveillance of Black people (Page and Jones 2021), heighten witnesses’ risk of conflict with police should they demand individuals stop recording their own accounts of an incident (Richardson 2020). Even the way digital hardware and software are managed in schools presents racialized disparities, with teachers in urban schools with high percentages of Black and Latine students bearing the labor required to maintain those tools with little IT support (Crooks 2019). Such race-conscious framings of the digital realm help us expand current technological “ethical imaginaries and frameworks,” often limited in their intersectional analysis of power (Le Bui and Nobel 2020:166). Digital tools are only as transformative or innovative as the people using them, with design influenced by complexities of identity, ideology, and capital often rendered invisible. Thus, we contribute to discussions of dehumanization in an increasingly digital educational culture with humanizing design visions for the future.

Humanizing Pedagogies In Practice

Joining a long tradition of educators and scholars, we affirm teachers’ daily work inside classrooms as sociopolitical and far-reaching. A humanizing orientation seeks to foster critical consciousness, further equity, and disrupt unjust practices in education that marginalize students, eschewing a power-neutral, autonomous approach to education.

Well before ubiquitous digitalization of education, teachers’ critical approaches to pedagogy have prioritized supporting minoritized students’ counter-storytelling about their own realities, a practice enabling students to preserve their own psyches against condemnatory deficit narratives about them and their communities (Solórzano and Yosso 2002). Garcia et al. (2015) demonstrated how students in a Council of Youth Research were able to, through research and presentations, construct counterstories that they shared with national research audiences and policymakers. By using their voices as students of color–and those of their communities–high school youth used digital compositions to deconstruct dehumanizing ways of viewing their communities. Finally, from an educator perspective, Lane (2018) details a politicized ethic of care practiced by Black women educators engaging empathy in a field where intellect and emotions are separated. Educators empowered students to articulate their sociopolitical positioning and advocate for educational equity for all marginalized students. Irrespective of specific technology tools and digital modes, critical ways of organizing researchers, people, and communities remain integral to an emergent vision for humanizing and liberatory pedagogies.

Dehumanization in a Digital Age

The above examples of humanizing pedagogies highlight teachers’ critical engagement with issues that impact students’ lives. Yet, in practice, teachers also find themselves struggling against structural constraints that limit their agency as critically engaged pedagogues. As more and more of our educational and social experiences are mediated through computational software and related technologies, we contend that historically dehumanizing ideologies -control, hierarchy, and racial reductionism - are now being reproduced, circulated, and reified in students’ and teachers’ everyday experiences of educational software-in-use (Aguilera and Chen, in press).

Here, we are using the term software-in-use as an extension of traditions of Discourse Analysis, which have established that the study of language is not very meaningful devoid of its context, but must focus on language-in-use (Haddix 2020). In a similar vein, we are most interested in software as it is used in everyday teaching and learning contexts, rather than as a standalone object to be studied in a vacuum. Following this logic, software that has not been traditionally considered educational - such as commercial videogames - can certainly be examined within a pedagogical context (Steinkuehler et al. 2012). Conversely, software that makes claims about being educational can also be examined by the ways that its everyday use actually supports these claims (Aguilera and de Roock 2022).

Proceduralized Ideologies

Before continuing our discussion, we should pause to discuss what we mean by the term “proceduralization,” and how it fits with more established concepts of “ideology” and “dehumanization.”

From AI chatbots, to intelligent tutoring systems, to learning management systems, all software is fundamentally defined by processes, which are in turn enacted through rules and rule systems (Zimmerman and Salen 2003). Recognizing software as fundamentally procedural in nature can provide important insights into the communicative power of the medium, particularly within educational contexts (Bogost 2010), although procedurality is not simply a hallmark of computational software. Our legal systems, schools, and businesses are also largely defined through many complex and interacting processes.

An essential part of how software operates in the ideological realm is through the translation of these ideologies into rules and rule systems—a process we have referred to in prior work as proceduralization (Aguilera 2022). We have argued that proceduralization within computational software occurs through at least four mechanisms: (a) repetition, which reinforces ideological constructions through repeated exposure (Hassan and Barber 2021); (b) scale, which diffuses the ideological impact of digital media across populations (Warren 2014); (c) automaticity, which normalizes and “naturalizes” ideological perspectives built into software (Selwyn et al. 2021); and (d) invisibility, which renders underlying designs inaccessible to the everyday user (Osterwell 2011).

Bringing these concepts together with our earlier discussion of ideology, we use the term proceduralized ideologies as a way to describe the particular ideological constructions that are embedded in and circulated through procedural means within technological designs. With regard to teaching and learning, these proceduralized ideologies can include the roles that people adopt for themselves and position other people into in society, including what it means to be human, what it means to be a learner, and what it means to position oneself within a lineage of Black history. The perspectives that characterize software developers’ experiences are also informed by existing ideologies “out in the world” - including the aforementioned ideologies of Neoliberalism, anti-Blackness, and Silicon-Valley solutionism (Morozov 2013). We maintain that when these ideologies - procedural or otherwise - are not critically examined, educators run the risk of allowing those experiences to frame our technologically-mediated practices in ways that maintain - and even exacerbate - existing inequalities. (Benjamin 2019; de Roock 2021).

In previous work, we have examined the ways that proceduralized ideologies can embody constructs such as white supremacy (Aguilera 2021), hierarchical power structures in education (Aguilera and de Roock 2022), and notions of “deviant” student behavior (Aguilera and Chen In press). Through this work, we also emphasized that proceduralized ideologies in educational software cannot solely be understood through a complete abstraction and separation of procedural resources into logical structures, mathematical operations, and computer code. Instead, these resources integrate with perceptual elements—graphics, sound, and language—to produce meaning potentials evident only in the full ensemble of multimodality (Hawreliak 2018).

To briefly summarize the argument thus far, we assert that in an age of increasingly proliferating interactive digital media, software is playing an increasingly pervasive role in circulating ideology. Thus, within the realm of educational software, teachers, students, and developers would do well to give critical attention to the ideological dimensions of this software beyond its immediately apparent or marketed function. While proceduralized ideologies cannot be avoided (in the same way that ideology itself cannot be avoided), they should be critically examined for their alignment to the more-just social worlds we aim to create. We turn now to an example of how ideologies of dehumanization can be designed into and disseminated through educational software-in-use, drawing on prior analysis of teacher education software called “simSchool.” We then provide a contrasting example - the sociotechnical practice of digital quilting - of educational software-in-use framed as a more humanizing ideological vision.

Dehumanizing ideologies in teacher education software

The example we share to illustrate the implications of proceduralized ideologies in a digital educational culture comes from the field of teacher education. We focus on the case of simSchool, web-based software developed and maintained by the organization simSchool LLC. The simSchool website describes the software asan “AI-powered” set of web-based simulations of teachers’ field experiences with students.

In a prior analysis (Aguilera and Chen In press), we focused on the ways that simSchool presents an ideological framing of teachers, teaching, and schooling that reifies existing hierarchical, instructivist, and datafied systems. Here, we extend this analysis to examine how ideologies of control, hierarchy, and racial reductionism are proceduralized through the software-in-use. As a point of clarification, we highlight this software as a telling case of dehumanizing ideologies - not necessarily as a particularly egregious perpetuator of these ideologies. As we move into this discussion, we encourage readers to ask what other educational technologies might embody the proceduralized ideologies we describe.

Ideologies of control

Like other educational technologies, simSchool can be ideologically characterized by its emphasis on control as a dominating aspect of teaching and learning. In defining this ideology, we draw on the construct of “social control, ” which refers to rules and procedures - including formalized mechanisms - in society that keep individuals bound to conventional standards (Deleuze 1992). Within software applications, we argue that ideologies’ social control can be identified in the procedural design of user actions - in what a user is allowed or not allowed to do (hard control), as well as what a user is encouraged or discouraged from doing (soft control). The user experience of simSchool, for example, involves taking on the role of a teacher controlling a classroom of simulated students (see Figure 6.1).

Figure 6.1.: Screenshot of the user view of the simSchool software.

Once the simulation sessions have begun, users are presented with drop-down menus divided into a range of routines, instructional activities, and classroom management tasks - primarily presented as directives - “Watch me,” “Now listen,” “Do a worksheet,” (See Figure 6.2). Once the simulation starts, a virtual countdown to the end of the session begins ticking, offering some additional pressure for users to “perform well” during the time available. Users’ ability to pause time to think through instructional decisions, further reinforces the degree of control a teacher might have within a given class.

Figure 6.2: Screenshot of routines, instructional activities, and classroom management tasks.

To underscore this even further, users can call up student profiles emphasizing certain aspects of the simStudents - including ones more easily quantified into metrics, deliverables, and datasets (Figure 6.3). We have noted in our prior analysis how this reduction of student identities not only runs counter to the messy everyday experience of teaching kids in classrooms, it also counters empirical findings about the malleability of human “traits” (Harris et al. 2016). We further discuss the dangers of such reductionist approaches in a later section of this chapter.

Figure 6.3.: Student summary profile displayed in simSchool

At the end of each simulated session, users are then scored on their performance by a set of external criteria imposed by developers of the software (Figure 6.4). In much the same way as an educational policy about teacher-performance evaluation serves as a tool for controlling pedagogy, so too does this proceduralized version operate as a way to constrain or shape user actions within the software.

Figure 6.4.: User report generated at the end of a simSchool session

Within the context of critical and humanizing pedagogies, ideologies of control run counter to the aims of liberatory education. Freire (1993) associated an emphasis on pedagogical control with what he called the “banking” model of education--another tool for suppressing the free and creative spirit of children in the classroom (microcosm), and for oppressing communities within the macrocosm of larger society.

In critiquing ideologies of control, we are not advocating for undermining teacher agency for making classroom decisions. Rather, we use this example to begin highlighting the ideological nature of educational software - and to invite others to consider whether these are indeed the ideologies we want to recruit our future educators and students into.

Ideologies of hierarchy

Drawing largely from our previous analysis of simSchool, we want to next highlight the ways that ideologies of social hierarchy can be proceduralized into educational software. We use the term “social hierarchy” within a broad framing of power in schools and society (Magee and Galinsky 2008). In our case, hierarchy helps describe how different social roles (teacher, student, administrator, for example), are inscribed through implicit or explicit rules and procedures. While inequitable power hierarchy has been associated with mainstream approaches to formal schooling for centuries, it takes on a new meaning as instantiated in the procedural design of simSchool itself.

In the simSchool software, we can identify a hierarchy of intended users: Administrators exert power and control over teacher educators. Teacher-educators manage and evaluate the performance of teacher candidates using the software. And finally, teacher-candidates exert power and control over the students in the software, simulated and computer-generated as those students might be. This design reinforces existing power structures and normalizes these power-distant relationships, despite their fundamental nature as social constructions. Returning to our discussion of Figure 6.4, we can see a snapshot of how these power relations are imposed on users who take on the role of teachers in simSchool. We continue to invite readers to ask: In what other ways might these hierarchical power relations be proceduralized into educational technology?

There is a well-established history of how social hierarchies have been utilized to structure power relations between a variety of socially-constructed identity groups - racialized peoples, women and girls in patriarchal societies, or the economically-exploited within capitalist societies, to name a few (Robinson 2020). Ideologies of hierarchy, like ideologies of control, have long since been a tool of racial capitalism, anti-Blackness, and imperialism exploitation since the foundational documentation of these histories (Fields and Fields 2022). And if we envision new educational technologies as promoting, rather than challenging the goals of critical, humanizing, liberatory education, we do well to pay attention to ideologies of hierarchy proceduralized into these technologies’ design and everyday use.

Ideologies of (racial) reductionism

Before turning to counterexamples of humanizing possibilities of technology in education, we want to highlight how educational software - regardless of its intent - can serve to proceduralize the decidedly dehumanizing ideology of racial reductionism. Reductionism in this context is a belief that the complexities of human experience (including learning) can be reduced down to a collection of identity markers - such as racialized, gendered, or ability-based categories. A reductionist approach to human experience deploys socially constructed identity categories often grounded in an arbitrary selection of phenotypical traits (e.g. skin color). Such approaches do not account for the intersectional nature of social identities within both lived and institutionally-governed human experience (Crenshaw 1991, 2013). Finally, a racial reductionist view fails to address the complex histories, material conditions, and diverse lived experiences of individuals and communities within these categorizations (Reed 2020).

Our analysis of simSchool demonstrates this view in action. At the end of a given simulation, users are presented with a series of summary screens called an “Equity Index,” which, in our analysis, appears to function as a way to address issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) that have come to occupy the attention of many a writer of institutional and corporate marketing materials. Digging into these charts (Figure 6.5), we can see that simSchool presents summary statistics of “Number of Interactions by Skin Tone,” as if to reify skin color as a meaningful marker of student identity.

Figure 6.5.: “Skin Tone” Charts as Illustrated Under “Current Equity Index” Post-Session Visualization

In addition to the reductionist metrics about “Interactions by Skin Tone,”(displayed as a bar chart) we also noted the “Number of Interactions Against Skin Tone Distribution” (displayed as a donut chart), along with the claim “You tend to favor students with _______ skin tones when addressing the classroom.” Chart displays, regardless of their grounding in reality, have been demonstrated to produce a kind of “science halo” effect, convincing viewers of their trustworthiness (Tal and Wansink 2016). Taken together with other instances of reductionism throughout simSchool (i.e. reducing students and teachers to metrics, performance scores, and ability groupings) rely on a specific ideological claim: that addressing issues of “equity” can be reduced down to metricized interactions across a select group of identity categories.

Reducing educational equity down to a set of metrics, and then further essentializing those metrics to notions of phenotypical skin tone and other simplified identity markers, amplifies the risk of obscuring, flattening, or outright denying the lived realities of racialized students, teachers, and communities within historical and contemporary white supremacist institutions and societies.

In sum, software - and educational software in particular, is not an ideologically-neutral entity. We have outlined how the concept of proceduralization can provide further insight into questions of how software serves to inscribe and circulate ideology. And finally, we shared our analysis of the teacher preparation software simSchool to highlight the proceduralized ideologies of control, hierarchy, and reductionism that can recruit users into an overarchingly dehumanizing vision of teaching, learning, and pedagogy. We turn now to propose an alternatively humanizing vision.

Humanizing Possibilities Of Technology In Education

Humanizing work is expansive work. It not only resists dominant paradigms of control, hierarchy, and reductionism, but imagines new possibilities beyond them. We follow the lead of teachers who enact resistive pedagogical approaches and appropriate digital tools in service of amplifying student voice and promoting educational equity, which often involves using tools for expansive purposes beyond what they were intended. From this lens, we position teachers as designers–professionals who regularly engage all stages of the design process in their daily work: empathizing with students, defining problems of practice, prototyping and testing solutions, and engaging iterative processes. Teacher-designers’ improvisational moves represent untapped possibilities to shift the technology design process toward more humanizing directions.

To distill our vision for humanizing technology in education, we present an example from our own context of teaching. Here, Olivia, a white, female-identifying pre-service teacher in a Master’s-level credentialing program has designed a learning experience for high school students. The design integrates literature, social practices, and digital software to empower students to construct their own intellectual artifacts as a communal exercise. We analyze the teacher-designer’s creative use of technology, ending with three principles that together move us toward a humanizing ethos in digital education.

The importance of digital quilting

Olivia, during her participation in a graduate course on technology in multicultural urban secondary English education, designed a weeklong learning unit entitled “Digital Quilting: Alternative Compositions in the Classroom.” It was designed for 12th-grade English students and focused on the reading and analysis of Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved. It also presented a number of multimodal artifacts for students to engage, including a video interview with Dr. Carolyn L. Mazloomi, the founder of the Women of Color Quilters’ Network, where she describes the background and purposes of her community’s quilting practice:

We as a people have a lot to say. So, the quilts encompass family stories, political stories, social issues. What's happening in the country at the time the quilts are made. What's happening in our cities. What's happening with us. I love these personal statements. So this is pretty much what the collection is about.

Dr. Mazloomi’s narrative, which served as the opening activity to Olivia’s learning unit, amplifies Black communities as those who “have a lot to say.” She describes herself as a creator of story quilts, textile arrangements which contain rich histories, narratives, and messages in their very composition. This interview vignette conveys the richness of quilts as stories of “what’s happening,” and illuminates the quilting process as one built by a plural “we” and “our.”

It is within this context of storytelling cultural practice that Olivia appropriates Padlet for making sense of Morrison’s Beloved. Padlet, a collaborative web-based software used for brainstorming, discussion, and resource sharing, is popular among educators. It features customizable layout templates where posts can be arranged as a grid, freeform, or other styles. Here, it is taken up as a digital space for students to share their textual analyses through multimodal representations, which Olivia describes in her lesson overview:

In teams of six, students will work together to form a quilt that represents an assigned character from Beloved. Students will have to pull and analyze textual references, which they will use to generate symbols in the form of images, audio, video, and/or gifs. Students will stitch their symbols together into a digital quilt using Padlet.

Through several activities, students are encouraged to use the affordances of the software to present symbols in ways that “combine to form a coherent representation of their assigned character.” Rather than a wholesale adoption of the tech, students are free to choose how they will use it to represent a character and associated meaning. The design resists digital software’s potential for invisible and dehumanizing effects, specifically its proceduralized ideologies of control, hierarchies, and racial reductionism. We take up these lenses to further explore Olivia’s learning design as a humanizing approach to software-in-use in education.

Agency to resist control

Throughout the digital quilting lesson, students have room to exercise agency in their use of the Padlet software. The design’s tasks and opportunities position them as capable of asking critical questions and invites them to share their sensemaking. It does so by building on Morrison’s, a Black woman, generative practice. Olivia describes: “just as Morrison’s novel is a collection of characters’ disjointed memories that come together to form a consistent story, so too will students’ analytical symbols.” While the lesson offers some direction by offering students an “assigned character” from the novel, their selected focus and modes of creation are agentive choices of their own.

One pedagogical move Olivia makes is to offer students a sample artifact to model the kinds of media and information that might be included on a digital quilt. The sample Padlet features: a mother holding her baby, a popular music video accompanying a quote about Beloved being “the one,” and a photo of a snake, mouth agape, adjoined to a quote about spite and venom. Olivia uses a pink and gray speckled granite background image for her quilt, to “represent Beloved’s incomplete headstone.” Each of these digital composition decisions demonstrate thoughtful, nuanced evidence of insightful textual analysis.

A reflection activity toward the end of the lesson asks students to share “curation strategies” that they used as a group. Such space for metacognitive reflection illuminates students’ agency and emphasizes value on process over product. As students narrate their decision-making, they practice articulating their own learning paths and sensemaking.

With time to “talk in your teams and decide how you will approach your quilt and what you will have prepared coming into class tomorrow,” students are positioned as designers, free to practice brainstorming and goal-setting, including plans for division of labor, and co-construction of a shareable narrative. This use of technology serves to further collaboration while also bringing the “personal” to the forefront through multiple types of agency.

Interdependence to resist social hierarchies

Aligned with Black and indigenous traditions, we understand relationships and horizontal expertise as core in learning. These traditions operate from the premise that all participants have something to contribute to the learning process and that learning happens in joint activity. Olivia’s design offers beyond inscribed roles of teacher-student, or leader-follower, to offer students horizontal learning in conversation with multimodal texts and of course, one another.

Interdependence then affirms the learning experience as an emergent phenomenon resulting from many people's contributions, and not an isolated activity or metric. Technologically-enhanced learning environments often promote hierarchical metrics of participation, (e.g. predetermined indicators such as quantity of clicks and input, time on task). These analytic indicators often leave out more humanizing practices of conferring with students, inviting in students’ cultural ways of knowing, and understanding learning as an experience beyond data points.

Using a more humanizing frame, Olivia’s design instructs that students will “collaborate in teams” and “stitch their quilts together.” Padlet’s use then becomes grounded in sociocultural practices and values, centering history and materiality in ways not often prioritized in relation to technology. One of these values is shared ownership as Olivia connects the “collective ethos of quilting” to students’ collective work in creating a digital quilt. For example, she frames the peer revision process as “generating a shared sense of ownership across the different quilts.”

This orientation to media construction emerges from pedagogical values of collective meaning-making and a participatory ethos, which is also evident in how the tool is taken up. Padlet becomes a tool for generating a “synthesis of the piecemealed characters’ perspectives”–a move that she posits will provide students a “holistic” understanding of the text. Thus, Black cultural practice of quilting is not just modeled as content and form, but is historicized, ensuring that these school-based practices are not carried out in a vacuum. Instead, this use of Padlet reveals a complex history of interdependence, community, and cultural practice, and ultimately, frames technology use as a socially-embedded endeavor.

Cultural authorship to resist racial reductionism

Authorship is a strong thread and guiding motivation for how Olivia pedagogically positions technology in this learning design, and it is done through a particularly culture- and race-conscious approach that elevates voices of Black women as a source of expertise and learning. Students first engage an image of Dr. Mazloomi’s Piece of the Pie quilt and are asked to “interpret” it by considering “what ideas/messages/events is the quilt communicating?” Within the video, they are also asked to reflect on how Dr. Mazloomi communicates her “intended purpose and authorial intent.” Throughout the discussion, Olivia, as a designer, keeps the activities, analysis, and tool use grounded in cultural authorship. Further, the software has been paired with Morrison’s Beloved, a novel which in itself also reflects quilting practices via the magical realism flow of memory, generations, and events as experienced by Black women.

Quilting as a practice embodies how cultural importance and value can guide practice; in this case, quilters are committed to sustaining and indeed expanding history and culture, not infringed upon by reductionist views of any one aspect of their identities and experiences. Quilts, passed from generation to generation, are invaluable to families and communities as artifacts of stories and family history. Olivia’s lesson, emerging from this tradition, arranges the tool, content, and pedagogical practice in ways that historicize Black women as cultural producers, authors, historians and also presents possibilities for students to do the same.

Rather than the tool being used to generate data (e.g. decontextualized demographic metrics) to serve a reductionist point of view, this design leverages Padlet to elevate student voice, promote student knowledge construction, and foster collaborative, multimodal meaning-making against the backdrop of a rich and complex cultural tradition. This is in stark contrast to using data representation as a “stand-in” for complexity in urban schools, such that “uncertainty, bias, and ambiguity are treated as aspects of metrology, rather than as aspects of human life,” (Crooks 2017:299). Instead, here cultural authorship is emphasized throughout the content and technology use, amplifying possibilities for nuance in the process and products of what students create as digital quilters. Thus, students become agentive cultural producers, not racialized objects in the digital platform.

The final assessment, described as “a digital characterization quilt” aims to allow learners to share their analyses in ways that “position students as knowledge creators.” By using the software to invite a broad range of student contributions, the design challenges an epistemology or point of view that there is a hegemonically-dominant “right way” to know or do. Instead, it makes room for multiple creative contributions and multiple modes for students to convey those, thus widening opportunities to leverage their cultural repertoires and processes of creative expression. Thus, the software-in-use is subordinated to priorities of culturally-grounded contributions and humanity, resisting ideologies that would essentialize learners as a matter of convenience.

Our Principles Of Humanizing Design In Technology And Education

We have argued here, using several examples of teachers’ constraints and imaginative possibilities, for the move away from neoliberal ethics toward humanizing design. To disrupt dehumanizing potentials of human-centered design, we offer a brief series of provocations for technologists, teachers, and others, including actionable considerations for designers.

Understand the tech as a tool, not a teacher

Humanizing possibilities of design include technology driven by consequential meaning-making and genuine human connection, not just automated “replacements” for the hard, messy, and human work of teaching. Teachers continue to be under exorbitant stress in a profession that positions them as disposable workers tasked with delivering content. Emerging technologies bear the risk of further rendering teachers automatons in educational spaces both virtual and physical. It may be possible to ignore these risks when not working directly with teachers, but even in AI and machine learning broadly, we emphasize a user relationship as one between people, not an autonomous relationship with tools.

The example we elucidated above is of the digital software, Padlet. It, like many other for-profit technologies, presents a fairly open design that has fewer constraints than self-contained software that requires adherence to a strict structure or set of activities. Yet a number of constraints still abound in open-designed tools, including the cost. Most educational technologies are not free, emerging from businesses that operate for profit. These are costs that schools and often teachers themselves must pay, which often further digital divides along race and class lines, including those related to internet access (Stelitano, Doan, Woo et al. 2020). Attending to the relational position of tools to teachers and students is a design principle for designers, educators, and other stakeholders alike to consider; tools need to support the goals of teachers, and not the other way around.

Prioritize community-driven design

Conceptualizing humanizing approaches to technology in education presents an opportunity to imagine design beyond a venture capitalist value model to one that is community-centered, where design happens with and by participants, rather than “for” users whose needs must be interpreted. Costanza Chock’s Design Justice (2020) places healing and empowering communities at the center of design theory and practice, with intentionality in how we “seek liberation from exploitative and oppressive systems” (p. 6). While knowledge creation is often mediated by tech tools, we imagine a system where the knowledge itself is not exclusive or proprietary. Rather than tools designed by teams of developers who engage teachers and students as users, community-driven design can start with the challenges and interests of teaching and learning.

This also moves us away from a banking model in schools, where materials like books, worksheets, articles, and other educational materials reflect a stance of knowledge and information as emergent from provided sources. Design in education might reorient these practices to instead offer knowledge creation as an invitational practice and possibility. Given histories of exclusion and subordination in what counts as learning and knowledge, we press designers to think in terms of “how does this tool make room for widened representations of student knowledge and learning, including their processes and not just outputs?” “What are possibilities for reflecting the community’s firsthand knowledge, and how might these be part of the design?”

Audit value in terms of humanization and ethics

Technological change has been rapid, catapulting us to a not-yet-known future in education and all other domains. We have an ethical imperative to reflect on our course, and regroup based on the emergent needs of humans. One way we can do that is by conducting “community-based equity audits,” which involves developing community leadership teams and gathering asset-based community data (Green 2017). “User-centered design” does not capture the full extent of users as humans, humans implicated in a complex ecosystem of social inequality and injustice. Many technologies, including educational technologies and ICTs, are governed by ideologies that may or may not be visible. A focus on constant (measurable) growth, innovation, and labor market impacts, for example, reflect how neoliberal market logics dominate how value is determined.

Economic-driven values fall short of capturing the human significance of tech design and impact. Value also includes a larger schema of meaning and importance, which we emphasize as co-design, honoring nondominant expertise, lives, and histories toward liberation. How do we see opportunities for learners’ creation and recreating their worlds? Instead of logics guided by market-centric values, how might we articulate and instantiate logics guided by a humanizing ethic toward justice? We encourage approaching design as an opportunity for drawing from logics of empowerment, freedom, and sustainable impact.

Conclusion

Throughout, we consider reimagined ways of humanizing technology design that historicize normative educational practices and assumptions, and craft a new way forward. Our questions here present ideas to respond to this challenge, beginning to map possibilities of humanization in education.

As a final point, we want to recognize that design, even from a humanizing, critically engaged perspective, represents but one front of a broader movement toward building a more just, sustainable, and livable future for all. Designers must recognize their role exists alongside communities and individuals engaged in forms of direct action –protest, mutual aid, and activist organizing, for example–and develop solutions that support, rather than distract from this important groundwork. At the same time, we recognize that the privileged position of designers, technologists, and digital pedagogues comes with important responsibilities for contributing to this broader struggle. We urge critically-minded designers to reflect on these tensions while moving this field into the future.

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