Teaching in the postdigital era: from neoliberal rationality to postdigital positionality

In the neoliberal culture surrounding Higher Education (HE), a dominant policy discourse assumes that teaching is automatically ‘enhanced’ through digital technologies. Underpinning this simplistic approach are notions of harnessing a ‘digital revolution’, including new generative AI tools, that now pervade people’s daily lives, to measure performance and improve outcomes. Whilst this slots easily into a policy rhetoric focused on generic processes, it also ‘forecloses comprehensively examining world makings and social constructions of reality in a digital age’. The term ‘postdigital’ is not a perfect concept either, but it describes our messy, hybrid era, where students and teachers are no longer in a world where digital technology and media is separate, virtual, ‘other’ to a ‘natural’ human and social life. In this chapter the consumerist narrative that has long alienated the HE teaching community is first explored through the notion of ‘McPolicy’. Drawing on Ritzer’s McDonaldisation thesis, critical linguistic analysis of policy documents revealed that technologies or buzz phrases are frequently attributed with outcomes usually associated with human beings. Yet a widespread shift to learning in personal spaces during the pandemic, clearly revealed the shortcomings of McPolicy in failing to recognise the deeply contextual, postdigital nature of education and related inequities. Considerable data was also generated, capturing diverse individual experiences. Therefore, the second half of the chapter contrasts McPolicy with a postdigital discourse which opens, rather than closes, debate. It raises questions about whose rationalities, values and discourse we really wish to train AI educational systems on, as we reconsider the social contract of HE? This is a cross-sector debate which enables the realities of diverse postdigital positionalities to be confronted and gives voice to a biodigital-postdigital discourse which is now much more relevant for Higher Education.