Do Teachers Fetishize Technology?

A few years ago, I read a flier for a visiting speaker. The speaker had been invited to campus to lecture about pedagogy. The focus of her talk: red pens. Yes, red pens, she was here to argue, make students uncomfortable. According to the advertisement, when a college teacher marks up a paper with red ink, it can trigger a student’s unpleasant memories from high school. This invited speaker was here to explain why we should all use digital comments. She was here to talk about an app that she created to write those comments.

At the time, my first thought was, this is why public universities get defunded. You couldn’t imagine a better advertisement for waste: the cost of flying this person out, putting them up in a hotel, taking them out to dinner and so forth. Around this time, conversations about “coddled” American students had started to gain traction. I remember thinking about my own students, some of whom had served in Iraq and Afghanistan. At age 17, the U.S. military thinks you’re old enough to operate a tank. On campuses, you’re apparently too fragile to read a comment written in red ink.

Looking back, I’ve since recognized that lecture as another product of the Pedagogical Industrial Complex. Like the Military Industrial Complex, or MIC, the PIC is a limitless source of new products. Subscriptions and apps. Lectures, workshops and conferences. Op-eds, peer-reviewed articles and books. Administrative, contingent and tenure-track jobs. To say nothing of all those NGOs and “consultants.” Together, they ensure that the gears of the PIC remain in motion.

Whereas the MIC revolves around the war on terror, a war that you can’t win—hence it never ends—the PIC revolves around Student Outcomes, a similarly vague term that, depending on the context, can mean anything, everything or nothing at all. As is often the case, you don’t even have to indicate what outcomes. We’re adopting—fill in the blank—Canvas, Blackboard and so on. Why? To improve Student Outcomes. We’re holding events to teach faculty how to use Panopto. Why? To improve Student Outcomes.

Like the war on terror, the PIC’s interventions often look downright creepy, reminiscent of a Foucauldian panopticon. “Have you ever suspected,” asks an advertisement for one university event, “that there might be a pattern in how your students are engaging (or not engaging) with your course content in Blackboard? The ability to investigate these patterns is right at your fingertips! With Blackboard A4L (Analytics for Learn) Integrated Learn Reports, you can now run canned reports of your courses to make data-informed decisions on course revisions” (italics mine). Blackboard A4L promises to improve Student Outcomes.

On the academic job market, it’s not hard to find advertisements asking applicants to talk about the “new,” technologically informed pedagogies they’ll bring to a campus. Given that most advertisements don’t even ask for student evaluations, one gets the impression that newness is an end in itself.

If the DEI statement is a litmus test for one’s commitment to (ostensibly) progressive values, then the teaching philosophy statement is a litmus test for one’s commitment to techno-progress. The teacher who uses SurveyMonkey at the end of every course to help them assess Student Outcomes looks hipper than the teacher who uses that last five minutes to lecture. Indeed, “lecture” has become a pejorative watchword in PIC discourse. Why lecture when you can break up your 50-minute course into five activities, four of which depend on a smartphone and a stable internet connection?

In the humanities, where we control the enormous real estate of first-year writing programs, we’ve harbored an unspoken contradiction. On the one hand, everyone rails against Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and other neoliberals who think their websites, apps and rocket ships are going to solve society’s biggest problems. On the other, we have no shortage of people who believe that we need to constantly develop new pedagogies that involve new technologies. Regardless of whether they actually believe in techno-progress, teachers are incentivized to—at least publicly—share the belief. You don’t get a job or tenure for saying there’s really nothing new to say about pedagogy.

At this point, you might think I’m a Luddite. To be clear, I typically don’t lecture for more than a few minutes at a time. I’ve also used Blackboard, Canvas, Panopto, SurveyMonkey and the like in my courses, to great effect. A lot of pedagogical innovation has, and can continue to, come from technological advancement.

But a lot of the best professors I’ve had as teachers and colleagues aren’t like me. A lot of them just want to lecture. And guess what? They also see high student evaluations, high performance on tests, essays and other assessments. I actually had a professor who wheeled in a TV with a VCR attached to it. This professor couldn’t have been more out of sync with the emerging technocentrism. But guess what? He had high Student Outcomes. He was kind, charismatic, accessible, erudite, entertaining and inspiring. He also loved to lecture.

As you might have guessed, he was older, and I suspect if he was on the academic job market right now, hiring committees would laugh at his statement of teaching philosophy.

In the same way I’ve known more than one graduate student who’s taken on a DEI position because they know they’ll have to write a DEI statement when they hit the job market, so too with graduate students who incorporate technology. It’s like the high school kids who take part in service trips and other volunteer opportunities simply because they know they’ll need something to write about when they apply to college. It’s not like incentives disappear in graduate school. We’re all aware of the job market. We’re all aware of academia’s fetish for new pedagogies and technologies. To adapt a quip attributed to Upton Sinclair, it’s not hard to get someone to embrace something when their salary depends on them embracing it.

Many people aren’t bad teachers because they haven’t incorporated the latest technological fix. They’re bad teachers because they’re uncharismatic, inaccessible and insufferably boring. If I’m a scholar in your field, and I’m bored by what you’re telling me about your course, and—after listening to you ramble aimlessly in a jargon-laden monotone for 15 minutes—I still have no idea what your course is even about (something about “American futurities”), how do you think your students feel?

A forgettable teacher isn’t going to turn into Dead Poets Society’s John Keating because their university purchased a Blackboard subscription.

Strangely, I’ve never taught at a college or university that requires its teachers to take even one public speaking course. You’d think that’d be a no-brainer prerequisite for being in charge of a classroom filled with dozens, if not hundreds, of students. Of course, it’s easier to download an app or to read the latest peer-reviewed article about asynchronous discussion board posts, online scavenger hunts on and on—the list is endless at this point—than to develop the kind of skill set that isn’t going to be mastered in an hour or two. But you’re not going to land another peer-reviewed publication, much less a tenure-track job, for bucking trends and reiterating commonsense.

It’s no coincidence that the growing fetish for technological innovation in discussions of pedagogy—one that has stretched well beyond practical interventions that can improve an ableist classroom—has increased in a late-capitalist hellscape where many teachers have to serve hundreds of students, teaching as many as four, five or six courses per semester. You don’t have to be Theodor W. Adorno or Max Horkheimer to see the relationship between capitalism and technocentrism. At a moment when colleges and universities are trying to turn a greater profit with a deluge of online courses—many of which pay teachers less than in-person courses—“pedagogy,” “technology” and “neoliberalism” might as well be interchangeable words. The charismatic sage on the stage as depicted in films is becoming a relic of the past. In its place is a new kind of teacher, one who is just as uncharismatic, inaccessible and painfully boring—but, importantly, one who is fluent in the new discourses and products of the PIC.

When teachers worry about artificial intelligence taking their jobs, it’s the latter teacher who is, given their resemblance to machine intelligence, going to be most replaceable.

Of course, it will be the professor still using a VHS who will be replaced.