Digital Education Colonized by Design: Curriculum Reimagined

Abstract

This paper enlists Paulo Freire’s work to explore the interplay between technology and pedagogy from a decolonial approach, thus stressing the importance of adopting a critical stance to the facilitation of digital education experiences. It starts by denouncing digital education as entrapped in digital capitalism, contending how curricular practices are likely to be subjugated to technological function. Through such a conceptual lens, digital curriculum design is explored from a perspective of learning solidarity, aiming to disrupt the instrumentalization of education and creating educational experiences that cater for a humanizing process of education. The paper aims to contribute with ideas towards a framework of critical digital education, deeming the interactive and creative side of technologies as well as the socio-affective dimension of education crucial to the decolonization of different ways of (curricular) knowing.

Keywords

• digital education
• educational technologies
• decolonization
• curriculum imagination
• Paulo Freire