WORKING WITH/IN THE TENSIONS: EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY AS FEMINIZED CRAFTWORK

Abstract

This paper argues that the literature of feminized craftwork offers insights for understanding educational technology as a tension-negotiating practice through which we might learn to see and experience alternate possibilities for the field of educational technology. Post-human and socio-materialist education technology researchers have focused on learner usage of existing objects and environments, while educational technologists have emphasized the collaborative and affective labour involved in their work. These realities have sustained boundaries and silences between different theorybased and practice-based forms of educational technology knowledge. Practices from feminized craftwork, including enacting agency, engaging in collaboration, and reworking possibilities, offer an alternative approach that involves actively engaging with the tensions in between essentialistinstrumentalist, object-affect, and individual-collaborative binaries. Practice-based examples of ‘Phonar,’ ‘Domains of One’s Own’ and ‘FemEdTech quilt’ are used to illustrate feminized practice in action, and the tensions of educational technology that require negotiation.

Keywords

• educational technology
• intra-activity
• feminized craftwork
• sociomaterialism