Learning machines, humans learning: Critical perspectives on languaging in digitally-mediated environments is a forthcoming volume in de Gruyter Mouton’s Contributions to the Sociology of Language series. The volume is edited by Sara Vogel, Enrique (Henry) Suárez (University of Massachusetts - Amherst), Beth Semel (Princeton University), and Chris Proctor (University at Buffalo, SUNY).
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Abstract
Many sociologists of language have considered how language, society, and education have co-evolved in conjunction with the networked digital devices we use to communicate. This work has considered the modalities that digital tools can afford, complicate, or disrupt for learners and educators, and the ways that digital communication has accelerated societal forces and processes like globalization, mass migration, and late stage capitalism. Questions about the role of digital communication and digitally mediated languaging for learning took on even more urgency as physical classrooms closed their doors and learning moved online in the early stages of the 2020 global pandemic.
And yet, sociology of language has tended to pay more attention to what is on screens, and how users leverage tools for communication in teaching and learning, and less attention to what is behind the screen, or who is in front of it. Technology developers often present the digital tools that have gained traction in learning contexts (e.g. personalized learning software, proctoring software, automated graders, machine translation tools) as panaceas that will solve a multitude of the structural problems that plague educational systems—especially in relation to the perceived achievement of students who are language-minoritized by traditional schooling. Dominant narratives position digital tools as neutral objects or rote algorithmic or statistical processes that simply relay information or streamline social, institutional, and expressive practices.
However, as scholars from science and technology studies (STS), Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), and information studies have shown, the reality is that digital tools are contingent, constructed, and politically charged artifacts. Moreover, as corporate and institutional actors design and implement these technologies, they can embed within them hegemonic models of learning and, in tandem, models and ideologies of language and communication. These artifacts’ histories and materiality (how they are made, with what physical resources and codes, and with whose labor and supply chains) also have profound impacts on languaging, learning, and society. Putting sociology of language into critical conversation with Science and Technology Studies, Human-Computer Interaction, Learning Sciences, and Computing Education, this volume will explore the relationships between digital tools, languaging, and learning as mediated by systems of power from a range of perspectives. Specifically, this book brings together empirically grounded works and analyses that will examine primarily North American contexts in which people, environments and technologies learn and language together.
In Part 1, chapters emphasize how designs of technologies and socio-technical spaces embed and enact language ideologies, theories of learning, and thus particular power relations. Part 2 focuses on learners and their creative and critical languaging practices and learning in technologically mediated interactional contexts. Part 3 follows projects that explicitly seek to transform and subvert traditional power dynamics and language hierarchies in digitally mediated learning environments.
While we acknowledge the power that digital tools can have in learning contexts, we aim for this book to critically consider what forms of languaging and communication are promoted, normalized, and reified through the introduction of digital tools into learning environments. Rooted in these understandings, we hope to surface ways of using technology for liberatory languaging and learning projects.