Digital Education Colonized by Design: Curriculum Reimagined

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Thank you for the opportunity to review this manuscript. There is merit in this work and it is worthy of publication. I do think though that further refinements would strengthen the manuscript.

I am not totally convinced by the argument made by the authors. The main gist, as I understand it, is that digital education needs to be decolonised because of the inherent biases in EdTech and the companies that develop these technologies. At the same time, the authors acknowledge that EdTeach is not deterministic and curriculum design is critical to new imaginings. I agree but this argument is not unique to digital education. Curriculum design is a broader issue and this point does not come through strongly enough in the paper. It could be argued that what was seen during the pandemic was as much about educators transferring their existing curriculum design understandings and associated teaching practices from in-person contexts to online contexts as it was about the limitations of the digital technologies in use. This is not fully considered. In addition, there were excellent online teaching experiences during the pandemic of the type argued for that are not discussed. While not as prevalent, I do think they need to be acknowledged to provide a more balanced and convincing argument.

There is quite a lot of duplication between sections (i.e. returning to make the same or similar points that have already been made). This makes it more difficult to see the full development of the argument. I encourage the authors to consider refining the manuscript so that the key points in each section are clear,  distinctive, and add to the development of the argument.

The quality of English Language is very good with only a few minor grammatical errors.

Author Response

Thank you for your comments. We appreciate spent on the paper and we have revised the paper with your comments in mind– please also see track changes to identify the changes made. We would however like to clarify some aspects:

• One of the key points of discussion is that the way technology is designed for education represents a more functionalist perspective of education than it should – this is an aspect of colonial thinking, of casting education from an oppressive lens of content delivery.
• In this vein, it is not that curriculum imaginations are critical of new imaginings, but rather that it would benefit from taking on a critical (theory) perspective. This is illustrated through the work of Paulo Freire.
• This paper is not just about education during covid, although we do claim that covid accelerated the process of technology integration in education. we have tried to sign post this more clearly in the new version. We have written about digital educational experiences of covid elsewhere, whereas this paper aims to be more conceptual in the type of discussions/ideas it aims to promote/convey

We have tried to streamline the narrative of the paper although different sections have been developed to make different points at the same time they aim to create a coherent narrative. We hope there is far less repetition now. Changes to condense the narrative have been made in blue. 

Reviewer 2 Report

This is a complex and (mostly) abstract paper about the potential of strategic routes to contribute to decolonisation processes through review of curriculum.  I thought the paper was well written and did a good job of trying to synthesize many different strands of thought. The central framing for the paper is the idea that educational technology can manifest instrumental forms of rationality and what is needed is greater intersubjectivity, participation and solidarity. It's well written and basically publishable in its present form.

A lot of the diagnostic here is not about curriculum but about the instrumentalising effects of technology and markets in education. The form of colonisation the authors seem most interested in is the colonisation of existing systems by digital capitalism (as associated with Habermas).  This is fine as a theoretical lens and I’m actually quite interested in this kind of thing, but I’m not sure this is about ‘coloniality’ as a relationship between countries or cultures. Some might find this a bit ambiguous and I wonder whether some clarification would be helpful.  The link between the two senses of coloniality comes about halfway through the paper with the discussion of Freire. 

Freire’s ‘pedagogy of the heart’ is highlighted in the abstract as a key theoretical framework but this phrase does not appear in the body of the text. The treatment of the problem from a critical theory perspective is sound although remains quite abstract. I agree with most of the suggestions made but I am sometimes left wondering what the more critical approaches would look like in practice divorced from the vocabulary of critical theory. Some concrete examples would really lift the paper’s contribution in my opinion. (Consider for instance the paragraphs from 468-494; we get a lot of concepts and design considerations here but how can we put this together?). Seeing an example of a curriculum that has been reimagined would be helpful!  Perhaps the authors consider this beyond the scope of the paper but I think they’ve done a good job of pulling together complex perspectives and these would be made more intelligible to the average reader (who does not specialise in critical theory) through examples.

Author Response

Thank you for your review comments which we appreciate.

Indeed, the paper is not about a more basic form of coloniality targeted at discussing nations or different cultures. It rather speaks to an understanding of pedagogical decolonisation, drawing on Paulo Freire’s work as key to understanding of epistemological and ontological oppression. Decoloniality is discussed in this paper with regards to knowledge practices and the role of technology in providing instances of liberation or not.

The pedagogy of the heart is one of Freire’s books. This has now been replaced with ‘Freire’s work’ to make it more broader and accessible to the reader.

The paper aims to bring critical theory to technological discussions, something that is less prevalent in this field of inquiry, hence why we would prefer to keep this style of language for the paper as to equip the reader with this theoretical background/reading of the issues we pinpoint in the paper.

As this is a conceptual and not a practice based paper we have not provided many examples. We have tried to convey this more clearly throughout the paper, especially in the writing in blue, which is the new writing.