Twentieth International Conference on Technology, Knowledge, and Society

Abstract

The model of contemporary tertiary education is still bound to the ideas, expressed in Humboldt (1810/2002), Schleiermacher (1808/1991), Newman (1852/1996), Habermas (1987) and MacIntyre (2009), of the university as an autonomous, communal intellectual space for scholars. Central to this picture is the secure and stable self of enlightenment humanism. However, more so than the postmodern critiques of the late twentieth century, the posthumanist observations on the impact of new technologies, artificial intelligence and smart drugs, question the fundamental tenet that the individual self is deserving of reward or censure grounded in works attributed to him, her, or them. However, this paper resists the easy pessimistic assumption that learners are contemporarily being reduced to elements in the reproduction of symbolic capital. It instead proposes an optimistic opportunity for learners to respond to changing material pressures in a socially autonomous way through an innovative pedagogical technique. Practices that manifest interdisciplinary, enquiry-based learning and are no longer dependent on outmoded individualistic modes of subjectivity are required in order to sustain an appropriate understanding of the autonomy of places of higher learning, as opposed to the ideological understanding of the autonomy of the individual. The main claim made will be that, in order to protect the virtues of higher learning, the role of the lecturer needs to develop from that of expert, bastion or guardian of knowledge to that of steward or facilitator and the role of student needs to become more independent and productive through guerrilla, group assessed context-based courses.