Where’s the Time to Care? The Temporal Politics of Caring for Educational Technologies

Abstract

Drawing from my action research project teaching and learning modding digital games for social justice with teens in a library setting in the US Midwest, this paper examines repeated moments of technological troubles and its demand for care during teaching to trace the temporal politics of caring for educational technologies. Instead of disregarding moments of technological troubles in pedagogical encounters as irrelevant logistics, this paper centers these moments by attending to emerging digital technologies’ request for canimating these moments to unpack the temporal order negotiated, made, and remade through its commonplaceness in teaching practices. By reading moments of technological troubles through feminist science and technology studies scholarship on care, temporality, and technologies, I argue that my habituated teacher subjectivity that used lesson plans as a technology and my habituated networked subjectivity that used emerging digital technologies in mylesson plans structured a temporal order that was inhospitable towards emergent artistic knowledge production through practices of care. Yet, as these moments point toward a visible seam in the temporal order of technological progress, I contend that art educators are also invited to care for mending this seam that might lead to the knowledge of an alternative logic. To do so, I conclude by advocating for art educators to make the time to care throughrethinking lesson plans as educational technologies.