Student Cosmologies, Digital Spheres
I work for an organization that employs postdoctoral fellows, one of whom regularly invokes “student cosmologies.” From my first hearing of the term, I was intrigued and continue to be so. I have not yet spoken with the fellow about his use of the term. I do wonder if he has a good idea of what makes up student systems —familial/communal, spiritual, physical, historical, metaphysical, theoretical, etc. — or if he asks students how their cosmologies are shaped and populated.
Whatever it is that makes up student cosmologies, each element may suggest a way toward knowledge, experiences, processes, influences, spaces and places, and “texts” from which to draw as one gives energy to myriad acts of knowing or moments for knowing. One may “read” the physical, a room full of people or a room empty of people, for example, rendering it either comprehensible or incomprehensible. One may sense the spiritual, or arrive at the theoretical. As I think about the various elements populating an individual’s cosmology, to say nothing of a group’s, I also wonder what elements individuals or groups may be inclined to leave out intentionally or may leave out of knowledge-making enterprises, unconsciously.
Online identities, online spaces, are a good and timely example of influences teachers in particular may leave out of their teaching, or students themselves leave out of learning inside the classroom. Yet, how many digital selves do students have? Is one’s TikTok self the same as one’s Instagram self, or Facebook self? It hasn’t been that long since teachers warned students about how they choose to present themselves on, say, Twitter if they expect to be employable? Very recently, a student who had won a college scholarship had it rescinded because of an appearance on social media in which she modeled a little weaponry. Clearly, some selves are okay while others are less so.
While possessing multiple selves is not new, the convenience with which people can today broadcast various performances is, relatively new, and definitely for someone of my age. What I’m interested in is not merely multiple and overlapping ways in which people construct themselves in the “digisphere” but the relationship between such acts of construction (in public contexts that may be spaces also for offering knowledge) and other, institutionalized, spaces for knowing.
One student with whom I’m very familiar because she is my adult daughter has at least three Instagram accounts and at least one Twitter account. Though I have only one IG account and one Twitter, I can totally understand why she has multiple. Each one allows for and serves a different construction of self and probably a different voice as well. My daughter is most active on Twitter, and while I am just the opposite — most active on IG — I know enough about her activity on Twitter to know that she has an important voice there and that, as a Black Twitter resident, she contributes daily to the creation and sharing of knowledge in that neighborhood. To be sure, Black Twitter, is a space of knowledge production, among other things, although it might not necessarily describe itself that way.
While my daughter has multiple digital selves as do I, I think it is safe for me to say that to some degree these multiple selves are integrated with each other and into her identity as an academic in training. Her involvement in digital spaces for knowing is not removed from traditional research and scholarship — academic ways. When it comes to digital spaces for knowing and its growing number of producers, students among them, the train long ago departed, and teachers should not ignore the fact. Simply put, most of us are behind the times.
Asked by a colleague what role technology serves in scholarship today, an easy answer that came to my mind was access. But, access is only the tip of the iceberg. Access is both a way to share with some public what one knows and/or thinks and, potentially, a way to engage other people who may share one’s interest even if from a different political perspective or to vigorously engage someone whose perspective might be quite different from one’s own. The reality of access, despite a reality also of a digital divide, has to a degree democratized the digisphere, which is why there can be something called Black Twitter, or Asian Twitter, or Chicago Twitter. These are digital, social, formations that may also be intellectual, artistic-creative, political, etc. And, they have become way too big for the academy to ignore. They might be engaged not as exotic sites to be researched but, rather, as legitimate places where knowledge is produced minute by minute.
Indeed, tech has created and thereby expanded space for public knowing, for infusion of “private knowing,” or private thought into the digital realm much as in this blog post, which I could easily write and publish in a day’s time or within an hour or less without having to send it out to peers for refereeing. It makes no claims of objectivity but perhaps can be said to offer sound reasoning. It is somewhat journalistic, somewhat social media. It is in between, private and public at the same time, and critical. Not a few professors have embraced the use of blogs as assignments, as acceptable forms of college writing, but perhaps not yet the Twitter thread or the Instagram post or story.
How, we should ask, do students relate to online spaces of knowledge production and how do we address and include (?) their values in our teaching? How many digital essays, produced by what would have not long ago been considered amateur, belong in our syllabi? How much room is there for students to co-curate our reading lists with inclusion of pieces born digital? On the other hand, if teachers choose to ignore, sideline, etc. most public knowledge, what message does that send to students about how professors evaluate diverse ways of knowing, the various pieces that make up student cosmologies? Is ignoring an idea first voiced on Twitter any different from ignoring the voices of students for whom the Tweet has deep meaning and profound impact? A student’s Twitter voice, indeed his Twitter self, may be that with which he is most comfortable and of which he is most proud.
About a year ago, my daughter made an IG post in which she had filmed herself writing a paper, a frenzied (increased camera speed) act of toggling from notes on three screens, an ongoing Zoom session on another, and a fourth displaying her writing as she typed. If it weren’t for the fact that I, along with many other people, work regularly using more than one screen, I would find my daughter’s productivity model problematical, actually maniacal. Instead, I think her frenetic movements are a sign that this middling Millennial has either brought to her current occupations — doctoral student and mass communicator — or developed from them a propensity to coordinate multiple productivity tools. First, there is the ability to do so, second, the awareness that such tools are for the taking and using. If productivity apps, for example, Google Keep, Evernote, or Slack are to be added to one’s repertoire of implements, social media apps similarly take up residence in one’s mind as one goes to work or to play, or to some combination of the these.
As it turns out then, the quality of access that technology provides is an important reason to center technology and social media in education; however, engagement is an equally important reason. Not engaging the digital realm, as a prominent element in student cosmologies, is the same as not engaging race, gender, location, etc. How long is the list, then, of “things” that get left out of course conceptualizations and of teaching in the preferencing of “teacher cosmologies”?
Ultimately, if the time has come for teachers to engage public knowledge, to formalize it as having a place alongside traditional texts, so that students don’t feel divided against themselves and increasingly divided against us, then teachers must ask themselves what the implications — in the classroom and in their own scholarship — are for engaging more regularly, more deeply, more fairly and humanely public, digital, spaces for knowing.
