Pedagogy, Power, and Palestine:
Encampments and Emails as Educational Technologies

When I started out as an assistant professor, I debated whether I should use social media for academic purposes. I knew there was a risk that Twitter would be a time sink—and I was right—but I thought the pros of disseminating my own work and learning about those of others might outweigh the cons. (It’s harder to say if I was right about that.) However, I made an intentional choice to have my Twitter account be used purely for academic pursuits and interests. For this reason, I chose @EdTechMuser as my handle, indicating that my primary role on the platform was to muse about educational technology. I did not want to have my name as my handle, because my Twitter account would not represent me completely as a person; in fact, it would not represent parts of my life that are more important than my work. It would not represent the religious, personal, political, or even other intellectual aspects of my life that went beyond my academic pursuits. By compartmentalizing myself, I could post things on social media related to my academic pursuits without worrying about not posting other things that I also found to be important—or more important.

Thus, I restricted what I posted to things that were (at least tangentially) related  to my work and academia. And I followed only people who were (at least tangentially) related to my work and academia. But of course, those people would post things that were not. And so I would read things that interested me (or things that did not—hence the waste of time) that were not related to my work. And of course, as the amplification algorithms of social media operate, I would see more of the things I would click on, even if I did not like or retweet them. So I found myself using Twitter to consume—but not produce or disseminate—content that was related to other interests of mine.

After October 7, 2023, I was faced with a dilemma. Could I continue to not post anything about the genocide in Gaza? At times, I would largely use Twitter to read posts about the situation in Gaza and people’s views on the issue. But my posting habits had not changed. If I posted one or two things, then I would break my rule and the question would be, why am I not posting more? And given the scope and intensity of what was happening, I would have to post a lot. On top of that, add the fact that I was a pre-tenured professor, and while our job apparently warrants a lot of academic freedom, critique of Israel is the kind of thing academics historically lost jobs over. And combine that with the excuse that slacktivism doesn’t really accomplish anything anyways and debating with people online is a waste of time and energy. So I chose to keep largely silent in the public sphere (especially on Twitter).

However, I have come to realize it is impossible to compartmentalize. As an academic, I am inspired by polymaths, many of whom blended pursuits across disciplines and across areas of life that might be seen as taboo in modern American academic circles. Polymaths of this sort did not compartmentalize their lives. And in my own academic work, I was venturing into the realm of equity and civil rights. My last blog posts on this site was a series of posts on African American inventors of educational technology and how their work was tied to the civil rights movement. I later published this work as a paper. I have my students read about these issues. So I was not really separating politics from my work. And then the politics on my campus became more real. So I could not separate politics from academia. On both fronts, I realized I could and should engage with what was happening. First, I can do research about the interrelationship between educational technology and the liberation movement of Palestinians. Second, as an academic I could voice my concerns on what was happening on my campus at the University of California, Irvine [1]—including the pressure to silence voices. And perhaps I could do these together. That is what this post is about.

To clarify where I'm coming from, I am not a Critical Theorist, a Marxist, a historian of liberation movements, etc. I approach this as a researcher who is interested in the epistemological and historical foundations of educational technology. Of course, I am also informed by my own personal moral, ethical, and political views, and while these views may influence the tone of my writing, the content for the most part does not assume the reader shares my views. I have written this post with the hopes that it is accessible to researchers in educational technology and the learning sciences as well as those curious about the topic who are not from these fields.

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Emails as Educational Technologies

If encampments are a constructionist technology, then emails and messaging sent by campus administrators and college presidents are the instructionist response. While constructionism emphasizes a bottom-up form of learning where agency is in the hands of the learners, instructionism (also a term coined by Seymour Papert) is the all-too-familiar top-down form of education where instruction is given by a (relative) subject-matter expert. While advocates of constructionism often frown-upon instructionism (and the term itself is a bit disparaging), I am not here trying to say that it is never warranted. Rather, I’m trying to make clear the epistemological differences between these approaches—and hopefully highlight how instructionism can go wrong when it gets muddled by political bias.

Here one may again question my choice of saying campus-wide emails and other forms of top-down communication are educational technologies. To consider them as such I turn to one of the earliest definitions of educational technology. The Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) is one of the most famous associations for educational technologists and it has been in the business of defining and re-defining educational technology since the 1960s (with the most recent definition offered in 2023). Prior to becoming the AECT, it was the Department of Audiovisual Instruction and it offered this definition in 1963: “Audiovisual communications is the branch of educational theory and practice concerned with the design and use of messages which control the learning process” (Ely, 1963). In one sense, messaging from campus administrators aims to do exactly this, except that it does not control the psychological learning process, but rather the broader educational process (e.g., setting the broader educational ethos of the institution, assuring campus safety, canceling classes, etc.). 

But it also works to control the learning process when it comes to learning about the current situation on campus and globally by presenting a particular narrative about current events. For example, at UCI, Chancellor Gillman sent an email on October 10, 2023 titled “Amidst Profound Tragedy: Our Shared Commitment to Humanity and Understanding.” He begins his statement by alluding to his “statement on statements” where he points out that it is not a university chancellor’s job to comment on geopolitical events. He argues that “In general, I should not associate the campus with particular political positions on matters not directly related to the mission of the university.” This seems like a good policy that is not followed by many institutions today that chime in on various political events, either due to personal views or external pressure; in effect, it is a policy to prevent using messages to “control” what people should believe. However, his next paragraph singles out what happened on October 7th as “not another international event or policy debate” effectively claiming that there is no room for difference of opinion on what happened. He claims “There is no notion of ‘freedom fighting’ or anti-Zionism that justifies or can rationalize the targeted murder and kidnapping of more than a thousand civilians.” Of course, we know there are differences of opinion on what happened, and in an academic community, it is worth understanding why reasonable people hold such differences of opinion—despite how hard it may be for people personally affected by these events. But let us assume everyone does agree on the interpretation of what happened on October 7th.

In a subsequent paragraph of the email, Gillman states:

In the days and weeks to come there will be many debates and arguments about many issues that arise in the wake of this tragedy. It is not my place to take positions on all those issues. I speak only now to give voice to our common humanity as we stand in unity against the cold, calculated massacre of the innocent.

In effect, Gillman is labeling whatever happens from this point on as a matter of debate, unlike what happened on October 7th. So the killing and displacement of thousands of Palestinians, bombing of hospitals, and destruction of all the universities in Gaza will evoke different opinions which Gillman has recused himself from speaking about. [5] Here, Gillman has provided the perfect demonstration on why his “statement on statements” is so important if he really wants to be impartial. Yet he has ironically used his policy of not speaking about political events to even more powerfully amplify certain views and silence others. Of course, he ends his email by saying

Let us reach out to each other to deepen our understanding of our many and varied life experiences and unique perspectives as we work through our differences in an environment of mutual respect and peaceful engagement.

And he signs it off with his characteristic “Fiat Lux,” referring to the UCI motto. But does he really seek to let light emerge through discourse, or are we supposed to take his views to be the light that is not up for debate?

One month later, Gillman sends an email forwarding the UC President Drake’s email on condemning bigotry, primarily focusing on anti-Semitism. While Drake’s email alludes to a policy that the University of California adopted that explicitly calls out anti-Semitism, Gillman added additional “details” to his own email such as “The report leading to the creation of this policy condemned not only to overt expressions of antisemitism but also ‘antisemitic forms of Anti-Zionism.’” Indeed, he was the only UC Chancellor to append his own message, using his position of power to add his own messaging on top of  (literally) that of his boss. However, as the Irvine Faculty Association subsequently pointed out, Gillman’s “statement is intentionally misleading and factually inaccurate.” They clarified that the “The Board of Regents concluded that adopting a definition of anti-Semitism that conflated it with anti-Zionism was unacceptable.” Here we see how the university (or specifically, the chancellor) is using messaging to push a certain narrative as truth and to police certain rhetoric—in other words, to control learners’ opinions—whilst claiming the space is open for discourse and debate.

On May 15, 2024, the day that the UCI called in over one hundred riot police to attack protestors and dismantle the encampment, the campus used another form of messaging to maintain control—and a false narrative around what was happening. UCI sent out a series of zotALERTS which are messages used to quickly inform the UCI community about emergency situations. The first of these zotALERTS said “Violent Protest confirmed at or near Physical Science Lecture Hall. Avoid the area.” Yet eye witnesses claim they saw no violence; the chancellor claims the violence involved assaulting police officers, a claim that they have not provided evidence for. Indeed, subsequent zotALERTS used the term “civil unrest” instead of “violent protest” to correct the description. But one could imagine how thousands of students would feel when they get a notification attesting there is a violent protest happening on campus without any more detail. People may have imagined protestors carrying weapons, or even active shooters on campus, while the reality was far from that. In a separate update posted on the campus safety website, there was a claim that “a group of several hundred protestors entered the Physical Sciences Lecture Hall.” This was corrected within a few minutes to “a group of several hundred protestors entered the UC Irvine campus and began surrounding the Physical Sciences Lecture Hall” though it took several hours before the administration issued a clarifying tweet on X/Twitter. Perhaps these were just mistakes, but they are mistakes with major consequences and they have the possibility of impacting the perceptions of thousands of students, staff, and faculty. Fortunately, I found my students worked towards constructing their own understandings of what happened, not merely accepting the misleading messaging they were receiving. In my class the next day when offering students a space to debrief, I was asked by students “Why did the school lie and say that there was confirmed violence” and “so do you know if there were people inside the lecture hall? because I remember seeing that they ‘overtook the building’ but then nobody was actually inside.” I had to do what I could to correct and explain the messaging that misled, confused, and angered many of my students.

Let us return to the 1963 definition of audiovisual communications. If you are like me, the word “control” should make you a bit uncomfortable. The AECT is seemingly using the word here in a positive sense, in that the field of audiovisual communications (later, educational technology) studies how we can—and presumably should—control the learning process using messages. My sense is this word is coming out of a cybernetic ethos. Cybernetics was in its heyday in the mid-1960s and likely played a big (if subtle) influence on thinking at that time. Even if you don’t know what cybernetics is, you’ve very likely heard the words cyberspace, cybersecurity, cyborg, and…cybertruck. These words have little to do with cybernetics, but the root word “cyber” comes from cybernetics. Cybernetics in turn comes from the original Greek word “kubernetes” which means “helmsman” or “governor”—in other words, the one who controls. Norbert Wiener coined the term in his book whose title basically gave a working definition for the field: Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. But not all cyberneticians would agree with this take that technology or messaging should be used to control learning. In fact, some of the staunchest critiques of this view may have also come from cyberneticians who believed learners should (at least in part) be able to control their own learning.

In 1973, the journal Instructional Science was launched to center research on the nature of teaching and instruction, and secondarily the product of instruction, namely learning. This journal was started by researchers in the field of educational technology, many of whom had a cybernetic bent. Oddly, the journal editors explicitly tied the practice of instructional science to political control—again in a seemingly positive way: 

Politicians, soldiers, scientists, lawyers, doctors, architects, mass media experts, community welfare workers, management scientists and educators all find themselves regularly wanting to know more about the instructional process.

Upon eliciting feedback from invited members of the advisory board, there was one leading cybernetician, Heinz von Foerster, who voiced harsh critiques about the title of the journal and its focus on instruction, particularly the political ramifications of this focus:

Unfortunately, the term “instruction” has by now assumed a very negative connotation because of its repeated use in the context of “order” and “command.” For instance, as you may recall, it was used at the Nuremberg Trials during which the defendants excused their actions because they “followed instructions,” and the same is now apparent during the trials associated with the My Lai affair where again the subordinates claim that they acted under “instructions.” (von Foerster, 1972)

Instead, he argued that the focus should be on learning. He also gave the first paragraph of the policy statement put out by the journal editors to 125 students in his cognitive studies seminar course and asked them to “paraphrase this paragraph, amplifying whatever they thought is implied by those statements” (von Foerster, 1972). He claimed that the ratio of negative to positive perceptions were 15:1. I do not imagine my own students having such a negative perception on a paragraph about the importance of instruction. But the fact that von Foerster’s students had such a negative perception is likely no coincidence. In Fall of 1968, in the wake of a rise in protests in the US and internationally [6] and the rise of American counterculture (Clarke, 2012; Scott, 2011), von Foerster offered a course called “Heuristics” at the University of Illinois, the first of several experimental courses that he would teach. The course and its later versions would attract undergraduate and graduate students from Liberal Arts and Sciences, Engineering, and other departments on campus. The class was co-taught by von Foerster, an electrical engineering and biophysics professor, and Herbert Brün, a music professor—both cyberneticians—with guest lecturers from biology, economics, math, and computer science (von Foerster & Brün, 1970). As von Foerster and Brün (1970) put it,

It was perhaps more than sheer coincidence that in spring of 1968 a group of undergraduate students from various departments approached us and expressed their desires to have a course on “Heuristic” installed in which the present state of the art of how to perceive problem and how to discover its solution could be learned.

von Foerster saw this as an opportunity to teach students about the cognitive processes (or heuristics) that underpin learning, problem discovery, and problem solving, and to teach the class using the latest research in the field, and to treat the class as a laboratory to expand our understanding of human cognition. The course textbook was to be Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (though it seems other books, like Polya’s How to Solve It and Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions were actually assigned) and students would learn about algorithms, Monte Carlo methods, and metaphors. If executed properly, the course would teach students how to learn and navigate the world, deploy the best teaching practices to the best of our knowledge, conduct basic and applied research in the classroom, and improve teaching practices as a result. Could a course better align with the mission of a university dedicated to teaching and research?

But that is not how the course was seen by administrators. Heuristics—which may be conceived of as a social constructionist project—resulted in a catalog jointly offered by the students called The Whole University Catalog, named after Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, a popular counterculture magazine in the late 1960s. In 1970, von Foerster and Brün were asked to testify in front of a committee put together by Illinois Senator G. William Horsley who was investigating “campus disorders.” According to the Illinois State Register,

Heinz Von Foerster, a physics professor for 21 years at the U. of I., testified concerning a publication which was written and distributed by members of one of his classes.

Included in the publication were such items as how to: Conduct a riot, cheat the telephone company, cheat on rent to the landlord, find Marijuana in Champaign County, make narcotics for yourself, shoot dope, inject drugs into the food supply at a cafeteria and cheat parking meters. 

Von Foerster said ‘more good than harm’ comes from the publication. After dickering with committee chairman G. William Horsley, R-Springfield, about his right to speak on the subject before being asked questions, Von Foerster explained the purpose of the class is “to find solutions to problems with constraints. ‘If you want to regulate a system you must understand it,’ he said. ‘Students are concerned with the deep problems of society. (as cited in Clarke, 2012)

Like the encampments, von Foerster’s courses were experimenting with innovative pedagogies that may cross over into civil disobedience. They resemble an extreme reaction against the instructionist norms of the university. But they also force us to think about what needs to change in a university. They force us to think about what it means for learners to learn how to live in this troubling world. Should a university not aid learners in that process? If a university does not want civil unrest, perhaps it needs to work towards creating more constructionist spaces, and less top-down instructionist regulation of the learning process. 

Again, my goal is not to say “instructionism is wrong and constructionism is right.” I do not claim to agree with all uses of encampments or the contents of the Whole University Catalog. Instruction has its time and place and constructionist technologies can be used towards morally wrong ends. But we might be able to better understand what is happening on college campuses and around the world today if we can see how technologies are being used for control vs. for challenging the status quo, as tools of regulation vs. tools of liberation, tools of top-down misinformation vs. bottom-up fact-checking, as tools for one to instruct others on one’s perception of reality or as tools for one to construct their own perception of reality with help from others, as tools that claim to shed “light” on matters or as tools that genuinely seek out the light. [7]

Fiat Lux.