Whilst the educational landscape for many across the globe now entirely exits online/in a virtual setting, students and tutors are finding innovative and creative ways of working in a blended approach to teaching and learning - fluctuating  ‘between’ what Simon Ofield-Kerr suggests as the ‘porous ecologies’ of physical and digital environments. Hence, I thought it would be timely to highlight this collection of multiple author chapters ‘Technoparticipation: Traversing Physical/Digital Thresholds’ from my recent Leap into Action edited collection (Peter Lang USA, 2020). Contributors include Kevin J. Hunt and Fo Hamblin, Aaron D. Knochel, Mark Childs and Anna Childs, Pauline de Souza and Laura Davidson. 

Below my signature is a snapshot description of this collection of chapters. If you would like further information and/or details of how to purchase Leap into Action  then please email me [log in to unmask] 

Best wishes and stay safe and well all, 

Dr Lee Campbell FHEA
Artist Filmmaker and Lecturer in Academic Support (Camberwell and Wimbledon) CCW, University of the Arts London 

DESCRIPTION:  
The collection explores the possibilities as well as the blind spots of enacting a Critical Digital Performative Pedagogy. It challenges learning taking place purely in the real ‘physical’ world with contributions by authors who are tutors who generate technoparticipation. They tap into the increasing importance of digital and virtual realities in students’ lives by helping them to engage with multiple technologies that build digital literacy thus ensuring that teaching and learning does not displace students’ unique life experiences. They employ technology to rapidly multiply the spaces and opportunities for collaboration and participation—to achieve technoparticipation—using the digital learning environment as a space to not only reflect upon artistic practice but also to produce it as well as prompt statements and responses from students as to its limits.  Critical debates from within Performance Studies in terms of the body, immersion and affect are imported into a section of these chapters which then interrogate what digital forms of teaching and learning may mean for tutors providing possibilities for sensory engagement/immersion amongst students. Indeed, these contributions (Campbell, Childs and Childs) aim to uncover ‘the point at which the body is crucial’ (O’Gorman, 2015) in terms of achieving sensorial bodily immersion through digital/virtual means in class. Working with and across physical and virtual platforms, without rendering real-world physical in class communication obsolete, dialogue that is initiated by tutors in the digital world is then picked up again in the real world in the classroom and vice versa. This sense of ‘to-ing and fro-ing’ between physical and digital platforms enacts liminality as methodology, which students explore through a multitude of contexts both theoretical and practical. By doing so, students test ideas out in one world/platform and then having spent time considering, ruminating upon and gaining more confidence, share a more concretised version via another world/platform. Students are then able to reflect upon virtual as opposed to face-to-face physical communication and examine how communication shifts when it is restricted to a virtual rather than physical state. Adopting a blended approach to learning allows students to generate and share ideas in a kaleidoscope of real-world and digital ways—a heightened sense of traversing liminal physical and virtual/online/digital thresholds. Students’ learning development and creative jouissance can be said to exist in a liminality repeatedly testing the flex of the definition as to the relationship between physical and digital learning spaces. As they fluctuate ‘between’ physical and digital environments both inside and outside of the classroom, students constantly agitate the ‘porous boundaries’ (Ofield-Kerr, 2017b) between ‘physical and digital ecologies’ (ibid.). This ebb and flow underlines how physical face-to-face and digital environments ‘flow’ (White, 2018) into one another and ‘are not separate things, they are different forms of presence and engagement’ (ibid.). Unpacking what (some of ) those ‘different forms of presence and engagement’ provides stimulus and fervour in how contributing authors  approach Critical Digital Performative Pedagogy. 

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