Part IV. Equity, Digital Capital, and Information Infrastructures of Agency

Abstract

Over decades now, in western marketized educational policy discourse, learning and teaching concepts have been colonised and sold back to fee-paying students in a variety of ways. Complex interactions in human, contextual learning situations have been reduced, as they enter government and university policy texts, into isolated ‘attributes’ simply bestowed upon those who are learning. This has degraded the deeply positional and ongoing personal practice of developing agency in learning, to the reified term of learner agency. Essentially, an active, critical process of growth becomes a nominalised item ripe for commodification, whether this is intended by the writer or speaker, or not. This chapter places the unique postdigital positionalities of those who are learning as a central concern for developing agency. Policy language that reduces dynamic, contextual processes into a product or service, such as ‘the student experience’ may support some to progress, but disadvantages others. It disempowers students too, if they are not equipped to critically engage with, and interrogate, new Large Language Models (LLMs), which are commercially packaged to be consumed in education, but not questioned. The functional pattern language of LLMs though can also be helpful as a wake-up call, because it clearly demonstrates how our human agency and attention can slip into more supervised and simulated appearances of curiosity and autonomy. Any policy or system that omits the key relational qualities that are personal to diverse students as they engage with a task, their teachers and their peers, needs to be critically examined in terms of the value it contributes or extracts and removes. It is recommended then that new provocations to human agency in learning that arise from Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) are met as opportunities for change in ourselves and throughout universities. There is a need to not only critically review extractive educational policy discourse, that LLMs simply reinforce in new ways, but to work inclusively with cross-sector partners to co-research and respond to, the flaws as well as the potential creative responses, that LLMs have now clearly exposed within our educational systems.