Dialogue,inquiry,and encounter: Critical geographies of online higher education

Abstract

The rapid expansion of online education compels debate over what accessible higher education should be, how it should be delivered, and whom it should serve. While geographers remain relatively marginal to this debate, they have engaged the question of the neoliberal university, where online education is sometimes characterized as another instantiation of the neoliberal turn. This paper draws geographies of education scholarship into productive conversation with online teaching and learning, critical pedagogy, and public geographies literatures to argue that geographers can reframe the debate over online education and reposition it as a productive space of critical dialogue, inquiry, and encounter.

Keywords

co-production of knowledge critical pedagogy encounter geographies of education neoliberal university online higher education online teaching and learning public geographies

I Introduction

The emergence of online teaching and learning as an increasingly popular distance education experience has pushed higher education into a debate about what contemporary, relevant, and accessible instruction should be, how it should be delivered, and whom it should serve. While geography as a discipline has begun to engage this debate (see WinklerPrins et al., 2007; Heyman, 2013; Olds, 2013; Smith and Jeffrey, 2013; Bose, 2014; Rye, 2014; Kalafsky and Conner, 2015, Sparke, 2017), geographers have been more active in critiques of the neoliberalizing processes associated with 21st-century higher education (Mitchell, 1999, 2003; Roberts, 2000; Larner and Le Heron, 2005; Dowling, 2008; Thiem, 2009; Moore et al., 2015; Morrissey, 2015; UKCPWG et al., 2015). It is, perhaps, the tendency to conflate online education with the neoliberal project that pushes geographers away from this topic. We suggest that online teaching and learning needs to be contextualized within a wider history and political economy of distance learning in higher education and viewed as a central theme in the emerging sub-discipline of geographies of education. We contend that critical geographers can engage broader publics through an active engagement with online education. Put simply, the possibilities for radical dialogue, critical inquiry, and new forms of encounter are not forestalled by the growth of online education, but rather made possible through this relatively new, and rapidly expanding, pedagogical modality.

This paper also emerges as debates around online education are increasingly common, particularly in public institutions in the United States where the authors are located and where massive defunding of higher education coupled with the shrinking size of college-age student populations are putting increasing enrollment pressures on universities and colleges. The response to these pressures have been many, with some institutions, such as Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU), choosing to go ‘all in’ on online education, while other campuses, such as San Jose State University, eschewing efforts to deliver credit-bearing content through massive open online courses (MOOCs). In the case of SNHU, the model has been to create a ‘curated’ suite of course and program content that could be delivered to over 35,000 students with a predominantly adjunct teaching workforce. Emphasis has been placed on ‘student support services’ centered around SNHU’s more modest residential campus in New Hampshire. Seeing the gains of campuses such as SNHU, academic administrators deploy online education as a mechanism by which institutions can ‘scale’ their educational programs and deliver those programs at lower costs to more students. Such models often depend on a labor force that is fungible and contingent and on programs that are increasingly under pressure to demonstrate their value to workforce development (cf. Ovetz, 2015a, 2015b). Some institutions have thus found themselves under increasing pressure to adopt corporate business models (Newfield, 2016) and align with for-profit organizations to tackle questions of scale, workforce development, and labor quickly and seamlessly with little central campus investment (LeBlanc, 2013). This is but one way to build online education; other alternative models exist.

Given the complex context and the dynamic growth of online education, we believe this is an exciting time to engage in a conversation about critical pedagogy in new kinds of teaching and learning spaces. This is particularly important as teaching and learning are increasingly a focus of scholarship within geography, with notable interest being paid to the formal and informal spaces of education (Holloway et al., 2010, 2011; Moore et al., 2015), the role of education as a sphere of social reproduction and inequality (Cook and Hemming, 2011), and geographies of educational provision and consumption (Holloway and Jöns, 2012). Research in geographies of education attends to the socio-spatial dimensions of education and schooling and aims to illustrate the multiple intersections and entanglements between schools and broader communities (Collins and Coleman, 2008; Holloway et al., 2010, 2011; Holloway and Jöns, 2012). Holloway et al. (2010) testify to the potential of research in geographies of education to ‘reorient the way scholarship views those being educated’ through renewed focus on student subjectivities and agency, ‘encouraging us to engage with young people as knowledgeable actors whose current and future lifeworlds are worthy of investigation’ (p. 594, their emphasis).

This paper draws the existing scholarship in geographies of education into productive conversation with online teaching and learning, critical pedagogy, and public geographies literatures to argue that geographers are well-positioned to reframe the debate over online education to produce constructive space for critical dialogue, inquiry, and encounter. In so doing, this article engages with current literature on encounter, which suggests that instead of thinking of encounter as opposing forces in a binary logic we think of encounter as ‘momentary enactments and rhythms of difference that undermine and contradict essentialist thought’ (Wilson, 2016: 14). We also strive to be sensitive to questions of pedagogy and instructional design that produce effective online education, while maintaining a radical sense of hospitality, openness, and diversity. This approach refocuses the debates within geographies of education scholarship to draw attention to the progressive potentialities and spaces for transformative possibilities afforded by online education. This article thus gives attention to the epistemologies (Jonassen et al., 1995) that foreground contemporary online education, arguing that online higher education can be employed to meet the progressive agenda laid out in the geographies of education literature. This recognition and recontextualization of online education enables geographers to interrogate how online teaching and learning can be strategically positioned as part of a wider political practice to challenge the neoliberal project within higher education, a practice that promises to increase the sociocultural, political-economic, and spatial literacies of millions of adult learners, who are older than the 18–23-year-old age range of the commonly understood undergraduate student.

The paper opens with a historical analysis of the distance education movement. We contextualize distance education as a complex project of democratizing access to diverse publics within the political economy of the US educational system. This section then turns to a deeper engagement with the debates around the neoliberalization of higher education (Giroux, 2007, 2014) and argues that within this project there are productive spaces of radical possibility pried open rather than foreclosed by the expansion of online education. We follow the discussion of distance education and the neoliberal university by drawing the geographies of education scholarship into conversation with conceptual and empirical advances in the fields of online teaching and learning, critical pedagogy, and public geographies. In focusing on the radical potential of online education, we want to be careful not to imply that one modality of teaching and learning (i.e. online or face-to-face) is inherently superior or inferior; rather, we recognize the relation between teaching and learning modality and teaching and learning outcomes is always contingent.

The third section of the paper traces the contours of broader debates occurring within the multi-disciplinary landscape of critical pedagogy to demonstrate how online spaces of teaching and learning provide access and educational opportunities to diverse populations, such as adult learners (Kahu et al., 2014; Arbour et al., 2015), people living with disabilities and limited mobilities (Burgstahler et al., 2004; Coombs, 2010; Roberts et al., 2011; Crichton and Kinash, 2013), rural and potentially remote populations (Iding and Crosby, 2013), people who disidentify with normative understandings of a ‘student’, as well as queer and LGBTQI youth (Peters and Swanson, 2004).

A core argument of this paper is that online education creates new spatial arrangements and connections that afford opportunities for critical geographers to engage those who may, for whatever reason, find themselves spatially-immobile or grounded in a particular place. Online education thus has the potential to open up global dialogue in ways that are not easily replicated in other modalities of teaching and learning (Sparke, 2017). Next, we tie in the growing literature on public geographies to further suggest that these online spaces provide novel ways to access diverse ‘virtual’ publics. We argue that advances in online education can produce pedagogical innovation with emancipatory and radical potential. We suggest that lessons learned from the academy’s experience with distance education and experimentation with new virtual technologies within online teaching and learning (Davidson and Goldberg, 2010), critical pedagogy, and public geographies can inform more nuanced debates regarding online education that extend beyond the boundaries of the common neoliberal critique. We conclude by setting an agenda for an ongoing critical geography of online education.

II Historicizing distance education within and beyond the neoliberal academy

Geographers have done little to engage with the sociospatial histories of distance education, a history that dates back to the 1800s when universities began teaching through extension, then correspondence and independent study (Wedemeyer, 1981).¹ We trace this history to demonstrate that online education is another form of distance, sometimes referred to as distributed, education developed to expand university education to diverse publics. This historical approach allows for a reinterpretation of the popular debate over online education, a debate that sutures online education to the neoliberal academy and brings into focus long-standing discomfort with distanced educational spaces, learners, and pedagogies.

1 The distance education movement

It was an attempt to establish the identity of the other form of teaching and learning, i.e. teaching and learning that did not take place in classrooms, that the concept of distance education was first proposed. (Moore, 2013: 67)

Distance education is best defined as pedagogical experiences where the teacher and the learner are not co-located, or where the university provides teaching experiences face-to-face that are not located on the main campus, but in sites of extension or in collaboration with other organizations (Moore, 2013). Legislation in the United States – including the Morrill Act (1862), the Smith-Lever Act (1914), and the Smith-Hughes Act (1917) – fostered outreach efforts through the establishment of land grant public higher education institutions founded with the mission to provide cooperative and extension education. One of the major goals was to democratize education, moving it from the elitist halls of private and early US public institutions into more accessible spaces of learning (cf. Pittman, 2013). A practical and applied sort of learning began to take hold. The development of such programs was not readily embraced within institutions of higher education. As Wedemeyer (1981: 24) avers: ‘From its inception, extension faced the slings and arrows of academics who were suspicious of any attempt to democratize higher education’. That said, elite public institutions, such as the University of Wisconsin, chartered extension campuses in the early 1900s, providing services to students who were unable to participate in their residential campuses (Moore, 2015).²

Early distance education programs always utilized media resources – correspondence, then radio, and eventually television – to facilitate and distribute a largely asynchronous, relatively self-paced education (Pittman, 2013). Jump to the early-1990s, universities were already experimenting with, and in many cases implementing, online education, replacing the television or mailed packages with virtual learning networks. These early pioneers of online education in the United States, in particular, largely built these programs internal to their campuses, giving rise to a new sort of faculty member who could work across both pedagogical practice and educational technology development. Indeed, campus systems began to experiment with and develop their own instructional technologies in the early 2000s, such as the Learning Management System called Sakai. As the 2000s progressed, a new intensity emerged in online education as more and more campuses witnessed shrinking residential student enrollments and increasing pressures from the defunding of public education and declining endowments in private colleges and universities. To make a quick move into an online educational space, targeting the 34 million adult learners in the United States with ‘some college’, many campuses turned to a rapidly developing for-profit enrollment services and educational technology sector that was interested in partnering with campuses to quickly expand fully online student enrollments (LeBlanc, 2013).

From the beginning, these for-profit partners offered a range of services to include the development of new student leads, full enrollment and application services, student support programming, as well as instructional and curricular design. These partnerships have not been inexpensive, as many of the for-profit companies (e.g. Academic Partnerships, Pearson/Embanet, Hobsons, Wiley, Colloquy) operate on a percentage basis. In some cases, 50 percent of gross tuition revenue has gone to the private firm before any money is returned to the higher education partner. This drives not only the need for very large student enrollment numbers, but also puts increasing pressure on instructional costs, forcing many institutions to further ‘adjunctify’ their teaching workforce with inexpensive, contingent labor. There remains contestation, as well, over the ownership of pedagogical content and the challenges that academic freedom faces in the context of online education. Some campuses now ‘curate’ courses and hire faculty to ‘facilitate’ those courses without any change. ‘Master teachers’ are hired to build courses and may be paid a ‘fee’ to do so, while they are asked to share their intellectual property with their institution. This means that this shared content is managed not only by the faculty member but by the university, which may use that content for years without reference back to the originating faculty member.

These partnerships have, however, put increasing pressure on the ‘for-profit’ higher education sector, which is now witnessing rapidly declining enrollment numbers as both private and public institutions do more in the ‘online educational space’. While early adopters of online education in the non-profit educational sector in the US partnered with outsiders to drive high enrollments, other campuses have begun to build capacity internally, eschewing the quick gains in enrollment in order to better manage the educational experience of fully-online learning populations (Straumshein, 2015). Even so, there are few campuses today that do not have some investment in educational technology, either in learning management systems, plagiarism detection and proctoring software solutions, or video-discussion technologies. There are signs, then, that the future of online education remains contingent, with a number of different directions possible within the US higher education landscape. For example, some campuses continue to reject its implementation for fully-online undergraduate programs in particular (such as the University of California), others continue to go down the path of expansive partner relationships (such as Arizona State University), while others are taking ownership of the entire student life-cycle, from lead generation to enrollment, teaching, learning, and student success (such as the University of Arizona).

Within the rapidly changing environment of online education, the emergence of massive open online courses (MOOCs) has drawn perhaps the most ire of scholars who have grown increasingly concerned that a few select individuals will control and manage all content as faculty become marginalized from the process of co-producing knowledge (Altbach, 2013). The ethical implications of these massive course efforts also remain unknown (Marshall, 2014). In the case of MOOCs, the notion that higher education can be easily packaged and delivered through a massive distribution system has suggested that the future of higher education may be an unbundled one, where students can go into the marketplace and build degrees by combining credentials from a wide range of higher educational providers (Agarwal, 2013). However, MOOCs also suggest that higher education can be distributed in new and interesting ways, breaking down some of the barriers to the elitism that is often held within the walls of the residential campus (Agarwal, 2013). MOOCs may provide a further challenge to the rigidity of academic credit and other potential anachronisms around which university education is often organized. If not MOOCs, the technologies that MOOCs are enabling provide a potential site of challenge to the current organization of higher education. These swift innovations in educational technologies present a disruption creating concern and leading writers like Neem (2017) to warn that ‘it’s not clear that one can speed up the rate of change in higher education without significant damage’. These challenges are worth deeper consideration by geographers of education, and critical geographers more broadly, and should be considered both in historic context and in light of the increased reliance on live digital contact in contemporary life.

Historically, and amid a broader societal shift away from a broadcast era toward one of interactivity (Holmes, 2005), distance education offers new opportunities for instructional communication and student support. That is, though there are very real concerns tied to distance educational models, emancipatory opportunities do coincide, particularly as new media technologies allow for both synchronous and asynchronous online dialogue to take place. Distance approaches can also represent a dramatic departure from ritualized instructional patterns and institutionalized authority structures that, as Brooks (2015a) suggests, hold traditional classroom participants hostage. In the example of online distance education, Pitts and Brooks (2017) assert that online interactions with peers can bring students toward – not away from – meaningful, transformative, or emancipatory learning. Again, we do not suggest that radical or transformative learning does not also happen face-to-face. Nor do we ignore the firm hold that for-profit power structures exert on distance learning models. Rather, this intervention highlights the varied approaches to distance education and their capacity to move away from or break out of well-trodden patterns of classroom engagement. It is in the flexibility of distance education, in the increasing possibilities for live digital contact, and in design and delivery decisions that the potential for emancipatory pedagogies exist.

Beyond the provision of new kinds of learning environments and patterns for interaction, distance education can be emancipatory for those without opportunities to reach on-campus classrooms. The flexibility inherent to distance education models widens higher education access to a diverse pool of potential students who may not otherwise enroll, including those with limited mobility, fully-employed students, people with physical disabilities, students from low-income families, or those living in remote locations. In fact, distance educational models can be shaped for or directly target the needs of particular communities (e.g. students on tribal lands or in rural places) or populations (e.g. veterans, adult or ‘returning’ learners). This is not to deny the ongoing digital divide or the challenges of reaching people in remote spaces with broadband internet access. These remain real obstacles to the democratization of online education. But, when those issues are surmounted, researchers have demonstrated that within distance education programs online learning is sometimes preferred over face-to-face encounters for some students who appreciate the opportunity to engage asynchronously with others (e.g. Caplan, 2005; Morahan-Martin and Schumacher, 2003). Others offer practical advice for how to provide online opportunities for particular populations – those living with disabilities for example – through a conscious investment in universal design for learning (UDL) (Coombs, 2010; Cooper, 2013). Distance models thus open the doors to the academy for those populations who may otherwise be excluded, and can facilitate successful learning experiences for those who learn differently. The diversification of access afforded by distance education models can function as a form of social justice in higher education and can also be viewed as part of what Gibson-Graham et al. (2013) consider a diverse economy of educational and community-learning opportunities. For geographers, then, greater engagement with distance learning presents rich territory for formulating new research, especially attending to questions of social justice, access, and alterity.

Despite the opportunities new instructional modes provide, there is a concern that new models of distance education are simply instantiations of the neoliberal university. In the next section, we examine the debates on the neoliberal university and situate distance education and the rise of online learning spaces within the changing context of higher education. Like Heyman (2000), we suggest that the corporatization of higher education is not unique to the 1980s and beyond. Geographical scholarship, focused on diverse topics ranging from education to the environment to the rise of market logic in everyday life, clearly demonstrates that outcomes of neoliberalism’s pernicious effects are contingent, multiple, and non-deterministic (Bakker, 2010; Holloway and Pimlott-Wilson, 2012; McGuirk and O’Neill, 2012; Birch and Siemiatycki, 2015; Braun, 2015; Ioris, 2015). Similarly, the performance of neoliberal logics within higher education is negotiated, rather than universal, and remains rife with contestation, micro-politics of resistance, and diverse subjectivities and practices (cf. Gibson-Graham, 2006). The recognition of alternative spaces and practices of resistance and flexibility within the history of distance education in a virtual world enables the potential to create new lines of flight within the confines of a constantly reimagined higher education environment (Lukinbeal and Allen, 2007; Stern, 2011). The transformation of higher education vis-à-vis neoliberalism produces important tensions and contradictions that require further explanation (cf. Butler, 1993).

2 Neoliberalism and the future of a diverse higher education

Privatization, commodification, militarization, and deregulation are the new guiding categories through which schools, teachers, pedagogy, and students are defined. (Giroux, 2014: 36)

The impacts of neoliberal policy and ideology on higher education have been widely debated. Common critiques outline the growth of the corporatization, marketization, and privatization of knowledge, increasing managerialism, the rise of new technologies of calculation leading to accountability culture, regimes of performance and audit society, the commodification of access to institutions and services within institutions, the massification of higher education, the redefinition of students as entrepreneurial subjects, clients, and consumers, and the institutionalization of competition and profit-seeking behavior (Labaree, 1997; Reading, 1997; Mitchell, 2003; Larner and LeHeron, 2005; Giroux, 2007, 2014; Dowling, 2008; Furedi, 2011; Connell, 2013; Holloway, 2015; Martin, 2015; Morrissey, 2015; Naidoo and Williams, 2015; Wilkens and Burke, 2015; Newfield, 2016). A result of these processes is the cooptation and transmutation of academic knowledge into ‘a commodity that can be readily exchanged for the price of a book, a consulting fee, or university tuition’ (Heyman, 2000: 299). Critics also warn of the mechanization of higher education (Cunningham, 2015), citing the recent growth of MOOCs, fully online degree programs, public-private partnerships (Mitchell, 1999), and the transitioning of previously in-person general education classes to online environments.

Paradoxically, neoliberal-inspired projects herald widening participation of underserved and minority student populations – a goal with democratizing potential, though in practice it may actually (re)produce, rather than reduce, inequality (Mavelli, 2014; Wilkins and Burke, 2015; Newfield, 2016). In the US, the impacts to diversity in higher education under neoliberal reforms raise serious concerns as slow economic recovery following the Great Recession has been linked to reduced enrollment of underrepresented students (Kobayashi et al., 2014). These uneven geographies of access to higher education, although unstable and historically and geographically contingent (Winders and Schein, 2014), reverberate across the higher education landscape and are especially profound in producing and maintaining the troubling low diversity rates found in some disciplines, such as geography (Adams et al., 2014; Kobayashi et al., 2014; Solís et al., 2014).

In the debates about widening access to higher education, a notable tension exists between achieving social justice goals of universal access to education and not compromising the elite status afforded to a university education (Larner and LeHeron, 2005; Connell, 2013; Wilkens and Burke, 2015).³ Diverse populations challenge universities and university professors to reimagine their pedagogy to engage differing student experiences. Many adult learners, for example, have to find ways to carve out space and time in their day to attend to their education, a reality that is not always easily aligned with traditional pedagogical practices of faculty (Kahu et al., 2014). By viewing students through a neoliberal lens as ‘seemingly equal consumers of knowledge’ (Mavelli, 2014: 860), rather than recognizing, and taking seriously, diversity and difference across populations and learner types, universities may fail to achieve access goals.

Emerging technologies are implicated in critiques of the neoliberal university (Sammons and Ruth, 2007; Ovetz, 2015a). The UK government, for example, has engaged a ‘digital-by-default’ policy wherein welfare services are only rendered online, leaving many – especially those traditionally underserved – to harbor the cost of digital connection (Yates et al., 2015). However, not dissimilar to ways that critical and participatory geographic information systems (GIS) co-opted geospatial technologies for activist, community empowerment, and emancipatory ends (Elwood, 2002, 2006a, 2006b, 2009; Elwood and Leszczynski, 2013; Elwood and Wilson, 2017), we argue that software and hardware do not inherently serve specific, pre-determined goals. Potential exists to de-suture technology and capitalism, creating open possibilities for under-served groups to appropriate and transform instruments of domination to serve their own goals (Mayo, 1999). Davidson and Goldberg (2010) demonstrate successful examples of realizing this radical potential through their experimental project that examines, while participating in, models of inventive co-creation, collaboration, and participatory learning made possible by the internet and contemporary mobile technologies. Rejecting technological determinism, we embrace a recognition of technological tools as mutable and indeterminate, and with access, able to be creatively harnessed to advance a progressive agenda.

Online distance education provides opportunities for increasing access to higher education and pursuing pedagogical practices aligned with critical theory and practice. Contextualizing the neoliberal critique within the distinct history of distance learning, we can reframe online learning as a modality of distance education, rather than simply a threat to residential education.⁴ This reframing allows us to recognize the radical potential of online learning to create spaces of alterity (cf. Gibson-Graham, 2006), to increase inclusivity and access to education for diverse groups of students, and to appreciate pedagogical advances that create new ways of teaching and learning. We aim not to deny the argument against neoliberal higher education, but instead to add complexity and nuance to allow for new lines of thinking, performing, and existing with and within the neoliberalized higher education system (Rouhani, 2012). This reconceptualization draws on Larner and LeHeron’s (2005: 845) call for critiques of neoliberalism to ‘be attentive to historical contingency, geographical specificity, and political complexity’. We recognize that mitigating the neoliberalization of the university and allowing for spaces of alterity to flourish is a responsibility and a call to action that academics inside the university must take seriously, not only in their research agendas but critically in their pedagogies and praxis. Acknowledging that labor force casualization, adjunctification, and alienation have frequently accompanied the growth of online education, we highlight the important role of securely employed academics (i.e. those with tenure or other job protections) in these projects of experimentation and resistance. In the next section, we draw together the fields of geographies of education, critical pedagogies, and public geographies to develop a critical geography of online education.

III Developing a critical geography of online education

Geographers are increasingly engaging with online education as an object of study (WinklerPrins et al., 2007; Heyman, 2013; Olds, 2013; Bose, 2014; Davis Conover and Miller, 2014; Rye, 2014; Slinger-Friedman, et al. 2015; Sparke, 2017), though not at a pace that matches the rapid rise of online programs in higher education. Given this mismatch, there exists a need for focused engagement with the potential for these programs to create productive spaces of emancipatory possibility, spaces that geographies-of-education scholars, in particular, must attend to. A critical geography of online education can consider how online teaching and learning can engage with critical pedagogy and public geographies to reimagine traditional university education and work with diverse publics. In online education, critical pedagogies translate transformative teaching and learning strategies via technologies to emphasize the co-production of knowledge, destabilizing the power relations embedded within the categories of ‘teacher’ and ‘learner’. The subfield of public geographies reimagines a critical online education via recognition of students as a central public, the formulation of public engagement as an encounter, and debates over the role of technology and online spaces for facilitating dialogue with diverse audiences. Developing a critical geography of online education thus opens new and expanded conceptual, methodological, and political avenues for geographers to encounter and engage with diverse (student) publics. This reimagining should begin with an understanding of geographies of education as a geographic field, and its conceptualization of learning as encounter.

1 Geographies of education and learning

…geographies of education and learning need to examine the historical and contemporary policies about, and experiences of, education and consider the un/intended impacts in creating particular types of citizens as well as (paid and unpaid) workers for the future. (Holloway and Jöns, 2012: 482)

A crucial turn in the geographies of education scholarship is the conceptualization of education as a site, which reframes educational research, drawing explicit attention to the experiences of situated encounter. The focus on encounter reinvigorates the view of the learner as a subject rather than an object of education. Holloway et al. (2011) argue this enables scholars to transcend the dichotomy between inward (subjective) and outward (objective) looking views of geographies of education (see also Holloway et al., 2010; Thiem, 2009). This approach acknowledges the bidirectional influence of geographers in affecting critical pedagogical practice and scholarship (and vice versa). Geographers are thus drawn to Bunge’s radical educational experiment, The Detroit Geographic Expedition (Merrifield, 1995; Heyman 2007, 2017; Knudson, 2017; Newman and Safransky, 2017; Thatcher, 2017),⁵ as well as the work of Katz (2004) and Aitken (2001) in children’s geographies as they deliberate on how they might reimagine geographies of education over the life course (see Del Casino, 2009, for a discussion of this history). Geographies of education’s prioritization of encounter also echo the contributions of educational reformer and pragmatic philosopher John Dewey, whose work on progressive education has been deeply influential in educational theory and more recently in a growing geographic literature that attends to the role of activist research and teaching in primary and secondary educational spaces (Hawkins et al., 2011; Moore et al., 2015). Concerned with the study of conscious experience, questions of learner agency and autonomy, and theories of how the mind encounters the world, Dewey (1997) exalts experiential learning, emphasizing the importance of social interaction and encounter in educational experience. Dewey rejects the traditional view of students as blank slates, instead recognizing students as agents influenced by prior experiences and preconceptions, who come to knowledge in multiple, different ways.

The renewed focus on student agency and subjective experience within the geographies of education scholarship provides a useful counterpoint to many of the strong structural critiques leveraged by the neoliberalization of education debate. Scholars of geographies of education recognize and attend to the need for critical research on how the restructuring of education impacts student learning, especially the (re)production of inequalities in access to provision (Holloway and Jöns, 2012) and the effects of individualization of responsibility (Holloway et al., 2011). Geographies of education scholars Cook and Hemming (2011) are sensitive to the enduring tension between structure and agency within the spheres and spaces of education. The relation between authority and control is indeterminate and the individual is able to resist prevailing expectations. Holloway et al. (2010) argue for the necessity of advancing understandings of student culture and diversity to ‘appreciate the different ways students inhabit, transform, and move through the places where they live and study’ (p. 591). Thus educational experience is linked to the production of identity, which Holloway et al. (2010) insist is ‘reproduced and reworked through sociospatial practices underpinning the delivery and consumption of curriculum in schools’ (p. 588).

The geographies of education literature provides a useful lens to investigate how existing structures, such as ‘processes, discourses, and institutions’ (Holloway et al., 2011), influence students’ experiences of the world in relation to educational spaces. But a limitation is the tendency to concentrate on youth and children,⁶ with less attention paid to other populations of learners. We argue that widening the lens of geographies of education scholarship to attend to more diverse student groups, including adult and online learners, provides opportunities to examine broader subject positions and practices. Expanding focus from younger people to adult learners offers an opportunity to further interrogate how distance and online education provide spaces of interactivity and new opportunities for populations who remain marginal to the wider project of higher education. Attending to higher education requires explicit recognition of the different populations of adult learners who enroll in online degree programs. Specifically, the demographics of online student populations demonstrate a significant shift toward older adult learners compared to traditional university students. In 2012, the majority of online learners (61%) were over 30, compared to 58 percent of traditional university students who are between 18 and 24 (National Center for Education Statistics, 2013; CollegeAtlas.org, 2013).⁷

The spatial geographies of online education draw distant learners into new networks of relations. These virtual networks rely upon technologies that may transform the teaching and learning experience and produce new anxieties about the future of higher education. This discomfort with virtual education technologies has been articulated in several ways: 1) a fear that a world experienced via computing and technology is spatially detached and disembodied (Smith and Jeffrey, 2013; Marshall, 2014); 2) a growing concern that this mode of education is producing impoverished and highly simplified technical subjects (Borgmann, 1992; Feenberg, 2009); and 3) an emerging concern that teaching and learning will become fully automated, significantly reducing the need for permanent, full-time faculty (Ovetz, 2015b).

What is missing from this understanding of spatially-distributed online education is that processes of interpretation and interaction remain central to the teaching and learning experience. Moving beyond humanist and post-humanist critiques, scholars of information and communication (e.g. Hjorth et al., 2012; Markham and Lindgren, 2014), as well as geographers of the ‘virtual’ (e.g. Graham, 1998; Kinsley, 2014; Leszczynski, 2015; Rose, 2016) are reframing how the relations between humans and technology are understood. There is a growing recognition that technology functions as human interaction in a different form, as a set of processes that acquire meaning via human collaboration and engagement (Feenberg, 2009). Through this lens, online education is understood as a site of dialogue and encounter between diverse others. This echoes similar arguments for resituating education as encounter in the geographies of education scholarship (e.g. Moore et al., 2015).

Following Moore et al. (2015: 407–8), who argue that ‘school gardens have the potential to expand knowledge acquisition beyond an individualistic, atomistic, neoliberal view of nature and social relations toward one based on solidarity with and mutual care for human and non-human others’, we can argue that within online education rests the possibility of educating from the position of what Derrida suggests is an unconditional hospitality (Derrida, 2002; Caputi and Del Casino, 2013). This is a largely unrealized hospitality, whose aspirations are managed by the conditional hospitality of modern-day higher education, related to who has access and who does not. That said, an online education built from the perspective of the unconditional suggests that educators can engage across vast spaces, make deep connections, and welcome radical alterities through the various practices of computer-mediated communication networks that enable dialogue and meaningful engagements with difference. If the ‘university should also be a place in which nothing is beyond question’ (Derrida, 2002: 205), then the potentialities afforded by new forms of community in online education should also not be beyond question. Put another way, online education neither naturally forecloses nor naturally opens up a radical sense of hospitality. That is only achieved when educators realize the critical potentiality that online education may afford. Lock (2015) suggests, for example, that global classrooms designed with the intentional purpose of creating dialogue and shared inquiry result in not only increased knowledge acquisition but the development of critical research and analytic skills that allows students and teachers to co-create meaning from shared experiences. This parallels what Brooks (2011: 174) suggests is the value of online and distance education for global classrooms, which ‘provides opportunities for students to collide, collaborate, converse, and create community’.

Recognizing online education as human interaction mediated by computer networks enables geographers to engage with online education as a set of social relations facilitated through technological platforms. This reinterpretation allows online education to be viewed as expanding communication, by facilitating multiple opportunities for engaging in shared learning processes, shifting the computer ‘from a coldly rational information source to a communication medium’ (Feenberg, 2009: 43). Thus, online teaching and learning modalities are remade as spaces for constituting creative, collaborative, and transformative possibilities via encounters with diverse (student) publics. We suggest online education can meet the goals of critical geography to provide geographic education that is open and emancipatory. To demonstrate this possibility, in the next section we examine the emergence of critical online pedagogies scholarship.

2 Critical online pedagogies and their transformative possibilities

[T]here are features of online pedagogy that can facilitate the transformative learning typically required in order for social justice literacy to flourish. Online environments can provide fertile conditions in which to help educators to read the world and act upon it in ways that create equity of opportunity and outcome for persistently marginalized students. (Bondy et al., 2015: 245)

Geographers have contributed widely to critical pedagogy scholarship. Although critical pedagogical practices in higher education first developed in face-to-face classrooms and in alternative educational movements beyond the academy, the implementation of critical pedagogy in online classrooms is increasingly the focus of a growing body of research and practice (Lukinbeal and Allen, 2007; Stern, 2011; Mundkur and Ellickson, 2012; Smith and Jeffrey, 2013; Caruthers and Friend, 2014; Davis Conover and Miller, 2014; Bondy et al., 2015; O’Shea et al., 2015). For over two decades, central facets in the debate over online education and the production and dissemination of knowledge have focused on the contested roles of computer-mediated communication, online learning networks, and the place of technology in education (Walther, 1996; Benbunan-Fich and Hiltz, 1999; Hiltz, 1994; Hiltz and Wellman, 1997; Johnson et al., 2000; Heckman and Annabi, 2005; Brooks, 2010; Borup et al., 2012). Although this debate continues, scholars have demonstrated that online education and transformative education rooted in critical pedagogy are not antagonistic (Brooks, 2010, 2015b; Bondy et al., 2015). As a teaching and learning modality, in the way it can distinctly provide new means of access, support new networks, and potentially allow for new voices, online education has the capacity to align well with radical education approaches, particularly those influenced by Paulo Freire, Antonio Gramsci, and bell hooks (cf. King, 1993; Mayo, 1999; Rouhani, 2012). Forsey et al. (2013: 482) argue that ‘Online technologies allow us to shift our pedagogies into more creative and effective spaces’. Jonassen et al. (1995) similarly contend that online spaces introduce emancipatory potential through the design of experiential, learner-centered instruction and collaborative online environments that can extend beyond traditional teacher-centered learning encounters. Citing Paulo Freire in their critical analysis of virtual student communication and related discussion of pedagogy, Pitts and Brooks (2017) refer to students’ ‘potential for critical engagement’ (p. 264) online.

An important intersection of the distance education (e.g. Moore and Kearsley, 2012; Moore, 2013) and critical pedagogy (e.g. Wells, 1993; Cazden, 2001; Brooks 2015a) scholarships is a longstanding interest in pedagogical transformations that stress student-centered learning, the autonomy of the learner, and the role of the instructor as both educator and facilitator. While not inherent to online education, contemporary instructional tools offer the potential to provide students with learning opportunities that are highly student-centered, democratic, and free of institutionalized patterns, paralleling the active classroom movement. In any course type– the active face-to-face, hybrid, or fully online classroom – when a student-centered approach is enacted, the educational spaces are deliberately interactive and require students to engage in the learning experience. As Talanquer and Pollard (2010: 81) demonstrate in their own chemistry curriculum, ‘innovative [online] tools create opportunities for students to create their own molecular representations, animations, and simulations, explore the dynamic behavior of chemical systems, and collect and analyze data in real time’. Active teaching and learning approaches force change in pedagogical practice and instructional design which, in turn, place both more responsibility and potentially more power for learning in the hands of the student, creating a new set of learning challenges (Bondy et al., 2015).

Another successful model for engaging diverse, fully online learners is to build communities of inquiry amongst students and teachers (Garrison et al., 2001; Garrison and Arbaugh, 2007). The community becomes a necessary building block to create the conditions for facilitating higher order and transformative learning. In online environments the development of a sense of community is key to student-student and student-teacher interactions, conflict management, and achieving higher order learning. For example, Caruthers and Friend (2014) find that virtual spaces offer the possibility for students to transform their thought, especially on issues of social justice and cultural politics. The advantage of online instruction is that, if it is designed affectively, students can manage complex conversations and in-depth analysis of reading while establishing relationships through asynchronous discussions that are moderated by faculty. The goal is to constitute space through the co-construction of knowledge and meaning that allows students and teachers to embody new modes of thinking and understanding (Dall’Alba and Barnacle, 2005), through their material, haptic, and sensory engagement with the technologies and sociospatial relations that mediate online teaching and learning. As Dall’Alba and Barnacle (2005: 737) suggest: ‘Synchronous and/or asynchronous communication online can contribute to maintaining contact and exchanges about what is being learned. Through transforming spatio-temporal locatedness and interpersonal relations in these ways, access to ICT’s can enrich the higher educational experience for students.’

With the explicit aim to produce critical sites of encounter for transformative education, Caruthers and Friend (2014) draw Edward Soja’s conceptualization of Thirdspace into conversation with the online learning environment to demonstrate that the online classroom is ‘a socially constructed space built from the multiple perceptions, meanings, values, and ideologies of students and instructors’ (p. 13). In line with Adams (2016), transformative education operates through ‘a new metaphysics of encounter [where] people engage with a wide range of different media and simultaneously encounter other people and things, near and far, still or mobile, perpetually redefining “here” and “there”’ (p. 7). In the scheme introduced by Caruthers and Friend, Soja’s Firstspace is interpreted as the face-to-face classroom, Secondspace is the online classroom, and Thirdspace is critical pedagogy in the online environment. In education scholarship, Thirdspace is recognized as a process (Ikas and Wagner, 2008), one that allows for new understandings in classrooms that are increasingly mobile (Kehm and Teichler, 2007). Online courses thought of as thirdspaces thus provide opportunity for transformative learning and encourage students to turn their attention to questions of power, identity, and social justice. Pitts and Brooks (2017: 13–14) demonstrate that transformative learning is not a natural outcome of dialogue in online spaces. It requires ‘guided, purposive, critical reflection of students’ own discourse’, which in their example of the global classroom involves students’ iterative writing and reflections on their own work.

Bringing critical pedagogies to online education serves to challenge dominant and hegemonic voices and encourage sites of encounter and communities of inquiry, thus providing new spaces for previously silent and/or silenced voices (Caruthers and Friend, 2014; Bondy et al., 2015). This is germane to the transformation of the student as object into the student as active agent, a central tenet that also connects to the geographies of education scholarship. This transformation introduces the potential to co-produce knowledge through collaborative and participatory pedagogy with online student publics and to ultimately serve the goal of critical human geography to recognize and challenge oppressive socio-spatial institutions and structures. Aligning teaching and learning in online classes with other forms of political praxis may further enable new ways of co-constituting knowledge and educational form within the neoliberal model of higher education. To clarify these political possibilities, we next turn our attention to the emancipatory politics of public geographies. We do so as we believe that the political praxis that rests at the heart of public geographies scholarship and activism aligns and emboldens the possibilities of a critical geographies of online education.

3 Public geographies and political praxis of online education

…one of the biggest constituencies to whom our research is ‘relevant’ is to our students – a relevance that is made flesh each and every time we teach. (Castree, 2003: 283)

If we take Castree (2003) seriously, we must approach our encounters with our students as the first line of flight for our public geographies. Put more directly, students are our first public. The aim of public geographies, a growing sub-discipline and wider concern within geography, is to link critical theory to practice with the activist goal of educating communities, facilitating meaningful engagement, and provoking positive change and progressive transformation (Massey, 2008; Zinn, 2008). As Mitchell (2008: 2) argues: ‘My sense is that what creates a public scholar is related to a profound urge to participate and intervene in the political practices of the world – to fight injustice or correct misinformation or provide a needed service – in short, to try to make the world a better place, corny as that sounds’. Mitchell (2008) further suggests it is not always easy to produce, translate, and disseminate one’s public scholarship. Here the classroom presents another space for scholars to engage with broader and more diverse publics (Ward, 2006, 2007; Fuller and Askins, 2007, 2010; Fuller, 2008; Morin, 2012).

Because public geographies emphasize that the public not only listen and receive content but that they actively respond via encounters and collaborations that are process-based, participatory, and founded in dialogue, there is an instant synergy with the practices of active classrooms and student-centered online learning (cf. Fuller and Askins, 2010; Hawkins et al., 2011; Crampton et al., 2013). Morin (2012) reminds us that ‘publics do not pre-exist discourse, they are brought into being and formed through it’ (p. 4) and, importantly, that they ‘are as much brought into being through networks of communication and discourse as they are inhabitants of some tangible space’ (p. 8). Student-centered online learning can benefit from doing public geographies – the encounters, interactions, communications, and co-productions of knowledge – that serve to bring into being a particular public collectivity (Ward, 2007). It is possible to thus recognize a number of productive intersections amongst the goals of geographies of education, critical pedagogy, and public geographies.

Virtual spaces, for example, have come into focus in the public geographies debates for their enabling potential by providing new tools, new publics, and increased visibility for public geographies and the potential for the democratization of knowledge production (Fuller and Askins, 2010). The rise of public geographies means that educators can integrate activism, dialogue, and co-production of knowledge into teaching and learning experiences (Castree et al., 2008), particularly in the spaces of encounter provided by online education that work across vast sites of difference. Public geographies, especially with a focus on online communities of inquiry and in media and technology platforms, align well with a critical online pedagogy in higher education that seeks to influence social transformation beyond traditionally defined student populations. Online courses and programs can be built in and around communities of engagement that align with critical public geographies serving to shift how knowledge is produced and how and where scholarship is practiced. These practices can sit at the center of any online education experience. This does not suggest that online education is more emancipatory than other teaching and learning models. Rather, it suggests that the practices of public geographies, and the growing role of social technology in those geographies, should and can be a centerpoint for any online pedagogy.

Exemplifying the potential to bridge critical theory to public geographies as online educational practice are projects that leverage the benefits of virtual communication technologies. The projects bring about positive ends for students while offering them new ways to wrangle with normative thinking (e.g. Brooks, 2015b; Pitts and Brooks, 2017). Indeed, researchers like Demont-Heinrich and Ivanišin (2010) assert that education that overtly links together diverse online publics allows US-based students ‘who represent an up-and-coming domestic elite and, by virtue of their nation-state’s global hegemonic status, an up-and-coming global elite’ (p. 326), a chance to critically consider views of themselves and others around the globe. The creation of new kinds of integrated publics – in classrooms, in communities, in networks – can offer sites for engagement and learning while, at the same time, function as research contexts for considering issues of identity, globalization, and the tacit barriers inhibiting meaningful understanding within and between diverse groups of people.

The effective use of online media and technology to facilitate communities of engagement and to enact public geography (Fuller and Askins, 2010) has much to offer ongoing conversations and debates in online higher education, especially relative to the contested role of information technology in the production and dissemination of knowledge. In this way, online education may provide a seamless space of engagement, enabling conversations over great distances and in relation to distinct experiences (e.g. Brooks, 2011). Online education can bring together scholars, activists, and students into collaborative learning spaces, producing new conversations and aligning online education with the overt political practices of public geographies. Furthermore, the desire within public geographies to challenge and ultimately disrupt the academic/public binary (Gibson and Gibbs 2013) shares a common theme with the aim of geographies of education scholarship to broaden the spatial lens of what count as spaces of education (Holloway et al., 2010) and to recognize the classroom as a site of both encounter and political praxis. We argue that reframing the classroom and spaces of education, more broadly, as sites of political praxis serves to challenge one facet of the neoliberal critique by rejecting the notion that knowledge is disseminated as information in a commodity form to a student consumer. Instead, we argue that marrying conceptual advances from geographies of education, critical pedagogy, and public geographies enables a progressive approach to viewing online educational spaces in higher education as new opportunities for co-production of knowledge and for encountering, engaging, and enacting collaborative geographies with diverse student publics.

IV Conclusions: Toward critical online futures

Although cost-saving may be driving new investments in distance education, we argue that online education holds potential to challenge the assumptions of everyday classroom practice, enabling the possibilities for new or otherwise-silenced voices to engage in widened conversations about the complexity of our everyday worlds. By bringing together diverse bodies of scholarship from geography, education, and other disciplines, as well as situating that literature within a longer history of distance education, we suggest that radical possibilities are not being diminished by online educational praxis. Even as we acknowledge that digital divides and inequalities to access and participation persist (Smith and Jeffrey, 2013), we also want to suggest that new technologies, which have already enabled a number of possibilities in our discipline, such as public participatory online projects and programs, can be empowering if taken up in ways aligned with progressive pedagogical practice. With this paper, we make a direct call to geographers to more fully engage with the radical potential that online education offers. We must, however, remain cognizant of the need to interrogate the kind of learning that is occurring to ensure that it aligns with our pedagogical goals. The empowering possibilities afforded by new technologies for enhancing student-centered learning, building communities of inquiry, nurturing political praxis, and facilitating public geographies are neither limited nor specific to online modalities of teaching and learning. Rather, there exists a synergetic relationship, as advances in technology and online pedagogical practices can and do infuse face-to-face classroom pedagogies, enhancing teaching and learning outcomes across the spectrum of online and face-to-face learning (Davidson and Goldberg, 2010).

Following the traditions of other critical geographers and pedagogists, this paper also argues that we should not accept the neoliberal agenda for higher education as a totalizing narrative. Instead, we seek ways to make space for radical sites of encounter, dialogue, and inquiry that empower students and teachers to challenge dominant narratives of what online education is supposed to be by co-creating alternative, technology-enabled, and innovative teaching and learning practices. We recognize that our radical futures may be intimately entangled with new challenges presented by digital society. Yet, the future of teaching and learning can benefit from many of these same new digital opportunities that encourage broader and deeper encounters with diverse and underserved publics. We thus offer this analysis as a way to see, project, and come to know new discourses opened up by online teaching and learning. These new educational approaches are instantiated by a sense of hope and can be shot through with a politics of hospitality, defined as radical openness, rather than a politics of disengagement.

Across this wide expanse of literatures, it is necessary that we engage with ongoing debates regarding the interlinkages between the spatialities of online education and radical practice. We remain deeply committed to ensuring that the expansion of online education is grounded in increased access to media and information by all segments of the population. We argue that online education has as much potential to produce spaces of alterity as it has to produce the neoliberalizing university. We are deeply troubled by the shift of responsibility for the costs of education, from the state on to the individual. For online education, this manifests in the offloading of responsibility for internet access, speed, and associated costs to the individual student. However, we believe that the mitigating factors do not deny the radical possibilities enabled by online higher education. Non-engagement with distance and online learning is simply not a solution.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Dr. Melissa Vito, Senior Vice President for Student Affairs, Enrollment Management, and Strategic Initiatives at the University of Arizona for funding the position that allowed us to engage in some of the early work that led to this article. We would also like to thank the Office of Digital Learning at the University of Arizona for supporting our online course development. The article was greatly improved by the constructive comments and suggestions of three anonymous reviewers and the journal editors.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

References

Adams

Solís

McKendry

(2014) The landscape of diversity in U.S. higher education geography. The Professional Geographer 66(2): 183–194.

Adams

(2016) Geographies of media and communication I: Metaphysics of encounter. Progress in Human Geography 41(3): 365–374.

Agarwal

(2013) Unbundling: Reimagining higher education. Huffington Post. Available at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anant-agarwal/unbundled-reimagining-higher-education_b_4414048.html (accessed 12 October 2015).

Aitken

(2001) Geographies of Young People: The Morally Contested Spaces of Identity. London: Routledge.

Altbach

(2013) MOOCs as neocolonialism: Who controls knowledge? International Higher Education 75: 5–7.

Arbour

Nypaver

Wika

(2015) Innovative uses of technology in online midwifery education. Journal of Midwifery & Women’s Health 60(3): 278–282.

Askins

(2008) In and beyond the classroom: Research ethics and participatory pedagogies. Area 40(4): 500–509.

Bakker

(2010) The limits of ‘neoliberal natures’: Debating green neoliberalism. Progress in Human Geography 34(6): 715–735.

Benbunan-Fich

Hiltz

(1999) Impacts of asynchronous learning networks on individual and group problem solving: A field experiment. Group Decision and Negotiation 8(5): 409–426.

10.

Birch

Siemiatycki

(2015) Neoliberalism and the geographies of marketization: The entangling of states and markets. Progress in Human Geography 40(2): 177–198.

11.

Bondy

Hambacher

Murphy

Wolkenhauer

Krell

(2015) Developing critical social justice literacy in an online seminar. Equity & Excellence in Education 48(2): 227–248.

12.

Borgmann

(1992) Crossing the Postmodern Divide. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

13.

Borup

West

Graham

(2012) Improving online social presence through asynchronous video. The Internet and Higher Education 15(3): 195–203.

14.

Bose

(2014) Technofetishism and online education: Globalizing geography through virtual worlds. Journal of Geography in Higher Education 38(1): 28–39.

15.

Braun

(2015) New materialisms and neoliberal natures. Antipode 47(1): 1–14.

16.

Brooks

(2010) Toward ‘hybridised’ faculty development for the 21st century: Blending online communities of practice and face-to-face meetings in instructional and professional support programmes. Innovations in Education and Teaching International 47(3): 261–270.

17.

Brooks

(2011) Cross-cultural classroom conversation online: Preparing students for global citizenry. Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education International Conference 2011(1): 174–179.

18.

Brooks

(2015a) Role, power, ritual, and resistance: A critical discourse analysis of college classroom talk. Western Journal of Communication 80(3): 348–369.

19.

Brooks

(2015b) Students’ perceptions and emotions relative to online assessments in college courses. In: Liu

Gibson

(eds) Research Highlights in Technology and Teacher Education 2015. Washington, DC: Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education.

20.

Burgstahler

Corrigan

McCarter

(2004) Making distance learning courses accessible to students and instructors with disabilities: A case study. Internet and Higher Learning 7: 233–246.

21.

Butler

(1993) Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge.

22.

Caplan

(2005) A social skill account of problematic internet use. Journal of Communication 55(4): 721–736.

23.

Caputi

Del Casino

Jr (2013) Derrida and the Future of the Liberal Arts: Professions of Faith. New York: Bloomsbury.

24.

Caruthers

Friend

(2014) Critical pedagogy in online environments as Thirdspace: A narrative analysis of voices of candidates in educational preparatory programs. Education Studies: A Journal of the American Education Studies Association 50(1): 8–35.

25.

Castree

(2003) Reclaiming pedagogy. Geoforum 34: 283–285.

26.

Castree

Fuller

Kent

Kobayashi

Merrett

Pulido

Barraclough

(2008) Geography, pedagogy and politics [Forum]. Progress in Human Geography 32(5): 680–718.

27.

Cazden

(2001) Classroom Discourse: The Language of Teaching and Learning, 2nd ed. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

28.

CollegeAtlas.org . (2012) 41 surprising facts about online students. Available at: http://www.collegeatlas.org/41-surprising-facts-about-online-students.html (accessed 25 September 2017).

29.

Collins

Coleman

(2008) Social geographies of education: Looking within, and beyond, school boundaries. Geography Compass 2(1): 281–299.

30.

Connell

(2013) The neoliberal cascade and education: An essay on the market agenda and its consequences. Critical Studies in Education 54(2): 99–112.

31.

Cook

Hemming

(2011) Education space: Embodied dimensions and dynamics. Social and Cultural Geography 12: 1–8.

32.

Coombs

(2010) Making Online Teaching Accessible: Inclusive Course Design for Students with Disabilities. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

33.

Cooper

(2013) Making online learning accessible to disabled students: An institutional case study. In: Searle

(ed) Approaches to Developing Accessible Learning Experiences: Conceptualising Best Practice.

34.

Crampton

Bowen

Cockayne

Cook

Nost

Shade

Sharp

Jacobsen

(2013) Whose geography? Which publics? Dialogues in Human Geography 3(1): 73–76.

35.

Crichton

Kinash

(2013) Enabling learning for disabled students. In: Moore

(ed.). Handbook of Distance Education, 3rd edn. New York: Routledge.

36.

Cunningham

(2015) Mechanizing people and pedagogy: Establishing social presence in the online classroom. Online Learning Journal 19(3): 1–14.

37.

Dall’Alba

Barnacle

(2005) Embodied knowing in online environments. Educational Philosophy and Theory 37(5): 719–744.

38.

Davidson

Goldberg

(2010) The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age. Boston, MA: MIT Press.

39.

Davis Conover

Miller

(2014) Teaching human geography through places in the media. An exploration of critical geographic pedagogy online. Journal of Geography 113(2): 85–96.

40.

Del Casino

Jr (2009) Social Geography: A Critical Introduction. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell.

41.

Demont-Heinrich

Ivanišin

(2010) ‘You’re invading the world and you don’t even know where Slovenia is!’ An analysis of an online forum among American, Australian and Slovenian university students. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 3(4): 325–345.

42.

Derrida

(2002) Without Alibi. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.

43.

Dewey

(1997) Experience and Education. New York: Simon and Schuster.

44.

Dowling

(2008) Geographies of identity: Laboring in the ‘neoliberal’ university. Progress in Human Geography 32(6): 812–820.

45.

Elwood

(2002) GIS use in community planning: A multi-dimensional analysis of empowerment. Environment and Planning A 34(5): 905–922.

46.

Elwood

(2006a) Critical issues in participatory GIS: Deconstructions, reconstructions, and new research directions. Transactions in GIS 10(5): 693–708.

47.

Elwood

(2006b) Negotiating knowledge production: The everyday inclusions, exclusions, and contradictions of participatory GIS research. The Professional Geographer 58(2): 197–208.

48.

Elwood

(2009) Integrating action research and GIS education: Negotiating methodologies, politics, and technologies. The Journal of Geography in Higher Education 33(1): 51–65.

49.

Elwood

Leszczynski

(2013) New spatial media, new knowledge politics. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 38(4): 544–559.

50.

Elwood

Wilson

(2017) Critical GIS pedagogies beyond ‘Week 10: Ethics’. International Journal of Geographical Information Science 31(10): 2098–2116.

51.

Feenberg

(2009) Critical theory of technology: An overview. In: Leckie

Buschman

(eds) Information Technology in Librarianship: New Critical Approaches. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited.

52.

Forsey

Low

Glance

(2013) Flipping the sociology classroom: Towards a practice of online pedagogy. Journal of Sociology 49(4): 471–485.

53.

Freire

(2000) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Ramos

. New York: Continuum.

54.

Fuller

(2008) Public geographies: Taking stock. Progress in Human Geography 32(6): 834–844.

55.

Fuller

Askins

(2007) The discomforting rise of ‘public geographies’: A ‘public’ conversation. Antipode 39: 579–601

56.

Fuller

Askins

(2010) Public geographies II: Being organic. Progress in Human Geography 34(5): 654–667.

57.

Furedi

(2011) Introduction to the marketization of higher education and the student as consumer. In: Molesworth

Scullion

Nixon

(eds) The Marketization of Higher Education and the Student as Consumer. New York: Routledge.

58.

Garrison

Arbaugh

(2007) Researching the community of inquiry framework: Review, issues, and future directions. The Internet and Higher Education 10: 157–172.

59.

Garrison

Anderson

Archer

(2001) Critical thinking, cognitive presence and computer conferencing in distance education. American Journal of Distance Education 15(1): 7–23.

60.

Gibson

Gibbs

(2013) Social media experiments: Scholarly practice and collegiality. Dialogues in Human Geography 3(1): 87–91.

61.

Gibson-Graham

(2006) A Postcapitalist Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

62.

Gibson-Graham

Cameron

Healy

(2013) Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming Our Communities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

63.

Giroux

(2007) The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex. Boulder: Paradigm.

64.

Giroux

(2014) Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education. Toronto: Between the Lines.

65.

Graham

(1998) The end of geography or the explosion of place? Conceptualizing space, place and information technology. Progress in Human Geography 22(2): 165–185.

66.

Guri-Rosenblit

Sebkova

Teichler

(2007) Massification and diversity of higher education systems: Interplay of complex dimensions. Higher Education Policy 20: 373–389.

67.

Haklay

(2013) Neogeography and the delusion of democratization. Environment and Planning A 45(1): 55–69.

68.

Hawkins

Saks

Cook

Rawling

Griffiths

Swift

Evans

Rathnie

Wilson

Williams

Feenay

Gordon

Prescott

Murphy

Allen

Mitchell

Wheeldon

Roberts

Robinson

Flaxman

Fuller

Askins

(2011) Organic public geographies: ‘Making the connection’. Antipode 43(4): 909–926.

69.

Heckman

Annabi

(2005) A content analytic comparison of learning processes in online and face-to-face case study discussions. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 2, article 7. Available at: http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol10/issue12/heckman.html.

70.

Heyman

(2000) Research, pedagogy and instrumental geography. Antipode 32(3): 292–307.

71.

Heyman

(2007) ‘Who’s going to man the factories and be the sexual slaves if we all get PhDs?’ Democratizing knowledge production, pedagogy, and the Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute. Antipode 39(1): 99–120.

72.

Heyman

(2013) Educational restructuring and strategic partnership. Antipode Foundation. Available at: https://antipodefoundation.org/2012/10/15/symposium-on-the-participatory-geographies-research-groups-communifesto-for-fuller-geographies-towards-mutual-security/ (accessed 25 August 2017).

73.

Heyman

(2017) Knowledge production, political action, and pedagogy in Trumbull. Antipode Foundation. Available at: https://antipodefoundation.org/2017/02/23/dgei-field-notes/ (accessed 25 August 2017).

74.

Hiltz

(1994) The Virtual Classroom: Learning without Limits via Computer Networks. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

75.

Hiltz

Wellman

(1997) Asynchronous learning networks as a virtual classroom. Communications of the ACM 40(9): 44–50.

76.

Hjorth

Burgess

Richardson

(eds) (2012) Studying Mobile Media: Cultural Technologies, Mobile Communication, and the iPhone. New York: Routledge.

77.

Holloway

(2015) Normalizing complaint: Scientists and the challenge of commercialization. Science, Technology & Human Values 40(5): 744–765.

78.

Holloway

Jöns

(2012) Geographies of education and learning. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 37: 482–488.

79.

Holloway

Pimlott-Wilson

(2012) Neoliberalism, policy localization and idealized subjects: A case study on education restructuring in England. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 37(4): 639–654.

80.

Holloway

Brown

Pimlott-Wilson

(2011) Editorial introduction: Geographies of education and aspiration. Children’s Geographies 9(1): 1–5.

81.

Holloway

Hubbard

Jöns

Pimlott-Wilson

(2010) Geographies of education and the significance of children, youth and families. Progress in Human Geography 34(5): 583–600.

82.

Holmes

(2005) Communication Theory: Media, Technology, and Society. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

83.

Iding

Crosby

(2013) Going beyond access: On-line education in Hawaii and the Pacific Islands. Education and Information Technologies 18: 245–252.

84.

Ikas

Wagner

(eds) (2008) Communicating in the Third Space. New York: Routledge.

85.

Ioris

AAR

(2015) Theorizing state-environment relationships: Antinomies of flexibility and legitimacy. Progress in Human Geography 39(2): 167–184.

86.

Johnson

Aragon

Shaik

Palma-Rivas

(2000) Comparative analysis of learner satisfaction and learning outcomes in online and face-to-face learning environments. Journal of Interactive Learning Research 11(1): 29–49.

87.

Jonassen

Davidson

Collins

Campbell

Haag

(1995) Constructivism and computer-mediated communication in distance education. The American Journal of Distance Education 9(2): 7–26.

88.

Kahu

Stephens

Leach

Zepke

(2014) Linking academic emotions and student engagement: Mature-aged distance students’ transition to university. Journal of Further and Higher Education 39(4): 481–497.

89.

Kalafsky

Conner

(2015) Exploring the dynamics of globalization: Supply chain vulnerability to natural disasters. Journal of Geography in Higher Education 39(1): 173–181.

90.

Katz

(2004) Growing Up Global: Economic Restructuring and Children’s Everyday Lives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

91.

Kehm

Teichler

(2007) Research on internationalization in higher education. Journal of Studies in International Education 11(3/4): 260–274.

92.

King

(1993) From sage on the stage to guide on the side. College Teaching 41(1): 30–35.

93.

Kinsley

(2014.) The matter of ‘virtual’ geographies. Progress in Human Geography 38(3): 364–384.

94.

Kitchin

Hubbard

(1999) Research, action and ‘critical’ geographies. Area 31(1): 195–198.

95.

Kitchin

Linehan

O’Callaghan

Lawton

(2013) Public geographies through social media. Dialogues in Human Geography 3(1). DOI: 10.1177/2043820613486432.

96.

Knudson

(2017) Detroit Geographical Expedition Institute: Unpacking the history and structure of the DGEI. Antipode Foundation. Available at: https://antipodefoundation.org/2017/02/23/dgei-field-notes/ (accessed 25 August 2017).

97.

Kobayashi

Lawson

Sanders

(2014) A commentary on the whitening of the public university: The context for diversifying geography. The Professional Geographer 66(2): 230–235.

98.

Labaree

(1997) Public goods, private goods: The American struggle over educational goals. American Educational Research Journal 34(1): 39–81.

99.

Larner

LeHeron

(2005) Neo-liberalizing spaces and subjectivities: Reinventing New Zealand universities. Organization 12(6): 843–862.

100.

LeBlanc

(2013) The new for-profits. Inside Higher Ed. Available at: https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2013/05/31/nonprofit-colleges-should-be-wary-new-breed-profit-players-essay (accessed 24 March 2017).

101.

Leszczynski

(2015) Spatial media/tion. Progress in Human Geography 39(6): 729–751.

102.

Lock

(2015) Designing learning to engage students in the global classroom. Technology, Pedagogy and Education 24: 137–153.

103.

Lukinbeal

Allen

(2007) Virtual egalitarianism, critical pedagogy, and geographic education. Journal of Geography 106(5): 199–205.

104.

Markham

Lindgren

(2014) From object to flow: Network sensibility, symbolic interactionism, and social media. Symbolic Interaction and New Social Media 43: 7–41.

105.

Marshall

(2014) Exploring the ethical implications of MOOCs. Distance Education 35(2): 250–262.

106.

Martin

(2015) Scaling critical pedagogy in higher education. Critical Studies in Education. DOI: 10.1080/17508487.2015.1115417.

107.

Massey

(2008) When theory meets politics. In: Mitchell

(ed.) Practising Public Scholarship: Experiences and Possibilities Beyond the Academy. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 142–147.

108.

Mavelli

(2014) Widening participation, the instrumentalization of knowledge and the reproduction of inequality. Teaching in Higher Education 19(8): 860–869.

109.

Mayo

(1999) Gramsci, Freire and Adult Education: Possibilities for Transformative Action. London: Zed Books.

110.

McGuirk

O’Neill

(2012) Critical geographies with the state: The problem of social vulnerability and the politics of engaged research. Antipode 44(4): 1374–1394.

111.

Merrifield

(1995) Situated knowledge through exploration: Reflections on Bunge’s ‘Geographical Expeditions’. Antipode 27(1): 49–70.

112.

Mitchell

(1999) Commentary. Environment and Planning A 31: 381–388.

113.

Mitchell

(2003) Educating the national citizen in neoliberal times: From the multicultural self to the strategic cosmopolitan. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 28: 387–403.

114.

Mitchell

(2008) Introduction: Becoming political. In: Mitchell

(ed.) Practising Public Scholarship: Experiences and Possibilities Beyond the Academy. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1–5.

115.

Moore

(2013) The theory of transactional distance. In: Moore

(ed.) Handbook of Distance Education, 3rd edition. New York: Routledge, 66–87.

116.

Moore

(2015) Remembering the founding of the Wisconsin Conference, 1984–1985. The American Journal of Distance Education 29(2): 78–84.

117.

Moore

Kearsley

(2012) Distance Education: A Systems View of Online Learning, 3rd edition. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Publishing.

118.

Moore

Wilson

Kelly-Richards

Marston

(2015) School gardens as sites for forging progressive socioecological futures. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 105(2): 407–415.

119.

Morahan-Martin

Schumacher

(2003) Loneliness and social uses of the internet. Computers in Human Behavior 19: 659–671.

120.

Morin

(2012) Geographical literacies and their publics: Reflections on the American scene. Progress in Human Geography 37(1): 3–9.

121.

Morrissey

(2015) Regimes of performance: Practices of the normalized self in the neoliberal university. British Journal of Sociology of Education 36(4): 614–634.

122.

Mundkur

Ellickson

(2012) Bringing the real world in: Reflection on building a virtual learning environment. Journal of Geography in Higher Education 36(3): 369–384.

123.

Naidoo

Williams

(2015) The neoliberal regime in English higher education: Charters, consumers and the erosion of the public good. Critical Studies in Education 56(2): 208–223.

124.

National Center for Education Statistics (2013) Digest of Education Statistics: Chapter 3: Post-Secondary Education. Available at: http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/ch_3.asp (accessed 28 September 2017).

125.

Neem

(2017) Let’s not rush into disruptive innovation. Inside Higher Ed, 16 March. Available at: https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2017/03/16/downside-innovation-and-disruption-essay (accessed 20 August 2017).

126.

Newfield

(2016) The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

127.

Newman

Safransky

(2017) Learning from Field Notes No. 4: The Trumbull Community. Reflections on the politics of urban land and participatory research. Antipode Foundation. Available at: https://antipodefoundation.org/2017/02/23/dgei-field-notes/ (accessed 25 August 2017).

128.

Olds

(2013) Mapping Coursera’s global footprint. Inside Higher Ed, 19 November. Available at: https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/globalhighered/mapping-courseras-global-footprint (accessed 20 August 2017).

129.

O’Shea

Stone

Delahunty

(2015) ‘I “feel” like I am at university even though I am online.’ Exploring how students narrate their engagement with higher education institutions in an online learning environment. Distance Education 36(1): 41–58.

130.

Ovetz

(2015a) When Hephaestus fell to Earth: Harry Braverman and the new division of academic labor. Labor Studies Journal 40(3): 243–261.

131.

Ovetz

(2015b) Migrant mindworkers and the new academic division of labor. The Journal of Labor and Society 18: 331–347.

132.

Peters

Swanson

(2004) Queering the conflicts: What LGBT students teach us in the classroom and online. Computers and Composition 21: 295–313.

133.

Pickles

(1986) Geographic theory and educating for democracy. Antipode 18(2): 136–154.

134.

Pittman

(2013) University correspondence study: A revised historiographic perspective. In: Moore

(ed.) Handbook of Distance Education, 3rd edition. New York: Routledge, 21–37.

135.

Pitts

Brooks

(2017) Critical pedagogy, internationalisation, and a third space: Cultural tensions revealed in students’ discourse. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development. DOI: 10.1080/01434632.2015.1134553.

136.

Readings

(1997) The University in Ruins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

137.

Roberts

Crittenden

(2011) Students with disabilities and online learning: A cross-institutional study of perceived satisfaction with accessibility compliance and services. The Internet and Higher Education 14: 242–250.

138.

Roberts

(2000) Realizing critical geographies of the university. Antipode 32(4): 230–244.

139.

Rose

(2016) Rethinking the geographies of cultural ‘objects’ through digital technologies: Interface, network and friction. Progress in Human Geography 40(3): 334–351.

140.

Rouhani

(2012) Practice what you teach: Facilitating anarchism in and out of the classroom. Antipode 44(5): 1726–1741.

141.

Rye

(2014) The educational space of global online higher education. Geoforum 51: 6–14.

142.

Sammons

Ruth

(2007) The invisible professor and the future of virtual faculty. International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning 4(1): 3–13.

143.

Slinger-Friedman

Powell

Smith

Mitchelson

(2015) Lessons learned and future prospects for online program creation and delivery: A case study from geography. Proceedings of the International Conference on e-Learning – ICEL: 279–286.

144.

Smith

Jeffrey

(2013) Critical pedagogies in the neoliberal university: What happens when they go digital. The Canadian Geographer 57(3): 372–380.

145.

Solís

Adams

Duram

Hume

Kuslikis

Lawson

Miyares

Padgett

Ramírez

(2013) Diverse experiences in diversity at the geography department scale. The Professional Geographer 66(2): 205–220.

146.

Sparke

(2017) Situated cyborg knowledge in not so borderless online global education: Mapping the geosocial landscape of a MOOC. Geopolitics 22(1): 51–72.

147.

Spooner

(2015) Higher education’s silent killer. Briarpatch Magazine. Available at: http://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/higher-educations-silent-killer (accessed 20 October 2015).

148.

Stern

(2011) You had me at Foucault: Living pedagogically in the digital age. Text and Performance Quarterly 31(3): 249–266.

149.

Strain

(1987.) Media and adult learning: A forum: The role of the faculty member in distance education. American Journal of Distance Education 1(2): 61–65.

150.

Straumshein

(2015) Arizona’s online holdout. Inside Higher Ed, 18 June. Available at: http://bit.ly/1IoJpck (accessed 28 September 2017).

151.

Talanquer

Pollard

(2010) Let’s teach what we think instead of what we know. Chemistry Education Research and Practice 11: 74–83.

152.

Thatcher

(2017) Looking back to Detroit for a (counter-mapping) path forward. Antipode Foundation. Available at: https://antipodefoundation.org/2017/02/23/dgei-field-notes/ (accessed 25 August 2017).

153.

Thiem

(2009) Thinking through education: The geographies of contemporary educational restructuring. Progress in Human Geography 33(2): 154–173.

154.

UKCPWG (University of Kentucky Critical Pedagogy Working Group), Mott

Zupan

Debbane

A-M

(2015) Making space for critical pedagogy in the neoliberal university: Struggles and possibilities. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 14(4): 1260–1282.

155.

Walther

(1996) Computer-mediated communication impersonal, interpersonal, and hyperpersonal interaction. Communication Research 23(1): 3–43.

156.

Ward

(2006) Geography and public policy: Towards public geographies. Progress in Human Geography 30(4): 495–503.

157.

Ward

(2007) ‘Public intellectuals’, geography, its representations and its publics. Geoforum 38: 1058–1064.

158.

Wedemeyer

(1981) Learning at the Back Door: Reflections on Non-traditional Learning in the Lifespan. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

159.

Wells

(1993) Reevaluating the IRF sequence: A proposal for the articulation of theories of activity and discourse for the analysis of teaching and learning in the classroom. Linguistics and Education 5: 1–37.

160.

Wilkens

Burke

(2015) Widening participation in higher education: The role of professional and social class identities and commitments. British Journal of Sociology of Education 36(3): 434–452.

161.

Wilson

(2016) On geography and encounter: Bodies, borders, and difference. Progress in Human Geography: 1–21. DOI: 10.1177/039132516645958.

162.

Winders

Schein

(2014) Race and diversity: What have we learned? The Professional Geographer 66(2): 221–229.

163.

WinklerPrins

AMGA

Weisenborn

Groop

Arbogast

(2007) Developing online geography courses: Experiences from Michigan State University. Journal of Geography 106(4): 163–170.

164.

Yates

Kirby

Lockleyn

(2015) ‘Digital-by-default’: Reinforcing exclusion through technology. In: Defence of Welfare 2. Available at: http://www.social-policy.org.uk/what-we-do/publications/in-defence-of-welfare-2/ (accessed 28 September 2017).

165.

Zinn

(2008) The making of a public intellectual. In: Mitchell

(ed.) Practising Public Scholarship: Experiences and Possibilities Beyond the Academy. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 138–141.