Will Brehm  1:10
Cormac Mac Gabhann, welcome to FreshEd.

Cormac Mac Gabhann  1:12
Thanks very much, Will. I’m delighted to be here.

Will Brehm  1:15
Congratulations on your first article. It’s really fantastic. I want to start by unpacking Apple Classroom, which you describe as being one of the most popular classroom management tools in Irish schools where you work. Can you tell me what exactly Apple Classroom is?

Cormac Mac Gabhann  1:32
Apple Classroom is an app created by the big Apple company that we all know and some of us love. And it responds to, I think, a genuine need that teachers have, which is to alleviate the fear that they don’t know what their students are doing when they’re in class and they have their devices open in front of them. So what I do in the article is I break down some of the core functionality of what that app does. So when a classroom starts, typically a teacher would get their students to log in, connect via Bluetooth. And then the teacher would have a screen with all of their students connected to it. And they would be able to see immediately the student’s thumbnail and what app the student is currently looking at. And they also have the functionality of replacing the student’s name or their thumbnail with the screen that they are currently viewing. So you can imagine this like a CCTV operator, right? They have X amount of students and they have X amount of screens that they’re looking at. And they can verify at a glance what their students are doing. And then after that, there’s a couple of key functionalities that the app makes available. So a teacher can click into an individual student’s screen and look at what they’re doing. And, you know, that has positive benefits. A teacher could direct a student based on precisely what it is that they’re looking at or what they’re working on, give them immediate feedback. They can also block a student’s activity, lock a student’s screen. Again, this is the fear that teachers would have. They would ask their students to open a book on X page and instead of being on the book on X page, they’re playing GeoGuessr or they’re researching something completely different on Wikipedia and they’re going a couple of pages deep. So it has that functionality. And then at the end of class, the app summarizes the activity of the class as a whole, but can also summarize the activity of each particular student. The way this was when I received training on this, we had an external company come in. And I remember the person giving the training, the practitioner, saying that when she works with her classes, she explains that for her, one second she was willing to accept as a mistake, but three seconds spent on an app that she hadn’t permitted, she considered willful self-distraction. So one second she wasn’t going to punish, but three seconds she would. And it struck me that my colleagues and I maybe weren’t considering the full implications of what it would mean to put an app like that one at the core of what we do in a classroom.

Will Brehm  4:05
What’s the sort of underlying logic for why such an app needs to be in the classroom to begin with? Like why would a school want to implement this level of monitoring and oversight?

Cormac Mac Gabhann  4:16
So I think there is a genuine and valid pedagogical concern, which is that when a teacher needs to have confidence that when they’re trying to achieve particular learning outcomes, or if they want to cover a particular curricular area, or encourage their students to fulfill a particular task, they need to, trust isn’t the right word because a classroom doesn’t necessarily create an environment of trust, but they need to have a belief and understanding that that’s what’s happening. Whereas I think a lot of teachers would be concerned about the potential distractions that are available through any device. I think there’s a wider logic of digital technologies, which is that the more data we can collect, the better the ultimate outcomes would be. So I think there’s a normative framework, which is data is good. And the more ways that we can collect data, then the better the experience will be. We’ll be able to learn, and Apple also make this clear in some of their supporting documentation. Apple are learning about student behavior in order to improve their app. And we’re all familiar with this. We know that apps in general collect our data in order to provide a better experience for us. And there’s also this idea that it also collects data so the teacher can make more informed decisions in the midst of a class, or indeed to use it as formative feedback for their next class. So they might be able to identify particular trends or moments of distraction or problematic apps that do distract their students. And therefore be more aware of them either in the next classroom, or in the immediacy of the class that is being done through via Apple Classroom. I don’t think that there are necessarily invalid concerns, which are prompting the creation and the use of apps like Apple Classroom.

Will Brehm  6:12
Right. And before we turn to some of the wider critique that you make about Apple Classroom, is there any evidence that with all of this data that’s being generated through Apple Classroom, that learning outcomes are improving?

Cormac Mac Gabhann  6:25
In my research, what evidence does exist is really patchy. And the OECD would recognize this, UNESCO recognized this. UNESCO used this phrase of robust evidence. There’s little robust evidence that supports the notion that increased use of digital technologies make education better. And that use of robust, I think, is interesting. We saw recently a retraction of a meta-analysis paper supporting the notion that the paper supported the notion that AI made education better. And that paper was retracted in the last couple of days because of the lack of robust evidence that was at the heart of it. So I think it’s quite difficult to disentangle the positive outcomes, if there are any, from the frame within which the research is being conducted to get that data.

Will Brehm  7:18
Let’s sort of step back and not necessarily just look at learning outcomes, but the use of Apple Classroom in classrooms, this oversight, this generation of data. What other sort of problems do you see emerging from it?

Cormac Mac Gabhann  7:31
My first concern is what is the nature of the pedagogical relationship that then exists between the teacher and the student? So I refer back to that anecdote. One second is a mistake. Three seconds is something that’s purposeful or willfully done. And immediately we’re in an environment of suspicion, of mutual suspicion, where the teacher and student aren’t engaging with each other in an environment of trust, but it’s actually openly distrustful. We need to make everything absolutely transparent in order to be sure that the class will proceed as the teacher wants it to. So I think that’s a relationship which isn’t, at its heart, an educational one. And there are questions as well about how are the students interacting? If what we’re installing is a pedagogical relationship between an individual and their screen, then what of the conversations or the interactions that they might have with their peers? And again, there’s an environment of suspicion which is building up around that. When I started teaching, there weren’t many screens at all. We had to go in that old experience of getting the trolley or going to a particular room. And the classroom is a noisy place. It’s a busy place. And that was something which was a feature of a classroom. And in my experience of working in an environment where students do have screens in front of them, it’s a much quieter environment. And those interactions between students, where they’re doing a lot of things that maybe we would have considered non-educational, but which are actually really important to them creating a relationship with one another, those experiences are quietened. And I think instead of that being a bug of education, I would consider that a feature of education. That’s not something which is apart from. It’s a part of the educational experience and what we should be valuing.

Will Brehm  9:23
It sort of seems like Apple Classroom and other digital tools that are similar. The way you’re describing it, it seems like it’s personalized learning to the extreme, where you’re in a classroom of multiple people, children, students. But the education is so unbelievably focused through this app on who you are and what you’re doing. You don’t have these social interactions with other students. And so learning all of a sudden becomes a very individualized thing.

Cormac Mac Gabhann  9:51
Yeah, there’s an idea which is at the background of that, which is that the classroom is full of friction, that there are things happening there that are fundamental distractions. And that could be the quality of the teacher, the quality of the resources. It could be the noise of our peers. And the idea is, if only we can get the absolutely appropriate scaffolding in place, at absolutely the right time, tailored to the distinct needs of each and every individual, we will get automatically these perfect outcomes for that individual. So I think there’s a bunch of assumptions in that idea of personalized learning, which kind of turn an education, this kind of mechanistic idea of, we have inputs, and with the correct influences, we’ll get these inevitable outputs. To my mind, that assumption needs to be challenged on the basis that, actually, education is a very humanist affair. It’s messy. If we take that friction out, perhaps we get these perfect outcomes, or learning outcomes. But is the educative experience, if we think of it as something broader than simply attaining learning outcomes, is the educative experience still what we think of it? Or is that friction actually an important part of what happens in schools, and in those relationships that we develop in schools? And then there’s also, putting aside that idea of learning outcomes, there’s a ton of other things that we do in schools that are important. It’s creating connections with one another. It’s socializing with one another. It’s forming bonds with one another. And what happens if those things are considered anathema to learning? And that is, in my mind, that is problematic.

Will Brehm  11:32
It’s like, wouldn’t we be happy for a student to be exploring and being creative, and maybe looking at things they shouldn’t be guided to look at? Going on a nap for three seconds actually might spur creativity and new ways of thinking. But in what you’re explaining, it becomes the definition of deviance.

Cormac Mac Gabhann  11:50
Absolutely. And, you know, it’s like teachers have always, since the dawn of time, been trying to recall a child’s or a student’s distraction. You know, the archetypal idea of the student sitting and staring at the window instead of being entirely focused on what the teacher is doing. But there’s never been a classroom where that hasn’t been the case. So then we need to ask, well, is that not just a part of what it means to be involved with a group of people trying to learn something or be engaged with something together? There are inevitable moments of distraction or of daydreaming or of floating away. And a part of the educational experience is to, or the pedagogical relationship, is to recall gently, perhaps, the attention, to recall the focus, and to draw the student back in. And the surveillance of Apple Classroom doesn’t have that gentleness. It has the discretion, perhaps, but doesn’t have the gentleness of what we might imagine as being a pedagogical relationship.

Will Brehm  12:50
In your paper, you treat Apple Classroom as if it has agency, like it acts as well on us and in schools and in systems. Why is that a helpful way to sort of think about this digital tool?

Cormac Mac Gabhann  13:02
I think it’s more than helpful. I think it’s necessary. Because a refrain that keeps coming back is this idea of it’s just a tool, that this software or the apps or the devices that we use, they’re just tools. And what you’ve kind of hinted at there, what that expression presupposes is this neutrality that the tool will just allow us to do whatever we want to do, but with a higher degree of efficiency. But actually, artifacts, all sorts of artifacts, not just digital technology, all sorts of artifacts are designed in very particular ways. Choices have been made at various stages of the design process to embed specific ways of being, ways of operating. And this isn’t in a cynical sense. This is just inevitably human sense that someone is making decisions about what an app should look like, what functionality is made available at particular times. And there’s a strong philosophical tradition of presupposing the non-neutrality of artifacts in general, not just digital artifacts, but artifacts in general. There is the value-neutral theory that if there are values embedded in tools, that they’re not sufficiently strong as to compel behavior. And I can understand that to a certain degree. But equally, I think it’s important to consider that these apps are framing possible actions, they’re framing possible behaviors. They’re not making those things inevitable, but they’re certainly prompting in very particular directions. So I think it’s important not to presuppose the neutrality of artifacts, because one of the reasons that they’re very often introduced, one of the justifications for introducing digital technology into classrooms, is as a counterpoint to the non-neutrality of the teacher. Consider the liberation pedagogies of the 70s and 80s. The teacher was problematized as a non-neutral political, possibly, agent. Whereas we don’t think of technology in those terms. Even in a commercial sense, GAFAMs very often would support the idea that they were just dumb pipes, so that there’s no need for them to take editorial responsibility, for example, for what was published on their platforms, because they weren’t arbitrating what was appearing there. They were just neutral publishers of content. So I think it’s important in introducing this software, any software or tools into our classrooms, to try to grasp at what possibilities that software, that technology is encouraging. And I suppose I use that term purposefully, in that there’s a difference between encouraging and rendering inevitable. Between adopting a deterministic stance, where technology will inevitably lead to X outcome. I don’t think that’s the case either, and it’s important to maintain that those tools are one agent in a classroom, amongst many others. The teacher has agency, students have agency, school leaders, administrators, policymakers have agency. There’s more than one agent in a classroom. The tools and the software and the hardware that we use are one of them, and they’re not a negligible one. They are framing teacher choices. They are framing student behaviors.

Will Brehm  15:58
Let’s maybe unpack that encouragement, how these tools encourage certain behaviors and actions and interactions. How has teaching changed from your experiences and the research you’ve done so far? What are these digital tools encouraging when it comes to the way in which a teacher is behaving? Previously, you said in the 1970s, teachers were seen as this political agent that were actively constructing a social reality, particularly for students and with students. What’s happening now with these digital tools like Apple Classroom?

Cormac Mac Gabhann  16:30
I suppose it can take a variety of forms. If we start, for example, with Apple Classroom, there are specific design choices there that are embedding a very particular type of relationship. The opening screen that a teacher has available to them is one where they immediately have access to what their students are doing. It’s not a choice that a teacher might have to see what activities their students are doing. That’s the first thing that they see. The data that the app collects, again, is not a choice. The teacher doesn’t ask to see the data. The data is presented as if it’s an a priori good that the teacher will want to see or that the teacher needs to see. I think in very concrete terms, the teacher still has agency. The teacher can choose to disregard the data. The teacher can choose not to look at what individual students are doing, but they are certainly encouraged to do so. The second type of trend or activity that I would certainly see, which is very prevalent as well in policy, is the embedding of student-centered. A very significant part of that reform was the introduction of classroom-based assessments. These were assessments that were supposed to take the pressure away from the terminal assessment that they traditionally did, and which was supposed to be self-directed. So it is project work and assessments that the students prepare during class time. That change in emphasis in assessment came at the same time as more and more hardware was being introduced in schools. Indeed, an interim report that was published a couple of years after Junior Cycle Reform was being implemented highlighted this kind of important relationship between the availability of digital technologies and the possibility of doing these types of assessments. It makes kind of logical sense, right? If you don’t have access to a computer or a library, then it’s very hard for students to self-direct whatever project they might be interested in. Within that, I think, and Biesta has highlighted this as well, is this notion that the traditional mode of teaching, the stage-on-stage mode of teaching, is perceived as being authoritarian, as being conservative. In opposition to that, student-centered learning is seen as being emancipatory or liberatory. And that very simple dichotomy, which is enabled by digital technology, makes or values specific types of learning strategies over others. And it frames, again, the pedagogical relationship between teacher and student through a very particular lens.

Will Brehm  18:59
So, you know, you’ve been talking a lot about sort of how the idea of a teacher is sort of changing and what their subjectivity is and how they behave in the classroom and thinking through, is it authoritarian, is it sort of, you know, quote-unquote freedom, and sort of being student-centered and pushing students with personalized learning where students sort of lead the way and sort of framing things in a normative sense where these tools help us understand normatively what types of pedagogy are valuable, when in fact they all might be valuable. When students are engaged in Apple Classroom and these types of digital tools, what happens to them? Like, how does this tool act on the student?

Cormac Mac Gabhann  19:39
Well, I think this is why Byung-Chul Han’s framework is really interesting and important to conceptualize that experience. One of the important notions that he raises is the question of psychopolitics, which he differentiates from Foucault’s biopolitics, but which for him is this focus on the mind, the ability to form and think in very specific and particular ways. And that’s articulated, or he articulates, that idea of psychopolitics around two key values of transparency and freedom. Again, making transparency appear as a good, as an intrinsic good, that the more we can make visible to others, then the better whatever activity we’re engaged in is. The more we can make our behaviors apparent, the more we can optimize them. And that freedom, which in Han’s notion of psychopolitics is deeply embedded with the coercion that happens at the same time. So there’s this paradox that exists, which Han articulates, that at the very moment that we consider ourselves to be free, and maybe we might unpack what that freedom might mean for Han, but at the very moment where we think we’re free, we’re actually very particularly and explicitly engaged with the modes of surveillance which are directing our behaviors. And that freedom is enmeshed with the transparency in that we willfully make our actions transparent to the owners of the data who continuously collect it. So that theoretical framework that Han is laying out, very robust work has been done by Shoshana Zuboff, for example, in her book Surveillance Capitalism, where she refers to the behavioral surplus that apps and websites are collecting on their users, which they’re using to ameliorate, to change their products, of course, and to inform what those subsequent design choices might be. But they’re also using that behavioral surplus to direct very particular behaviors, online behaviors, but also real-world behaviors. So what Han is articulating there is obviously in conversation and dialogue with Foucault’s idea of biopolitics. And the distinction is, for Foucault, it’s statistics and data which informed policies which affected the body, the biological processes, birth, death, literacy rates, etc. And the difference here is that it’s an order of magnitude greater. Obviously, Foucault is referring to the changes in thought and behavior which come as a result of those policies, of that focus on the biological. He is obviously looking at thoughts and the behaviors that come from those thoughts. But what Han is articulating is the capacity of these digital technologies to skip the biological phase and go directly for the psyche to mold it and around values which hide the molding which is occurring, around values like transparency and freedom, which we hold as being inherently good and constitutive of our subjective experience, but which in a Han framework are actually molding us quite surreptitiously.

Will Brehm  22:43
And for me, when I read Han, compared to Foucault, and I think Han says this quite directly, when he’s talking about how power works here, it’s not sort of a power of saying, no, you can’t do this in the Foucauldian sense of controlling what people can and can’t do, but actually creating power in a positive sense where people are more than happy to participate and give them all of this data because they get some sort of an enjoyment out of it, because they see themselves as a project, always trying to achieve something that they probably never will achieve, like a lifestyle of a billionaire, for instance. How does that sort of positive power play out in a classroom through something like Apple Classroom?

Cormac Mac Gabhann  23:25
I think that’s why Han is quite illuminating or certainly when I apply him to my educational context and the one in Ireland, he’s quite illuminating. So you said there about the positivity of Han’s notion of control or of the positivity of the power. And you’re right, he is very explicit. He says that in a Foucauldian framework, it’s no, you can’t. In a Hanian framework or in a digital framework, it’s that Barack Obama’s call of yes, we can or yes, I can. So if you think back to maybe what we might all imagine or conceptualize as being a classroom of the 50s or 60s with quite an authoritarian teacher who is forbidding students from going to the bathroom or forbidding students from using their left hand instead of their right hand to write in their copybooks, that’s a version of education which we’re happy to reject because we see it as being coercive. For Han, the replacement of that model hasn’t decreased the coercion. It’s changed the shape of it and it’s hidden the means by which that coercion or that power is applied to students. So if, again, we think of those classroom-based assessments that I was referring to, it’s no longer you must study for your exam. It’s the late multiverse now. You can discover and you can be curious and the idea of achieving and maximizing one’s potential is at the heart of this and is what Han refers to as the achievement subject as opposed to the sovereign subject or the discipline subject in Foucault’s work. Han’s notion of psychopolitics is very helpful in conceptualizing the different types of pedagogies and pedagogical relationships that become apparent or that become encouraged at that nexus of the three modes of teaching and the introduction of digital technologies.

Will Brehm  25:15
I was at a lecture recently, actually it was a film screening and at the end they had a panel and one of the people on the panel was McKenzie Wark who in the 90s wrote a book called The Hacker Manifesto and more recently has written things like Capital is Dead and she’s a fantastic scholar. But she said something, it was all about AI. The collection of data from these platforms like Apple Classroom, the number one goal is to collect data to monetize it. That’s the primary purpose. Any secondary effect is secondary. If it does have a pedagogical effect, if it does have all these other effects that’s almost beside the point for what Apple is actually trying to do. It’s really important, she was saying, that we don’t lose sight of that because these platforms can be so we can get so entrenched in them and so enchanted by them that we sort of lose the reality that there’s actually sort of this capitalistic endeavor taking place through what we’re inputting into this platform. And I say that, I guess, by way of conclusion because at the film screening what a lot of people were saying was basically we should just stop using AI we should stop using these platforms and really think twice before we integrate them fully. I guess you are a secondary school teacher as well as a PhD student studying a lot of these things like Apple Classroom. Can teachers just simply say no, I’m not going to use this? Is that actually an option to sort of opt out of these digital tools that are so pervasive in education today?

Cormac Mac Gabhann  26:39
So teachers always have agency and I think that’s maybe one possible manifestation of that agency. I don’t think a mass opt-out of teachers from working with these apps and hardware as it emerges I don’t think a mass opt-out is representative of the lives that their students are living representative of what their students are habituated to and indeed doesn’t benefit from the possibilities that these technologies allow for. In short, I think the simple answer is in general I don’t think a mass opt-out is necessarily a good outcome and indeed I don’t think it’s one that will be available for the vast majority of teachers. That said, I concur with the grounds of critique so first of all these services and products are overwhelmingly offered by very significant corporate interests they’re not charities, they aren’t selling these apps out of the goodness of their hearts. Money is obviously at the core of it but beyond that it’s the imperative of making money which is being introduced into classrooms and I think what I would rather see is that the imperatives of classrooms be introduced into technology. So what are the pedagogical needs that are concerning teachers and students because I think I had an interaction today with a student, the internet was down in our school for a couple of hours and the student said there’s nothing I can do, I can’t get ChatGPT anymore and he kind of said it half jokingly and half seriously I guess but there was this notion that well there’s a problem here, I’m so dependent on this thing that I’m not even sure what I’m engaged in when it’s not available to me anymore so students are also aware of the risks or certainly to some extent they’re aware of the risks that are at play when they become reliant on whether it’s AI or other software and I was at a talk once where someone said we’re getting this all wrong we need to start this argument from what do we need pedagogically and he wasn’t actually talking about what was happening in classrooms, he was talking about in society in general. What if the imperative was not commercial or social, what if we were to think of the imperative as being pedagogical. What impact does that have on design choices on how we choose to live together and the relationships that we construct either with one another personally or with our institutions what difference does it make to think pedagogically rather than commercially.

Will Brehm  29:22
Well, Cormac Mac Gabhann, thank you so much for joining FreshEd. Congratulations on your new paper. There’s a lot of big questions that I think will certainly see you through your dissertation and your PhD studies but hopefully many others will be following suit and thinking through because I think philosophically, ethically, practically, politically pedagogically, there’s a lot to unpack with these digital tools like Apple Classroom.

Cormac Mac Gabhann  29:47
Thanks very much Will.

Recommended Resources

Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power – Byung-Chul Han (Verso, 2017)

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power – Shoshana Zuboff (PublicAffairs, 2019)

The Beautiful Risk of Education – Gert Biesta (Routledge, 2014)

Good Education in an Age of Measurement: Ethics, Politics, Democracy – Gert Biesta (Paradigm, 2010)

Do Artifacts Have Politics? – Langdon Winner (Daedalus, 1980)

Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse? – McKenzie Wark (Verso, 2019)

UNESCO Global Education Monitoring Report 2023: Technology in Education – A Tool on Whose Terms?

Have any useful resources related to this show? Please send them to info@freshedpodcast.com