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Instructional design, technological design, and their cultural politics

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Abstract

How instructional sequences guide learning processes are often regarded as a neutral act. However, does designing instruction carry a politics? This investigation explores how instruction is made as a pedagogical object. The purpose is to explore the epistemological principles and conceptual framework that produce instruction’s formalized pedagogical processes, each of which carries uncontested cultural and political aspects. Through textual analysis, the article considers theoretically and historically the problem of how instruction’s design entangles people, power, and technology to operate as social technology, making up human kinds when instruction is designed as rule-bound programming—as an algorithm. Such algorithms engineer cultural action to engineer more harmonious human relations, embodying a greater political project that closes a technocultural lag, ameliorating human deficiencies while producing social exclusion and inequality.

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Acknowledgements

I thank three anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments, suggestions, and criticisms.

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  1. Department of Education, Wells College, Aurora, NY, USA

    John P. Ivens

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Ivens, J.P. Instructional design, technological design, and their cultural politics. Educ Inf Technol 28, 12823–12843 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-023-11726-4

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