Following scientific approaches to distance learning in schools during the COVID-19 pandemic, this chapter examines how learning in postdigital scenarios can especially harm disadvantaged students who have to cope with challenges of self-guided learning and its methods of (self-)monitoring. This is exemplified by examining drill-and-practice strategies and the creative challenges of e-portfolios. Instead of feeling excessively dominated by algorithms and the pressure of learning output, learners should have the opportunity to experience dialogic forms of transformative education that enable them to (re-)think and discuss in a critical and co-creative atmosphere. This can be arranged in video conferences, for example, where they are able to learn with and from each other, using media such as textbooks, podcasts, or films.

While these ways of learning do not eliminate postdigital challenges, they do help students to address them and to make use of new situations meaningfully and responsibly, taking into account that digital learning practices and processes must address issues of surveillance and contingency in order to empower the vulnerable critical learner. Postdigital learning can thus be based on an educational theory of recognition with the aim of reducing injustice and establishing inclusive education.

Monitoring and Being Monitored: From Educational Injustice to Promises of “Drill and Practice”

During the school closures in the COVID-19 pandemic, teachers and students had to cope with distance learning, digital lessons, and didactical challenges (Goetz, 2020) far removed from their regular everyday school routine (Huber, 2021). For many unused to distance learning, these experiences were entirely new (Huber & Helm, 2020). A well-versed handling of digital didactics can improve students’ education (Tulodziecki et al., 2019). However, many teachers first tried to avoid using technical innovation that they found stressful and confusing, instead working with printed worksheets in schools lacking the necessary technical equipment and didactic expertise to arrange digital distance learning (Eickelmann et al., 2020).

Suddenly these teachers were not only facing the new challenge of digitality, but also that of postdigitality, learning that human beings not only use digitality but can also be influenced and dominated by it, mostly unable to see through or overcome the entanglement between digital and human factors (Bettinger & Hugger, 2020; Redecker, 2020). In postdigital correlations of technical and social constructions, digitality and its various relationships to human beings and their practices become more relevant in discourses of educational theory (Jörissen, 2017; Macgilchrist, 2021a), inspiring inquiries such as “how data is entangled with shifting socio-cultural, political, economic, historic and material orderings and normalisations” (Macgilchrist, 2017, p. 100).

As a matter of power (Butler, 2014; Hall, 2019), social practices are not only initiated by subjects but also influence and construct them, while schooling can be understood “as precisely one salient mode of productive power, which is why there is such an important value in thinking concretely about how best to intervene in how it happens, and how it might be transformed” (Butler, 2012, p. 177). Taking into account that postdigital practices can be seen as power relationships in the entanglements between technology and sociality, the pandemic resulted in disadvantaged students in particular, with less social capital (Bourdieu, 1983), suffering from practiced forms of data-driven distance learning. While teachers were expected to support them (Anger & Plünnecke, 2020), the reality was that many children were in fact desperately lacking this support, with the result that they ultimately had to learn alone (Helm et al., 2021; Redecker, 2022a) with insufficient access to technology (Ariyo et al., 2022).

Leaving printed worksheets behind and entering the world of digital learning, a first step can aim at drill-and-practice programs (Hoffmann, 2020; Jornitz & Leser, 2018), offering children the opportunity to manage their learning process and to control its outcomes, while teachers oversee these learning practices with a “focus […] on self-assessment to encourage independence in the learner, although counselling backup should be available when needed” (Moisey & Hughes, 2011, p. 421).

Some disadvantaged children who need a lot of advice and support are unable to cope with these apparently autonomous processes of self-guided learning (Aufenanger, 2020), which have to be explored and exercised with support from experienced teachers (Burow, 2021). Confronted with digital didactics and postdigital learning challenges for the first time, teachers had to address digital practices in educating subjects both involved in and affected by these same practices, which can be problematized by praxeology (Butler, 2012; Knaus & Bohnet, 2019; Allert et al., 2018). Installing and using algorithms, digital subjects seek to monitor digital practices while themselves being monitored by these algorithms (Reichert, 2014). They lack the possibility to oversee and manage the amount, ways, and impact of surveillance practices. For example, internet research and communication means being monitored and influenced by programs that generate profiles, demands, and offers, while users are unable to fully understand how they are being prompted and “normed.” Even digital learning processes follow this pattern of postdigital practice.

Using drill-and-practice programs, students are monitored by algorithms and by their teachers, who make use of these. Michel Foucault (1995) described these methods of domination by authorities as disciplinary techniques. In practices of self-guided learning, learners are made to believe they are acting autonomously while in fact they are being influenced by activities they are unable to oversee (Selke, 2014; Redecker, 2020).

With the aim of widely replacing in-person teaching activities, drill-and-practice programs seem to offer a one-fits-all solution for learning issues that ignores the often dramatic situations of some socioeconomically disadvantaged students. They may lack support from their parents, who have been stressed and overburdened by the pandemic and its challenges, not only concerning health and working conditions. Some disadvantaged children in particular felt the further socioeconomic pressure from which their parents were suffering (von Klitzing, 2020) when jobs and future perspectives were at risk. Many of them were learning in an atmosphere of anxiety, depression, and uncertainty. While this rendered (digital) empathy and support all the more necessary, schooling during lockdown showed that children in several countries felt isolated (Joulaei & Zolfaghari, 2021) and developed learning deficits (Wößmann, 2021; Hurrelmann & Dohmen, 2020). Many were left alone in their self-guided learning processes or taught by bewildered and exhausted parents (Huber et al., 2020) who were unsuccessfully trying to replace teachers at home.

Creative Challenges: The Ambiguity of e-Portfolio Strategies

To avoid and overcome norming procedures of drill and practice, digital approaches can focus on more creative forms of online learning, for example e-portfolios that can be seen as digital learning diaries (Häcker, 2005). These show learning processes and outcomes in an ensemble of digital products such as texts, photos, podcasts, and films. This fosters a much more flexible and individual way of self-guided learning, where students plan, configure, lead, and evaluate their learning processes, possibly enriched by blogs, wikis, and chats. Such methods enable them to shape their outcomes in co-creative processes with their peers of different backgrounds and interests, thus supporting inclusive learning in contexts of digital diversity. Here,

the participatory nature of the web means that a two-way information flow is available to all. Both amateurs and experts, and all those in between, can access information, collaborate, and network online with others who share similar interests/passions. Learning can be reciprocal, with experts learning from and building upon the ideas generated by non-experts. (Wellburn & Eib, 2016, p. 67)

At first glance, e-portfolios that offer strategies like learning by teaching not only support the creative but also the autonomous and participatory learner, who has “responsibility for his or her own content. No longer a passive consumer, the learner is in an ownership role” (Martindale & Dowdy, 2016, p. 129). Rethinking this first impression, we can see an especially perfidious form of postdigital surveillance in e-portfolio strategies. Children face an ambiguous world of flexibility that can be both helpful and harmful at once (Meyer et al., 2011; Allert & Asmussen, 2017; Redecker, 2022b). They have to cope with the creative opportunities (Uther, 2019; Kanuka, 2011) and challenges (Bröckling, 2015; Filk & Schauer, 2011; Redecker, 2021b) of digitality, while suffering from a kind of Foucauldian governmentality (Foucault, 1995) in the name of creativity. Controlled and normalized by those who are often more interested in economic stability than in personality development, learners follow the rules of “an ethics of self-care and self-responsibility, and a battery of market-led rationalities and procedures” (Wilkins, 2012, 124), when they try to be more creative than others.

Ulrich Bröckling (2015) has described this mode of controlling the competitive controller with an elaborated logic of the “entrepreneurial self.” Assuming that in several life contexts, from the workplace to leisure activities and from early childhood to old age, we act like entrepreneurs of our lives, Bröckling criticizes the ideology of being motivated to act as successful and competitive managers of our fate while the struggle to be better, wealthier, and cleverer than others can be seen only as an apparently autonomous way of living our lives. Entrepreneurs of their fate usually fail to realize that their living contexts are pre-formed by others and the other—not only by authorities such as politicians or teachers, as Foucault (1995) pointed out in his critique of disciplinary techniques, but also by practices (Deleuze, 2010) that control the controlled as well as the controllers. Accordingly, Nikolas Rose (2000) points out the technical relevance of controlled self-guidance: “Thought becomes governmental to the extent that it becomes technical. It must connect itself to a technology for its realization: audits, budgets, tests, examinations, assessments, dossiers, types of inscription and calculation, forms of practical know-how and so forth” (Rose, 2000, p. 145 f.).

Rose criticizes “a kind of cybernetics of control” by “mechanisms to fabricate a kind of moral virtuous, self-activating citizen” (Rose, 2000, p. 171). In digital learning contexts, even teachers can be seen as self-activating agents monitoring their students creatively. This seems to be extraordinarily harmful because learners need their teachers to create helpful learning processes. Especially learners with special needs should benefit from creative, empathic, and didactically professional teachers (Helm et al., 2021). While Zierer stresses “that how school closures affect learning success greatly depends on individual schools and individual teachers” (Zierer, 2021, p. 11), even these schools and teachers can be seen as controlled controllers ruled by administrative and digital procedures:

Concepts of the self that value self-knowledge, self-awareness and self-entrepreneurialism; a moral and political environment in which taking responsibility for one’s life as an individual rational actor is privileged and promoted; the ability of digital technologies to monitor an increasing array of aspects of human bodies, behaviors, habits, and environments; the emergence of the digital data knowledge economy, in which both small data and big data are valued for their insights and have become tradeable commodities; and the realization on the part of government, managerial, and commercial actors and agencies that the data derived from self-tracking can be mobilised for their own purposes. (Lupton, 2014, p. 12)

Axel Honneth combines a critique of the entrepreneurial self with his theory of recognition when he argues against the “emphasis on the individual actor as a self-employer individually responsible for his or her own success or failure on the capitalist market” (Honneth, 2020, p. 103). Not only students but also teachers can be dominated as entrepreneurial subjects by the algorithms they have installed in order to monitor their (self-guided) learners. Bearing in mind that the entrepreneurial self described by Bröckling is a flexible competitor, learning creativity can be instrumentalized, normed, and normalized to motivate a struggle for learning outcomes with the main aim of building an economically flourishing future society of materially focused competitors in search of the most creative way to leave the others behind. Angela McRobbie (2011) argues against this instrumentalization of creativity criticizing a “rhetoric to become a space for producing young people who are to be ‘entrepreneurs of the self’ just as Foucault predicted in his mid-1970s lectures.” Here, creative digital learning aims at a scenario where “the so-called entrepreneurial self is more or less explicitly an educational goal” (Heidkamp & Kergel, 2016, p. 58).

This atmosphere of creative competition can be fostered in schools, supported by digitality as one of the most famous future technologies. “Forced to adopt frameworks, discourses and strategies based on efficiency, competition, innovation and flexibility, education institutions have become subsumed within the logic and vocabulary of business and entrepreneurial literacies” (Wilkins, 2012, p. 125), preparing and promoting the flexible, lifelong-learning member of working society by training the agile digital learner, who not only gathers but also creates economically useful information. Especially for those who are unused to dealing with these techniques of domination, this means weakening and damaging the learning self. Therefore, “an expansion of the analytical and ethical gaze in critical education technology research” is necessary in order “to focus on the techno-economic business model and the experimental technologies that increasingly underpin and configure a wide array of educational practices” (Macgilchrist et al., 2021a, p. 374).

Socioeconomically disadvantaged, disabled, or migrant learners who are unable to show competitive flexibility and creativity and therefore often do not receive much interest, help or encouragement from their teachers suffer from a certain self-fulfilling prophecy, which predicts further failure for these so-called “losers.” Teachers who are not motivated to promote weaker and underprivileged learners leave the disadvantaged behind and are confirmed in their judgement concerning all these apparently “stupid” students (Foitzik et al., 2019; Mecheril, 2018; Stojanov, 2019). Not believed able to learn effectively, underprivileged students lose support and encouragement and are excluded from the struggle for success:

The main domain of cognitive (dis-)respect during childhood, it should be noted, is the school […]. When children are exposed to social disregard, they are liable to underestimate their abilities and to discount their own views and beliefs. Thus these children are ultimately unable to integrate these views and beliefs into their current life and this problem will persist into their future public life. (Stojanov, 2019, p. 334)

Furthermore, the burden of being under surveillance by teachers, other learners, and algorithms is much more damaging where digital creativity, self-guidance, and flexibility cannot be managed by learners who become disoriented by the vast amount of internet information they have to consider, filter, and evaluate in their learning research practices (Reichert, 2014; Schaumburg & Prasse, 2019). They have to find their way through the diverse contents of manifold websites and are challenged to decide which information is trustworthy. Digital communication can impose yet further pressure when students are faced with the input of various, possibly contradictory statements in the entanglement of algorithmic and human creation and the control of communication: “Algorithms owned by large corporations often determine the information that people are exposed to, but it is evident that outcomes may be unpredictable when vast numbers of users receive this information” (Ungerer, 2021, p. 560). This entanglement of control and contingency is confronted with a state of over-control. Students suffer from algorithms that monitor what they do online, how often they are active on learning platforms, post in chats, and react to those of others (Karsch & Sander, 2020). The struggle for the most creative monitoring practices ultimately leads to frustration and exhaustion, deeply weakening those who are disadvantaged before the struggle even starts. Postdigitality can further reinforce these mechanisms of injustice, especially dominating vulnerable learners with extraordinary effectiveness. Already battling with learning difficulties, they may not be able to tolerate the feeling of being under continuous observation, while postdigital practices dominate and norm them by—automatically—watching, recording, and evaluating their activities (Damberger & Iske, 2017; Selke, 2014).

Not knowing who is collecting data about whom, when, and where (Meyer et al., 2011) means that especially students who need special support suffer from the ambivalence of control and contingency. If students do not know when they are under surveillance, they expect constant observation and feel the pressure of being dominated and suppressed all the time. This can make them anxious, demotivated, and insecure—another self-fulfilling prophecy prejudicing the less successful learner. The pandemic can be seen as a prominent moment to begin further research on how disadvantaged students in particular cope with digital learning. While educational data and learning analytics can be very helpful when designing future education, they are also means of surveillance that treat these learners as mere objects of observation while their privacy and personal dignity are at risk (Baker & Inventado, 2016). Teachers and researchers are called upon to balance the opportunities and disadvantages of these practices.

Dialogic Didactics in Video Conferences: Where Digital Education Means More than Learning

While the digital learner aims at profitable learning outcomes, ruled by technically arranged monitoring processes in the struggle for economically successful outcomes, we can ask how learning subjects—and especially the disadvantaged—can be empowered by educational attitudes and practices that support personal development. This does not mean denying the relevance of economically profitable learning outcomes, which are indeed manifest in personality development. While learning focuses on many aims and forms of internalization, even of the unconscious and conditioned kind, education can highlight critical learners, bringing them into meaningful and responsible relationships with others, the other, and the self (Mayrberger, 2020).

Learners should be motivated “to develop skills and literacies that are appropriate for deep learning from (or in spite of) the published but unfiltered information they are currently encountering” (Wellburn & Eib, 2016, p. 70), focusing “the need for evaluation and critical thinking when using the Internet for research” (Johnson et al., 2011, p. 407) and communicating in digital scenarios. This seems to be a much more demanding form of learning than drill and practice or a creative struggle for economically successful learning outcomes. It can refer to digital means supporting the critical subject, not only affirming dominant practices, and it can also problematize these practices. If we talk about practices of subjectivation (Schäfer, 2019), we should not forget to consider subjects and persons at the same time. Looking at practices where subjects are constituted and formed, we should remember that there is no problematizing of subjectivation without a subject. Practices of subjectivation can only be relevant for us when we experience and address them, which is not possible without an experiencing and thinking subject.

Postmodern deconstruction theorems have taught us to question the subjects of truth and autonomy (Foucault, 2001). Postdigitality reminds us of the technically dominated, subjected self, no longer a knowing but rather a questioning subject with the possibility of focusing on forms of education. Here diverse students learn together, asking further questions and discussing, evaluating and elaborating on them, while the teacher’s personality is crucial for children’s critical learning in processes of transformative education (Koller, 2012). The teachers can also question their students’ point of view, motivating them to reconsider learning outcomes.

This can be achieved in video conferences that establish dialogic didactics (Goetz, 2021; Redecker, 2022a) and encourage learners to question their attitudes and argumentation. These learners benefit from teachers who avoid offering schematized answers. Instead of drill-and-practice internalization, students learn from questioning in processes of transformative education, experiencing that their former views can be re-examined. Here, “students do more than learn, and the teacher is quite explicitly an educator” (Macgilchrist, 2017, p. 99).

Transformative education can be explained with a phenomenological approach (Waldenfels, 2011; Meyer-Drawe, 2008) that focuses the individual and perspective-informed experiences of each learner within the plurality of digital diversity. Doubting one’s own regular patterns of explanation can be harmful because we cling to our practiced patterns and often do not wish to abandon them when transformed by new experiences; on the other hand, without questioning our structures of explanation, we are unable to learn something qualitatively new, which can be referred to not merely as learning but as Bildung. Learners need somebody to question their views and help them to accept new experiences, stances, and reasoning. They benefit from teachers’ encouragement to venture forward in this uncomfortable but enriching process of transformative education, where they are not only astonished and surprised but also disturbed and sometimes even helpless.

We need dialogic partners in “a space in which risk can be welcomed” (Macgilchrist, 2017, p. 99), helping us to cope with this educational process of critical questioning. Dialogic didactics focuses on empathic and sensitive teachers who do not necessarily provide new answers but who cast doubt on the old ones. They can ask questions such as: What do you think about this? How can we prove it? What surprises you? And how can we deal with this? Finding and pointing out their reasoning in regular video conferences, children enter into discussion not only with teachers but also with their peers. Critical thinking becomes communicative in manifold ways: “Critique moves the conversation forward by raising questions and troubling those previously held assumptions and convictions, including our assumptions about what work the word ‘critical’ should be doing. It also moves the conversation forward by imagining otherwise” (Macgilchrist, 2021b, p. 247).

Here, postdigitality focuses not only on an overwhelming relevance of digital technology in learning processes but highlights pedagogical actors, methods, means, and goals, looking at digital ways of learning that are not instrumentalized for aims other than personality development. In this context, participation—even in inclusive and transcultural settings (Redecker, 2021a; Filk, 2019)—can mean encouraging children to decide meaningfully and responsibly between several ways of finding and discussing their reasoning in learning processes.

Far removed from drill-and-practice impositions and a creative struggle for learning outcomes, this scenario can be arranged via video conferences where members of a learning group meet each other, problematizing learning contexts as if they were together in person (Redecker, 2022a). Here, the so-called social distancing is only a physical distancing. Using cameras, microphones, and loudspeakers, members of the learning group can see and hear each other in real time, enriching their communication with digital means such as chats, films, textbooks, cartoons, podcasts, or wikis. In video conference learning groups, the participants can learn with and from each other in different social formations, such as breakout rooms, where small groups can be formed according to different learning goals and methods. Video conferences can also make use of think-pair-share arrangements or controversial and detailed discussions with the whole group, where all participants can feel that their voices are heard. In such debates, participants learn to shape, present, and question their arguments and cooperate with others in an as-if scenario, analogous to in-person interaction but enriched by digital research and communication methods.

Disruption, Critique, and Empowerment: Recognition in Postdigital Scenarios

While children missed their daily school routine during the pandemic, regular video conferences helped to empower students, disadvantaged students in particular, and give them structure and support (Goetz, 2020) via daily meetings involving live contact. This form of learning together offered the flexibility of mobile learning (Uther, 2019). Highlighting the transformative and discursive potential of video conferencing does not have to mean completely neglecting drill-and-practice strategies, however. These strategies can be helpful in preparing processes of critical learning in postdigital entanglements of various online learning methods. These can also be problematized in meta-reflections that discuss the advantages and challenges of different learning approaches:

In this sense, digital education prefigures a new assemblage of human and non-human actors, since students receive individualised feedback from not only their teachers and peers, but also from software. Education, in this sense, is about the whole person, it includes space to reflect together on the technology and to take a critical distance to the media being used. (Macgilchrist, 2017, p. 99)

Video conferences can be arranged to problematize challenges of the digital entrepreneurial self in- and outside the meeting. For example, in common agreements, rules can be established in the group to avoid both harmful communication (Uebel, 2021) and an exaggerated (self-)monitoring of chat and mail activity: “instructors can vary the degree of openness to allow students to develop a level of comfort while allowing them to practice self-directed, networked learning in safe spaces” (Couros & Hildebrandt, 2016, p. 158). At the same time, students have to learn that even safe spaces are often not completely safe. By working with communication rules, students learn self-responsibility and social esteem, which is more than helpful, especially for disadvantaged learners.

Although video conferences offer the opportunity to learn in communicative arrangements of transformative education, they do not provide a one-fits-all remedy with which to overcome the entrepreneurial challenges of postdigitality. These challenges can be deconstructed and problematized, but not denied or completely removed. In digital learning contexts, we remain subject to practices we do not have completely under control, while at the same time they continue to “watch over” us. Even in video conferences, data about participants can be collected, evaluated, and processed. Chats are recorded and attendance times are registered. Combined with further digital devices on learning platforms (Gerhardts et al., 2020), students can suffer from the pressure of always on and anytime anywhere promoted by mobile learning. It is therefore more than important to shape a digital education that focuses on the empowered and critical learner in discursive lessons enabled by video conferences.

Considering the entrepreneurial self and its dangers, teachers have to consider that even the critical learner is restricted by the limits of autonomy. Educating the critical digital subject means strengthening powers of reasoning, resistance, and social responsibility. Dealing with disability in inclusive scenarios, we can learn consideration for special needs, for example focusing on the “ability of asynchronous communication technologies to give students equal opportunities to contribute. When facilitated effectively by the teacher, this can result in a democratic learning environment for all students” (Kanuka, 2011, p. 104). Disabled learners can also be supported by assistive technologies and instruments such as personal environments or screen readers (Llouquet, 2017), bearing in mind that these measures can also mean restriction and less participation at the same time (Weich, 2020), another example of the ambiguity of harmful and helpful digitality.

Beyond competitive structures, and without denying power relations, a mutual education (Stojanov, 2011) can be established in scenarios of digital diversity considering that participation as a path to educational justice is based on an—even controversial—interaction with teachers and peers (Goetz, 2021) that enables students to support one another. And not only people with disabilities: we all have our restrictions and handicaps that can help us to deal realistically and confidently with challenges of postdigitality and our vulnerable selves in line with approaches from recognition theory (Honneth, 1995, 2020; Stojanov, 2019; Huber & Mork, 2021).

These approaches are established especially in contexts of diversity, disability, and inclusion (Boger, 2020; Felder, 2016), as well as interculturality (Castro Varela & Mecheril, 2010), which can be fruitful for an education-specific recognition theory of postdigitality. Referring to Axel Honneth’s famous concept of recognition, we can ask how processes of addressing and re-addressing in digital learning scenarios can be shaped and situated meaningfully and responsibly. Highlighting “the communicative or cooperative structure of all processes of ‘Bildung’ or education,” Honneth (2020, p. 103) emphasizes “the dependency of the child on others—be it peers or adults—by pointing out that his or her moral and cognitive development is deeply relying on different forms of recognition, starting in early childhood with love and care, followed by esteem in its many forms, and finally respect.”

Unlike Honneth’s prescriptive position, a descriptive direction of recognition theory (Bedorf, 2010; Ricken, 2013) denies the possibility of knowing each other and therefore of succeeding in recognition. Addressing and re-addressing each other, we try to get to know the person we are dealing with without success, determined by the social sense between us (Schaller, 1987), a kind of “inter-subjectivity” (Meyer-Drawe, 2008) that cannot be assigned to concrete interactors even though the latter co-construct it. Communication and the way we see one another is therefore vague, ambiguous, and contingent. This alienation is intensified further when communicating in video conferences. For example, looking at the computer screen in video conferences, we can only see the heads of other participants and not the whole person. There is often a time delay when we write and read posts or hear spoken sentences, and we have to tolerate a technology-induced incongruence between meaning, saying, hearing, reading, and interpreting, which can make us feel dominated by precisely those digital scenarios on which we depend.

This can be examined and problematized in a theory of postdigital recognition that attends to the vulnerable, digitally dominated, but also resistant human being who can benefit from solidarity and cooperation. A postdigital theory of recognition should therefore not stop at pointing out the opposition between prescriptive and descriptive recognition. It should discuss a postdigital recognition that realizes the pressure of contingency and control without failing to problematize how far practices of addressing and re-addressing can be shaped meaningfully and responsibly. For ultimately, the digital subjects of education are not “something in the place of which something else, as an equivalent, can also be placed”, but an “end in itself” with “inner worth, that is, dignity” (Kant, 1786, p. 77).

A postdigital theory of recognition that regards descriptive and prescriptive aspects in concert can empower digital learners. Such an approach avoids the desperate fatalism of both so-called mistaken recognition and of normative restriction. It encourages critical thinking on the part of the empathic learner, who builds personal strength on the basis of their own vulnerability and solidarity with the aim of appreciating and handling the ambivalence of digital opportunities and dangers. Vulnerable learners can embrace meta-reflection even beyond e-portfolios or video conferencing: virtual reality, for instance, can help them to question their horizons of experience and reflexive positions. By discovering the ethical aspects of history (Marrison, 2021), for example, they can improve their own educational process rather than optimizing it in an entrepreneurial manner.

Both compliant and resistant digital subjects can learn to cope creatively with postdigital challenges (Knaus, 2020), experiencing that they are not only influenced by but also playing with digital technology and features (Allert et al., 2018). They can escape monitoring to a certain extent, for example by not using the camera in a video conference, changing the background setting, or using a false name. By addressing human vulnerability and finding one’s own reflexive and responsible way to deal with digitality, the empowered learner can exercise strategy and flexibility, refining digital creativity and practicing it in collaborative solidarity.

Conclusion and Outlook: Resistance and the Vulnerable Learner

Problematizing digital learning in pandemic-related circumstances, this chapter has critiqued drill-and-practice scenarios and highlighted learning strategies by e-portfolios. These digital learning diaries can overcome the schematized self-guidance demanded by drill-and-practice strategies. At the same time, however, e-portfolios can exercise a much more harmful form of control as a result of postdigital practices that norm creativity. While this can be extremely harmful for disadvantaged students, a further step of the argumentation has concentrated on video conferences, which provide a digital space in which processes of transformative education can be inspired.

However, while video conferences can offer this space for deconstruction and problematization, they can neither fully overcome nor deny the postdigital pressures of control and contingency. This can be problematized, however, by a theory of postdigital recognition that highlights the vulnerable, empowered, critical, and resistant learner who aims to deal with digitality in a responsible and realistic manner. This can be seen as an ongoing issue in the establishment and promotion of transformative education in co-creative learning settings.