Keywords

1 Background Context

This chapter is a reflection on the convergence of changing contexts and changing pedagogies in higher education: one precipitated by a rapid shift towards ‘digital spaces’ and the ongoing work of reconciliation with Indigenous individuals and communities. This chapter, written in polyphonic voices, represents our respective encounters as educators and academics with and within the spaces and places of higher education in colonised and unceded Australia—and especially those constructed and mediated by digital technology. The aim here is to gather our collective thoughts and experiences; thoughts and experiences that necessarily carry with them questions concerning whiteness and colonisation, but which nevertheless remain open to the promises and responsibilities that accompany ethical participation in learning and teaching. Central to this chapter is a commitment to preserve the voices of each contributor—as each is expressive of a different inflection of scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL)—whilst simultaneously using SoTL and the challenge of speculative thinking as a way of unifying the chapter’s overall argument. The contribution of this chapter to SoTL in higher education is two-fold. Firstly, it provides examples of the movement from comfort to discomfort that is the prerequisite for change. Secondly, it demonstrates that speculation as questioning (questioning power, knowledge, the means and ends of education, etc.) is an activity and not merely the precursor to action. For discomfort and questioning are the learning and teaching spaces—the places—in which we are most open to the Other.

Learning and teaching in higher education takes place in spaces. These can be physical spaces enclosed by walls and adorned with labels such as ‘seminar room’, ‘classroom’, ‘laboratory’ or ‘lecture theatre’. The spaces described here are embedded in over 200 days of teaching and learning in rapid and repetitive periods of social and geographical isolation resulting from pandemic lockdowns. These conditions fructified the extension of learning and teaching ‘spaces’ to interactive environments mediated by digital technology, including but not limited to, teleconferences, podcasts, games and simulations, multimedia, social media, discussion fora and other digital communication modes and methods. Learning and teaching environments in which digital technology is central to the educational experiences of students and teachers, shall hereafter be referred to in this chapter as ‘digital spaces’. Examples of digital spaces (e.g. a seminar via Zoom) or ‘traditional’ settings (e.g. a seminar that does not rely on multimedia facilities) by no means exhaust what constitutes learning and teaching ‘spaces’. After all, the practise of learning and teaching spills over into, and is simultaneously inundated by education that takes place ‘elsewhere’. Students and teachers already bring themselves and their experiences of other places (e.g. home, nature, workplaces) into every educational setting, figuratively speaking. However, increasingly, digital technologies allow such places to be co-opted into the ‘digital spaces’ of higher education.

Our first concern then, with respect to re-thinking pedagogy characterised by a tectonic shift towards the proliferation and normalising of ‘digital spaces’, is to question the ontology of ‘digital spaces’. That is to say, exploring the question: What is a ‘digital space’ in higher education? This makes possible a re-imagining of teaching spaces beyond the assumption that they are closed, neutral, material, objective and reliable, and towards a position where we encounter them as ‘places’ that may be dynamically and communally occupied by bodies, memories, tensions and paradoxes.

There are many contenders for what constitute learning and teaching spaces, and unsurprisingly, just as many objections or criticisms of spaces so defined. For instance, viewing spaces as material, neutral and inert learning architectures may support a rather technical and functional commitment to efficiency, utility and optimisation in learning and teaching. Critics of such a view would insist on greater acknowledgement of bodies within these spaces and their inter-activity with the ‘agentive’ materials that make up such spaces. What a learning and teaching space is today (its ontology) is just as likely to be a ‘digital space’ consisting of chimera of physical bodies (staff and students present on- or off-campus) and digital representations and mediators (e.g. webcam streams or avatars). Yet despite the superficial differences between digital and non-digital spaces, the importance of what makes up such learning and teaching spaces may run much deeper. Undergirding these and other constructions of ‘spaces’ may be more profound and enduring metaphysical commitments that only become evident in moments of discomfort and disequilibrium: bidden or unbidden.

This brings us to our second concern. Coincident with the rapid turn towards learning and teaching in digital spaces in response to the pandemic was a commitment on the part of the Melbourne Graduate School of Education (MGSE) towards greater acknowledgement and inclusion of the knowledges, perspectives, and histories of nations and communities indigenous to Australia (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders) prior to European colonisation in the eighteenth Century.Footnote 1 Such a formidable task was undertaken within a broader social movement within higher education and other public and private institutions in Australia that was dedicated to practises of de-colonisation and a reconciliation between Indigenous and post-settlement Australians. Within our Graduate School this amounted to a re-imagining of learning and teaching across all programmes and a major shift in curriculum and pedagogy (which included the development of new subjects and the incorporation of Indigenous knowledges and perspectives into coursework activities, readings and assessment). Importantly, this collective enterprise went beyond a mere administrative restructuring. Re-thinking higher education in the light of Australia’s historical and current mistreatment of Indigenous people demanded a re-examination of our respective positions of privilege, power and culpability as Australian academics from white-immigrant backgrounds. That is, doing the work of reconciliation through learning and teaching in higher education called for a movement away from the familiar and the comfortable and towards a critical examination of what it means to be a white academic creating educational spaces that make reconciliation possible.

A moment in practise that contextualises the spaces we are evoking is recalled. In an initial teacher education class, an American international student questioned why we were devoting so much of our work together on addressing the ‘gap’ in the educational outcomes of Indigenous students when Indigenous Australians make up only 2% of the population. Anger arose in the room at such a statement largely in the form of indignance. One Australian-born student became so incensed that they had to leave the room to calm themselves. This was in the context of a student-led lesson, so the decision to step in was a loaded one, but the disruption as a discomfort emerging as anger, defensiveness and shame required a reset of the class, and then a debrief.

What the students think they need to know is ‘how to teach Indigenous students’, as though some essentialist reading will homogenise the needs of members of the oldest continuous culture on earth. What we aim to teach them is how whiteness informs much of the way that they have been taught and are learning to teach. There is pain in this. It is an embodied sensation that tells us we are doing the work. To acknowledge the privilege of whiteness is to acknowledge that until it is disrupted, all that protects this privilege—the power of cultural historical knowledge and legacies, the way it has written itself on our bodies and minds as most valuable—needs to be washed away to make way for social justice. In the neo-liberal university, competitive and capitalist, this cannot easily be seen as logical or even possible. Doing so risks devaluing the very thing we are ‘selling’ to our customer-students.

Moreover, can we do this without re-traumatising the victims of this history and adding to their labour? How do we shoulder the responsibility for the dominance of ‘white victimhood’ in these conversations? Eddo-Lodge (2020) expresses that: “In theory, nobody has a problem with anti-racism. In practise, as soon as people start doing anti-racist things, there is no end to the slew of commentators who are convinced anti-racists are doing it wrong” (p. 98). We are informed by scholarship of trauma and the effects of the generational and immediate affective static that creates dissonance in learning and teaching. This affective turn in teaching is considered here alongside the epistemic. Knowing is affective and practises of knowing, teaching and learning create sites (virtual, digital, blended) that often reproduce oppression and dominance, but can be brought to be sites of emancipation and reconciliation.

What follows is not a set of useful findings or conclusions to be accommodated perfunctorily into the contemporary scholarship of learning and teaching in education. Rather it is a set of accounts—albeit personal—of the discomfort brought about by the necessities of a world in which the Indigenous ‘other’ is no longer, nor should be, silent before us, and nor should the other remain beholden to the disembodied certainties that re-emerge from time to time in different guises. So, we ask: does the rush towards new digital spaces of learning and teaching disguise the oppressive weight of Western metaphysical assumptions about the ‘spaces’ in which learning and teaching in higher education takes place, and to the detriment of reconciliation with Indigenous communities? If higher education is in chaotic flux, and we are simultaneously called upon to ‘do the work’ that we should not expect oppressed people to do, do we have reason to pause, lest our impatience and sense of certainty does more harm than good? If we no longer assume or assert the right, nor the privilege, of charging ahead and re-shaping the future in altered but familiar forms, it is because the future—higher education—is not exclusively our own.

These questions go to the heart of the matter. Whenever we decide to re-think the present or speculate about the future of (higher) education, we run the risk of forgetting or ignoring the hidden or dormant assumptions, biases and prejudices that may colour the complexion of our imagination. Hence our first point of departure in this chapter involves metaphysical (re)thinking. That is, re-searching what is foundational in our thinking about educational (digital) spaces (for reconciliation). This starting point is a comfortably uncomfortable one. It emerges from a Western tradition that saw the vita contemplativa in terms of philosophy distancing itself from the mundane world of politics in order to engage with what may be the bedrock of our thoughts and actions—and perhaps even what transcends these. Yet, the task of inquiry cannot dwell too long in this ‘placeless’ space, for our commitments to care about and with the world calls us to examine the foundational within the world. Only then do we gain the advantage of surveying with scepticism the tyranny of certainty and dogma with which we often live our lives, or the prejudice with which we are encouraged unquestioningly to encounter the others.

2 The All and Nothing of Learning and Teaching Spaces

Two ideas haunt the Western imagination and infect our conceptions of education. The first is our capacity to entertain the idea of the infinite and the unbounded. The second is the evocation of nothingness: the empty, the void, a vacuum, zero. The discovery of these extremes has come to terrify us with their persistent threat of alienation. They threaten to make one, as Albert Camus (1955) put it: “[a] stranger to myself and to the world, armed solely with a thought that negates itself as soon as it asserts…” (p. 36). The availability of nothingness and infinity through reason and reflection are concepts at odds with an embodied experience of the finitude of life. They are also at odds with a larger historical account of the coming into being and the passing away of such things as species, mountains, climates and even (perhaps especially) cultures and civilisations. Nothingness and infinity also seem in conflict with that irrefutable experience of being (as being-with-other) that secures us against a free-fall into nihilism or solipsism. Yet despite the Western philosophical landscape being strewn with the wreckage of failed attempts to reconcile the way we live our lives socially and culturally with the metaphysical realms of either the universal ‘everything’ or the nihilistic and sceptical ‘nothing’, we remain bewitched by the promise of power and control that accompanies the potential for unlimited creation, or destruction.

The place of the infinite and the void in the Western imagination has a bearing on how we respond to the task of Indigenous inclusion in our teaching, as well as the call to adapt our teaching practises and content to the new platforms, technologies and practises that have come into prominence during the pandemic. An appreciation of the Western commitment to the metaphysics of nothingness and the infinite is helpful we suggest, not only in re-thinking the ways in which these commitments may have conditioned the ideology and practise of the British colonisation of Australia in the eighteenth century, but also in addressing the question of whether such a colonising impulse, or aesthetic (in the Kantian sense), is still in play today in higher education. If this aesthetic persists, then we ought to have concerns about the extent of reconciliation possible between Indigenous and non-Indigenous ways of being and knowing.

3 Learning and Teaching Spaces as Terra Nullius

Terra Nullius is a Latin expression that translates as ‘nobody’s land’. The phrase is used to describe justification for colonising a territory on the grounds that it is legally unoccupied. British territorial claims on continent of Australia were made in the 18th Century on the basis of this principal, dispossessing the Indigenous nations and communities of their land without a treaty, payment or compensation.

One way in which Western metaphysics and aesthetics of the infinite and the void may have bearing on supporting or hindering Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies in higher education, particularly under the ‘emergent’ and ‘emergency’ conditions of the pandemic. Specifically, it concerns an orientation towards the ontology of learning and teaching spaces that invokes terra nullius. The concept of terra nullius combines the infinite and void in a two-fold aesthetic, and simultaneously functions as an implicit political claim over the territory and sovereignty of the Other. Put simply, it is an impulse towards taking over educational spaces, negating what was there, and filling the space with a universalising sense of infinite ‘potential’. This ignores the deepest ontological, cultural, existential, and phenomenological occupancy of educational spaces by Others (setting aside the possibility for tokenistic recognition of ‘what has been done before’). Moreover, it calls upon a classical metaphysical distinction between essence and existence: one that serves to drive the experiences of being-a-student and being-a-teacher into the realms of infinite ideation and ideology, life-negating objectification, or nihilistic relativism. This double dis-placement of being leaves no room for the aspects of Indigenous ways of being that are deemed incompatible with the ‘all and nothing’ of education. That is, unless these other ways of knowing and being are co-opted.

The response to the pandemic, with its rhetoric of ‘pivoting’ to the ‘new normal’ is indicative of the profound challenge of including Indigenous ways of being into higher education within a climate favouring other priorities. It also suggests privileging a functional approach that ‘places’ Indigenous ways of knowing and being into digital spaces: into digital terra nullius. For terra nullius, involves a kind of rational and objective (but specious) ‘creative destruction’ that despite good and reasoned intentions, may result nevertheless in a combination of dis-placement and re-placement. Here the root word ‘place’ stands for conceptions of (learning and teaching) spaces that eschew the oppressive and negating ontology of terra nullius. Place is used to capture the embodied, phenomenological, and existential sense of being-in-the-world—in the tradition of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy—whilst also accommodating the notion of place as a site of human and other-than-human inter-action (see for example, Braidotti, 2019; Latour, 2005; Schatzki, 2003). It also includes language and embodiment as a site for political action (see for example, Cavell, 1999; Mulhall, 2014). Hence, the aesthetics of terra nullius under the disruption of the pandemic, allows a re-location of education into another place that may be inhospitable to the (Indigenous) Other, whilst making void what was there before.

There is, however, something to be gained from an acknowledgement of this two-step process of dis-placement and re-placement that is already evident in the language of ‘pivoting towards the new’ and its ilk. Such phrases speak not only to dis-placement and re-placement as such, but indirectly to an intermediate place: that which follows the experience of re-location but precedes a fully-fledged acceptance of the necessity to re-place what has been. This state of suspension in the in-between echoes contemporary uses of the notion of liminal space: literally the space marked by threshold. Rather than being seen as a place of inaction, passivity or apathy induced by an unavoidable transition, it may be better thought of in terms of dwelling in a place prior to any conscious, rational, or reflective thinking. This state of suspended judgement—a kind of intellectual silence or pause—is recognisable as the state of epoché as described by phenomenologists following in the tradition of Husserl (with earlier attribution to the Pyrrhonists). Viewed as such, the liminal is a space of ‘being’ of learning (and not simply online learning). It is a place to dwell—opened up by the ‘disruption’ introduced by the pandemic response; and not merely a necessary and rational step along the path towards a destination with infinite possibility. Moreover, dwelling in such an in-between place (as opposed to owning it) challenges the kind of nullification or reduction that is concomitant with the impetus for progress and ‘getting things done’ or ‘doing things differently’.

The argument here should not be mistaken for one of political or cultural conservatism or the wholesale rejection of change. Nor should it be taken as an abstract and mysterious positioning that is insensitive to the complex relationships that give rise to asymmetries of power and agency as enacted and materialised in the world. Rather, the argument is meant to caution against a naïve perpetuation or re-instantiation of the metaphysical foundations and aesthetics that are claimed to be at odds with other, non-Western ways of knowing and being. For instance, the phrase Indigenous Knowledge is already made to participate in the discourse of science and technology as a chimerical combination of (i) what is situated or placed in the cultural experience of Indigenous people (inside bodies, on and in country, language and song but outside of history) and (ii) what is usefully appropriated to serve the aims of scientific and technological discourse and practises. Similarly, the aesthetics of modernity and late-modernity (and dare we say post-modernity!) also participate in the dis-placement of the experiences of being white (and the ontological, existential, and phenomenological questions that attend such a way of being) into objects referred to as White beings characterised by the essence of Whiteness.Footnote 2 Such a manoeuvre, parallel to what was described earlier, runs the risk of simultaneously performing the negation of being (white) whilst generating a free-floating, essentialist and universalising idea of whiteness as if it were a property that merely attaches itself to an object.

Critics of social, political, economic, or other injustices would evidently be opposed to such a re-framing of their positions. Moreover, critics of a status quo that maintains institutional and systemic inequities would argue that action to minimise or overcome the harm faced by the marginalised or oppressed must be immediate and urgent. Yet, the capacity to dwell in place, need not amount to a silence that is complicit with oppression nor a form of moral negligence. For the kind of liminal, educational space imagined here provides access to ways of knowing, doing and being that counterbalance the controlling and calculative impulse that transforms things and experiences into merely manipulable objects and categories.

4 Artful Learning and Teaching Spaces

There are, fortunately, alternatives to the controlling and hyper-rational emergency response to educational practise that are likely to be better attuned to Indigenous life and culture. One alternative invites the recovery of a non-metaphysical orientation to being in the world that recuperates, rather than rejects wholesale, a conception of the infinite and nothing. Here we commend Heidegger’s seminal work On the Origin of the Work of Art (Heidegger, 1971), which distinguishes between ‘aesthetics’ as we have described it so far, with aesthesis, which instead attends to works of art (and this includes learning and teaching) as embodied, experiential and ‘placed’ (in the more expansive and inclusive sense described above).

This proposal has two advantages with respect to the integration of Indigenous perspectives into educational practise and the need to dwell differently in learning and teaching (digital) spaces. The first advantage of this artistic re-conceptualisation of our relation to place is that it sets aside the compulsion to see Indigenous knowing and being simply, or primarily in ‘aesthetic’ terms. That is, it mitigates a compulsive and totalising ‘aestheticisation’ of Indigenous Knowledge and ways of being, which tend towards a pragmatic objectification or commodification of Indigenous experiences, and at worst a kind of fetishising. Put another way, approaching learning and teaching spaces as works of art, suspends Western metaphysical commitments, and holds open a liminal space for Indigenous ways of relational being without reducing Indigenous people or practises to useful objects. Secondly, spaces viewed in this non-metaphysical way, allows the practises and experiences of education in online spaces, or indeed elsewhere, to be foregrounded as embodied and relational, and characterised by the inherent mutuality of the educator and education, as well as the education and the educated.

5 On Multi-narratival Discourses

So, what do educational spaces devoid or diluted of their Western hegemonic metaphysical assumptions look like in practise? How, precisely, do we foreground the embodied and relational in our teaching and learning, to allow room for Indigenous and other multi-narratival discourses?

These are significant pedagogical problems requiring resolution to be sure, and not merely because we, as authors, have suddenly found ourselves teaching in online spaces and, in our cases, mindful of not wanting to contribute to the perpetuation of the familiar Western metaphysical biases and commitments. The destructive dominance of hegemonic discourses over multi-narratival ones, of non-Indigenous over Indigenous narratives and ways of knowing, is not a purely Western or European colonialist story but a global one. The domestication, tokenisation and, in some instances, wholesale rejection or ignorance of unfamiliar Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies unfortunately has a long and sordid history.Footnote 3 The assault on Indigenous culture and ways of knowing can be found well beyond Australian shores, though we make for quite an ignominious pattern. As an example, the forcible removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, and therefore from their education, languages and culture continued well into the 1970’s. Asymmetries of power and agency, the marginalisation, minoritisation and exclusion of groups and silencing of voices has historically characterised the educational experience the world over. It is a phenomenon that knows no cultural boundaries and whose march into the digital world, if left unchecked, may well progress unhindered.

The move to digital spaces must therefore prompt educators and educational providers, interested in avoiding recasting the familiar old structures of power and perpetuations of inequality that have dogged the sector, to re-examine existing policies and practises, and especially pedagogies and knowledges. And nor should the motivation be thought of exclusively as a moral one. It is also one of blatant self-interest or self-preservation. The move to digital modes of delivery, whether synchronous or asynchronous, dual-mode or remote, has brought with it not just challenges but also affordances. Western-centric hegemonic narratives are, and will continue to be, diluted as the inevitable and well-publicised pivot to Asia gains pace and new educational markets open and spheres of educational influence shift and evolve. A paradigm demonstrated in part by the rapid growth in Chinese and South Asian citizens enrolling as students at Australian universities. Western narratives will inevitably continue to lose the centre stage. The educational turns and turbulence being experienced in our new digital domain, exacerbated by the disruption of the pandemic and the move to online learning, has led to the dissolution of spatial, temporal and, ipso facto, of cultural borders quicker than it would otherwise have been. This will endure well into the future.

Our classroom interlocutors have now changed, with both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, native English speakers and non-native English speakers, ‘domestics’ and ‘internationals’, increasingly occupying most virtual classrooms: digital spaces. They straddle geographical boundaries, which invites opportunities and challenges to consider questions of indigeneity elsewhere and anywhere. How quickly institutions and educators can traverse this digital and multi-cultural terrain, will, one suspects, determine how well they are likely to flourish in this new order.

So how, to repeat, do we guard against the mistakes of ‘our’ Western past? How do we, in this instance, white-immigrant educators, who have benefitted from historical white privilege, disrupt this dominance of whiteness, and incorporate multi-narratival discourses into our practise and educational spaces? What will other educational jurisdictions choose to do? What type of pedagogical practises will serve us best in our collective new order?

The answer may well lay in the promise of pedagogical traditions that rise above the cultural, metaphysical and ontological milieu that has given birth to them.

6 Community of Inquiry Pedagogy

Conversation and talk come naturally to most of us and commonly saturates most educational spaces; digital or otherwise (Splitter & Sharp 1995; O’Conner & Michaels 2007). This is significant, particularly if one accepts that semiotic mediation, ‘the use of “signs” in dialogue with self and others’ (O’Conner & Michaels 2007, p. 275) underlies learning and reasoning, language acquisition, meaning-making and knowledge construction.

In “Semiotic mediation, dialogue, and the construction of knowledge’ (2007), Gordon Wells goes one step further arguing that “[a]s signs are internalised, so is the “dialogicality” or meaning-making stance of the home culture internalised” (p. 276). Understanding, therefore, the type of talk that dominates our learning and teaching spaces or institution, may well provide the necessary insights as to why those from different linguistic, social, cultural, or ethnic groups might find themselves marginalised or ‘othered’. Knowing our classroom discourse allows us to know our classroom culture. Understanding how to manipulate the former, may in turn allow us to manipulate the latter. And there is one pedagogical heavyweight contender that may allow us to do just that.

Community of Inquiry (CoI) pedagogy is an educational practise whose theoretical roots can be traced back to the concept of dialectic, as evidenced in the extant works of Heraclitus, improved on by Socrates and his advent of the elenctic style of questioning and latterly by pragmatist philosophers Charles Sanders Peirce, John Dewey and practitioners of Philosophy for or with Children (P4wC) Matthew Lipman, Ann Margaret Sharp and Gareth Matthews. As a pedagogical form, CoI is characterised by communal discourse, it is dialogical rather than monological, and constructivist rather than transmissive. Such participatory approaches aim to disrupt the patterns that make members of oppressed groups see themselves as responsible for their situations while also obliging those who are in privileged positions to identify practises of theirs that extend oppression and inequity (following Bozalek, 2011). Access to both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic discourses are essential in overcoming discrimination. Content delivery, though fundamentally important, is necessarily accompanied by purposeful critical dialogue revolving around provocations, typically in the form of questions (student-generated or teacher-generated), appropriate for and accessible to its participants, and where collaborative and cumulative talk is favoured over disputational talk. This preferred interactional approach to teaching and learning sees the teacher-facilitator adopt a stance best characterised as being philosophically weak but pedagogically strong: ‘weak’ in the sense of resisting the temptation to view one’s role as being wholly about the transmission of facts and determining of truths, and ‘strong’ in the sense of knowing how to elicit critical engagement through one’s dialogic practise. It is also an approach where problem-posing is as important as problem-solving.

Proponents argue that CoI pedagogy is a culturally neutral and inclusive place, where collective meaning-making is co-constructed and questioning, inquiry, creativity and criticality are encouraged in the pursuit of making collective epistemic progress. Designed to foster rich, democratic, pluralistic and tolerant educational environments and where intellectual risk-taking is encouraged, CoI pedagogy makes for far more “fluid narratival spaces” (Kizel, 2015, p. 35) helping, so the argument goes, to guard against the thoughtless acceptance of “authority, prejudices and fashion” (Chetty & Suissa, 2016, p. 13). Supporting rather than denying multi-narratives, it is a pedagogy that deliberately invites excluded narratives to find positive expression within its dialogic framework and to coexist. Extending the ontology of learning and teaching spaces, CoI (at least when well-facilitated) serves as a safe place that allows the expression of the ‘otherness’ of the ‘Other’ (in Levinas’ sense). After all, “recognition of the Other/ness is a prerequisite for a philosophic CoI” (Kizel, 2015, p. 20).

Nevertheless critics, it must be conceded, have argued instead that even under optimal circumstances the challenge of enabling the voices of silenced, marginalised and excluded groups to be heard or noticed still plagues CoI practises (Chetty & Suissa, 2016). Its original founders, it is true, failed spectacularly to appreciate how differences in indigeneity, race, class and gender impacts classroom discourse: in terms of the stimulus material that gets chosen, the questions that get asked, and the voices that get privileged (Gregory & Laverty, 2021). But the CoI enterprise was never intended to remain fixed (at least as envisioned by one of its original founders Ann Margaret Sharp). It is now a sufficiently broad and robust enough field to welcome a diversity of theoretical views and practical approaches, and that openly invites critiques and debates.

CoI pedagogy, with its emphasis on dialogue and reasoning, intellectual risk-taking and democratic values still remains a largely Western construct with all the usual cultural baggage and more than a subtle whiff of Western-scented values. But it also provides lay educators, as well those tasked with populating our newest educational spaces, or those suddenly finding themselves caught under the yoke of their own nation’s dominant narratives, valuable pedagogical insights on how teaching can be done differently, where Indigenous and alternative ways of being, doing and knowing are deemed to enrich rather than encumber educational experiences.

That said, the loss of physical space has necessarily forced upon us (educators and institutions) new questions and problems around positionality and privilege.

7 Digital Space

Education does not start out as an uncontested or ‘uncontaminated space’ (Biesta, 2020, p. 1024), nor is it constructed from the outside. It emerges from practises within the space. Digital teaching and learning relationships are suspended in virtual spaces of image, audio and text, where windows into the lives and homes flicker in and out of frame. Suspended in such spaces, positions and power are felt through the screens across the world. Coming together as a class, the shared interest is teaching and learning. The relationships are bounded and defined by roles: lecturers, tutors, students, etc. There is an understanding that defines the meaning of the digital space and time that creates the community space—signalled by handbooks (which are really websites), and an institution with buildings and commons covered in grasses and other flora that the students may never smell or touch. Simultaneously, the loss of sharing a physical space with physical bodies starves us of many of the human signals and gestures that help us to communicate and connect. Bodies tell each other things, they allow us to feel not just the physical, but also the social space. They tell us if we are in a place of safety, a place where we are wanted, where we belong. They are also part of what tells us what is right and what is wrong. How to care for one another’s needs. These are ways of knowing (and knowing that one does not know) the Other.

The community members are living digitally saturated lives at a time when ethics in social media, machine learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are yet to face a reckoning. We share ideas through teaching materials and assignments that are scrutinised by software. Students are analysed into quantification of engagement that indicates how much of one’s screen time has been dedicated to engaging with this material, this subject, this learning community. It is the best we can do and so we have halted the conversations about screen-free time for wellbeing, forging ahead with sometimes barely scrutinised apps and software that have inherent biases, assumptions and injustices built into the core binaries of their programming. All at a time when truth, veracity, and verification are being questioned and manipulated through curation of social (and traditional) media platforms designed to capture our wants, needs and relationships, feeding us more of what will capture time and attention. This is justified with discussion about the affordances of measurement outcomes and effectiveness (for a full accounting see Biesta, 2015, 2020), but do these accountings have any way of responding to the public good that is supposed to be the contribution of education and the academy? Advancing reconciliation should be careful, ethical work. Yet how do we establish a shared vision required without a shared country and in the face of polarised individualised streams of ‘knowledge’ blasted at us each day? With respect, resonance, and a willingness to connect with discomfort through the discourse of inquiry.

The academy and its traditions have much to answer for, but as new generations of Indigenous Australian scholars bring long histories of knowing into digital scholarship, opportunities arise for reaching into the past and present and engaging with these works in our teaching of teachers. The work of a white educator for Indigenous awareness requires the positioning of oneself as the Other, forcing reflexivity into practise. One is guided by the discomfort, by the legacy of apology and the shifting foundation of country never ceded. Position yourself as an inquirer with your students and the discomfort of acknowledging and owning one’s privilege and position. Bozalek (2011) also identifies the need to include participants in research, in identifying privilege and marginalisation through encounters across difference. She draws on Tronto’s concept of ‘privileged irresponsibility’ to explain how decolonising methodologies (and we expand this to pedagogies) should include positionality discussions from both disadvantaged as well as privileged perspectives.

As white-immigrants to Australia, we force our discomfort to acknowledge the shame of the historical white privilege that serves us, yet we believe that we are working towards disrupting the dominance of whiteness. As we write this a storm is brewing around Critical Race Theory in the academy as our United States colleagues are under political surveillance for their scholarship drawing on Critical Race Theorists (hooks, 2014; Crenshaw, 2017; Ladson-Billings & Tate, 2016, for example) who argue that whiteness is a commodity and works as capital, garnering access and privilege. In the wake of the #blacklivesmatter movement, we can see how these themes resonate across experiences of exploitation and subjugation of people of colour across the planet, like the privileges of whiteness in Australia and Australian university classes.

Temporality and topographies shift and fold as centuries of physical and symbolic violence arise in emerging and now established Indigenist (Martin & Mirraboopa, 2003) voices in the academy. We bring those voices into our teaching through assigning readings and providing examples of trauma to explain the complexity of power in education policy and practise. In our globalised education experience, our classes have many international students predominantly in China, who know little of the history of colonisation and genocide in Australia, and so we eventually find a need to contextualise our efforts in the retelling of trauma, conscious that we are doing so in the possible presence of Indigenous students who are also members of the class. Is this a form of intellectual colonisation? Are we casting our own shadows onto these students by bringing these events into a globalised classroom by being a ‘nice white intellectual’ coloniser using Indigenous students as “vehicles for learning” (Singh et al., 2016)?

Within a global distribution of higher education (refer to Global Distributions of Students in Higher Education chapter), many of the international students are unlikely to ever set foot on Australian country, or understand the connection, care and conservatorship that informs the centuries of Indigenous knowing and being so can we be the vehicle for bringing Indigenous insights through the workings of and in the position granted to white-immigrants by a Western institution? There is cultural care to be afforded here: care requires reciprocity. In classrooms where racial identity ‘Others’ students from China from the institution and local students, at a time when global fingers are pointing their racist blame for the virus at the heart of the pandemic, this history helps to contextualise the power and privilege that can contort societal gaze in such a way that they do not have to “pay the cost of representation” (Eddo-Lodge, 2020, p. 148). Is it enough that we, as Nakata (2007, p. 315) advises, acknowledge that our versions of Indigenous knowledge are “screened through a filter that positions it to serve (our) educational objectives…drawing on…prior theoretical investments in knowledge and knowledge practise”?

8 Conclusion

Reaching for reconciliation in digital spaces of learning and teaching in higher education presents many challenges and opportunities as we are called upon to acknowledge the past, re-imagine education in the present, and carry on into that which lies ahead. This is an activity that ought not to be limited to the domain of experts and specialists. It is not an enterprise for others and by others. It begins instead by attending to our own experiences in the spaces of learning and teaching: spaces that owing to our embodied experiences of being, our memories, our histories, and our ethical commitments, are dynamic places that are alive with knowledge and knowing amongst others.

As colleagues, we believe that we must attend carefully and respectfully to such places of higher education even when—especially when—they are entwined with digital modes of inter-and intra-action, or they disrupt familiar and comfortable boundaries between beings, bodies, geographies and histories, or they are bewitched by a yearning for certainty and control. The care and respect required is available if educators can resist the temptation to rush in with solutions that negate the possibility for the ethical encounters with Other that are foundational to education. Likewise, it is to learn from our past, and take ownership of whiteness, to resist the temptation to (re)colonise (digital) learning and teaching spaces at the very point when they present themselves as globalised spaces that are at once everywhere and nowhere.

In this chapter we have asked if ‘Communities of Inquiry’ can address asymmetries of power and the privileging of some kinds of knowledge and knowing over others? How do we have conversations about our legacy of colonisation and neglect of Indigenous others when the embodied and existential aspects of country dissolve in the fluidity of occupying digital spaces? This chapter polyphonic voiced chapter purposefully invites educators to pose problems and speculate on other ‘what if’ questions rather than answering them: that is, evoke response-ability. To achieve this, we propose a speculative approach to the scholarship of teaching and learning in higher education that is generative: questioning how it is to be ethically open and responsible to Others.