Educating for ethical know-how:

Curriculum in a culture of participation

and complicity

Dennis Sumara, Brent Davis, and Tammy Iftody

Ethical know-how is the progressive, firsthand acquaintance with the virtuality of self. (Varela, 1999, p. 63)

Abstract

In this paper, we point to an infamous example of cyber bullying (the “Star Wars Kid”) to frame a consideration of the sort of situated ethics needed to mediate relationships in a seemingly infinitely and complexly connected communicative cyber world. We argue curriculum that educates for “ethical know-how” aims to provide students with meaningful opportunities to represent and refine their empathetic identifications with others in both real and virtual contexts, by drawing on both real and imagined experience. We begin with an overview of contemporary theories of human consciousness, and further explore the ways in which consciousness is inevitably entwined with emerging technologies. We then look at how this entanglement has been taken up by critical and complexivist conceptions of curriculum and pedagogy. We end on a tentative note by considering the daunting questions and yet-to-be-understood implications of a participatory understanding of consciousness and an emergent understanding of ethics.

Over the past several decades, theories of the subject, of subjectivity, of mind, and of language and narrative have profoundly influenced work in curriculum studies in terms of what constitutes the identities of learners. Informed in particular by poststructural perspectives on language and narrative, learners are understood to be both producers of and products of discourse and discursive practices. As many commentators have argued, schooling participates in the ongoing production of the subject (Britzman, 2003; Davis, Sumara, & Luce-Kapler, 2008). From this perspective, curriculum is not seen only as the topics, ideas, or materials that are provided for learners, but also as influential to the ways learners might experience and interpret their own and others’ identities.

While this theoretical understanding provides a more hopeful and expansive view of subjectivity, it also presents a few challenges, particularly now when experiences and expressions of identity occur in cyberspace. What sort of ethics might guide our relationships with others in spaces that are not always face-to-face? Can something be learnt about curriculum practice by examining cases where what Varela (1999) would call “ethical know-how” breaks down in the social spaces of the Internet? Can we teach ethical know-how?

We grapple with these issues in this article, framing the discussion by revisiting an event of cyber bullying that drew international attention. We then offer a brief overview of contemporary theory and research on human consciousness, followed by a look at how new technologies both inform and are informed by these studies. We then link discussions of consciousness and technology to education by drawing on the work of critical theorists and complexivists who have troubled common-sense conceptions of curriculum. Concluding with the assertion that ethical know-how must be taught, we present some questions and challenges for how educators might think about this daunting task in a seemingly infinitely and complexly connected communicative cyber world.

The Star Wars Kid as a limit-case example

In its ubiquity, the following case has seeped into public consciousness and now frames most popular discussions of cyber bullying. It is the tale of 15-year-old Ghyslain Raza, infamously known as the “Star Wars Kid”. Using equipment available at his private high school in Quebec, Canada, Ghyslain innocently made a video of himself wielding a golf ball retriever as a mock lightsaber while re-enacting a scene from Star Wars. The video was not very flattering to its portly star, and his actions were often clumsy and awkward. Yet none of this should have mattered. This was a private production. However, on 14 April 2003, three boys from the same school found Ghyslain’s video and posted it on the Internet without either his knowledge or consent. The rest is viral history. By October 2004 an Internet site dedicated to hosting the video had recorded 76 million visits (Haykowsky, 2006).

This saga of the Star Wars Kid can be analysed in several ways. Within this particular example, both the destructive and productive nature of mass communication technologies are evident. First, there is the memorable narrative of the victim’s experience. What were the consequences of this instance of cyber bullying for the victim? The international public’s ridicule and local derision from classmates was too much to bear. Ghyslain dropped out of school, spending the rest of the semester in a children’s psychiatric ward. His parents eventually sued the parents of the three boys who posted the video. As Haykowsky (2006) reports, “The Statement of Claim included long excerpts alleged to be from Internet chats among the three student perpetrators, showing that they lacked remorse and bragged of their attempts to avoid being caught by school officials.” In 2006 the case was settled confidentially out of court.

The narrative that surrounds the victim’s experience is a predominantly legal one and relies on the assumption of a coherent boundary between the actions of individuals and the culture in which these individuals act; in brief, the classic self–society dualism. In this view, the cyber bully is defined in instrumental terms as one who sends, posts, or otherwise distributes socially harmful or cruel texts or images using the Internet or other digital communication devices (Willard, 2005). According to Willard, the tactics of the cyber bully are many, including flaming, harassment, cyberstalking, denigration, masquerade, outing, trickery, and exclusion. All of these tactics are employed strategically in the new social spaces created by networked communication technologies.

Yet, within this story is also a lesson about the unpredictable and arbitrary nature of text and image on the Internet—conditions that openly thwart any attempt to draw such definitive boundaries between self and society, personal and social responsibility. The three boys who posted the video could not have anticipated its ultimate popularity. The original video became the raw material for hundreds of future productions and parodies on the Internet as well as television. In many of these subsequent imitations it was the amateurish form of the video that drew interest, not necessarily the subject at the centre of it. That is, once the video went viral, Ghyslain, the legal subject, became the Star Wars Kid, an inherently narrative subject (or character).

We will return to the narrative of the Star Wars Kid in the final section of this paper after touching on three topics: (1) current insights into consciousness; (2) the entwinements of modes of consciousness and prevailing technologies; and (3) the cospecifying characters of consciousness, technology, curriculum, and pedagogy. Throughout these discussions we attempt to foreground the manner in which notions of transdisciplinarity, emergence, and complexity have become (or are becoming) the assumed backdrop in studies of consciousness and technology (and, to some extent, discourses and practices of curriculum). With those details in place, we revisit the narrative to ask about the possible contributions of contemporary research on human consciousness and technology to critical studies of curriculum and pedagogy.

Consciousness as an emergent phenomenon

In describing the evolution of human consciousness, Donald (2001) emphasises the need for a dialogue between the humanities and the sciences that bridges the two worlds, a theme echoed by neuroscientists (for example, Edelman, 2004) and cultural critics (for example, Johnson, 2004, 2005). Three primary assertions have been made that are germane for educators regarding how emergent technologies create conditions for the education of consciousness: consciousness is a process, not an object; consciousness is everywhere and nowhere; and consciousness is an intersubjective phenomenon.

Consciousness is a process

There is a growing consensus among theorists and researchers that consciousness is a complex cognitive process that emerges via neurophysiological interactions occurring in the brain, but one which cannot be explained as merely a by-product (epiphenomenon) of those interactions (Capra, 2002; Damasio, 1994, 1999; Edelman, 2004; Stewart & Cohen, 1997). Consciousness and cognition are both understood to be distributed across the entire organism embedded in its environment. Human consciousness has emerged as a special kind of cognitive process that allows us to track our own subjectivity within this emerging complex biocultural matrix (Capra, 2002; Donald, 2001). Therefore, the unified sense of self that we imagine controls our actions is an emergent property of both the brain’s organisation and its enculturation. As Donald (2001) argues, the personal feeling of consciousness depends almost entirely on culture for its realisation.

Consciousness is everywhere and nowhere

Most contemporary scientists and philosophers reject the notion of a “Cartesian theatre”—that supposed place in the brain where objects are brought into the light of consciousness for a central observer. Although most of us experience consciousness as unified and coherent, physiologically it is a global process involving the interpenetrating activities of neuronal populations distributed throughout the brain (Edelman, 2004). Consciousness is not “centred” anywhere; it emerges from a decentralised network of biological and cultural connections (Capra, 2002).

However, there is a tendency to assume the centrality of consciousness because this is what conscious thought feels like to us. A gap between the biological and phenomenological realities of consciousness is thus revealed. Consequently, a theory of consciousness for educators must challenge those metaphorical reifications wherein the individual brain remains the primary origin of consciousness. This is the problem around which transdisciplinarity in consciousness studies has thrived: how can we explain the neural/cognitive processes that lead to consciousness and also account for the way that consciousness is experienced by an individual? Simply put, consciousness is an emergent property of the creative collision between cognition and culture (Donald, 2001), not simply a brain-based or socially constructed phenomenon. It is a symbiotic by-product of the complex interweaving of the biological self with the largely invisible cultural symbolic web.

This point is an easy one to illustrate, even though most of the images and metaphors used to describe consciousness retain the mind/body/culture divisions. One need only consider how an everyday breakdown of the experience demonstrates the complex ways consciousness is organised. For instance, anyone who has experienced a hard-drive crash, where saved material is lost, understands that one’s “mind”, in part, is distributed through and with cultural objects or artefacts, and not merely “stored” in the brain’s memory system.

Consciousness is an inherently intersubjective phenomenon

Human consciousness cannot be limited to the capacities of individual brains but, rather, its potential evolves in relation to and with others as part of a distributed cognitive network (Donald, 2001). Evan Thompson (2007) further argues that even though we may experience it as a unified and self-contained phenomenon, consciousness is not developed from the inside out, but is instead a complex form of cognition that is shaped both by our ability to empathise and by our enculturation.

Put another way, we come to understand our own consciousness via an ability to imagine the consciousness of others rather than the other way around. We are oriented by an innate capacity for “mind-reading” (or Theory of Mind) which refers to the ability to observe, infer, and predict the behaviour of others, while at the same time realising that others’ interpretations of the world may be very different from one’s own. This cognitive ability for building theories of other minds is mostly unconscious, and constantly being updated, in response to both the real and imagined social situations we navigate (Johnson, 2005). So while mind-reading is a biological predisposition, it continues to evolve in creative collusion with an increasingly complex sociocultural environment (Donald, 2001).

A contemporary example of the way in which culture colludes with evolving mind-reading abilities can be seen in the recent popularity of reality TV programming. Identifying with “real” people in sometimes “unreal” circumstances draws on our inborn knack for interpreting human behaviour using verbal, gestural, facial, and other contextual cues. Our observations of conversations in online fan communities suggests that some viewers are bringing these mostly unconscious mind-building processes to the forefront, articulating and testing them within a community of like-minded others.

In sum, consciousness does not emerge from the independent and isolated workings of individual brains but, rather, is an elaborate process that arises as the conscious self and the “other” interweave and enfold one another in a complex choreography of co-determination. As many have argued (perhaps most convincingly, thinkers such as Sartre and Merleau-Ponty), one’s sense of personal subjectivity requires a learnt ability to perceive and imagine the “other”. Fledgling “mind-readers” by the age of four, children soon learn that their immediate caregivers, siblings, and peers have thoughts that are different from their own.

One’s evolving sense of identity, or subjectivity, then, depends upon empathetic identifications with others. And as a number of commentators have further argued, one’s sense of personal consciousness emerges as much from what one imagines as what one actually encounters, and these include the kind of “imaginings” that take place in the shared spaces of the Internet (Hine, 2000; Miller & Slater, 2000; Sumara, 2002; Turkle, 1995).

Consciousness and technology

In brief, then, one’s personal, individualised consciousness emerges from one’s relational and imagined identifications with others. Consciousness is ever emerging and evolving, part of a lifelong process of learning how to be a subject for oneself and for others. One could say that the process of “educating” and the structures of curriculum are primarily concerned with affecting consciousness.

Research into complex systems (like consciousness) cautions us from interpreting that last statement in overly deliberate or causal terms (Osberg & Biesta, 2003). There is clearly a relationship between consciousness and curriculum, but obviously there is not a determining one. In an effort to unravel some of the complex entailments of consciousness research for the curriculum and pedagogy (in particular, as oriented by a critical attitude), we proceed here with a review of how others have theorised the relationship between consciousness and technology. An orienting assertion in this section is that, historically, changes in technology have prompted significant changes in how humans experience consciousness. This point will be elaborated in the subsequent section, where we argue that significant changes in educational theory and practice have also coincided with dramatic changes in technology. We further argue that this realisation should compel a mindful attendance to our participation in the production of possibilities for technologies and consciousness.

For the most part, the word technology is understood in terms of the latest tools and gadgets. However, with the constantly accelerating pace of technological innovation—so that such development now occurs in almost the same time frame as personal experience—it is now obvious that a more nuanced definition is needed. Derived from the Greek tekhne, meaning “art” or “skill”, technology once referred not just to artefacts and tools, but also to the array of methods, theories, and practices that define a culture. Such technologies encompass our choices for and manners of representation, and so contribute to self-identities by affecting what we notice, know, do, and retain. More concisely, technologies participate in the transformation of minds—that is, experiences of consciousness— by channelling perceptions and by shaping how experiences are represented.

There is an abundance of empirical evidence for this claim in the archaeological record, in which there are indications of clear and rather abrupt advances in technologies that correspond to different social structures, different intellectual demands, and different preoccupations. These shifts might also be described as sudden lurches in intelligence as humans expanded their repertoires of possibility at a pace that simply cannot be explained through biological evolution.

Different commentators organise eras and developments in different ways (for example, Deacon, 1997; Dennett, 1997; Jaynes, 1979; Mithen, 1996). For our purposes, we find a frame developed by Donald (1991) to be particularly useful. He argues that the complexity of technology can be taken as an indication of the level of consciousness a culture has achieved. For instance, it appears that until about two million years ago the prevailing technologies were tools that were found rather than made, such as sticks and broken rocks. These items were for immediate use by individuals, calling on only short-term memory, and therefore discarded and perhaps forgotten once the task was complete. Donald suggests such technologies are indicative of an episodic consciousness—an awareness of the here and now, but of little more.

A new category of technology appeared about two million years ago, one that was associated with the deliberate manufacturing of tools. Such tools required long-term memories that made it possible to select from past experience and contemplate future needs. Using the phrase mimetic consciousness, Donald suggests such a mode of awareness was more social and highly reliant on imitation (mimesis), and, arguably, its emergence represents the beginnings of what might now be recognised as a formal curriculum.

Donald argues that a need for more flexible technologies to collect and organise ideas arose as these technologies proliferated and were improved. He associates this transition with the emergence of sophisticated languaging technologies that made it possible to distribute memory across communities and to extend capacities to interpret the past and project into the future. This mythic consciousness, he suggests, emerged a few hundred thousand years ago. With it, we suspect, more fully articulated sorts of “curricula” began to arise.

Much more recently, in the order of 5,000–10,000 years ago, capacities to think abstractly were greatly enhanced. This sort of theoretical consciousness is associated with the technology of writing, which makes it possible to deal with information in a more detached way and to stabilise insights by offloading memory on to physical artefacts. And, notably, it corresponds to the creation of formal education and stabilised curricula.

Donald ends his analysis there, but it seems reasonable to argue that we are witnessing a further evolution/complexification of consciousness. In fact, using the markers suggested by Donald—that is, enhanced technologies, improved abilities to mass link minds, increased intellectual capacities that cannot be explained by biological evolution, emergence of new memory systems to store and access information, and shifts in social and cultural organisation—it would seem likely that we are on the cusp of a new mode of consciousness. For example, a recent article in Scientific American (Bell & Gemmell, 2007) reported on current projects to digitally chronicle every (conscious) aspect of a person’s life, enabled by advances in video and data-storage technologies. Clearly, such enhanced memories present the possibility of dramatically transforming experience—and hence consciousness. Much has also been written on emergent possibilities, personal and collective, of various iterations of the World Wide Web. Web 1.0 offered dramatic enhanced capacities to represent, distribute, and access information; Web 2.0 enabled the emergence of participatory and collaborative knowledge-producing networks through modifiable (mash-up) interfaces; the not-yet clearly discernible Web 3.0 (the “semantic web”) offers promises of automated and tailorable applications that will likely be able to “understand” (that is, interpret, anticipate, project, etc.) the desires and intentions of users—in brief, becoming more and more integrated with user awareness.

It is probably premature to try to specify the nature of a new form of consciousness that might be triggered and enabled by new technologies. However, an emergent mode of being will likely embody growing awareness of the complexity of learning phenomena and the participatory nature of knowing. Recent research on uses of participatory technologies online is already showing how learners are using archived data via social networking to generate powerful learning communities. Ironically, although the Internet was first created by researchers for this very purpose, it is now researchers who are modelling their data archiving and analysing methods using what they have learnt by following popular culture uptakes of these social networking practices.

Of course it is impossible to name a mode of being that has not yet fully emerged, but possible candidates include participatory consciousness (following the current academic popularity of participatory cultures and participatory epistemologies) or, more provocatively, complicitous consciousness (echoing emergent emphases in discussions of complexity, identity, and ethics).

Consciousness, technology, and critical education

The impulse to link discussions of consciousness, technology, and critical education is certainly not new. Freire (1971) championed conscientização, a Portuguese word that is typically translated as “consciousness raising”. He used it to describe an approach to education that is concerned with noticing and uncovering oppressive political and cultural structures, coupled to an imperative to take action against such structures.

A main pedagogical strategy in Freire’s work involves turning the technology of language onto itself—inviting learners into critical examinations of the conventions that frame their experience of, in particular, social class. Through the 1970s the concerns of critical pedagogy were elaborated to encompass race and gender, and since then to include interrogations of Eurocentrism, heteronormativity, and anthropocentrism. A more recent arrival on the block is technicity, which, following Tomas (2000), is argued to be analogous to ethnicity. This idea alone—that is, that new social and cultural distinctions are emerging around differential access to technologies—renders the topic of clear and immediate relevance to educators. However, it is not yet clear how the situation might be engaged. Is it a matter of consciousness raising? Or is it perhaps more a matter of consciousness transformation? Or, perhaps, of raising consciousness to an awareness of its participation/complicity in its own transformations?

Assuming that commentators such as Donald (2001) are correct in their suggestions that experiences of consciousness are changing, it is reasonable to suggest that education is wholly complicit in the emergence of new possibilities. It is perhaps ironic that much of schooling practice still seems to be organised around the linearity of print-based texts, the singular authority of a mandated curriculum, and an ideal of individualism (embodied in evaluation schemes, classroom arrangements, and teaching strategies). The irony increases when one considers that the massive successes of video gaming and related technologies are at least partly due to the ways their creators have deliberately exploited principles of learning related to collectivity, sociocultural contexts, shifting identities, embodiment, implicit associations, effortful study, nonlinear pathways, and other notions that have been largely ignored by schools (Gee, 2003).

The issues here could be phrased in terms of the way that conceptions of “curriculum” emerged and evolved alongside human consciousness. For instance, with the here-and-now-ness of Donald’s episodic consciousness, curriculum would have been largely accidental and nondeliberate, as novices copied the actions of experts. With the development of mimetic consciousness, as humans created task-specific tools, curricula had to become more intentional, with clear needs for selection, preservation, and practice. With the emergence of abstract language and sophisticated narratives of a mythic consciousness, curriculum would have had to become elaborated once again as those in authority sought to maintain the cultural privilege of certain narratives, values, qualities, and perspectives. Correspondingly, the emergence of a theoretical consciousness prompted an explosion of possible roles, presenting a need for a curriculum that is as much about preparation for the future as maintenance of established knowledge.

Is curriculum nearing a new crossroads as it faces another shift in emphasis, away from individuals who pass on established knowledge and toward collectives who elaborate emergent knowings? As illustrated in the example of wiki spaces—and wikipedia.org in particular—electronic technologies have enabled more democratic, collective, and participatory writing spaces in which such issues as power dynamics, authorial voice, distributed knowing, and networked intelligence are dramatically transformed, as are possibilities for writing spaces that are organised around specialised interests, crossfertilisation of ideas, and creation of virtual communities (see Lankshear & Knobel, 2006). Further, as Clive Thompson (2007) notes, these and other elements of Web 2.0 have enabled the emergence of a new sensory capacity that he dubs “social proprioception”—a collective analogue of one’s awareness of where one’s body parts are (that is, in relation both to one another and to the context) at any given moment. Not only are collective dynamics coming into clearer focus, but the individual’s participation and complicity in those collectives is becoming a more integrated aspect of consciousness.

In the era of paper-based texts, communication was mainly unidirectional and unidimensional, but emergent technologies in which the screen takes the place of the page open up multidirectional and multidimensional spaces. Discussion forums, chat rooms, and blogs are three obvious illustrations at the moment, and probably only just a hint of what is on the horizon. Not only do they enable instantaneous responses, but they also make it possible to complexify authorship by altering the texts received. Further, electronic messages are more image-oriented than the paper-based notes they are replacing. As authorship is distributed and diffused, and as the linearity of written text is interrupted, authority of the written word is diminished, reshaping concerns about power and privilege (Kress, 2003). Our world changes with the tools used to represent it—and this realisation should prompt us to wonder about how emerging technologies enable and constrain interpretive possibilities—and, with those, consciousness and teaching. On that count, it seems fair to say that formal education is on the verge of taking on a more participatory and complicitous emphasis.

Globally, we now find ourselves in a proliferation of previously unimaginable possibilities. Those with privileged access to information technologies can locate facts, acquire texts, distribute insights, and offload memories to an extent and in ways that were not conceivable even a few decades ago. New technologies also enable immensely interactive and participatory “mass collaborations”. Whereas print technology is principally one-way, current information technologies allow for multidirectional conversations that can involve hundreds of thousands of people. They also allow for “critical masses” of people to assemble around ideas and interests that previously might never have been popular enough to attract a community. The conditions for an ever-faster-paced expansion of human possibility are in place—which has prompted some commentators to suggest that human intelligence might be trillions of times greater by the end of this century (Kurzweil, 2005).

On the one hand, such enthusiastic projections might appear to offer hope for those hoping for more just enactments of formal education—in very much the same way that earlier technologies (such as the written word, mass print, and television) were greeted by many as means to even out imbalances in educational experience. Yet, for the most part, it seems that exactly the opposite has happened. Following a tenet of amplification with complex dynamics (more popularly phrased “the rich get richer”), disparities have grown more pronounced and means of oppression and injustice have diversified and proliferated. The Star Wars Kid is a case in point, and a potent one, which shows how schools are no longer (if they ever were) isolated islands of activity. Digital technologies of communication make it possible for “knowledge” in the form of narratives of the “other” to be quickly produced, instantiated, and distributed—the bully is no longer embodied on the playground but, rather, is distributed as an elusive fiction created by many minds via the Internet. Possibilities for collective participation extend out of and reach into these institutions in ways that, it seems, can only be recognised once they are realised.

And so, even if humanity falls far short of projections of increased capacities, technologically enabled emergent modes of consciousness will almost certainly prompt dramatic changes to conceptions and enactments of schooling. Although it is impossible to address such matters here in any deep way, there are some issues that can be highlighted. For instance, in terms of the “classic” concerns of critical educationists, the accelerating pace of technological development appears to be contributing to an amplification of the differences between haves and have-nots on many levels, including access to resources, technologies, and information. But there are entirely new and still underaddressed contexts and means of differentiation and oppression—ones that may be so insidious that the example of the Star Wars Kid might serve as little more than a benign foreshadowing. For example, humanity has reached the point whereby it can use cultural knowledge to transform biological forms. How can we even begin to imagine what that might mean for curriculum? Perhaps of more immediate relevance, how might a critical pedagogy that has been so focused on issues of equity and access respond to emergent needs to curtail consumption? These questions are not new, but neither have they been addressed in a manner that demonstrates an appreciation of complex entailments. The only detail that seems to be reasonably assured in these sorts of discussions is that whole new categories of injustice are going to arise. And this is where we begin to wonder about the role of critical and liberatory mind-sets in education. Are these doomed to be a step behind, offering only reactions and critiques to emergent injustices?

Perhaps the most important issue for educators is the manner in which individual and collective identities are affected by current and upcoming innovations. The inventions of language, writing, and mass printing had massive impacts on human identifications; there is every reason to anticipate that digital technologies will trigger similarly dramatic shifts. The modern school is largely organised around print technology. Clearly, whatever curriculum is, it is going to have to change. And, of course, an irony here—and perhaps a site for important contributions from critical thinkers—is that if and when issues of emergent technology are engaged in discussions of education, they tend to be organised around questions of how to (or even whether to) incorporate new technologies into schooling.

Concluding comments, questions, and challenges

As educators, what can we say about the Star Wars Kid example? Most obviously, we can notice how the shared spaces of the Internet have created new opportunities for bullying to occur. But there is more. In reviewing the documentation on the Raza case, it is clear that the “perpetrators” did not intend the effects of their posting of Ghyslain’s video being taken up in the ways that it was. They could not have known that it would be used to produce new forms of humiliating footage. They could not have imagined how these new perverted depictions of Ghyslain’s identity would be linked to Ghyslain’s own sense of personal subjectivity. As educators we need to wonder what can be done. At present we are not able to control the social spaces of the Internet. In some ways, these uses of online social spaces contribute to what we used to call the “hidden curriculum”—the places of learning that are not planned by teachers, but that are always present as the usually unnoticed sites of learning for students.

Perhaps the best that we can do is to educate ourselves and our students in what Varela (1999) calls “ethical know-how”. For Varela, ethics is not a set of a priori principles that can be applied to any situation; instead, ethics emerge from our empathetic identifications with others. Here, empathy is not used as a place holder for some generalised form of sympathy or identification with others, but instead as a necessary condition for developing an adaptive and responsive (that is, participatory and complicitous) sense of personal consciousness or identity. To empathise, then, is to try to understand another person by imagining how that person perceives you. Deep empathising requires a dissolving of one’s own ego boundaries; an understanding that to be more fully “oneself” one needs to imagine the mind of another.

Like face-to-face encounters, the spaces of the Internet require skills and practices of empathetic identification. In synchronous communication events that occur online (such as in instant messaging), the imperative to empathise becomes more obvious, since immediate response from “others” can be seen, heard, and felt. However, in asynchronous forms (such as YouTube, blogs, etc.), where information is posted for mass circulation, and where authorship and authoring are less obvious and often collectively shared, empathetic identification becomes more difficult, since the “other” is mostly imaginary, and often very elusive.

The “curriculum” of these online events, like all learning situations, involves forms of knowledge and also identities that are engaged in producing and communicating these forms. However, because the identities of these users are often elusive and not obvious—and, in many cases, not really an “I” but instead a collective “they”—the ethics guiding action is not always obvious and, even when it is obvious (as in the case of the Star Wars Kid), not so easy to deploy. In such cases ethical action depends on a studied and internalised understanding of the complex ways personal and social identities are mediated by cultural artefacts and processes, and also a deep understanding of how one’s “identity” is not isolated to one’s biological body.

In the field of curriculum, we need to re-examine the early theoretical work of Maxine Greene (1975), who argued for the importance of imagination in all learning contexts. As Greene and others have strongly argued, imaginative identifications are extremely influential in our learning (Sumara, 1996, 2002). Although there has been considerable attention paid in recent years to the importance of creativity in planned educational contexts, the division between “virtual” and “real” experience continues to guide curriculum practice, with the latter nearly always afforded more resources, attention, consideration, and value. In any planned educational context, educators must remember that all imaginative identifications shape both personal and collective identities. The ability for human beings to “mass minds” and information using the social spaces of the Internet has amplified the effects of collective imaginative engagement and production. Although as educators we cannot (and should not) control the shared spaces of the Internet, we are able to develop pedagogies for a more action-oriented ethical engagement with both the embodied and the imagined “other”.

As is evident in the Raza example, what constitutes the “object” of learning, adaptation, or transformation, once detached via cyberspace from the embodied Ghyslain Raza, begins to function as an historical cultural artefact, available online for all forms of analysis and interpretation. While the so-called “perpetrators” of this situation cannot be held wholly responsible, the same cannot be said for society as a whole. It is our contention that the Raza affair could only unfold in a society/culture where ethics is applied to those who are already known or recognisable, and not necessarily to those who are imagined, denigrated, oppressed, and so on. And while it would be comforting to imagine that the Raza case is an extreme example of the massing/mobbing gone bad online, we would like to point out that these forms of bullying occur daily in all educational contexts, where a distorted set of imaginative identifications create the conditions for the shaping of a narrative of the “other” as undesirable, irregular, and deviant.

If we are anywhere near the mark in our analysis, the question that presents itself to those interested in questions of curriculum is: How does one educate for a participatory/complicitous consciousness? What sorts of experiences are needed? What interventions are possible? How can one proceed in a manner that is itself ethical—virtual, contingent, tentative, attentive … and utterly necessary? How do we teach empathy? Compassion? Surely we are in trouble if it must only be learnt through face-to-face embodied encounters, since so much human communication and relationality are digitally supported and created.

As educators we must further develop curriculum that provides our students with meaningful opportunities to experience and practise empathetic identifications in action. Of course we have considerable experience doing this already: the literary and dramatic arts have afforded opportunities for readers, viewers, or participants to develop imaginative identifications with characters and their situations and, in so doing, experience other “consciousnesses”. However, while these imaginative identifications are helpful in many ways, our ethical commitment to characters is not the same as our commitment to people whom we encounter in our daily lives. As we have shown in this article, the Ghyslain Raza situation presents us with a new problem: What do we do when the “imaginative identifications” of “characters” who exist on the Internet are able to be linked to or identified with real people? How do our ethical obligations change when we are complicit in the creating of “virtual” consciousness that connects with “embodied” consciousness?

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The authors

Dennis Sumara is Professor and Head of the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy at the University of British Columbia. His areas of research include curriculum theory, teacher education, and literacy education, as oriented by conceptual interests in hermeneutic phenomenology, literary response theory, and complexity science. Specific topics of research include literary engagement and curriculum, problems and possibilities of learning and teaching, and normativity and counternormativity in teacher education. He is the author of several articles and books, including Why Reading Literature in School Still Matters: Imagination, Interpretation, Insight, recipient of the 2003 National Reading Conference’s (USA) Ed Fry Book Award.

Email: dennis.sumara@ubc.ca

Brent Davis is Professor and David Robitaille Chair in Mathematics, Science, and Technology Education at the University of British Columbia. His research is developed around the educational relevance of developments in the cognitive and complexity sciences, and he teaches courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels in curriculum studies, mathematics education, and educational change. He has published books and articles in the areas of mathematics learning and teaching, curriculum theory, teacher education, epistemology, and action research. His most recent book is Engaging Minds: Changing Teaching in Complex Times (2nd edition, 2008; coauthored with Dennis Sumara and Rebecca Luce-Kapler).

Email: brent.davis@ubc.ca

Tammy Iftody is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy at the University of British Columbia. Her areas of research include “new literacy” practices in virtual communities as mediated by popular culture, framed by interdisciplinary interests in studies of mind and consciousness, poststructural theories of language, and complexivist understandings of knowing and learning.

Email: iftody13@interchange.ubc.ca