“I feel like I'm not dealing with people”: Posthumanism, agency, and language teaching

Abstract

Language research has displayed a long-standing interest in evaluating the practical utility of particular digital tools, but this area remains under-theorized in a broader sense. A posthumanist perspective, or one that de-centers humans in a given context and reveals the diffusion of agency among various actors (human and non-human), assists in establishing how educators are enabled to act and are acted upon within a teaching event. By applying this concept to digital technologies in the EFL classroom, an area in which little posthumanist work has been done, it becomes possible to elicit how a teacher’s agency is affected by particular interfaces. In pursuit of this, we conducted 21 in-depth interviews with English as a Foreign Language instructors about their interactions with specific teaching technologies, the results of which were open coded and then focus coded for themes relevant to posthumanist concerns. The results expose the extent to which technologies can decrease an educator’s capacity of agency, limiting their ability to effectively monitor students and manage classrooms to a sufficient degree of satisfaction. Digital tools are also revealed to increase capacity of agency, particularly when used for real-time collaboration and to provide evidence of students’ comprehension and retention. Collectively, these examples indicate how teachers’ desired intent is expressed through, and sometimes limited by, non-human actors, thus justifying a perspective that argues for a more diffuse notion of agency. For the field of TESOL and education at large, this study provides practical examples of how teachers’ use of technology in their classrooms both increased and decreased their capacity of agency, encouraging all educators to consider their entire educational environment when planning to implement new technologies in their classrooms.