The water in digital education
In his 2005 commencement speech, “This is Water,” David Foster Wallace shared a poignant analogy: Two young fish swim past an older fish, who nods and says, “Morning, boys. How's the water?” The young fish swim on, and eventually one asks the other, “What the hell is water?”
This story illustrates a quiet truth about the purpose of education. The most obvious, ubiquitous, and seemingly unchangeable realities of our lives often go unnoticed and unquestioned. Wallace argued that the real value of education lies not just in acquiring knowledge, but in developing the capacity for critical awareness—the ability to choose what to pay attention to and how to construct meaning from our experiences. In essence, education should teach us to recognize and question “the water” we swim in daily.
In the realm of digital education, this “water” takes the form of what Michael Gallagher, Markus Breines, and Myles Blaney call the hidden curriculum. In their 2020 paper “Ontological Transparency, (In)visibility, and Hidden Curricula: Critical Pedagogy Amidst Contentious Edtech,” they explore how this hidden curriculum manifests in online learning environments.
As Gallagher et al. explain, the hidden curriculum of digital spaces are implicit messages, norms, and values represented through the very structure of our digital educational experiences. The learning management system's design, the choice of communication tool, patterns of online interaction-these are the means by which we are instructed in unstated lessons about what knowledge is valued and how learners should behave in these digital spaces.
Just as Wallace’s fish might not notice the water around them, students and educators might not immediately recognize how digital structures shape their educational experience. The design of a platform might subtly prioritize certain types of knowledge or interaction. The choice of communication tools might implicitly value certain forms of expression over others. The patterns of online engagement might unconsciously reinforce certain power dynamics or social norms.
Gallagher et al. argue that critical pedagogy in online spaces should involve questioning these hidden aspects, examining their impacts, and work toward an online learning environment that is more just and enabling. What they are calling for, in other words, is the sort of discrimination and critical consciousness for which Wallace was arguing. By noticing these hidden curricula in our online learning spaces, we are able to make more overt choices related to the design, use, and harnessing of educational technologies. Awareness lets us plan a digital learning environment that transmits not only knowledge but also critical thought and awareness at the heart of true education.