In early 2019, around the time I received my acceptance letter to OISE, I attended a conference in Toronto called the Digital Pedagogy Lab (DPL). By this time I had been working as a teacher, education technologist and digital curriculum designer for almost a decade. I had attended many ed tech conferences, usually focused on new technologies and innovative approaches to teaching and learning in digital spaces. I was expecting DPL to be much the same. Instead, the lab was critical of both education and technology. I was confused and felt misled. If I had been asked to define the term pedagogy at the time, I likely would have said that pedagogy is concerned with how we teach and was the counterpart to curriculum, which is concerned with what we teach. So how could an event called Digital Pedagogy Lab not be about how to teach (pedagogy) with technology (digital)?
Over the three days of DPL, I found my beliefs about teaching and learning and ed tech to be challenged and, at the time, I felt uncomfortable and out of place. I was introduced to the work of Paulo Freire, bell hooks, and Maxine Greene amongst other critical theorists. Although I found their ideas profound, I didn’t really see an immediate relevance to my own work. My pedagogy was never really about politics or ideology – I just helped construct engaging learning experiences. However, it became apparent very quickly that the discussions that I participated in over the course of DPL planted seeds of discontent that had an immediate impact on my work which would eventually drastically change the course of my studies. Suddenly, I was much more concerned with the why of teaching, and not just the what and how.
When I applied to the doctoral program, my goal was to study digital pedagogy. I planned to investigate the design of digital learning experiences, including “the role of digital media and learning technologies, the architecture of learning experiences and the social aspects of learning design” (Dilkes, “Statement of Intent”). My interests were rooted in my professional experiences during the first nine years of my career, during which I worked as an English Language instructor and curricular designer, first for K-6 students in South Korea and then at a private school that prepared international students for studies at a Canadian university. In this work, I approached learning as social and relational, starting to move away from the ‘transmission model’ in the design of courses and my own teaching. I embraced a student-centred pedagogy, creating activities and courses that provided students with the power to direct the curriculum. I also lead the development of our digital programming, embracing technology as a tool for innovation and a way to enhance opportunities for dialogic and collaborative learning.
In my first year at OISE, I chose courses that focused on instructional design, digital communication, and online communities. Although these courses examined a lot of ideas relevant to my intended research and to my professional experiences, I found myself dissatisfied with the largely uncritical, glorified approach they took to education technologies and digital teaching. Although this stance likely reflected my own practises and beliefs prior to attending DPL, I found myself seeking a more critical pedagogy.
Rooted heavily in the work of Freire, one of the tenets of critical pedagogy is that education is never neutral. Education acts to either bring about conformity or freedom (Friere, 2000). I have realised that my ability to assert an apolitical approach to education was rooted in my own privilege. I have spent most of my life navigating educational systems that have been largely designed for me: an English-speaking, white student who came from a supportive and socio-economically comfortable family. Being included allowed me to remain ignorant to systemic and institutional exclusion, but the decision to be ‘apolitical’ in educational practice is to reinforce the power structures that create exclusions (Fellmayer, 2020, p. 49). First DPL and then my subsequent studies of critical pedagogy were like worrying a loose thread, it unravelled my comfortable perceptions of education and made visible systemic and institutional exclusion.
Approaching pedagogical practice through a critical lens means interrogating the values and power structures that constrain education and critically examining how these structures impact agency, legitimise or delegitimise certain knowledges, and govern social relations (Giroux, 2020, p. 4). As I started to engage more and more with the ideas of critical theory, I started to reflect on how the institutions and systems in which education was enacted were designed and how these designs afford and constrain teaching and learning practises. My doctoral research draws heavily on this idea that pedagogy is a situated practice, informed by ideological beliefs but constrained by institutional structures (Dilkes, 2021).
At the time I attended DPL, I was working as the digital curriculum lead for an Undergraduate Medical Education program. I understood my job to be largely a pedagogical pursuit focused on making design decisions regarding content, assessment, technologies, and the composition of courses. The program was in the midst of a curriculum renewal focused on moving towards a competency-based assessment model and more student-centred teaching. This renewal was not progressing as planned and met with a lot of resistance from faculty. Reflecting back, I think that part of this resistance was rooted in an ideological rupture between the proposed changes to the curriculum and the beliefs of the faculty on what the role of the teacher was: a subject matter expert who believes that “knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing” (Freire, 2000, p. 72). Although the program wanted to change how they taught, the underlying philosophy hadn’t changed. The goal of the program was still to enculturate medical students into medical practice – it was still a pedagogy of conformity. In reflecting on this experience earlier in my studies, I questioned whether it was possible for professional education to ever fully move away from this concept of education, or whether, by working in Medical Education, “surrounded and influenced by the climate which generates the banking concept” (Freire, 2000, p. 79), my ability to imagine pedagogy as a true practice of freedom was constrained.
For me, in the three years since attending DPL, pedagogy has become a place of praxis, where ideology and practice converge. In my studies, in my conversations with faculty, in my course and curricular designs, in my own teaching, I recognize the importance of empowering students to critically examine and ultimately change the institutional power structures that constrain education and their place in society. Part of this has been centring deliberate reflective practice in my pedagogy to challenge my own complacency in reinforcing those power structures.

References
Dilkes, D. (2019). “Statement of Intent”. Unpublished.
Dilkes, D. (2021). “Inclusion By Design: The Beginning of a Research Proposal”. https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/0b715ee0b72745d88aca309a5f8a0fd6
Fellmayer, J. (2020). “Disruptive Pedagogy and the Practice of Freedom” in Stommel, Friend, C., Morris, S. M., & Benjamin, R. (Editors) Critical digital pedagogy : a collection. Hybrid Pedagogy Inc.
Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed (30th anniversary ed.). Continuum.
Giroux, H. (2020). On Critical Pedagogy (2nd Edition). Bloomsbury Academic Press.