Rise of the Cyborg Collaborator and Practitioner: Composition, Co-operation, Expertise, and Mediated Praxis Across Face-to-face and Digital Sites of Learning and Practice

Technology and digital media are increasingly present in today’s classrooms, often used as tools for learning, connectivity, or even subversion. This dissertation project examines how everyday cybernetic practices–the blurring of the boundaries between human and machine, and between the physical and non-physical (Haraway, 2006)–are intentionally leveraged in the individual and collective development and enactment of expertise. Specifically, I explore how diverse undergraduate novice teachers, representing a range of majors, ethnicities, nationalities, and language practices, participated in a hybrid (online/in-person) education practicum course aimed at developing critical practices of service learning and engaged scholarship.This study is grounded in Cultural Historical Activity Theory (Engeström, 1999) which posits that learning is situated and dependent on social, historical, and cultural contexts that we navigate in our everyday. Following this theory, I examine how learning is mediated by material and psychological tools that are passed down through generations but always have the potential to be changed and transformed (Cole, 1996). Special attention is paid in this study to the way that digital tools, in the age of the cyborg (Haraway 2006; Lupton, 2012), can be transformed across timescales in ways that allow us to trace a person’s history of engagement with material and psychological tools almost instantly.As a social design-based experiment (Gutiérrez & Jurow, 2016), this research project employed ethnographic and social data analytic methods to illuminate cyclical and iterative processes of collaborative inquiry and co-operation (Goodwin, 2017) when students used custom-designed, state-of-the-art digital collaboration tools, across multiple sites (digital and face-to-face) of learning. To this end, data included video recordings of classroom interactions, field notes generated by study participants and myself, digital artifacts, back-end network analy