The Art and Science of Networked Learning

Performing Futures through Collective Pedagogy

Abstract

This paper explores how the ideals of networked learning are materialised through the ethical and creative labour of a student-led decolonising initiative. Drawing on an ethnographic study of the Decolonising the Curriculum Steering Group (DtCSG), the paper examines how collective learning takes form through acts of care, repair, and imagination. It argues that while networked learning scholarship often assumes collaboration and openness as inherently functional, these ideals depend on continuous work that is ethical, material, and affective.

The study is framed within the epistemology of the Fluxus art form, where inquiry itself becomes a participatory and artful event. While ethnography serves as the overarching approach, portraiture provides the analytic and aesthetic strategy for data generation. Together, they stage research as performance, creating a space where learning and analysis occur through co-creation, interruption, and creative gesture. Data include interviews, fieldnotes, and participant-generated artefacts or performances such as digital collages, poems, and asynchronous chat fragments.

The paper contributes three main insights. First, it redefines speculation not as a design element but as a performative and accountable practice embedded in the present. Second, it establishes solidarity as the ethical and infrastructural condition that sustains networked learning, extending current theory toward questions of care, access, and responsibility. Third, it conceptualises collective pedagogy as negotiated relation rather than harmony, presenting it as an ongoing process of learning through difference.

By performing research as artful inquiry, the study reimagines networked learning as a space of experimentation, relation, and care. It proposes that the future of collective pedagogy lies not in designing better systems but in performing solidarity within the limits and possibilities of the networks we inhabit.