Beyond Tools: Navigating Pedagogical Innovation in Postdigital Classrooms

Nowadays, emerging technologies are not simply tools to facilitate learning but are becoming an integral part of how knowledge is created, shared, and experienced. Defining pedagogical innovation in such a complex landscape is not an easy task. Traditionally, two instrumentalist perspectives have guided the conceptualization of pedagogical innovation: it can be either driven by technology or by pedagogy. To move beyond this binary vision, Fawns (2019) proposed the idea of entangled pedagogy, which serves as a foundation for envisioning future classrooms as environments where technology is intricately woven into the sociotechnical landscape. Consequently, pedagogical innovation is not solely a matter of incorporating technological tools; rather, it involves reimagining teaching and learning in settings where the digital and non-digital are fully integrated, and it might shape and be shaped by collective imaginaries of how future classrooms should look like. However, anticipated futures of postdigital classrooms include a vague concept of pedagogical innovation, which remains blurred if not concretized in specific case-in-point. Therefore, focusing on the specific case of gen-AI, the authors of this paper collaborated with students of a teacher training program to go through the speculative production, enactment, and negotiation of future postdigital classrooms. Building on an integration of speculative methods and scenario design, the authors exploited the uncertainty as a prompt to inform visions of the future direction of education. The speculative practice helped to concretize the shape that pedagogical innovation may achieve in the postdigital era.