Introduction
At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, universities across the world were forced to rapidly transition in-person classes to online forms of instruction (Hodges et al. 2020). This transition required instructors and students to quickly adapt to new technologies and practices in order to maintain productive and safe spaces for learning (Quintana et al. 2021). Re-imagining exams became a particularly vexing issue for universities, as they had to grapple with the possibility of students cheating on assessments that had formerly been proctored in person. In response to this challenge, many institutions adopted online proctoring services to use technical means to monitor students taking exams remotely. Offered through companies such as Proctorio, ExamSoft, and ProctorU, these invasive surveillance technologies rely on video recording, automated facial detection, and web traffic monitoring to catch students cheating on exams. While maintaining academic integrity within a classroom is a noble goal, online proctoring comes at a steep price, as the technology breaches student trust, disadvantages marginalized students, and fosters increased anxiety for many during the testing process.
In this article I look beyond the pandemic to consider the social, political, and cultural conditions that allowed for online proctoring to spread throughout higher education institutions. In this, I agree with Charles Logan’s argument in this journal (2021) that, “It’s not enough to weed out online proctoring.” What we need is a “controlled burn” of the beliefs and practices that allowed this surveillance technology to take shape even before the COVID-19 pandemic catalyzed its mass adoption. To further our understanding of the conditions sustaining the adoption of online proctoring, my analysis trains its focus on neoliberalism as an underlying ideology enabling the adoption of online proctoring. In particular, I argue that the permeation of higher education institutions with the neoliberal values of marketized competition, atomization, and precarity helped rationalize the uptake of online proctoring within the university.
While previous scholarship has made important headway in situating online proctoring within larger social, political, and cultural frames, the role of neoliberalism in propagating online proctoring remains under-examined. Notable exceptions can be found in McKenna (2022) and Hébert (2021). McKenna’s critical realist work (2022) builds on insights from Sayer (2015) to elucidate how neoliberal ideology serves as a precondition for the emergence of online proctoring. Hébert, meanwhile, analyzes the relationship between online proctoring, neoliberalism, and audit culture, arguing that, “Beyond ensuring institutional integrity then, considering the commodification of higher education, online remote proctoring might be perceived as a defense against the devaluing of particular university degrees in the marketplace, with cheating potentially defacing the university ‘brand’” (2021, 27). Following these two authors, this article aims to further expand on the “conditioning effects of the social structures of neoliberalism” (McKenna 2022, 2) by attending to the neoliberal values of competition, atomization, and precarity, examining how they are both preconditions of and perpetuated through the spread of online proctoring. I also connect thinking about neoliberalism to scholarship within critical pedagogy and the learning sciences, suggesting that insights from these scholarly perspectives can promote resistance to online proctoring and to the neoliberal ideology it sustains.
The structure of my analysis is as follows: First I provide an overview of online proctoring, including its typical features, common criticisms of it, and forms of resistance it faces. I then provide a survey of neoliberalism, its historical evolution in the United States, and its impact on higher education, arguing that the widespread adoption of neoliberal values of marketized competition, atomization, and precarity helps rationalize the uptake of online proctoring within the university. Given these ideological foundations, I argue that resistance against online proctoring should necessarily include challenging the neoliberal conditions that allowed for these surveillance technologies to take hold. Finally, I conclude by highlighting insights from critical pedagogy and the learning sciences to consider how scholars, students, instructors, and education technology designers can confront the neoliberal foundations of online proctoring envisioning a more just future for higher education.
Critiques of Online Proctoring
While online proctoring has had a foothold in higher education throughout the 2010s, the rapid transition to online courses during the COVID-19 pandemic catalyzed its mass adoption in 2020. According to Proctorio CEO Mike Olsen, the company expected to monitor over 25 million exams across 1000 different institutions in 2020 alone (Harwell 2020). In an informal QuickPoll conducted by EDUCAUSE in 2020, the study found that out of 312 institutions surveyed, 54 percent were already using online or remote proctoring services, and another 23 percent were planning or considering their use (Grajek 2020). This is a staggering development, which begs critical interrogation by the instructors, staff, and students whose educational and work experience are being transformed by it.
Common features of online proctoring include taking a 360 scan of a student’s testing space (often their personal bedroom), video recording students during their exam, using automated facial monitoring to detect “suspicious behavior,” recording web traffic during a test, and locking down browsers to prevent the test-taker from looking at other sites. If the automated proctoring technology identifies “suspicious behavior,” the video recording is flagged and sent to a test administrator (frequently a university professor) to make a final determination on whether cheating has occurred. The list of potential actions to trigger flagging a student is numerous. Examples include: looking off screen too long, another person walking into the testing room, looking at other websites, unknown noises being detected in the room, or the test taker’s face going out of frame.
The adoption of online proctoring services has been critiqued by a wide range of scholars, educators, students, and other commentators. It has been taken to task for in-built racial biases, as the facial detection software has struggled to recognize students with darker skin (Johnson 2020; Feathers 2021). The technology has also been criticized for invading student privacy and mishandling student data (Germain 2020), as in one notable case in 2020 when hackers leaked over 440,000 user records from ProctorU (Abrams 2020). Another notable data breach occurred when Proctorio CEO Mike Olsen published a student’s chat log during an argument on Reddit (Caplan-Bricker 2021). Online proctoring has also been identified as having ableist (Brown 2020), transphobic (Caplan-Bricker 2021), and classist (Hébert 2021) implications. Such pointed challenges to online proctoring in particular have expanded upon a wide range of digital studies scholarship, which has trenchantly demonstrated how algorithms and emerging technologies reinforce systemic racism, sexism, ableism, classism, and other forms of oppression (Benjamin 2019; Noble 2018; O’Neil 2016).
In response to the proliferation of invasive and oppressive online proctoring, critics have employed a multitude of resistance tactics. In 2022, a federal judge sided with a student at Cleveland State University, declaring that “conducting room scans is unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment” (Bowman 2022). Other major universities, including the University of Washington and Baylor University have announced decisions to either cancel or not renew their contracts with Proctorio (Caplan-Bricker 2021). At Baruch College, CUNY, students amassed close to 28,000 signatures in a petition to halt the use of online proctoring. Three days after the petition went live, school administration sent an email notifying faculty that students cannot be compelled to use proctoring apps, and should seek alternative methods of assessment when possible (Shwayder 2020). At the University of Michigan-Dearborn, staff resisted the adoption of online proctoring by hosting faculty programming on authentic assessments, proposing instead the hiring of additional support staff to assist with assessment work (Silverman et al. 2021).
Organizing efforts against academic surveillance are also occurring against a larger backdrop of academic labor organizing across the United States. Most notably, in November of 2022 over 48,000 academic workers at the University of California went on strike to advocate for improved salaries and working conditions, making it the largest higher education strike in US history (Lichtenstein 2022). Given the recent groundswell of protests in academia, critical scholars would be well served to link online proctoring and the rise of academic surveillance to larger social, political, and cultural frames. By contextualizing online proctoring in this way, students, faculty, staff, and technology designers can work to dismantle the foundations that legitimize and enable the expansion of academic surveillance.
In the following two sections, I will argue that neoliberal ideology serves as a precondition for the proliferation of online proctoring. To develop this argument, I will first provide a historical survey of neoliberalism in the US and its specific impact on higher education. The following section will highlight how online proctoring in particular reinforces the neoliberal ideals of marketized competition, atomization, and precarious working conditions.
Neoliberalism and the University
Since the late twentieth century, neoliberalism has become a dominant political and economic ideology throughout the US. Within the political-economic framework of neoliberalism, the role of the state is primarily relegated to promoting free-market competition through deregulation of business activity and privatization of public services (Harvey 2007). Through the invisible hand of the free market, neoliberals seek to unleash the power of an unfettered capitalist society, arguing that innovation, capital accumulation, and entrepreneurialism will flourish to the benefit of all if unimpeded by state interference.
As the name implies, neoliberalism can be understood as a modified resurgence of classical liberalism. Drawing on Enlightenment era ideals and reaching its zenith in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, classical liberalism was a political and economic philosophy that advocated for laissez-faire economic policies of unfettered market exchange, buttressed by a limited form of property-based individual liberties. A rehabilitation of the ideals of classical liberalism in the twentieth century among some economists was in part motivated by the crisis of capitalism leading to the Great Depression and by the global rise in totalitarian regimes in the lead-up to World War II (Busch 2017, 14). The apparent failure of more state-interventionist Keynesian approaches to crises of disinvestment and unemployment, first developed in response to the Great Depression, to deal with the “stagflation” crisis of the 1970s allowed advocates of neoliberal economics to dominate debates over macroeconomic policy in the US and similar industrial capitalist economies. Importantly, this transition in the world of economic ideas was backed by a political project for the restoration of class power for capitalists, battening down the compromises brokered since the New Deal in order to restore profitability—and thus, ostensibly, economic growth for the benefit of all (Harvey 2007). The neoliberal turn in the US was cemented in the early 1980s with the election of Ronald Reagan, whose program of tax cuts, union busting, deregulation, and trickle-down economics put the neoliberal ideals of an unencumbered free market into practice.
Following McKenna (2022, 4), it is important to conceptualize neoliberalism as more than a political economic agenda that emboldens the free market, and consider how the ideology functions in broader epistemic terms. By enmeshing itself within the social fabric of daily life, neoliberalism has established itself as an underlying ethos where “competition is the only legitimate organising principle for human activity” (Metcalf 2017). By valorizing competition and the never-ending commodification of social activity, the social episteme of neoliberalism has transformed public life through economic terms. As Giroux (2014, 2) notes, under neoliberalism, notions of the public good, community, and social responsibility are readily replaced by a vision of the good life emerging from an economic Darwinism favoring unbridled individualism, self-interest, and competition.
The social episteme of neoliberal ideology has had a profound impact on the shape of higher education, as scholars have observed a proliferation of organizations dedicated to advancing education policies in line with global market interests (Slaughter and Cantwell 2012), a growth in marketing efforts by universities (Busch 2017, 40), and a shift toward corporatized management practices in higher education (Giroux 2002). Such changes reflect the increasingly popular notion that higher education should primarily serve the private interests of business and of students as individuals, rather than a broader public good. Within this conceptualization of higher education, only those academic activities that are easily monetized are valued as part of its mission.
In the classroom, the impact of neoliberalism has been no less profound. In the neoliberal vision for higher education, the function of learning is often reduced to a process of “separating the wheat from the chaff,” as atomized students compete against each other for grades and social mobility in the job market. Rather than valorize the ideals of communal knowledge-sharing and collaboration, the ethic of competition undergirding neoliberal teaching models—as in broader market competition between firms—suggests that each student is in it for themself. This individualized, competition-based model of teaching and learning runs counter to decades of research that speaks to the benefits of community-based models of teaching (Scardamalia 2002; Bielaczyc and Collins 1999).
Neoliberal ideology has also been linked to the intensification of surveillance and shame in the academy. For instance, Shahjahan (2020) describes how shame and surveillance in the neoliberal university reconstitute academic subjectivity as “Being for others.” As academic life is increasingly made to be visible, audited, and remodeled according to the gaze of the other, shame is internalized as academics are increasingly scrutinized and pressured to demonstrate value for their institution. These conditions are evidenced in the proliferation of performance-based policies, metrics, and rankings, which imposes a consistent need for academic performativity. Shahjahan (2020) further describes how this performativity promotes a culture of “impact mercantilism” where academics work to “sell” the economic and societal impact of their work for grants and higher evaluative scores from peer reviews. This intensification of academic surveillance and shame parallels the ascendancy of surveillance capitalism, where corporations collect massive amounts of consumer data for the purposes of modifying and consumers’ emotions and behavior.
Online Proctoring and the Neoliberal University
Online proctoring is a metastasis of the neoliberal university. By emphasizing the values of market-like competition, atomistic performance, and precarious working conditions, online proctoring reinforces the neoliberal vision for a corporatized education where learners are treated as consumers pitted against each other in a zero-sum battle for social mobility. Evidence for this can be seen throughout marketing material for online proctoring service providers, online proctoring CEO interviews, and research investigating the impact of online proctoring on students.
In 2016, the Proctorio website advertised that “Proctorio protects your academic achievements, so you get to compete on a level playing field.” The notion that students need to protect their achievements so they can compete (within their class or on the job market) neatly aligns the neoliberal vision of education where competition and individual prestige are valued over cooperation and community knowledge-sharing. Furthermore, the insistence on creating “a level playing field” for academic competition reinforces the myth of meritocracy, where individual accomplishment can be solely attributed to one’s actions, rather than acknowledged as partially an outcome of systems of privilege and oppression that unequally impact student achievement.
Further evidence for Proctorio’s concordance with the ideals of marketized competition within academia can be observed in interviews with CEO Mike Olsen. In an interview with the New Yorker, Olsen claimed that “integrity is the brand,” and that “every university sells the same product—calculus is calculus—so the brand means everything. You can’t have a big old cheating scandal come out” (Caplan-Bricker 2021). By likening integrity to a university brand and academic subjects to a product, Olsen frames academia within a marketized discourse where cheating is less of an ethico-learning concern and more a problem for brand management. In a separate interview with the Washington Post, Olsen further claims that, without measures in place to prevent cheating in online learning, prospective employers would consider degrees earned during the pandemic less credible. In Olsen’s terms, these “Corona diplomas” would tarnish the accomplishment of students in the eyes of employers (Harwell 2020). By equating perceptions of the reliability of student test scores with graduates’ value in the job market, Olsen reaffirms the notion that the function of schooling is to prepare students as competitive job seekers, while cheating represents an existential threat to a university’s alumni brand on that job market.
The justification of competition as a legitimate organizational framework for education requires a corollary process of atomization, whereby the neoliberal education episteme depicts individual students as existing outside of larger social processes. Drawing on Boykoff (2011, 105), this process of atomization requires an “end of the social” to interiorize the rationalities of neoliberalism:
Masquerading as the end of the social, neoliberalism encourages individuals to ‘‘go it alone’’ and maximize their ‘‘utility.’’ Atomization allows the technologies and rationalities of neoliberalism to interiorize within the skulls of individualized subjects, marking the marketization of everyday life.
Atomization is exemplified in Proctorio’s previously mentioned marketing tagline about protecting academic achievements in order to allow students to compete on a level playing field. By promoting the ideal of an “even playing field,” Proctorio reinforces the notion that individual accomplishments can be solely attributed to one’s actions, rather than implicated within the systems of privilege and oppression that often have a greater impact on student achievement, or rather than as part of a collective process of learning. While automated online proctoring does not invent this form of isolated thinking about learning outcomes, it does intensify and institutionalize it. This process of atomization was also characterized by Lee and Fanguy (2021) when they found that subjectifying students into the binary of cheaters and non-cheaters with proctored exams shifts the discourse on academic fairness away from structural issues that have a much greater impact on inequitable learning outcomes (e.g. mental health, family circumstances, technology access). In this way, “the complex notion of educational ‘fairness’ became an individual student’s moral responsibility” (Lee and Fanguy 2021, 484).
The invasive surveillance of online proctoring also creates precarious testing environments that require extensive unrecognized emotional labor from students—a microcosm of emerging working conditions under neoliberal capitalism. By subjecting students to the panopticon of online surveillance where any number of innocent behaviors could be misconstrued as devious, the traditional anxieties of test taking are compounded by the intense scrutiny of the online proctoring environment. The pervasive feeling of precariousness among students under surveillance—one wrong move and their learning and future employment prospects could be thrown into question—is damaging to the learning experience. This point is strengthened by Woldeab and Brothen (2019, 7), as their study “found strong indications that online proctoring had a negative effect on students with high anxiety.” A separate study from Meulmeester et al. (2021, 1776) similarly found “a substantial percentage of … students reported fear of being wrongly accused of fraudulent behaviour (possibly leading to invalidation of the test result) and invasion of privacy.” The deleterious emotional states fostered by precarious testing environments are clearly harmful to student learning, but the neoliberal vision for performance of trustworthiness and competitive ranking comes to overshadow the humanistic ideals of a supportive learning environment.
This intensification of precarious testing conditions is reminiscent of the global rise of the precariat class under neoliberal capitalism. Within the growing precariat class, workers increasingly deal with precarious, anxiety-producing working conditions where their fleeting employment is dependent on the employers’ whims, structured by short-term contracts, detailed accountability metrics, and atomistic entrepreneurialism as alleged freelancers. Ostensibly, these precarious and heavily surveilled working conditions offer employees flexibility and autonomy to work when and where they please, but recent scholarship highlights that these conditions promote mental health issues and long working hours, all while stripping employees of important benefits (Wood et al. 2018). It is worth noting that online proctoring similarly weaponizes flexibility and autonomy, as students are “afforded the opportunity” to take their tests from anywhere. But beneath this veneer of autonomy is a system of dataveillance that promotes anxiety-producing testing conditions and reinforces systems of racism, ableism, classism, and other forms of oppression. Indeed, appealing to the notion of individual autonomy while devalorizing the larger social ramifications of precarity is a leitmotif of our neoliberal techno-centric landscape. As the Precarity Lab notes: “the digital also builds on, reproduces, generalizes and makes abstract forms of precarity inherited from the laboratories of the colony, the plantation, the factory, and the prison” (2020, 8).
Uprooting Online Proctoring
Online proctoring and the neoliberal conditions that sustain it are not inevitable. Resisting the hegemony of academic surveillance requires students, instructors, and technology designers to confront the ideological foundations that rationalized these harmful technologies in the first place. While advocating for novel alternative assessments in place of online proctoring is a helpful first step, the long-term project at hand is more deeply rooted in connecting the politics of pedagogy, technology design, and the mission of higher education. To be sure, this work has already begun, and the rhizomatic foundations for the abolition of online proctoring spread across multiple scholarly domains.
Insights from critical pedagogy and the learning sciences help us envision how instructors, students, and technology designers can work toward dismantling the hegemonic normalization of academic surveillance. The structure of my final argument is as follows: First, I review Freirean critical pedagogy, particularly in its critique of dehumanization and in its description of the process of liberation, demonstrating its contrast with the neoliberal model of online proctoring, particularly in the use of technological black boxes as a means of maintaining the oppressor-oppressed relationship. Following this critique, I advocate for education technology design processes that promote a horizontal, dialogical relationship between students and designers. Finally, I shift to the learning sciences to highlight how educational practices can be reconceptualized outside the neoliberal values of competition, atomization, and precarity. In particular, I will highlight insights from situated cognition and communities of learners to envision learning environments that make use of integrated, communal, and student-created assessments.
Critical pedagogy, and the more recent advancements of critical digital pedagogy, offer a rich corpus of theory and practice in resistance to neoliberalism and academic surveillance. Writing in the late 1960s, Paulo Freire prophetically observed that “oppressors are using science and technology as unquestionably powerful instruments for their purpose: the maintenance of the oppressive order through manipulation and repression. The oppressed, as objects, as ‘things,’ have no purposes except those their oppressors prescribe for them” (2020 [1970], 60). Freire’s critique of the objectification of learners through surveillance neatly aligns with our present concern with online proctoring. By construing learners as precarious, atomized individuals in competition with each other, online proctoring efficiently strips learners of their humanity, reifying them as paternalistic objects of social control. This stands in contradistinction to Freire’s humanistic goals where learners, as Subjects, are integrated and in relationship with the social world (Freire 2008 [1974]).
For Freire, liberation from systems of oppression is intimately tied up with the process of humanizing learners as Subjects through a dialogical process of education. In order to achieve liberation that fulfills its humanizing goals, revolutionary leaders cannot simply propagandize or “implant” their beliefs—a model of education that maintains the paternalistic dynamics between the oppressor and oppressed, and reinforcing an atomized disposition where the oppressed are forced to adapt to their present social context, rather than transforming it. Dialoguing and problem-posing with the oppressed as humanized Subjects are both essential maneuvers in Freire’s critical pedagogy. By engaging with learners in a dialogical manner, the oppressed can achieve a level of critical consciousness where they integrate with social reality and act on the conditions shaping their lives (Freire 2020 [1970]).
Given the importance of dialogue and horizontal power relations in dismantling systems of oppression, one step toward abolishing oppressive educational technology necessarily entails advocating for increased transparency and mutuality in the design and implementation of education technology. This means critical educators, staff, students, and technology designers should refuse black boxes where the workings of education technology is hidden or at best opaque. Drawing on Pasquale (2015, 6), I conceptualize technological black boxes on three levels: 1) real secrecy which “establishes a barrier between hidden content and unauthorized access to it”; 2) legal secrecy which “obliges those privy to certain information to keep it secret”; and 3) obfuscation that “involves deliberate attempts at concealment when secrecy has been compromised.”
These three levels of technological black boxes are apparent within online proctoring. For instance, Caines and Silverman (2021) adroitly characterize the use of fourth-party contracts as a method for obfuscating the relation between universities and online proctoring vendors. Furthermore, Proctorio’s copyright lawsuit against Ian Linkletter showcases how the tech company uses real and legal secrecy to maintain their repressive system of surveillance. After sharing a series of faculty training videos on Proctorio, Linkletter, a former employee at the University of British Columbia, was sued by Proctorio for copyright violation. This lawsuit has subsequently been characterized as a strategic lawsuit against public participation (SLAPP), a kind of legal maneuver designed to threaten freedom of expression (Smalley 2022).
Dismantling the technological black boxes that obfuscate the power relations embedded within online proctoring represents a tangible form of resistance critics can take based on horizontal power relationships and mutuality. Beyond these black boxes, though, education technology designers need to establish models of collaborative and participatory design that seriously consider the perspectives and experiences of students. Rather than positioning students solely as consumers of a product, designers should open lines of dialogical inquiry where students’ experiences are incorporated as part of the design and implementation of the technology. Engaging in such design processes will work to disrupt the paternalistic oppressor-oppressed relationship where educational tools are designed for students, and more clearly position technology, aspirationally, as “manifestations of our attitudes, assumptions and relations in the world” (Papendieck 2018, 4). Lachney et al. (2017) provide inspiration for such design practices, as they showcase how a culturally responsive computing framework can be used to design with schools, communities, and designers in the creation of ethnocomputing programs, including one they profile titled Cornrow Curves. Beyond shallow inclusions of cultural signifiers (e.g. changing the appearance of an avatar), such ethnocomputing applications seek to create a hybridity between cultural capital and the computational medium by incorporating computational thinking that already exists within authentic cultural practices. Further inspiration is found in Cober et al. (2015), who draw on participatory design to engage teachers in the design of educational software. Such design processes not only improve end-user experiences, but also have important implications for relations of power embedded in design processes.
Turning toward the learning sciences, we can also find inspiration for new models of learning that provide alternatives to the values of competition, atomization, and precarity, as with theories of situated cognition (Lave 1991) and communities of learners (Bielaczyc and Collins 1999). By complicating learning as relational social activity beyond individual recall on an exam, these scholarly directions in the learning sciences provide fresh ground for building understandings of learning that resist the hegemony of neoliberalism and classroom surveillance.
Situated cognition helpfully frames learning as a process of inculturation within a community of practice. Rather than conceptualize “meaning” as a static, transferable concept, situated theories of cognition foreground how meaning is actively (re)constructed based on the social, historical, and cultural context a learner is situated in. As learners authentically participate in a community, they develop from newcomers into knowledgeable experts within a social practice. In this departure from the traditional delivery model of instruction, assessment and instruction become integrated:
As the nature of instruction changes to be more collaborative, situated, and distributed in its sources of information, traditional means of assessment will quickly prove inadequate. Multiple-choice items that assess the static factual knowledge of students must be replaced by cognitive tasks and assessments that can focus on the processes of learning, perception, and problem solving. In addition, assessment can no longer be viewed as an add-on to an instructional design or simply as separate stages in a linear process of pretest, instruction, posttest; rather, assessment must become an integrated, ongoing, and seamless part of the learning environment. (Young 1993, 48)
In the learning-communities paradigm of education, Bielaczyc and Collins (1991) describe how classrooms can foster a culture of learning where each student brings specialized expertise that can contribute to the construction of collective knowledge. In this departure from the traditional one-way classroom, students develop a collective identity as they draw on their diverse individual skills to solve complex problems. Assessment practices in this model for education also change drastically, as students are given increased autonomy to develop novel ways of assessing themselves and their learning community. When assessment practices become tied to a larger social contract within a learning community, there is an opportunity for educators to reframe the purpose of assessment away from competition toward notions of the collective good.
This scholarship on critical pedagogy, situated cognition, and communities of learners represents multiple hopeful pathways for a future outside online proctoring. Such scholarly discourses do not simply disrupt the technology, but invite us to fundamentally reconsider learning, technology design, and assessment practices. The ethos of Freirean critical pedagogy emphasizes increased mutuality and dialogical relationships in the design of education technology. Situative theories of learning beckons us to consider the integrated nature of assessment and instruction. The communities of learners scholarship highlights the fruitful pedagogical implications of collective understanding and student-made assessments. Extending us away from the reaches of neoliberal educational models that valorize the precarious, atomized learner, these educational futures foretell a learner in communion with peers, technology, and instructors.
Conclusion and Future Directions
Uprooting online proctoring requires a collective struggle against the conditions that justified its legitimacy. Instructors, students, staff, and technology designers need to continue interrogating the foundational social logics that allowed for online proctoring to take hold even before the COVID-19 pandemic. By reinforcing the tenets of marketized competition, atomistic performance, and precarity, online proctoring has continued to reinforce the neoliberalization of the university. Resisting the proliferation of online proctoring technology therefore requires a wholesale resistance of the neoliberal university and the politics that sustain it.
While the scope of my analysis has emphasized re-envisioning university pedagogy as a challenge to neoliberalism and academic surveillance, I see opportunities for expanding the terms of such pedagogy beyond the walls of the university. Drawing on Giroux (2004), I think it is helpful to frame larger social, cultural, and political forces in terms of a “public pedagogy.” By attending to the pedagogical implications of neoliberalism, theorists, educators, and researchers can train their analyses on the ways learning and identity formation are entangled within neoliberal policies and cultural practices outside of schooling. This is particularly relevant in our age of new media, where informal learning and social interactions are increasingly mediated by corporate data harvesting, targeted advertisements, and misinformation. Given these conditions, future directions for scaling out a critical public pedagogy challenging the episteme of neoliberalism should detail how learning and counter-narratives are practiced outside the walls of academia.
This scholarly direction is well in line with contemporary learning sciences research. While the learning sciences have historically been reluctant to address issues of ideology and politics, the recent sociocultural turn in the field has made important headway in conceptualizing how politics, culture, and power are entangled with learning processes outside of school (The Politics of Learning Writing Collective 2017; Vakil 2020). Notable recent examples include Vea (2020), who advances the notion of emotional configurations to analyze the situated nature of feeling, sense-making, and social practice in an animal rights group, and Uttamchandani (2021), who draws on educational intimacy and prefiguration to elucidate the character of learning in a group for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer, Intersex, Asexual, (LGBTQ+) and other allied youth. Given the groundswell of recent critical, situative, and sociocultural learning sciences literature, future scholarship would be well served to take inspiration from this research, particularly as a means of better articulating the pedagogical implications of neoliberalism and surveillance outside the academy. By attending to the situated, pedagogical nature of neoliberal politics and cultural practices, we can begin to envision pedagogies of resistance that are responsive to the unique circumstances of new contexts.
