Learning Machines x jan jagodzinski: Pedagogy as Non-Pedagogy
Online Talk + Conversation — December 9, 1–3 PM EST
REGISTER HERE
The Learning Machines are thrilled to host jan jagodzinski, a Professor Emeritus of Visual Arts and Media Education at the University of Alberta and boundary-expanding art education scholar, to talk about AI (and much more!)
jagodzinski has spent decades tracing how the field of art education is reshaped by designer capitalism, ecological crisis, digital mediation, and the swirling affects of youth culture. Across works such as Art and Education in an Era of Designer Capitalism: Deconstructing the Oral Eye (2010), Arts Based Research: A Critique and a Proposal (with Jason Wallin, 2013), edited volumes What Is Art Education? After Deleuze and Guattari (2017) and Ahuman Pedagogy: Multidisciplinary Perspectives for Education in the Anthropocene (with jessie beier, 2022), he has continually pressed the field to confront the forces that govern learning—its fantasies, its failures, its intensities.
In more recent years, his writing has taken a decidedly posthuman and planetary turn, offering incisive critiques of arts-based research, the anthropological machine, and the technics of contemporary education, while proposing experimental frameworks for thinking-with ahuman subjectivities, environmental collapse, and AI-driven pedagogical futures.
Pedagogy as Non-Pedagogy
In this talk titled Pedagogy as Non-Pedagogy, he joins the Learning Machines to share his newest research, which turns toward the Unteachable: that remainder of learning that refuses automation, refuses capture, refuses to become a problem AI can simply “solve.” Drawing on François Laruelle’s non-philosophy, the transcendental computer, and non-photography, jagodzinski reimagines AI not as a surrogate teacher but as a co-educator, a formal machine capable of processing pedagogical material without legislating a master pedagogy.
This experimental framework treats images, data, and student artifacts as clones of the Real—usable traces rather than authoritative representations—and opens up possibilities for preserving failure, resistance, and creative deviation in the age of algorithmic assimilation. Read the full abstract here.
What to Expect
The session will open with a presentation by jagodzinski, followed by a collective conversation and Q&A. Together, we will explore how alien AI subjectivities might unsettle what learning can be—and how such disturbances might reshape pedagogical relations, practices, and futures. We invite you to think, speculate, and wonder with us about how the Unteachable can still be held, protected, or even activated within contemporary educational systems.
Please register (free) to receive the Zoom link and participate in the conversation. The talk will be recorded and later posted on the Learning Machines website.