Creating sustainable posthuman adaptive learning environments for pregnant teenagers.

Abstract

Posthuman theorisation provides us with the conceptual tools to analyse and to understand how sustainable learning environments (SuLE) are created through adaptive learning (AL) as a form of artificial intelligence (AI) and as an aspect of a broader collective of relationalities. In this study our focus is on how pregnant teenagers relate to the curriculum, one another, other learners, parents, teachers, schools, communities, and non-human and more-than-human entities as they learn. Their condition currently makes them vulnerable and places them in less powerful positions to influence their learning in ways that align with their abilities and modes of being. The Posthumanist lens assists moves away from socialised gender, racial or generally underclass categories and dispositions. It enables us to situate pregnant teenagers’ feminine subjectivities beyond Humanism’s representations of this demographic as bearing-stigma, facing exclusion and marginalisation. This mode of seeing enables the possibility of re/imagining the pregnant teenager’s experiences through modes of being in which participation in networks and collaborations through adaptive learning, among others, draw on pedagogic technologies of change. We argue for a dissolving of Humanist barriers that define, stigmatise and burden the pregnant teenagers as they are fully integrated in their relationalities as learners in AI learning networks. Access to AL and similar software and gadgets need to be massified and opened up for use by all, irrespective of gender, socio-economic status, religion or any marginalising marker.