Karyna's Response

[Robert Greco]

#353

As time passes, I more often think of myself as a social psychologist. As such, I am both a scholar and a teacher. I have a profound interest in the structural, social, ideological, and personal elements that permeate human interactions as well as the methods of learning about those elements. Simultaneously, I see as my duty to share my knowledge with my students in non-evasive ways that would allow them to make choices in how they would like their social reality to be constructed. Technological progress, in turn, had a great influence on both parts of my professional identity. As new media and social networks began to redefine the ways in which people construct their identities, perceive their realities, and engage with their peers, as an emerging scholar I could no longer deny that taking these changes into account is a necessary part of understanding human consciousness and behavior. I began to recognize the utility of technology in a research process as both its tool and subject. And yet,  I remained very skeptical about it, particularly around issues of privacy, ethics, and covert control that it allows certain groups and corporations over users.

As a pedagogue, I began to see technology as a tool that needs to be taught to students in all its variety and complexity. I tend to entertain a rather utopian idea, grounded in Vygotskian theory, that technology, when utilized thoughtfully in a classroom, is potentially a world-changing tool. More and more often I find myself thinking of ways to integrate technology in my classes in a way that will not only illuminate to students the hierarchy of power behind technology and its use but also will allow them to agentically engage with technology in ways that can potentially defy or shift those dominant structures. Such pedagogical practices are often embodied in seemingly simple choices of whether to teach a ridiculously expensive statistical software like SPSS or an open-source software such as R. Forcing me to continuously grapple with the social, political, and ideological implications of teaching each of them is one of the ways in which technological progress impacted me as a teacher. And yet, I feel like technology did not change my core values as a psychologist and a teacher. If anything, it provided me with tools to make them more explicit and engage with them in broader and more critical ways.

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