Dynamically developing networked digital environments are shaping a new type of hybrid subjectivity and community based on, among other things, embodied simulation, transversality, immersivity and metaversum. In other words, this is what the student already comes to school ‘equipped’ with to some extent. Meanwhile, current Polish Language and Literature education forces students to adopt and develop a cognitive model that is alien to them and quite anachronistic, based on media environments from the 20th or even 19th century. This dissonance has a negative impact on a young person’s ability and willingness to acquire and develop a sensibility based on the literariness of the world. Advances in technology are also increasingly influencing educational methods, as well as the subject of study and research itself – i.e. literature and the ways in which it is received, and are reshaping the multidimensional model of the literary field (sociology of literature). Despite the fact that literature is increasingly operating in new media ecosystems (new literacies), the educational paths in Polish Studies classes are not designed to meet the new competences of students, which emanate from the fundamental changes in social life, and innovative tools are used by Polish Language and Literature teachers selectively and usually at an elementary level. There are also few ideas for the use of technologically advanced “Literature Labs”, which would become fully functional equivalents of school laboratories. Teachers are mostly expected to replace traditional teaching tools with digital ones. The use of robots, ozobots, VR goggles and gamification models is occasional. Elements of programming are still seen as unnecessary fantasy in Polish Language and Literature lessons. This in no way opens students up to the multimodality of contemporary literature and art, to its inherent polysensoriality, polyphony and spatiality, nor does it build an interpretative workshop tailored to the cultural reality of the 21st century, and ultimately does not enable them to find in mono-media literature values that are relevant to modern man. This does not create the conditions for a creative reinterpretation of literary classics, of these great books, and thus for an active use of cultural heritage. After all, literature is no longer based solely on the letter, but also on kinaesthetic, multi-sensory spatial experience, immersion, interactivity, and even causality and secondary orality, i.e. everything that we owe, among other things, to advanced technologies and the processes of mediatisation.
Technopaideia offers an answer to these challenges of contemporary education. It is a modern educational model developed by the OMBEiK team, which uses advanced information technology tools and elements of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) education in the processes of teaching Polish language and literature. The constructivist-connectivist STEM model offers to the Polish Language and Literature educator many valuable teaching methods and tools, such as model-based inquiry, game-based learning, exploration technologies, connected learning and bifocal modelling. In the case of Polish Studies education, technopaideia would consist of integrating advanced technologies and elements of the STEM model into the didactic process in such a way that they enable pupils and students to expand their interpretative competences, e.g. with multimodality, polysensoriality, causality, embodied thinking related to kinesthetic acts and the sense of space (e.g. the use of VR motion sensors), which are important for contemporary literature. Paideia itself is also, in this view, more than education. It is about introducing people to being in a community of a whole new type, to interact in solidarity within it, to skilfully share and use knowledge from different disciplines and subjects. This, in turn, implies a kind of transversal mindfulness capable of moving seamlessly between different modalities, disciplines, discourses and ultimately breaking down the barriers between science and art and between science and humanitas; a mind capable of consciously and critically existing between and in different worlds. Technopaideia is thus based on the practice of creative use of innovative technologies (e.g. interactive virtual reality experience) in the interpretation of literary texts, but according to the cognitive specificity of the humanities. Our assumption is that these technologies must not have an appropriating or destructive effect on the non-empirical model of truth on which, among other things, the sciences of literature are founded. At the same time, technopaideia would be part of a philosophy of education in which high-tech and digital environments behind it become the starting point for thinking about how they influence the process of shaping, profiling and broadening students’ cognitive skills.
As part of technopaideia, we are also considering the creative use and readaptation of labs for the teaching of Polish Studies aimed, after all, at sustaining specifically human forms of sensibility rooted in literature, or more broadly, in language (media labs, mission labs, labs in a cloud). A question occurs here on how to draw inspiration from “literature labs” and create idea labs, interpretation space called @goras, in which students would use the strategy of embodied simulation, scrum and the concept of start-ups – i.e. impermanent team initiatives to solve specific challenges posed to them by, for example, performative action, robot theatre, cyber theatre or media experiments?
