The technology-pedagogy intersection is a place at least as old as the wax tablet, yet it remains a scene of panic and hyper-enthusiasm around each new and shiny thing. It’s a place where methods and tools collide, and teachers and students lurch, battered and bruised, into and out of the wreckage.

Ok, that’s a bit dramatic, but I’m writing in early 2023, as everyone panics about ChatGPT-3. Right now, artificial intelligence (AI) is a gift and a curse in equal, and extreme, measure.

I recently published a framework called Entangled Pedagogy. It came from a need to help a range of educational stakeholders navigate the large, but largely forgotten, middle ground between technology-centred and pedagogy-centred discourses. Between promises that particular tools will disrupt, revolutionise, solve or reinvent education, or will debase, dehumanise, devalue or destroy it. Between ‘techno-centric’ and ‘pedagogy-first’ positions.

I sympathise with educators who take a pedagogy-first position. I believe that they have good intentions. A lot of tech enthusiasts do too, I am sure. And I am wary of EdTech providers who are trying to sell things, take our data, control us, or even just naively solve complex problems with deterministic solutions. But putting pedagogy first is unrealistic and problematic. Pedagogy always involves technology. If students are reading texts, or sitting on chairs, or basically doing anything in the world, they’re making use of technology. To ignore the shaping influence of technology by relegating it to the back of the queue of things we consider is to both miss out on important opportunities and to skate over the risks and implications that are always, inevitably, there. Technology can’t be put last, because it has a shaping influence on what people do, how they feel, and how they understand what’s going on around them. That shaping influence is not an isolated force: each technology is always a combination of other technologies.

Entangled pedagogy is an attempt to articulate a way of taking technology into account while remembering that it is just one of a complex mix of factors. From an entangled view, pedagogy is a dance of technology, teaching methods, contextual factors, student characteristics, what we are trying to achieve, and what matters to the various people engaged in an educational program.

One of the benefits of the framework, I think, is that it shows us why simplistic takes are problematic. For example, if technology is always entangled in other things, there is little point in trying to prove in any straightforward way that Technology X works better than Technology Y, or that any one aspect of education – technology, teaching method, modality or practice – is inherently better than another. Part of this equation is the idea that students actually contribute to their own learning experiences and outcomes.

Returning to artificial intelligence and the compulsion for people to talk of crisis, disruption, revolution or utopia, we can use an entangled perspective to recognise the relational aspect of human agency. By that, I mean that we are neither the puppets of technology, nor the masters, but we are tied to the conditions and elements around us. These strings do not dictate our movements but they constrain them, and each move we make must be in accordance with the movements or inertia of that with which we’re entangled. The proliferation of AI may result in some quite radical changes to practice, but these can and will also involve intentional and empowering intervention by thoughtful educators. By taking into account the complexity of our relations with technology, we are better able to act in accordance with our values and purposes. Perhaps the technology-pedagogy intersection is not a crash site after all, but a wild, fertile place that demands clear-eyed awareness of complexity, challenge and possibility.