Technopaideia in Literary Education

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Since the learning algorithms were based on data downloaded from the network, the choices made by the robot can be seen as a reflection of the state of our own culture, the negative forms of expression, attitudes and behavior operating in it.

hard to deny, since it is based on a fully falsifiable and currently preferred model of truth, based on science. However, the truth about a man from a cultural studies or philological perspective seems completely different, and the answer to the question posed by the ancient philosopher is infinitely more complicated. This problem was approached by the poet Adam Zagajewski with an anecdote about Raïssie Maritain , who wrote [in her memoirs] about the spiritual desert of the Sorbonne, overrun by adherents of positivism, that is, the belief that the sciences can solve all the problems of mankind. She also wrote about the effort required to walk about two hundred meters […] to the Collège de France, where there was already a different intellectual climate, because one of the professors there […] was Henri Bergson, working on a new synthesis of natural science and philosophy, trying to overcome the spiritual poverty of scientism (Zagajewski, 2007, p. 18).

Also, Wystan H. Auden warned against scientification and technicization of the educational model, involving, inter alia, a preference for a particular type of truth based on empiricism. In 1958, he wrote that experimental sciences deliberately try to keep human beings on or reduce them to a sub-personal level at which they can be scientifically controlled, and it is no longer possible to know them in the poetic sense. […] In our age when the practical applications of experimental science have caused such amazing transformations in the conditions of human life that kind of truth sought by science seems to many the only kind, the most important educational role of poetry and other arts is to assert that the verb "to know" can be used in another sense than in which an experimental scientist uses it.

[…] an organism is more than a cluster of physico-chemical events-and for persons it is not only invalid but also immoral to seek for it. To the degree that it is possible to know a person in the scientific sense, he is not a person, that is to say, a freeman, but a slave, and our moral duty is to try to educate him to the point where such knowledge is no longer possible (Auden, 2010, p. 150).

There is a beautiful paradox of knowledge here, in which only cognition through poetry or, more broadly, through literature completes the work of educating a person and allows him or her to fully exist in the community as a free individual. However, it is no longer possible to escape technology, digital humanities, robotics or digital thinking; nor is it possible to maintain the traditional mono-medial model of literature and previous culture of reading. Therefore, the effort that both poets make to go beyond the "poverty of scientism" is also ours. The Technopaideia proposed herein is, in part, an attempt at such a Bergsonian-in-spirit synthesis of advanced technologies and literary education.

Schools of advanced technologies

High-tech schools are units based on the STEM education approach, equipped with so-called labs where a single model of truth is cultivated and developed. However, the presence of advanced technologies therein is not limited to teaching aids. Digital lab tools, robots, cloud labs, VR goggles, programming zones, interactive whiteboards or visualizers and internal e-learning platforms are not only integrated into the learning process itself (modification and redefinition levels in Ruben Puentedura's model), but also combined with the design of educational spaces. 4 It is worth to mention the PlayMaker School in Santa Monica, the ALT School (San Francisco) or the Quest2learn school network (New York), Kastelli School in Oulu and Scuola Centro Civico (SCC) in Turin functioning within The Educational Lab. 5 In Poland, high-tech schools have been established, inter alia, owing to the Laboratories of the Future program in cooperation with the GovTech Center. The Zone of Discovery, Imagination and Activity program (Polish: SOWA) also plays an important role in this area. 6 It consists of a network of independent units cooperating with the Copernicus Science Center. These units are equipped, inter alia, with workshop spaces called Masterspaces, special rooms designed to conduct experiments on science or technical subjects, which are the same as so-called maker labs known in American schools. However, we rarely hear of analogous spaces for humanities subjects. If they do exist, they are based on the idea of a laboratory. For example, on the laboratoriaszkolne.com website, in addition to the possibility of equipping biology or chemistry labs within the Laboratories of the Future program, one can find "ideas for history and language labs," the latter, however, being concerned with the study of foreign languages. 7 Additionally, the Lesser Poland Education Cloud program for years 2016-2023 envisages "a new model of teaching, implemented in a partnership formula in cooperation with eight universities" focusing on science subjects with the use of advanced technologies. There are, however, no humanities institutions on the list of cooperating entities (except those related to foreign language learning). In addition, the new performative pedagogy has redefined literary education in many countries along the lines of exact sciences. Examples include transformative pedagogies and cultural making, innovative solutions developed by Paulo Blikstein and his TLTL (Transformative Learning Technologies Lab) team at Columbia University. While it is necessary to develop a 4 The division of student workspace at the Scuola Centro Civico in Turin, https://torinocitylab.it/images/ documents/Edulab/EDu_lAB-2019-layout.pdf; whereas the organization of the educational space at the playMaker School involves a division into a Dream lab, a Maker lab, and an Adventure Room, https:// gensler.com/projects/playmaker-school (13.07.2022).

theoretical basis for innovative forms of education in humanities that would be adapted to conditions of a highly mediatized information society and compatible with well-developed educational methods for science, humanities should not undergo excessive scientification. By posing frequently the same questions (such as this question about a man), humanities are beginning to provide answers in the manner known from empirical sciences and, therefore, with respect to their own cognitive specificity, shallow. The model of humanities as a "prosthesis" of the exact sciences develops and profiles cognitive functions of students in a single-track manner, orienting them toward one, absolutized, and thus dangerous kind of truth, which Auden described many years ago.

Technopaideia: toward a transversal subjectivity

What about literature, then? How can high-tech schools be used to form free people rather than slaves for whom everything becomes a lab, including literature; people capable of going beyond thinking about the world in purely empirical terms? Technopaideia may be the answer here. One should understand it as: a. the practice of creative use of innovative technologies (e.g. interactive virtual reality experience) when interpreting literary texts, while adhering to the cognitive specificity of humanities; technologies cannot have an appropriating or destructive effect on the non-empirical model of truth on which literary studies, among others, are founded; b. a part of a philosophy of education in which technologies and digital environments behind them become a starting point for thinking about how they shape, profile, and expand students' cognitive skills.

In the case of literary studies, the technopaideia would involve integrating advanced technologies into the educational processes, in such a way that allows students to expand their interpretive competence that is essential in contemporary literature, including multimodality, multisensoriality, agency, embodied thinking associated with acts of kinesthesia and sense of space (e.g. the use of VR motion sensors). Technopaideia is thus an attempt to incorporate an inherent humanistic, philological nucleus into the empirically-oriented education model, a factor that makes it possible to maintain Auden's paradox of knowledge. It is also important to emphasize that paideia itself is currently more than just a learning process. It consists of bringing a person into a community of a brand new type, interacting with one another in solidarity, skillfully sharing and using knowledge from different disciplines and subjects (Borowicz, 2021). This, in turn, implies a kind of a transversal mindset capable of shifting smoothly between different modalities, disciplines, discourses and ultimately tearing down barriers between science and art or between science and humanities; a mindset capable of acting consciously and critically between and in different worlds. 8 The most valuable offering currently coming from high-tech-based digital environments is a new type of hybrid subjectivity and communality shaped by digital participation, embodied simulation and empathetic projection, neo-tribality, transversality, immersivity, augmented being, extended models of subjectivity and even multi-subjectivity and metaversality. In other words, it is, to some extent, the "equipment" with which a student comes to school. Meanwhile, in many cases, traditional methods of teaching literature force students to adopt and develop a cognitive model that is unfamiliar to them and quite anachronistic, based on media environments of the twentieth or even nineteenth century. This dissonance ultimately negatively affects a young person's ability and willingness to assimilate and develop a sensibility based on the literariness of the world (Xu et al., 2022). Contemporary culture offers an immersive, hypertextual, multimodal or even polytopic experience and not necessarily a human-centered model of being in the world. Immersivity is not merely intellectual or textual here, but immediate and corporeally engaging in a way that is far more appealing than a traditional book. A brief review of London exhibitions from the past few months that are offering VR experience shows the power of the message mediated by advanced technologies as well as the scale of the problem (see "transversale Vernunft," Welsch, 1997). 9 For example, the description of the exhibition We live in an ocean of air is as follows:

[it is] a multi-sensory immersive installation by London-based immersive art collective Marshmallow Laser Feast. The work unveils the invisible yet symbiotic connections that bind the animal, plant, human and natural worlds into one enchanting tapestry of wonder, all in stunning virtual reality. 10 Visual-audial-corporeal bewilderment is a type of experience that mono-medial literature in its classic Greenbergian frames can hardly compete with in the twenty first century. Besides, advanced technologies are already not only an inalienable part of modern art but also of physics or biology classes, i.e. subjects dynamically responding to the new type of mediatization and technicization of life. "We are very near to the time when virtually no essential human function, physical or mental, will lack an artificial counterpart" (Moravec, 1988, p. 2). Are humanities, however, adequately prepared for such a significant change? If a literature teacher wants to creatively develop students' new competencies and use them to study literary texts created before the era of the so-called new media, he or she needs to be adequately prepared. Such a teacher should not only have a well-equipped "Literature Workspace" at his or her disposal, but also be well-versed in mediatization processes and intermedia theory. Hence, I believe that future literature teachers can no longer be educated without access to classes on new technologies; nor can these classes (as is often the case) focus on knowledge of the tools or applications themselves, since proficiency in their use is not the point, as the objective is to understand how technology affects the learning process and how to make the most of its functions to enhance it. It is also worth realizing that today's technologies are not new media per se, but platforms that merge existing technologies (electronic media + the Internet + location-based and Augmented Reality technologies) in a new mode of digital composite imaging, data association and socially maintained data exchange and communication (Lapenta, 2011, 15).

Therefore, education pathways for future teachers need to be remodeled with the aim of equipping them with knowledge on mediatization and technicization processes, and the impact they have on students' cognitive and interpretive abilities. Moreover, a literature teacher will find many valuable learning methods and tools in the constructivist-conectivist model of STEM education, such as model-based inquiry, game-based learning, exploration technologies, connected learning or bifocal modeling (see Blikstein, 2014).

It is also worth considering how to creatively apply and re-adapt the formula of labs (media labs, mission labs, labs in a cloud) for teaching literature which aims, after all, to sustain specifically human forms of sensitivity rooted in language. The challenge is how to create ideatories, workshops of ideas, spaces of interpretation, or @goras, where students will use such strategies as embodied simulation or startups, i.e. nonpermanent team initiatives made to solve specific problems, such as interpretation of literary texts through performative actions, robot theaters, cyber theaters, or media experiments, among others, rather than "laboratories of literature." The metaversal theater is already a fact, as can be noticed through the activities of the Dream Adoption Society. 11 It should be emphasized that children begin to develop special competencies (including transliteracy) and operate non-linear forms of thinking (hypertextuality, think digital, and performativity) through convergence processes as early as in their childhood. These intellectual activities are very much desired and important in the humanities, however, they do not receive a proper enhancement in literary classes. Although literature functions in new media ecosystems that emanate from fundamental changes at the level of social life, educational pathways are not profiled with new media competencies of students in mind. In addition, teachers use many innovative tools selectively and at the most elementary level. Furthermore, there is an insufficient number of ideas for the application of technologically advanced literature workspaces. Teachers are often required to replace traditional teaching tools with digital ones. Occasionally robots, VR goggles, or gamification models are used. 12 In many countries, elements of programming are still regarded as pure fantasy in literary classes. This does not help to prepare students for the multi-modality of contemporary literature, for its inherent polysensoriality, polyphonicity, and spatiality; nor does it build an interpretive skillset tailored to the cultural reality of the twenty first century, and ultimately does not enable finding values in mono-medial literature that are relevant to contemporary man. Therefore, it does not set up conditions for a productive reinterpretation of literary classics, the "great books," and therefore for active use of cultural heritage. After all, literature is no longer based exclusively on the letter, but also on a kinesthetic, multisensory spatial experience, immersiveness, interactivity, and even agency or so-called secondary orality.

Technopaideia in progress

Academia Electronica, which is a non-institutionalized educational center operating in Second Life and Spatial.io, may be a good example of implementation of advanced technologies in humanities and their embedment in teaching processes at the university level. 13 Currently, experimental solutions are also being sought at Jagiellonian University's Multimodal Educational and Cultural Research Center, where I am leading the "Educational function of heritage sites in literature teaching" project. It aims to develop new curricular pathways for integrating academic knowledge into the horizon of teaching with living heritage and embedded education. The idea is to use the potential of cultural heritage sites (from antiquity to the twentieth century), as well as cultural and educational institutions, to embed knowledge acquired by students in specific micro-historical frameworks through the direct experience effect, active participation and spatial thinking. This approach uses the educational power of heritage sites, affective practices and spatial embedment (Stolare et al., 2021). It also involves the performative use of heritage sites in the construction of new educational strategies based on the discursivization of spatial activities and locative media. The aim of combining advanced technologies (in the form of sensors and VR goggles), and location-based media with real cultural environments is to go beyond traditional interpretive practices and build new cognitive competencies based on immersivity and the so-called networked art objects. These activities can be executed, among others, through strategies of situationist drift, transurbation, embodied simulation, analysis of documentation/objects in galleries or reconstruction of sites in metaverse (so-calles non-sites) and juxtaposition with heritage sites, cybercartographies of heritage sites, elements of gamification (so-called missions), or essayistic meta-stories and photo-essays about heritage sites typical for land art practices. In the embodied reception of heritage sites, I use cartographic imagination, participatory mapping, bio mapping, emotional landscapes, or neogeography. 14 Drifts or walking through sites such as the Pnyx, Lycaeon, Plato's Academy, or the agora in Athens involve, among other things, combining theoretical knowledge (teachers' commentary) with knowledge that is produced on site as an effect of emerging questions, discourses, embodied being, digitally mediated, mapped, and embedded. Therefore, such an experimental model of knowledge production is taking place in a hybrid setting consisting of human and non-human actors, the physical world, a communication component, the electromagnetic spectrum and technical objects. As Henri Lefebvre said, it creates a situation or a moment that is new, surprising, and endowed with a creative context (Lefebvre, 1997). The reception strategies emerging during such drifts aim at building a critical apparatus of a new type that may be used later by students in their reinterpretations of conventional literary works.

The case of Pnyx -introductory research

Pnyx ("pressed one against the other") is the name of one of the most important hills in Athens, located opposite the western slope of Acropolis and the Areopagus. Pnyx was the site in which popular assembly, so-called ekklesia, were held during the classical period. That is the place where all of the most renowned Athenian speakers, such as Themistokles,

Demosthenes and Pericles gave their speeches. The hill's architectural arrangement was adapted to serve a public purpose and comprises a lectern (bema) and a semicircle auditorium for assembly members in the form of a terrace that was carved in a rock. In case of Pnyx, the situational drift strategy enables project participants to play the role of a polis citizen, a speaker, a member of the audience and the assembly, in particular whenever such action comprises a part of gamified classes, such as the I spy Greece project developed within the Institute of Play. 15 The drift's basis comprises bodily and sensory-motor, mainly visual, sensations, the ability to situate oneself against other humans, objects and elements of landscape, including recognizing their scale and placement (body cognition). Studies that I conducted in situ during the fall of 2022 on a group of 15 anonymous volunteers enabled me to create a map of density patterns of biosensory activity. After a walk along a designated route with stops in pre-determined places, participants were supposed to indicate on digital maps places or objects on which they focused, starting with those that aroused most interest. The result showed that over 90% of respondents focused on three places: Acropolis, Agora and Areopagus, which comprise a "scenic triangle" consistent with the site's specular policy. Pnyx's significance during the classical period is remarkable exactly due to its topographic location with regard to Acropolis, Areopagus and Agora, i.e. the political and religious heart of Athens. Everyone speaking in front of the assembly had these sites in front of them and perceived them as a kind of a monumental, "theatrical set" for the ekklesia. The topic of Athens' citizens' discussion, i.e. polis' best interest, was thus made visible and materialized through that view from the above, from a perspective adequate for an all-knowing narrator-observer (third-person narration). Athenians had the subject of their debate literally in front of their eyes, which constituted a playing field for a visual, rhetorical and bodily game between the speaker, participants and their surroundings. The city landscape's panoramic view enabling a distanced and full outlook can also be treated as a part of a pictorial rhetoric that reinforces speaker's message. Athens were "displayed" to participants of the assembly giving their speech, and, as a result, they were able to reflect upon them and consider the message in an active manner. The visualization schema that complies with the world picture's model of time is strictly connected with the axiological sphere and the model of cognition that was developing in the classical culture, based on a rationalized stance with regard to the world (a human as a distanced observer that is able to make an objective evaluation).

Therefore, Pnyx's geographic location with regard to Agora, Areopagus and Acropolis realizes the primacy of a particular thinking model developed within the Greek world, that is based on distancing oneself, reflection, observation and theory (gr. theōría, "carefully observing, " theōréō, "looking, considering," theōrós, "spectator"), and rational premises. One is supposed to make important decisions as a speaker and a spectator on the Pnyx, looking at one's polis from a distance. Considering this rhetorical scheme can constitute an interesting exercise while organizing various types of school debates that are aimed at practising arguments and discussion, for instance during a Socratic Smackdown, i.e. a model developed by Rebecca Grodner for Quest to Learn schools in New York. 16 It is also worth emphasizing that a multi-modal 3D interface named Bema enables active participation in a debate on Pnyx in virtual reality (Kim et al., 2015).

Summary

I believe that the future of highly technicized school and university is a kind of multimodal education, where science can be integrated with humanities through a network of transdisciplinary modules. Programming skills as a new form of literacy and a deeper knowledge of mediatization processes are fundamental for such multimodal meta-platforms. Additionally, within the perspective of a couple of dozens of years, it will be necessary to incorporate self-aware non-human entities into learning processes instead of robots with computational "thinking" as is the case today. The goal of such integrated education based on advanced technologies is a new polymathy and a transversal mindset that will enable students to move freely in multiple modalities and diverse (in traditional terms) learning areas, while maintaining a poetic sensibility in the age of highly technicized societies. Connectivity, dialog, and communication between the specificity of individual subjects or different "languages" of learning is already the basis of innovative education in Finland, among others, where newly designed schools have no clear division into classrooms, and students can freely "flow" between courses by mixing their ages. Finally, it should be emphasized once again that the truth sought within science is fundamentally different from the truth that literature has been containing, developing, and sustaining-from Gilgamesh to technopoetry. Our task is to ensure that cognition in the philological sense is not completely supplanted in school (or university) education by cognition in the scientific sense. It is literature, regardless of the media it uses, within the framework of specific languages it uses, that makes it possible to create human subjectivity and fulfill social needs of an individual. At the same time, it is worth emphasizing that technologies have been changing civilization since Paleolithic hominids began to chip the first stones. They have always shaped the way our species thinks, subsequently significantly redefining the most human of the sciences, philosophy and philology. However, in terms of the ability to make and use tools, technology is significantly older than literature. It is also related to learning at the most rudimentary level. Therefore, let us also learn to enjoy the benefits of advanced technologies while being, however, like Auden, aware of the dangers they pose.