Writing Education After ChatGPT Asking About What a Word Might Hold
Anne Beate Reinertsen · 2025
In our postdigital society and education systems, humans have become fabricated hybrids of organism and machine, we have become cyborgs. Ignoring the affective dimension of education, digitalized environments give way to an ethical and conceptual vacuum, wherein student teachers and teacher educators risk being reduced to repeaters of slogans. Writing education after ChatGPT asking about what a word might hold, I put postdigital literature in conversation with posthuman affect theory because we need new vocabularies and a view of language as material to describe our postdigital web of entanglements and how this relates to the way we educate teachers. In the posthuman project, humans as affective are significant and need to be written – as in storied – for us to become creative with its functionings. By thinking inter alia with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of rhizomatic writing, and with Hannah Arendt on the concept of mother tongue, I address the need to approach teacher education in a new way, by way of affects and storying. This implies a view of writing as a political life-engendering force and processes of subjective becomings. My aim is to bring teacher education to life by discussing affects in students and storied cyborgs. Based on Arendt, Cassin, (2024), argues that the relationship between language and people must be dissolved and what makes a language a mother tongue is probably the ability to invent and that poetry, the making (and creation) of language, belongs naturally to the mother tongue (p. 94). The performative power that thus lies in language as politics requires a vigilance to avoid conformity, submission, obedience and in a worst case, prejudice: Without a mother tongue, when the mother tongue is no longer a language, it is nothing but propaganda. That is because you have a responsibility for the words you use, a responsibility as a writer, and not just as a receiver or communicative intermediary (...) In general, language derives its political power from its performative effect. (Cassin, 2024, p. 96-7) Writing teacher education in times of failing recruitment to the profession and smaller cohorts of children demographically speaking, putting affect back in might prove pivotal for saving education as knowledge producer and inclusive democracy builder. It implies affirming educators and student teachers a mother tongue for learning and educational innovation: writing as storying not only asking what might a word then hold, but also who holds our words, or should we say ‘what’ holds our words? Given this, I discuss teacher education in general and the master thesis in particular. Writing after ChatGPT challenges issues concerning theory/practice relationships, research and research methodologies, evaluation and professionalism just to mention a few. Key words: Teacher education; Writing; Post-perspectives on education and research; evaluating ontology; the affective turn; subjective becomings; storying; References: Cassin, B. (2024) Nostalgi. Når er vi egentlig hjemme? Odyssevs, Æneas, Arendt. Oversatt av Thomas Lundbo. H//O//F