Students' Experiences of Emotional Connection with Pedagogical Agents

Background

The continuing debates about the nature and process of learning in higher education have created a minefield of overlapping concepts, with few clear frameworks for understanding the relationship between the context and the experience of the learner. However, those in the field of critical awareness have argued that theirs is not simply another perspective on adult learning but rather a shift in ideology. The ideals of this tradition stem largely from theorists such as Freire (1972, 1974) and hooks (1994), who have argued that social and historical forces shape the processes through which people come to know themselves and develop their view of the world. Learning is therefore seen to occur in a social and cultural context and this necessarily influences what and how people learn. Learners therefore must seek to transcend the constraints their world places upon them in order to liberate themselves and become critically aware. Yet it would seem that higher education has increasingly become colonised by an enterprise culture and the result is that students and academics have become defined by and through this culture. These colonising forms of enterprise higher education reflect the market forces and the quick fix stance of commerce and industry. Higher education that only supplies ‘training’ is unlikely to equip students to work in an uncertain world. Giroux and Giroux (2004) have argued that educators should build courses by combining ‘democratic principles, values, and practices with... the histories and struggles of those often marginalized because of race, class, gender, disability, or age’ (p. 99). They argue that academics should shift beyond the lands of academia and integrate with the larger spheres in the community, where culture and politics are truly learned and made relevant. One such sphere is the online world, a core part of students’ everyday lives.