Electracy and Pedagogy
Ulmer’s work has implications for the practice of education as well. Co-author of a textbook for freshman English courses, Ulmer develops undergraduate and graduate level courses which incorporate his theories and invite students into the process of inventing new practices and genres.
Alan Clinton, in a review of Internet Invention, writes that “Ulmer’s pedagogy ultimately levels the playing field between student and teacher” Academic Lisa Gye also recognizes the pedagogical implications of Ulmer’s work:
The transition from a predominantly literate culture to an electronic culture is already engendering changes in the ways in which we think, write and exchange ideas. Ulmer has been concerned with the kinds of changes that take place as a result of this transition and his primary concern has been a pedagogical one – that is, he is interested in how learning is transformed by the shift from the apparatus of literacy to the apparatus of what he comes to term ‘electracy’.
Electracy as an educational aim has been recognized by scholars in several fields, including English composition and rhetoric, literary and media criticism, digital media and art, and architecture Mikesch Muecke explains that "Gregory Ulmer's ideas on electracy provide … a model for a new pedagogy where learning is closer to invention than verification"
Ulmer himself writes:
Electrate pedagogy is based in art/aesthetics as relays for operating new media organized as a prosthesis for learning any subject whatsoever. The near absence of art in contemporary schools is the electrate equivalent of the near absence of science in medieval schools for literacy. The suppression of empirical inquiry by religious dogmatism during the era sometimes called the "dark ages" (reflecting the hostility of the oral apparatus to literacy), is paralleled today by the suppression of aesthetic play by empirical utilitarianism (reflecting the hostility of the literate apparatus to electracy). The ambivalent relation of the institutions of school and entertainment today echoes the ambivalence informing church-science relations throughout the era of literacy.
Ulmer's educational methods fit into a broader paradigm shift in pedagogical theory and practice known as constructivism. He discusses the relationship between pedagogy and electracy at length in an interview with Sung-Do Kim published in 2005.
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