Stefano Calzati

Teaching

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Teaching Philosophy

Whenever I teach a university class, I introduce my eclectic professional and academic profile – spanning from journalism and media studies to philosophy of technology and data governance – acquired in various settings – Italy, France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Estonia, Hong Kong – because I have learnt by now that students become more open and engaged when they realize they face a teacher who has passions beyond mere grading, as well as an intercultural background that favours a deeper understanding of them individually and as a collective. This is to say, in other words, that when I am in class, I am always committed to balancing my authority as a teacher with those other facets of my persona that show students who I am beyond my role as a teacher. This, in turn, kindles students to reflect upon themselves and draw upon their own interests, passions, and ambitions, when it comes to contributing to the class.

This incipit leads me to address the preliminary fundamental point of my teaching credo: be proactive and receptive; teaching, after all, requires a mutual adaptation between learners and teacher to be really empowering. Before entering the class, I know how I intend to structure the lesson – it is, in fact, my duty – and yet, I also make all efforts to remain open to students. This means not only that my lesson’s plan is flexible and adaptable to the students’ contributions and needs but also that I strive to understand the skills, attitudes, levels of competences, and socio-cultural diversity of the cohort of people I am facing. This is usually easier with small classes, such as those I had for the seminars in “Cultural History” at the University of Leeds (15 students on average), or the elective in “Ethics for the Data-driven city” at TU Delft. When this happens, I resort to quick rounds of interventions during the introductory class, asking students to tell me more about themselves: their studies, their interests, what they expect from the course. In this way, students feel more involved from the outset: they feel, in a way, that the class – as a space and a learning process – belongs to them. By contrast, whenever I teach to big classes, as happened in Hong Kong, Milan, or Tallinn (from 50 to 130 students), I make sure to always provide my academic contacts and to spend a great deal of the first lesson explaining the structure and functioning of the course. Over the years, I have learnt that such an approach is the best way to soften, if not neutralize, questions and doubts about the course’s requirements and then proceed without impediments. Moreover, this worked especially well in Hong Kong, where the students were tendentially more reluctant to speak in class due to a cultural-specific inhibition.

In fact, not only the size of the class but also the kind of students I am surrounded by plays a role in guiding my teaching method. For instance, I am all in favour of requiring students to engage in short writing contributions beyond in-class oral participation. The writing can be in the form of brief notes, ongoing dairies, or questions that the students jot down and that we can discuss individually or collectively based on the topic and the student’s willingness to do so. In this way, I keep track of the students’ learning advancement – as a self-reflective process – and I can also utilize these writings to redirect the following lessons. In a similar vein, I ask students to send me, via email, one/two questions or a short reflection on the texts they are expected to read for the following lecture; or I ask one of them, on a rolling basis, to present in class the assigned reading, connecting it to their own academic background and personal experience (e.g. when the article deals with the use of a data-driven service or technology). In this way, I not only make sure that students come prepared to class, but I often recycle their contributions and presentations as kick-off starters in the new lesson, bypassing shyness, or limitations due to the class size. This worked very well, for instance, at Tallinn University of Technology and Delft University of Technology, where the courses in “Big Data and Governance” and “Ethics for the Data-driven City” were open to a diverse cohort of students in terms of both their academic level (MA and PhD) and field of research (e.g., in one case: business, economy, law, public administration, sociology; in the other case: urbanism, architecture, astrophysics). Given such variety, having weekly written contributions from the students allowed them to re-appropriate and reframe the issues we were discussing – i.e., the impact of digital transformation and datafication on societies – in the context of their own studies and interests.

To this, I shall add that I often try to include guest lectures, fieldwork visits, and non-academic readings to make the courses more diverse and engaging. For instance, in Hong Kong I hosted two colleagues from Germany with whom I was working on a research project that addressed the same issues discussed in class – self-representation in writing and on social media. Therefore, I included in the syllabus two texts authored by these colleagues, and I asked students to send in their comments over the weekend, which I then used as prompts to the lecture. On that occasion, the class took the form of a very interactive and stimulating panel in which students – possibly thrilled by the informal presence of other scholars – were keen to elaborate further on their written comments and challenge their guests. Similarly, for the course in “Ethics for the Data-driven City” at TU Delft, each year I organized a hands-on visit to The Green Village – the living lab on TU Delft campus – to allow students grasping ongoing tech innovations for the urban environment, which could then work as a basis for their own assignments; or also, I invited colleagues and artists from my network, as well as organized visits museums which periodically hosts exhibitions at the intersection of design, technology and society. Last, I like to include heterodox readings that frame the issues at stake from a non-academic perspective: for instance, concerning the digital transformation, works by Isaac Asimov, Luis Borges or Ray Bradbury (or also the TV series Black Mirror) worked particularly well and were appreciated.

My teaching is also modelled according to the type of lesson delivered. When a chiefly theory-based lecture is needed, I want to facilitate the grasping of key concepts by combining a seminal core text with a second one (usually more recent) that questions the former or present a concrete case study. In this way, students are led to autonomously compare the texts, developing their critical approach to relevant literature in the field. A case in point is a lecture I gave in Hong Kong that focused on writing and photography as different techniques/technologies for autobiographical recording. The readings included a rather complex essay by philosopher Sigfried Kracauer and a text on visual representation taken from the work of Japanese scholar Maki Fukuoka (with whom I worked in Leeds). During the in-class debate, students demonstrated their ability to intuitively ‘fill the gaps’ of Kracauer’s text – i.e., what they could not understand of it – by relying on Fukuoka’s text. Moreover, the built-in dialogue between the two texts – one belonging to the Western academic tradition and one whose ethos was culturally and temporally closer to the students – allowed me to contextualize the teaching experience depending on the cultural specificity of the learning environment. Another example comes from the course “Ethics for the data-driven city”, in which more theoretical articles discussing the value-laden development and implementation of digital services are accompanied by real-life examples drawing from news and literature reviews.

In the teaching of seminars, by contrast, it is easier to adopt a more interactive approach. In these cases, I usually start the lesson by asking whether the materials in the syllabus presented any difficulties. This is often enough to kick off the discussion, which then I make sure to guide by addressing the key points I have in mind (which I eventually sum up in one/two slides at the end of the lesson). Most importantly, I promote interventions and examples that move back and forth from the past to the present and that draw upon the students’ own knowledge and diverse backgrounds. The goal is to strengthen their awareness that the tech/cultural phenomena we study are not self-enclosed in a space-time void but part of socio-historical and global processes that can be addressed from different perspectives. An emblematic example is a seminar I led in Leeds on war and memory. That year – 2014 – was the 100th anniversary of World War I. So, beyond the assigned texts, I asked students to bring to class one/two keepsakes – postcards, diaries, letters, photos, brooches – that belonged to their grandparents and related directly to the war. During the seminar, we focused on these “memorial objects” by listening to the students’ stories and showing how institutional and collective memories are deeply entrenched practices rather than juxtaposed lists of facts and dates. Remarkably, some students found the topic so interesting that they decided to develop it for their final dissertation.

The type of class that favours the greatest flexibility is the workshop. In workshops, in fact, teaching metamorphoses into the organization and coordination of the various contributions from the participants. In this respect, I often enact a “connective intelligence” approach, whereby, after briefing participants about the umbrella topic of the workshop, smaller groups are created, each one addressing the topic from a specific angle, after which groups are brought together to explore the synergies and tensions of their own works as soon as these are reframed within a bigger picture. This was my experience with two workshops that I organized and chaired in Wuppertal and Hong Kong for exploring and testing the initial results of the research project on offline and online self-representation practices. For both workshops, I prepared a presentation concerning the objectives and methodology of the research (first workshop), as well as findings and further developments (second workshop). Beyond that, each session, which spanned over three days, was open to discussion, suggestions, and critiques from the participants, whose diverse backgrounds helped acquired a composite understanding of the dynamics under analysis. In a workshop-style fashion, I also organized and taught the course in Academic Writing for the master Erasmus pioneer students at Tallinn University of Technology. Since the goal of the course was to provide students with hands-on tips on how to properly formulate a research question for their thesis, as well as on the right choice of the research methodology, it would have been pointless to deliver frontal lectures. So, I organized the course around small weekly writing assignments that helped students build up their own research topic and thesis backbone.

Lastly, my teaching is also shaped by my academic formation. As a student, I have dealt with both the Anglo-Saxon approach – especially in my graduate and postgraduate studies in Amsterdam and the United Kingdom – and the Continental Europe’s approach, during my BA (in “Communication Sciences” both in Bologna and Paris) and MA (in “Publishing and Journalism” at Sapienza University of Rome). This means I have become acquainted with both, and I have discovered their strengths and weaknesses. One major difference is that the continental approach tends to adopt a genealogic perspective that seeks the roots of macro-phenomena and their consequences, while the Anglo-Saxon approach favours the identification and isolation of issues that are historically and culturally transversal. Concerning this latter approach – which characterized my teaching in the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, and the Netherlands – I am well aware of the deep, but sometimes decontextualized, insights it can provide. As a consequence, whenever I follow this approach, I always encourage students to broaden their perspectives, enriching my lessons with questions and examples that aim at bringing the relevance of the context to the foreground. The goal is to foster the students’ critical stance towards the theme treated, enticing connections among contemporary world-wide events as well as between past and present ones. This becomes even more relevant whenever I teach to multicultural classes – especially in the UK – where the need for relativizing Western ethnocentrism is a necessity. On the other hand, the continental approach, while wide in its breadth, tends to remain disciplinary in nature, thus hindering the interdisciplinary exploration of the studied phenomena. This limitation is particularly evident when teaching courses that deal with media cultures and tech innovation – such as those I taught especially in Hong Kong and Milan – whose innervation in the societal realm is by now transversal, cutting disciplinary and cultural borders as well as requiring mixed methodologies.  For instance, in the courses in Hong Kong and Milan (i.e., “Facebook and Autobiography”, “Sociology of Media” and “Digital Cultures”), when focusing on the use of social media, as a way to promote a strong sense of self-fulfilment, students from China and also India correctly pointed out that Asian cultures tend to frame such self-accomplishment to social acceptance within a community. Such remarks encouraged intercultural comparisons, delving into the diverse conceptualizations of self and collective identities in the West and the East. Similarly, when in Tallinn some students were “returning students” who had already worked in practice for years – e.g., in governmental offices – and who wanted to have a more comprehensive understanding of the potentialities and drawbacks of tech innovation for society at large. Hence, their own experiences and contributions allowed other students to benefit from first-hand testimonies about dos and don’ts when it comes to the use of certain algorithmic technologies in the public sector, ultimately expanding and enriching the horizon of the whole course. More generally, this has led me, over the year, to favour a non-normative and transdisciplinary approach to the topics I teach, thus – on the one hand – compelling students, at all times, to questions their own assumptions and not take anything for granted, while – on the other hand – promoting disciplinary and cultural cross-fertilization. Learning – I learnt – is truly empowering when it is configured as an endless process, beyond the seeking and reaching of “solutions”: at stake is the opening up of issues, not their closing as if they were self-standing boxes.

This brings me back to my teaching credo: the class is a space of negotiation and mutual learning. This is especially true with regard to the topics I teach, which seek an ongoing negotiation between individual and collective stances and values. Indeed, new technologies and their users not only are the focus of attention, but they (need to) become active factors and actors in the field and in class. This awareness introduces my final consideration on teaching. To purse the idea of teaching as a productive experience for all actors involved means to create an environment in which every actor is part of a comprehensive project with precise learning goals. In other words, each teaching experience shall be designed without losing sight of a systemic vision, within which each contribution can thrive.

Just to give two last examples, this was the case especially with the course “Anthropology of Communication”, co-led with Prof. De Kerckhove at Politecnico in Milan, and the course “Ethics for the Data-driven City” at TU Delft. In the former, students became the co-actors of the teaching experience by collaboratively contributing to the themes of the course, which were developed first in small groups and later in bigger thematic clusters revolving around the tech-driven regeneration of a small Italian village. The result was not only the fostering of a deeply reflexive modus operandi but also the creation of a unique form of self-taught understanding of the tensions running through today’s techno-society. In the latter, ethics was approached from a non-axiomatic perspective – thus dismissing the possibility of assessing, once and for all, whether certain data-driven technologies implemented in the urban environment operate for good (or bad) – and encouraged students to investigate the extent to which each technology “for good” – e.g. social inclusion, sustainability, democratic participation – always contains its own entangled drawbacks – e.g. tradeoffs, rebound effects, etc. – leading to both negative and positive unintended consequences. Hence, the course shifted away from a problem-solving approach towards a problem-opening approach that compelled the whole class to foster a collective-level modus cogitandi about the addressed issues. This is, I believe, the most effective way to provide students with the required tools, methods, and lenses for consciously facing the present and the future of the technological revolution – in other words, for being critical and self-critical.

List of courses, lectures, workshops, seminars, MOOCs

  • 2023: MOOC “Ethics for Geotechnologies”, Twente University
  • 2021-2023: Course “Ethics for the Data-driven city”, TU Delft
  • 2021-2023: Guest lecture “Open Urban Data”, TU Delft
  • 2021-2023: Guest lecture on “Data Ethics and Housing”, Amsterdam Real Estate Business School
  • 2022: Learning materials on “Data Ethics” for Twinning Open Data Operational – H2020 project, University of Zagreb
  • 2022: MOOC – Spider Erasmus+ project, Module on “Ethical Perspectives on Open SDI.”
  • 2019-2021: Course “Big Data and Governance”, Taltech
  • 2019: Course “Writing master thesis”, Erasmus Pioneer students, Taltech
  • 2018-2020: Course “Sociology of Media”, Polytechnic Institute of Milan
  • 2018-2020: Course: “Sociologia dei processi culturali e comunicativi”, Polytechnic Institute of Milan
  • 2018-2020: Course “Digital Cultures”, Polytechnic Institute of Milan
  • 2018: Course “Anthropology of Communication”, Polytechnic Institute of Milan
  • 2016-2017: Course “Social Media and Self-representation”, CityU HK
  • 2013-2014 & 2014-2015: Teaching seminars for the BA core module “Cultural History”, University of Leeds

Synopses of main courses

2021-2023 MA elective (5 ECTS) “Ethics for the Data-driven City” at Delft University of Technology

This elective course, open to all TU Delft students, was held together with Prof Hendrik Ploeger. In the course we explored the individual and collective tensions and dilemmas at the intersection of data-driven technologies, the city, and ethics. Notably, the course tackled ethics from a transdisciplinary, non-axiomatic perspective, meaning that it considers ethics as an ongoing practice cutting across fields and cultures, thus dismissing the possibility of assessing, once and for all, whether certain data-driven technologies implemented in the urban environment operate for good (or bad). Rather, the course compelled students (12-14 per year) to investigate the extent to which each technology “for good” – e.g., social inclusion, sustainability, democratic participation – always contains its own drawbacks, leading to both negative and positive unintended consequences. Hence, the course shifted away from a problem-solving approach towards a problem-opening approach. To do so, the course first provided students with the necessary theoretical background in ethics of technology for the city – including a hands-on visit to The Green Village, the living lab on TU Delft campus – after which students were required to design and built an artefact that materialized the identified ethical tensions and unintended consequences of a chosen tech-city case study.

2019-2021 (Spring Semester): MA & PhD module (5 ECTS) “Recent Issues in Big Data and Governance” at Tallinn University of Technology

The module (around 50 students) was designed as a master and PhD course. Keeping a global perspective by default, together with Prof. Anu Masso we delved into the main theoretical, methodological, practical and critical aspects regarding the spread and use of big data in analyzing social processes.  The course also introduced the main methods for using big data in addressing social changes. Topics were covered based on existing literature, comparative analysis across different countries – from both the Global North and the Global South – and through practical examples/news and exercises.

2019: Research Seminar – Academic Writing (MA Erasmus Pioneer students – 5 ECTS) at Tallinn University of Technology

Weekly seminars dedicated to MA students enrolled in the Erasmus pioneer program (involving the universities in Tallinn, Leuven and Munster). The seminar was oriented towards the realization of group research projects focused on digital transformation, e-governance, and processes of tech innovation at different scales (city, national, international) to be presented at the end of the semester. As a teacher, on the one hand, I supplied students with academic writing strategies and, on the other hand, I supported the students during the identification and shaping of their thesis’ topic (and I eventually supervised three of them).

2018 (Fall Semester): MA module (6 ECTS) “Anthropology of Communication” at Politecnico of Milan

The module was held together with Prof. Derrick De Kerckhove. I was responsible for the whole coordination of the course, the supervision of students’ projects, the teaching of few classes, and the oral exams. Around 60 students enrolled in the module: by realizing de Kerckhove’s theorization of the “connected intelligence” approach, the module configured a practice-based exploration of today’s techno-society, by asking students to become the co-actors of the teaching experience. In fact, given the umbrella initiative of the digital-aided regeneration of a small Italian village undergoing depopulation, students contributed to the identification and definition of the issues to tackle, which eventually crystalized in a cloud of keywords. These issues were first discussed in groups of three and later connected in bigger thematic clusters – politics, ethics, economy, ecology, urbanism, technology, education – comprising six to nine students. In this way we brought to the surface the collaborative building of knowledge and we managed to keep an edge on the latest developments of techno-society of which we addressed the majors potentialities and limitations by offering a viable path for the design (and future implementation, beyond the course) of digital solutions on a testbed case.

2018-2020: MA & BA modules (6 ECTS) “Sociology of Media”, “Sociologia dei Media” and “Sociologia dei processi culturali e comunicativi” (in English & Italian) at Politecnico of Milan

The modules were conjointily held with Prof Matteo Ciastellardi. Around 50 students enrolled in the MA modules “Sociology of Media” and “Sociologia dei media” and 150 students in the BA module “Sociologia dei processi culturali e comunicativi”. All modules, which focused on industry 4.0, sharing economy, and algorithmic culture, practically required students to design a cross-platform plan for a chosen media product (a TV series, a movie, an art exhibition, a book, etc.). As a teaching fellow, I delivered half of the classes (both in English and Italian), I mentored students through the realization of their projects (which were then showcased in an exhibition at Politecnico) and held the final oral exam.

2018-2020: MA module (6 ECTS) “Digital Cultures” (in English) at Politecnico of Milan

The module was held together with Prof. Giovanna di Rosario. The module comprised of around 50 students (the majority of whom were international students) and it discussed several core issues related to new media and the cross-boundaries formation of individual and collective digital cultures: the rhetoric of new media, the rise of fake news, media literacies, political off/online activism, self-branding, new geographies of power. As part of their final assignment, students were required, in small groups, to identify a text (a song, a poem, a fairytale, a myth, etc.) and design a double transmediation of it, thus re-tailoring the dissemination of the message of the text based on the chosen media supports and the identified audiences, Results were presented in class during the last week of the course. As a teaching fellow, I delivered half of the classes, mentored students towards the completion of their projects, and assessed them.

2016-2017: BA & MA module (5 ECTS) “Facebook and Self-Representation”, City University of Hong Kong

The module was held together with Prof. Roberto Simanowski. Around 50 students (most of whom Chinese) enrolled. Alongside “traditional” lectures dedicated to situating self-representation practices on SNSs within the history of media evolution, the module was based on a practical approach aimed at involving students in the analysis and self-reflection of their own daily media diet. Two articles derived from this teaching-research experience. As a postdoc fellow & teaching assistant, I helped design the course, delivered half of the classes, and I was responsible for the managing of the whole digital autoethnographic research: its design, collection and analysis of data, as well as the mentoring of students about how to proceed with the assignments.

2013-2014 & 2014-2015: Seminars for the BA core module “Cultural History” (5 ECTS), University of Leeds

The course was conjointly held by Prof. Griselda Pollock and Prof. Claudia Sternberg. It comprised of about 45 students and revolved around the retracing of the roots of (Western) modernity from the Enlightenment up to the present postmodern condition. Specifically, it did so by focusing on characterizing trends of modernity – the city, the subject, human vs. nature, the birth of psychoanalysis, memory and war, etc. – and looking at these trends through the lenses of both critical theory and media and technology. For two years, I was responsible for the seminars that followed each lecture. Thus, I prepared materials and presentations that pointed at the most important issues unpacked during the lectures. Moreover, I was responsible for the mentoring of the students all along the semester, not only in view of their final exams (which I also marked as part of my appointment), but also concerning the possibility of developing one of the themes of the course into their final dissertation.

Recent Supervised theses