187: A Pedagogy of Networks

May 26, 2025

Learning, Copyright, and Resistance in the Age of AI

Students cheat because the system cheats them first. The real crisis in education isn’t plagiarism—it’s that we’re still pretending learning happens in isolation, inside institutions, on terms set by publishers and proctors.

But today’s learners are fluent in something else: a pedagogy of networks. Copying isn’t stealing. Piracy isn’t a crime. And AI? It’s not the threat—it’s the symptom.

The Education System is a Closed Loop
Our education systems were built on a simple metaphor: the mind as a container, and the teacher as the one who fills it. This “banking model,” as Paulo Freire called it, trains students to receive, repeat, and regurgitate.

But in a world of ubiquitous information, this model doesn’t just fail—it actively harms. It punishes curiosity and improvisation. It equates copying with cheating, even when copying is how people actually learn. And it treats tools like generative AI as interlopers, instead of what they really are: mirrors of our collective intelligence.

The result? A war between students and systems.

Enter the Pedagogy of Networks
A pedagogy of networks begins with a different assumption: that knowledge is not owned, but shared. It flows through relationships, through infrastructures, through memory—digital and otherwise. It treats learning not as a one-way transfer, but as a networked process of co-creation.

In this view, students aren’t empty vessels. They’re nodes in a system. Agents in a distributed mesh of meaning-making. Every act of remixing, quoting, prompting, or collaborating is a valid form of participation in that network.

AI doesn’t break the classroom. It reveals the network that was always there.

danah boyd and the Politics of Adaptation
danah boyd’s work on youth, surveillance, and resistance maps this terrain with clarity. She documents how young people navigate systems of control—especially digital ones—not by complying, but by adapting. By bending the rules. By figuring out how to live in a system that doesn’t trust them.

School becomes just another system to hack. Citation rules, honor codes, LMS platforms—all of it becomes another layer of adult-imposed protocol that rewards performance over understanding.

A pedagogy of networks acknowledges this adaptation for what it is: not dishonesty, but literacy. Students are reading the room. Reading the algorithm. Reading the contradictions in a society that says "knowledge is power" while locking it behind paywalls.

Freire’s Radical Dialogue
Freire’s pedagogy was always about power. He insisted that education should begin with the lived experience of learners, and that true learning only happens through dialogue—horizontal, reciprocal, political.

In a networked context, that dialogue expands. It includes not just people but platforms. Not just teachers but systems. Not just texts but prompts, datasets, and protocols. The question becomes not "did you write this yourself?" but "how did you think with others—human and machine—to arrive here?"

A pedagogy of networks is Freirean because it centers conscientização—critical awareness of the systems shaping knowledge and the learner’s agency within them.

Copyright is a Counterinsurgency
Against this backdrop, copyright functions not as protection, but as repression. It polices the boundaries of legitimacy. It says: you must buy the book, cite the source, follow the chain of ownership. It denies the reality that all knowledge is built on what came before.

In a networked pedagogy, copying is not theft—it’s practice. Piracy is not deviance—it’s access strategy. And AI is not deception—it’s collaboration.

We should be designing institutions that understand this, that work with networks instead of against them. But instead, we get AI detection software, plagiarism panics, and subscription models for knowledge.

We need to stop asking how to stop students from cheating—and start asking how to stop systems from lying. About what knowledge is. About how learning works. About who gets to own ideas in a digital commons.

A pedagogy of networks would:

  • Teach students how to navigate, curate, and critically evaluate networks of knowledge

  • Recognize that writing with AI is now part of writing itself

  • Embrace citation as storytelling, not compliance

  • Treat education as infrastructural, not institutional

  • Value collaboration over isolation, process over product

Most of all, it would treat students not as threats to academic integrity, but as authors of a new epistemology—one that’s already emerging in every shared folder, every forum, every prompt.

Because in the end, the future of authority belongs to those who understand the network—not those who try to fence it off.