Teaching Within the Assemblage

Abstract

Dominant frameworks structuring cybersecurity education, from the NICE Workforce Framework to K-12 Cybersecurity Learning Standards, embed humanist assumptions locating agency within individual learners, knowledge as possessed by autonomous subjects, and assessment as the measurement of isolated human performance. These assumptions prove increasingly inadequate for articulating what actually occurs in postdigital learning environments where curriculum emerges through human–AI collaboration and student understanding develops through iterative dialogue with large language models. This chapter synthesizes critical posthumanism with postdigital scholarship to develop a framework revealing what humanist perspectives systematically occlude. Through analysis of three productive tensions—agency configured as individual competence versus distributed across assemblages, knowledge framed as human possession versus relationally produced through socio-material practice, and assessment oriented toward individual performance versus assemblage effectiveness—the chapter demonstrates how posthuman lenses make visible dynamics invisible to humanist framings. Reflexive practitioner inquiry grounds these theoretical insights in the author’s own cybersecurity ethics teaching, examining curriculum design and student engagement as sites where posthuman conditions already constitute educational practice. The analysis contributes the concept of assemblage literacy, the capacity to recognize how distributed human–AI configurations shape what becomes perceivable, thinkable, and actionable, as a form of postdigital expertise increasingly central to professional practice. For postdigital research methodology, the chapter demonstrates how an “on-yet-around” orientation to technology, combined with productive tensions analysis, enables theoretical synthesis as legitimate scholarly intervention in professional domains where humanist frameworks cannot articulate emergent practices.

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Published in CHAPTERS in Education (Petar Jandrić, ed.), Springer Nature. https://doi.org/10.1007/60490_2026_13