Tubing the Future: Participatory Pedagogy and YouTube U in 2020

Our vision for the future of composition focuses on the “tube” and the culture inspired by online video sharing. Understanding composition in 2020 requires further theorizing about the participatory practices occurring in online video culture. Based on practices found on the platform YouTube, we turn to the term “tubing” to explain phenomena taking place there, and we put forward the concept of “participatory pedagogy” that we see emerging in 21st century classrooms. The ubiquitous and historically loaded “tube” (noun) and its YouTube-specific counterpart “tubing” (verb), explain many of the shifts taking place as acts of writing expand to include participation in online video sharing. Other scholars have forwarded the notion of “postpedagogy” (Vitanza, 1991; Davis, 2000; Arroyo, 2003, 2005; Rickert, 2007), which places a high value on invention, encourages the playful, yet serious linking of disparate historical figures, and opens up new pathways that we see as working in tandem with what George Siemens (2005) called a “pedagogy of participation,” an offshoot of what Henry Jenkins named “participatory culture” (2009). Using tubing as a guiding metaphor, we develop our version of “participatory pedagogy” for 2020 by focusing on the propagation of Internet memes and the inventional possibilities found in the everyday practices of video culture, which create an historical archive, an untapped repository of cultural patterns, and a light yet ruthlessly public demand for participation.