Education is never merely the delivery of content or the transmission of knowledge; it is always already an act of world-making. This series has argued that pedagogy is shaped not only by explicit aims or institutional policies, but by deeper, often unspoken background assumptions. These assumptions, about what counts as learning, how learners should behave, and what outcomes are worth pursuing, form part of what Charles Taylor calls the moral background: the tacit frameworks of value and meaning that orient our actions and give shape to social life (Taylor, 1989; Taylor, 2004).

Taylor’s concept of the moral background refers to an ensemble of implicit understandings, qualitative distinctions, and shared sensibilities. These are not merely abstract ideals, but practical orientations that structure how we judge, relate, and interpret experience. In education, such backgrounds are embedded in everything from curriculum frameworks to assessment rubrics to digital platforms. They shape not only what is taught but how teaching itself is understood. For example, learning management systems that privilege linear progression, quantifiable achievement, and time-stamped interaction do more than organise information, they encode a vision of the learner as self-managing, efficient, and constantly visible.

Throughout this series, we have examined how these normative architectures manifest in the design of platforms, the regulation of time, the framing of autonomy, and the valorisation of merit. These elements are not neutral tools. They reflect and reproduce broader cultural imaginaries rooted in market rationality, performativity, and managerial control. A progress bar, for instance, may seem like a harmless interface element, but it conveys a moral logic in which progress is linear, measurable, and always externally validated.

To address these concerns, we have relied on Taylor’s interpretive framework to name and reveal the moral underpinnings of digital pedagogy. But diagnosis alone is not enough. As we reach the conclusion of the series, we must pivot from critique to reinvention, from exposing what is to imagining what could be. For this, we turn to the work of Cornelius Castoriadis, whose theory of the radical imaginary allows us to see institutions not as fixed constraints but as historically contingent creations, products of collective imagination that can be refigured or replaced (Castoriadis, 1997).

Castoriadis insists that society is self-instituting: that the norms, values, and structures we inherit are not given by nature or fate, but are sustained and reshaped through human activity. This view is profoundly generative for educators. It reframes pedagogy as a site not only of reproduction but of reinstitution. If institutions are created, they can be re-created; if imaginaries are inherited, they can be reimagined.

Bringing Taylor and Castoriadis together enables a richer understanding of education as moral and political work. It reveals the stakes of digital pedagogy as more than technical or procedural. At heart, to teach is to participate in shaping a social imaginary, to decide, often implicitly, what kind of society education serves. If we want that society to be just, plural, and humane, then educators must name the background, reveal the frame, and begin to institute otherwise.

Every time a teacher sets a deadline, chooses a platform, or decides how to assess learning, they participate in shaping the social imaginary of education, often without realising it. Educators are not merely implementers of policy or transmitters of content. They are cultural workers whose everyday practices carry, reproduce, or interrupt the deeper assumptions that structure educational life. These assumptions, about what counts as knowledge, who counts as a learner, and what the purpose of education ought to be, do not arise from nowhere. As Taylor (2004) argues, they form part of a broader moral horizon: the shared, often unspoken sense of what is valuable, appropriate, or meaningful in social life.

Pedagogy, then, is never neutral. It always enacts and affirms a vision of the world. A module that rewards high-stakes individual performance does more than assess knowledge, it instantiates a social imaginary of competition, scarcity, and fixed ability. A learning platform that tracks engagement through activity logs and dashboards does more than manage data, it reinforces a vision of the learner as measurable, self-regulating, and ever-visible. Even apparently minor design decisions, such as defaulting to lecture-based delivery, emphasising deadlines, or ranking participation, gradually solidify particular norms and expectations, making them seem natural or inevitable.

These embedded values form what Giroux (2020) terms the hidden curriculum: the implicit lessons, routines, and values that socialise students into dominant understandings of authority, agency, and success. While official curricula may emphasise critical thinking or inclusivity, the underlying practices may pull in quite different directions, towards performativity, conformity, and surveillance.

Yet this transmission is not automatic or unchangeable. As Biesta (2013) reminds us, teaching is not simply about achieving outcomes or delivering content; it is a normative and relational practice that requires judgment, care, and a sense of educational purpose. Educators interpret curricular mandates, negotiate technological systems, and shape classroom dynamics. In doing so, they mediate between institutional structures and lived experience. They become the point at which competing imaginaries converge: between the imperatives of platform capitalism and the commitments of democratic education; between the drive for efficiency and the ethics of care.

This gives educators a particular kind of agency, not absolute freedom, but the capacity to choose, adapt, resist, and reimagine. They are not passive conduits of institutional logic, nor are they entirely free to act outside of it. But they can act reflectively within it, questioning what they reproduce and envisioning what they might do differently. Freire (2005) reminds us that teaching is always a political act, not because it involves indoctrination, but because it shapes how learners understand themselves, others, and the world.

Educators, then, are bearers of social imaginaries. Whether they affirm, contest, or refigure them depends on their willingness to reflect critically on their practices, and to act with imagination, courage, and care.

When a university replaces its VLE, rewrites its assessment policy, or redesigns a course template, it does more than tinker with tools, it reshapes the moral and political grammar of education. Institutional change is never just a matter of technical adjustment or managerial reform. It involves navigating competing visions of what is good, just, or worthwhile, and making choices that carry ethical weight. Charles Taylor’s concept of strong evaluation helps illuminate this terrain. For Taylor (1985), human beings do not merely register preferences or seek utility; they distinguish between better and worse kinds of desires, aspirations, and practices. These distinctions are not trivial, they are foundational to how we orient ourselves in the world.

Educators engage in strong evaluation constantly, whether they recognise it or not. A lecturer deciding whether to allow late submissions without penalty is not just making a procedural call, they are enacting a judgment about fairness, autonomy, and the purpose of assessment. A course team choosing between platforms is not simply weighing features; they are deciding what kinds of pedagogical relationships and learner behaviours they want to normalise. Should learning analytics be used to monitor participation, or does that compromise student trust and self-determination? Should assessments reward standardisation or originality? These are not logistical questions; they are moral and political acts embedded in institutional life.

Taylor helps us recognise the ethical depth of these decisions. But recognising is not the same as reimagining. For that, we turn to Cornelius Castoriadis. Castoriadis (1997) argues that society is not governed by external laws or deterministic forces. It is instituted, brought into being through collective acts of imagination. The structures we take for granted, legal systems, economic norms, educational practices, are historically created and socially maintained. Crucially, what has been instituted can be re-instituted. Institutions are not fixed; they are open to transformation.

For educators, this insight is both liberating and challenging. It means that course templates, assessment regimes, platform defaults, and quality frameworks are not natural constraints but the product of past decisions, decisions that can be unmade, revised, or replaced. Castoriadis calls us to engage in imagination not as fantasy but as praxis: the collective act of creating new meanings and forms. In this sense, digital education is not a neutral delivery mechanism but a contested space, a site where dominant imaginaries can be reinforced or resisted.

It begins when we pause to ask what our defaults say about our values. When we dare to imagine otherwise. And when we act, designing courses, choosing tools, shaping cultures, in ways that reflect not just what is, but what should be. Reinstitution does not require a revolution from above. It begins wherever educators reflect critically, name what matters, and act accordingly. Strong evaluation becomes the basis for imaginative reinvention. Imagination becomes the ground for institutional renewal.

Critical pedagogy begins with exposure, with surfacing the values that shape our platforms, policies, and practices. But exposure alone cannot transform. If we stop at naming what is wrong, we risk leaving its structures intact. As Taylor (2004) reminds us, our actions are embedded within a background of shared understandings, what he calls the social imaginary. To bring that background into view is to make visible the normative frames that structure educational life. But the work cannot end there. Transformation requires a move from critique to creation: from naming and revealing to instituting otherwise.

Here, Castoriadis (1997) offers both philosophical depth and political provocation. For him, society is not governed by laws or fixed logics, it is instituted through acts of collective imagination. What we take to be permanent features of educational life, grading systems, platform defaults, assessment conventions, are in fact historical constructions. They can be reconfigured. The institution, in Castoriadis’ terms, is not a finished object but an ongoing project: one shaped by those who participate in it. This understanding invites educators to become not just critics, but creators, to engage imagination as praxis.

That move from critique to construction does not begin with grand visions. It begins in what Freire (2005) calls conscientisation: a process of becoming aware not only of oppression, but of one’s capacity to act. To bring the background into focus is to expose, for instance, how a VLE’s tracking dashboard positions the learner as a measurable, self-monitoring subject. To reveal the frame is to understand that such defaults reflect an imaginary shaped by efficiency, individualism, and institutional control. But to institute otherwise is to ask: what pedagogical alternatives affirm a different vision of the learner, the teacher, and the educational relation?

This work is already being done. A course that centres collaborative inquiry over individual competition affirms a pedagogy of solidarity. When students co-design assessment criteria, they enact autonomy and shared responsibility. The use of asynchronous discussion, designed with care for those navigating disability, precarious work, or caregiving, embodies an ethic of plurality and compassion. These practices are not add-ons. They are expressions of a counter-imaginary, one in which education is not a site of calibration, but a space of possibility.

Such practices unsettle dominant scripts not only in what they do, but in how they are imagined. Where platform capitalism privileges surveillance and predictive metrics, an alternative imaginary values dialogue, unpredictability, and slowness. Where institutional metrics reward standardisation and compliance, the pedagogy of plurality welcomes messiness, uncertainty, and co-creation. These are not neutral choices. They are strong evaluations, acts of moral and political imagination that shape what education becomes.

This is not a luxury. It is the quiet labour of educational freedom, the commitment to autonomy, care, plurality, and justice enacted in everyday design. Naming, revealing, and instituting otherwise is the work of reclaiming pedagogy not just as critique, but as creation.

Reinstituting the social imaginary doesn’t begin with policy, it begins in the classroom, the platform settings, and the assessment form. If educators are to reclaim their role as agents of change, imagination must become practice. Naming and revealing the dominant moral orders of digital education is a necessary first step, but it is through everyday pedagogical choices that alternatives take shape. This section explores three domains, course design, platform use, and policy engagement, where educators can enact new imaginaries of justice, autonomy, and care.

Courses that prioritise dialogic learning and co-creation foreground relationships over transmission. When educators engage students as partners in shaping learning activities, assessment criteria, or course content, they disrupt hierarchical assumptions about expertise and affirm students as co-creators of meaning and knowledge (Cook-Sather, Bovill and Felten, 2014). Ethical inquiry can be embedded by inviting learners to examine not only what they are learning, but why it matters and for whom. Such practices shift the focus from performance to participation, from certainty to complexity. This is how an alternative imaginary, grounded in plurality, mutual recognition, and shared responsibility, comes into being.

While institutional platforms are rarely chosen by educators, how they are used is politically significant. Surveillance features, like engagement dashboards, activity tracking, or attendance analytics, may be marketed as pedagogically neutral, but they embed assumptions of productivity, visibility, and compliance (Prinsloo and Slade, 2017). Educators can subvert these logics by disabling metrics, minimising coercive functions, or directing students to alternative tools. Open-source platforms, federated discussion forums, or student-owned digital spaces (e.g., shared annotation with Hypothes.is) can decentralise authority and affirm learner agency. Even within constrained systems, deliberate configuration becomes a form of institutional resistance.

Policy, too, is a site of imaginary reproduction, and potential reinstitution. While often framed in bureaucratic terms, policies on assessment, attendance, feedback, and digital engagement are grounded in normative assumptions about what education is for. Take attendance monitoring: while presented as a support mechanism, it often reflects a logic of surveillance. Rewriting such policies to centre autonomy, contextual flexibility, and trust affirms a different vision of the learner. Similarly, assessment frameworks can be reimagined to support sustainable assessment, a concept Boud (2000) defines as assessment that not only evaluates current performance but also builds learners’ capacity for future judgment and learning. This includes practices like self-assessment, formative dialogue, and authentic tasks that prioritise long-term learning over short-term performance. Engaging in policy is not merely reactive; it is a chance to propose values-informed alternatives that scale.

These practices are not hypothetical. In many institutions, students co-develop modules, educators pilot contract grading, and departments create policies through staff–student assemblies. Some courses now run fully outside the institutional VLE to promote digital sovereignty and community accountability. While these interventions may seem marginal, they signal a different horizon, one in which pedagogy is not about compliance, but about collective world-making.

Reinstitution won’t come from mandates. It begins wherever an educator pauses to ask, what kind of world does this practice make possible? That question, repeated in design, dialogue, and resistance, is how transformation begins.

Teaching is not a neutral act, it reshapes relationships, reaffirms values, and reconfigures what is possible in public life. Educators are not just facilitators of learning or implementers of policy. They are moral and political actors, participating in the ongoing construction of the social imaginary. Every syllabus, every assessment, every design choice enacts a vision of what matters and what kind of world is being prepared for. Whether acknowledged or not, to teach is to take a stand.

Throughout this series, we have drawn on Charles Taylor’s concept of the moral background and Cornelius Castoriadis’ theory of the radical imaginary to show that education is never free from frameworks of meaning. Taylor (2004) reminds us that our practices are oriented by shared understandings of the good, often unspoken but deeply influential. Castoriadis (1997), in turn, insists that these frameworks are not fixed, they are instituted through human imagination and can be re-instituted through collective action. Together, they reveal that educational practice is not only shaped by institutional structures, but also capable of reshaping them.

When digital education is driven by logics of efficiency, visibility, and predictive control, educators must ask: what do our practices affirm? Do we mirror the values embedded in platform dashboards and managerial frameworks? Or do we design for dialogue, uncertainty, and care? A learning activity that invites co-authorship of criteria, or a classroom space that makes room for vulnerability, is not just a methodological choice, it is a moral and political act that reconfigures what learning can mean.

Reimagining education demands more than critique. It requires what Castoriadis calls creative responsibility: a refusal to accept the existing order as inevitable, and a commitment to acting as though alternatives are possible. This is not about heroic reinvention. It is about the everyday labour of redesigning structures, however modestly, to reflect more just and humane imaginaries. When an educator reshapes a module to centre community dialogue, that is reinstitution. When a team revises an assessment policy to prioritise trust and sustainability, it challenges prevailing norms. When students and staff build learning spaces that affirm care, equity, and autonomy, they give form to a different educational world.

This work is often quiet, slow, and partial, but no less political for that. It lives in decisions rarely celebrated: an assignment reimagined to prioritise reflection, a conversation held differently, a platform setting quietly disabled. As Freire (2005) insists, education is never neutral, it either reproduces the status quo or becomes the practice of freedom. To inhabit education as a space of creative responsibility is to embrace its unfinishedness, to act with care, imagination, and resolve.

Educators, then, are not merely subjects within institutions, they are participants in the making and unmaking of the institution itself. Our task is not only to critique what is, but to imagine what should be, and to teach in ways that bring that vision closer. At its best, education is not just transmission. It is world-making.

• Biesta, G. (2013) The Beautiful Risk of Education. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.
• Boud, D. (2000). Sustainable assessment: Rethinking assessment for the learning society. Studies in Continuing Education, 22(2), pp.151–167. https://doi.org/10.1080/713695728
• Castoriadis, C. (1997) The Imaginary Institution of Society. Translated by K. Blamey. Cambridge: Polity Press.
• Cook-Sather, A., Bovill, C. and Felten, P. (2014). Engaging students as partners in learning and teaching: A guide for faculty. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
• Freire, P. (2005). Teachers as cultural workers: letters to those who dare teach. Expanded edition. Translated by D. Macedo, D. Koike and A. Oliveira. With a foreword by D. Macedo and A.M.A. Freire. Boulder, Colo: Westview Press.
• Giroux, H.A. (2020). On Critical Pedagogy London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
• Prinsloo, P. and Slade, S. (2017) ’An elephant in the Learning Analytics room: the obligation to act’, in Proceedings of the 7th International Learning Analytics & Knowledge Conference (LAK17), New York, NY, 13–17 March 2017, pp. 46–55. https://doi.org/10.1145/3027385.3027406
• Taylor, C. (1985). Human agency and language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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• Taylor, C. (2004) Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.