Fragmented Learning, Fragmented Selves: Microcredentials and the Possibility of Educational Praxis

Informed by critical theory, this paper examines microcredentialing as an emergent expression of the neoliberal reconfiguration of higher education. While recognizing that microcredentials remain heterogeneous and unevenly implemented, the paper argues that dominant policy and institutional trajectories increasingly align them with the market rationalities of employability, flexibility, and continuous workforce adaptation. Drawing on Frankfurt School critique, Marxist political economy, Foucauldian governmentality, affect theory, and critical pedagogy, it examines how the technical and modular features of microcredentials may become mechanisms through which education is reorganized around the temporalities of capital and the logic of lifelong employability. The disaggregation of learning into modular, skills-oriented units risks fragmenting educational knowledge epistemologically, socially, and existentially, contributing to the commodification of knowledge and the responsibilization of learners as self-investing entrepreneurial subjects whose value is continually recalibrated through employability metrics. The analysis further explores how platformization, competency tracking, and data-driven governance may intensify self-monitoring and affective compliance. Moving beyond critique, the paper outlines a praxis-oriented alternative informed by critical pedagogy, slow learning, and knowledge commons approaches, calling for renewing higher education around democratic participation, collective capability, reflection, solidarity, and shared human flourishing.