From xxxxxx <[email protected]>
Subject A Teacher Discovers What Is Wrong with Online Teaching in Higher Education?
Date July 5, 2020 12:00 AM
  Links have been removed from this email. Learn more in the FAQ.
  Links have been removed from this email. Learn more in the FAQ.
[Forced by the coronavirus into a hastily designed virtual
education mode, a college teacher discovers such classes are fraught
with problems and students learn better when left to their own devices
rather than pushed into frenetic online lectures. ]
[[link removed]]

A TEACHER DISCOVERS WHAT IS WRONG WITH ONLINE TEACHING IN HIGHER
EDUCATION?  
[[link removed]]


 

Jyoti Raina
June 30, 2020
xxxxxx

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

_ Forced by the coronavirus into a hastily designed virtual education
mode, a college teacher discovers such classes are fraught with
problems and students learn better when left to their own devices
rather than pushed into frenetic online lectures. _

College students at Gargi College in New Delhi participate in
teaching-learning in an online space. All teaching at Gargi College,
which is affiliated with the University of Delhi, is now online due to
the coronavirus pandemic., Muskan Vishwas

 

I was teaching American philosopher John Dewey's influential
essay _My Pedagogic Creed_, first published in 1929, to women
students of a teacher education program when the pandemic struck. The
college I teach at declared closure even before the country locked
down. The University of Delhi, of which the college is a constituent
hastily, mandated a transition advisory to shift teaching into online
spaces, even before the underlying pedagogic issues could be
scrutinized. 

As a subject of the state (the college is state-funded) I followed up
this allegedly authentic state of exception. This meant an uncritical
transformation of my teaching work into the exceptional measure of
online lecturing.

The practice of freedom

The university's advisory was to undertake a systematically planned
immersion routine of providing e-resources, remaining virtually
available to students during time-table hours and presenting live
lectures resulting in a packed schedule resembling a corporate work
culture. Such tight-fitting corporatization of education smoothers
creativity, imagination and innovation for students
([link removed]
[[link removed]])
as well as for teachers; becoming a barrier to the practice of
freedom as also to unconventional pedagogical breakthroughs.  The
introduction of new statist, off the rack, teaching structures by a
top-down directive robs a teacher of imaginative possibilities. It
left no scope for an educational imagination of how to teach when the
students were physically separated from the teacher. The personal
agency to envision creative possibilities was lost as re-thinking
already centered on the existing point of focus: online teaching. 

There is another aspect of the denial of freedom, which is distinct to
woman students in their domestic sphere, which is now site of
education. The home is not free of gendered iniquity in which finding
private-silent time in a separated physical space is particularly
precarious. The coming out of home into the physical classroom
provides a free space for independent pursuits that is especially
enabling for woman-students.
([link removed]
[[link removed]]). 

Revisiting _My Pedagogic Creed_

The essay is an essential reading of the course that I teach bringing
theory and methods from social philosophy to educational reform in
school education and community life. Its influence has only expanded
for over a century as it continues to shape educational theory and
schooling practices the world over. The educational reformer Dewey was
the first to propose that individual growth be based on social
processes and recommends a school education that introduces young
children directly into social life through a curriculum that is based
on their immediate environment.

The essay still resonated in the student's working memory when it was
morphed into the virtual modality of zoom  and google spaces. _My
Pedagogic Creed_ is divided into five articles each of which examines
the fundamental themes of what is _education_, what
the _school_ is, what constitutes the _subject matter of
education_, its _nature of method_ and finally the relationship
between _school and social progress_. I decided to undertake five
video conferencing lectures discussing each one of these articles,
which seemed like a thorough teaching arrangement. 

The first video lecture attempted to address the first theme by
proposing that all education takes place by the 'participation of the
individual in the social consciousness of the race' because the
student is 'a social individual' and society an 'organic union of
individuals'. This co-constitution of student and society becomes a
lived experience in a classroom simply because students and teachers
come together to occupy a shared physical space with immediacy in
contact. In the absence of direct human engagement this participatory
aspect sorely morphed into the surreal abstraction emblematic of
the pixelated faces of an asocial screen. 

For the second lecture addressing the theme: what is a school, the
essay author unequivocally believes it to be a social institution, 'a
form of community life'. He writes:

"Much of the present education fails because it neglects this
fundamental principle of the school as a form of community life. It
conceives the school as a place where certain information is to be
given, where certain lessons are to be learned, or where certain
habits are to be formed."  

In the barrage of black rectangles, squares and polygons interspersed
with erratic texts of names where is the room for a social formation
of a community life? Moreover the adaptation to an online pedagogy
compromises interactivity necessary for experiencing the social
context to classroom teaching-learning. 

The third session on the essay's third article defines the subject
matter of education as the social life of a child, in correlation with
not the school subjects like science, history or literature but the
'child's own social activities'. Even an unmuted virtual interaction
was too superficial to allow for experience of a thread of
interconnectedness that could feel anything like a social activity.
The lack of physical presence in a virtual space with students on mute
was feeling like a silence of the social in the teaching-learning
process. 

The fourth talk on the nature of method; found affirmative resonance
with the students, as they were themselves passing through an
upsetting pedagogic transition. Here too the essay author's suggestion
to base the method on the active side of the learner was in contrast
to the scale- at- will technology oriented solution provided by the
passive online transmission of knowledge. 

My last talk examined the relationship between the school and social
progress, of which, according to the essay author, education alone is
the basis. The online teaching was not even remotely an education of
this kind. Instead it was simply degenerating into a training of
individual-students with little scope for formation of authentic
social life necessary for social progress. The essay concludes with
the pronouncement that progress cannot take place merely by enactment
of law, which is precisely what the state of exception's teaching
approach was premised upon. Teaching of this last article provided the
final coup de grace that turned into an epilogue for online teaching
of this thick reading.

MY TEACHING EXPERIENCE  

There was a persuasive teaching realization that my live yet passive
online lectures to teach this essay needed to discontinue. The
adaptation of video-conferencing type lectures was in complete
divergence with the very pedagogic creed it advocates. So wide was the
schism between the essay and the method to teach it that after a few
zoom lectures the dissonance was agonizing as well as mind-melting.
This kind of online teaching simply had to stop. 

This stoppage was just the intermission that the students needed. It
facilitated their escapade into practice of freedom, responsibility of
self-time management, opportunity to step backwards for quietude and a
search for an intellectual togetherness within the lost immediacy of
personal contact. It was the right requiem to sequester back to the
essay re-arranging the previous classroom discussions in their minds.
Left to their own mental devices the students identified key phrases,
wrote reflective comments and deepened their personal responses to
each of its articles.

In this process I discovered that letting students be with what they
have already discussed during personal student-teacher contact was
more valuable than frenetic online teaching. The former is accompanied
by a cognitive overload caused by supplementary stressors that tax the
mind's attentional processes attenuating learning
([link removed]
[[link removed]]). The
insight that asynchronous solutions like calling, emailing, texting
scaffold notes and reaching out worked better than synchronous
solutions like zoom classes and goggle meets; was illuminating. It was
closer to the traditional writing of a simple letter albeit shared
electronically. Perhaps the former left the students with time,
freedom and openness to explore their own psychological devices for
learning. 

Contemporary research in psychology has started paying attention to
how the unprecedented practice of video calling in the name of online
teaching wears adversely on human psychological functioning. The mind
degenerates into paying only continuous but partial attention not
merely to virtual experiences but even to real, direct experiences
too. This is neither conducive for meaning-making apart from
devastating students as learners in the longer term
([link removed]
[[link removed]]).    
 

BANALITY OF ONLINE TEACHING

Some of the limitations of online teaching are apparent and have
received the attention they merit particularly as virtual models
portend to a post-pandemic new normal. On the issue of access to
online modes the sharp digital divide is an oppressive instrument
disadvantaging already disadvantaged students who are living in
communities with less developed connectivity infrastructure. The
divide even ends up excluding several sections of students. Online
education thus exacerbates the already prevailing educational
inequalities associated with class privileges, regional disparities
and other injustices
([link removed]
[[link removed]]).
Educational practices and egalitarian policy interventions should aim
at modes of teaching that realize equalizing possibilities through
education. In contrast policy-makers world over are scrambling in the
opposite direction by moving teaching online for mitigating the loss
of teaching time. The current state of exception has provided an
unwarranted policy-thrust to online education as the methodology to
boost enrolment in higher education. This is particularly disturbing
in the context of developing countries with poor higher education
participation rates as social divisions of class firm up with those on
the other side of the digital divide further marginalizing the
marginalized. 

However a far deeper qualitative issue that merits independent
attention on educational grounds relates to its pedagogic efficacy to
serve the purposes of higher education. The curricular content of
higher education in the social sciences is predominantly aimed at
recovery of critical thought. This is particularly important in the
context of emerging critical social science frameworks. The
inadequacy of studying _My Pedagogic Creed_ through online teaching
demonstrates the inherent banality of such limited modes in engaging
with curricular content of this kind. In the teaching of this essay
the classroom was to learning what a scaffold is to a building. Online
teaching collapsed learning and knowledge into inert information in
the absence of an active pedagogy that fosters meaning-making
essential to the development of this kind of knowledge. Authentic
learning involves construction and deconstruction through the
intellectual tools of analysis, comparison and synthesis in a dynamic
meaning-making process. Active immediacy of contact between the
teacher and the student facilitates this process. Didactic online
teaching is least amenable to this kind of a meaning-making process.
It's continuation in higher education presages to turn social
sciences into an uncritical acquisition of a pre-defined body of
static knowledge. Before the higher education arena is re-shaped by
new roadmaps for universities, departments and colleges in view of an
unprecedented phase of protracted campus closure; research based
evidence about the pedagogic compromises intrinsic to online teaching
merit highlighting.

_[Jyoti Raina is Associate Professor, Department of Elementary
Education, Gargi College. She is also the Anti-Discrimination Officer
of the Equal Opportunity Cell of the college. xxxxxx’s moderators
thank the author for sending this article to us._]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web [[link removed]]
Submit via email
Frequently asked questions [[link removed]]
Manage subscription [[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org [[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]
Screenshot of the email generated on import

Message Analysis

  • Sender: Portside
  • Political Party: n/a
  • Country: United States
  • State/Locality: n/a
  • Office: n/a
  • Email Providers:
    • L-Soft LISTSERV