Thinking about teaching after the pandemic
As the term is progressing, I am already seeing my hypothesis coming back in an altered form. Here’s what I initially came up with at the start of the term:
Visual Stimulation is Required
Students expect completion equals quality
Interaction in class is unnecessary
Class is a solo experience
This is part four and the final part – class as a solo experience.
I remember my first time teaching classes in Japan. I did my typical pedagogical style of making a couple of statements, then pitching them to someone in the class for a response. Usually this gets things going, but in Japan it was a total non starter. I had to scramble a bit and take on the uncomfortable teaching style of direct instruction – aka bad lecturing (in my opinion) – to make the class work.
Of course this kind of instruction is only bad from my point of view. The worst thing a teacher can do is mistake their preferences for universal principles of teaching. We all learn and gain interest through different vectors – that’s the study of rhetoric really – and we should be open to being profoundly uncomfortable in front of our students. However, this experience really did stick with me throughout my Japanese lecture tour.
It was only near the end when I met a Japanese high school teacher named Tony, an Australian who had been living in Japan for many years that I understood that this was a cultural force. According to Tony, the best way to think about the students is that the teacher is the source of knowledge – there’s little one can learn from one’s peers. If you don’t understand something, that’s on you, and you should go off by yourself in order to fix it. Learning is a solo experience, done in larger classes because that’s efficient was my conclusion.
Maybe we should celebrate this epistemology as it seems to be the stake in the heart of group projects, something everyone shudders at. Reflecting on this now it seems that many students see class as a solo experience in this way, a reflection of being a head in a box (or a turned-off camera in a box) for a long period of their education during the lockdown.
What is the value, other than economic efficiency, for putting 30 people in a box, in rigid plastic chairs, all facing the same way, for 40 to 90 minutes? I don’t know if there’s much value aside from those “life moments” of catching the eye of a classmate you are attracted to, watching someone perform a mysterious and strange habit across the room from you, or relishing the schadenfreude of someone who asks an incredibly dumb question or answers the teacher incorrectly. No wonder people keep their head down and don’t engage in the traditional classroom.
This is compounded by the lockdown as all you really had when class was over was yourself and a computer screen. Perhaps there is a positive value of the physical classroom – the conversation before and after class between pseudo-strangers. In a class, students are all having an experience that they often confirm with one another in those moments just to make sure they are not crazy: “Is this professor for real?” “Can you believe that exam?” “What project is he/she talking about?”
Taking those accidental community moments and moving them to the center of the classroom might be a good goal. How does one make side conversation the curriculum? In rhetoric, this is easy – for me as a sophist I take as a goal the claim of Gorgias not just to be able to answer any question, but show you how to answer any question in a way that provokes good vibes, confidence, and a feeling of “movement” – what I’ve been recently calling in my head “the persuasive force.” This is the feeling of gravity you get from an argument that you know probably won’t change your mind but you can still feel its energy (dunamis) as an aspect of the shade of rhetoric known as “recognizing all available arguments.”
Students feel that there’s little to gain from class interaction anyway, further pushed on by COVID and the lockdown’s many flaws of bad technology use, grade inflation, and the horrors of death and illness all around. Students got more comfortable being alone and believing that they, in a bubble, can learn and gain knowledge without the assistance or interaction with peers. Badly designed group projects reinforce that idea. How could it be that everyone we meet was the “only person” in the group who did any of the work?
This assumption is broken down, for me, by turning the class into a space of civic practice – how to make and substantiate a claim, and also looking at claims to see what operates within. Assignments and direct instruction can be pushed to the realm of homework – the so-called “flipped classroom” which always makes me think of a bad HGTV show starring twin real estate agents who indulge liberally in tan-in-a-can. Moving the speeches out of the class has been very productive in allowing students to see that the comments made by peers are very instructive, but maybe not in a direct acquisition of information way, but a way to see the resonances and harmonies in our speech that can be used, abused, or misused to try to get another person to, in the words of Wayne Booth, have some sort of effect on another human being.