Not sure I can cover everything in one post because I haven’t really thought through it all, but here are a couple of ideas that I got after attending my first University Senate meeting and getting a taste of the University discourse there. I believe that the two I’m going to suggest here are the biggest and most important re-considerations for teaching but that might change after I finish off this series of posts (tagged postpandemic teaching if you just want to read these posts together).
The background: Discussing teaching in any pragmatic or practical manner at the university isn’t possible, because we do not have a professional discourse of teaching. What I mean by that is that when someone offers criticism or critique of a teaching performance, it is read as a personal attack. This might not be true at all universities, but it’s definitely true where I work. Since there is not a conversation about teaching, or principles of considering teaching as-such, any critique or commentary, no matter how well-meaning, is taken by the teacher as an attack on their quality as a person.
Most graduate pedagogy avoids talking about teaching in any meaningful way. There’s little to assist the graduate student in teaching except a basket of “what’s worked” whispered unwillingly by a faculty member who would much rather be talking about some esoteric publication opportunity with their grad student. This carries on into the professorship, of which a significant portion will be dedicated to teaching.
The aim of these re-considerations is to attempt to create a discourse about and for and of teaching in order to be able to have such conversations the way we do about curriculum, requirements, credits, and (in our departments) theory and practice. It should be able to move throughout the university by establishing its own principles and it’s own language that is marked: “This is the art of teaching.” We want it completely divorced from the notion that pedagogy is some place of private, soulful struggle best handled in isolation as the fault of failing individuals who should just “know how to do it.”
I’m thinking of pushing for an open forum on teaching with no agenda, where at a regular time people bring their experience and frustrations with teaching into the same room for some time to toss out issues and discuss solutions. This would organically, over time, generate some conversational and discursive norms, which could be expanded to the University community.
Principle 1: Teach Things that Can’t be Looked Up
Teaching online should have caused us all to experience how easy it is to look things up online during lecture, class, or discussion due to the overwhelmingly powerful access to information we enjoy while connected to a University. Even those who do not have University library access have an incredible ability to find information.
Things like grammar rules, historical facts, scientific discoveries, and the like should not constitute a majority of course information. What should be in a course are things that cannot be looked up or referenced. What these would be are practices in defining and redefining problems, critical appraisal of information, formulating and judging solutions to problems, and the discussion of exclusive or comparative advantages. Courses should be about the guided practice of things that cannot be looked up.
The only objection to this principle is that this is “hard to grade.” It’s a lot easier to grade very clear and easy things like following grammar rules or instructions. My point is that we need to reduce our time and concern about these things, unless they foreclose communication (i.e. you can’t access or understand at all the product delivered by the student).
When students go to the workforce they will be able to look up what’s expected in terms of rules for formatting and presentations and such for their workplace. What they won’t be able to look up is how to reframe a serious issue facing their department, leading to the saving of that business, the jobs of colleagues, and future leadership challenges handed to them after they have such success. Let’s prepare them for what can’t be looked up – judgement and appraisal.
Principle 2: Multimodality
It should be pretty clear now that the in-person classroom is a very poor, very weak place to pin the center or the heart of the pedagogical experience. What the pandemic has demonstrated is that the best pedagogical experiences are distributed across modalities – some amount of in person, some amount of asynchronous recording, some about of live video (streaming or conference call), some amount of text, and some amount of student cross-conversation in the course facilitated by various technologies (such as texting or social media).
The trouble here is conceptualizing this as additional labor instead of additional access. The principle does not call for professors to triple or even double their labor. On the contrary, the principle suggests we re-imagine the centrality of the in-class time as a resource that can be packaged and delivered in different ways, changing the nature of that one experience into this multi-layered one.
One thing I’ve recently done (over the past few years) is audio record my classrom and post the audio file to the LMS. This provides students another way to engage what happened in class that day. Perhaps they were in a bad mental place, emotionally fraught, sleepy, hungry, or feeling ill and missed some of the class. They can listen to it and get a different relationship to the “text” of the class which they will “interpret,” or “criticize” in a future assignment. Even those who are attentive and engaged in the course benefit from having recordings to reference in the future to jog the memory, or more likely, create a new memory or relationship to that memory and the person who was there, read by this new person listening to a class they attended, and commenting on it at a different point in the term.
This is just one example of how positionality and audience can create various levels of evaluation and consideration through time as the semester moves on. Blogging the course, or having students share the responsibility of creating a course narrative in Google Docs would be a way of doing this as well, particularly because the history of edits is freely available.
These two principles are large perspective principles of how the pandemic should influence the future of university teaching. This is just an initial foray into the topic for me, but these loom large as governing ways to approach our courses in the years to come. Adherence to both shouldn’t just be to bring pandemic teaching up to some pre-pandemic standard – they should supercharge pedagogy for the uncertain future ahead. Adherence also should help prepare us for the next pandemic, natural disaster, or human-caused event such as war or financial collapse which, no matter the scope or scale, will impact the normal operation of the university which, like it or not, depends on the presence of good, regular instruction of students.