Blending, congruence, and affect

There were two questions we asked in our PBL group as we discussed the topic of blended learning. The first was how we could design face-to-face and online activities in a blended learning environment so that they are congruent. The second was about the place of affect in blended learning. I share here two experiences with blended learning, in order to engage with these questions, and end with the idea that perhaps thinking about blending means addressing some inequalities in technological spaces.

On the question of congruence

A blended learning course I taught was “Public Writing and Communication”. For this course, the students accessed readings and videos before they came to class, and when they came to the physical classroom, we would discuss their responses to these. They also worked on a group project almost from the start of the semester, so there was often writing or peer review required of them at home, which they would discuss in class. I was part of a team that taught this module (which was compulsory for all first year undergraduates of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences to take), and one of the things that us all feel a little unsure was the sense that this “flipped classroom” or “blended learning” model was not really very different from anything we had been doing before. One argument put forward was that instead of more “teacher talk” in the classroom, we could use physical lessons for students to share ideas, ask questions, collaborate on multi-part blogs and presentations, and generally develop an understanding of public communication from the ground up.

The online and offline activities did end up being quite seamless – students brought their laptops to class, and worked on google docs, discussing one another’s contributions and how to connect them. They would also have a conversation about comments that they had inserted on one another’s writing. In the student feedback at the end of the module, this was one of the aspects that students said they enjoyed and found useful, because until then, they had never really written for an audience beyond the teacher.

So I offer this as one example of how congruence can be achieved. Not through thinking in terms of online and offline as separate spaces to design for, but in terms of learning objectives that focus on the development of skills. This works if we see students as whole people who can do certain things on their own with the right resources and scaffolding, and who then benefit from conversations with one another.

On the question of affect

This question I think has to do with the affordances of the online and physical spaces, how we blend (platforms, proportions, etc) and what pedagogical assumptions we bring to the act of blending. I believe that affect is very important in any kind of learning, and her I want to talk about the inadvertent blending that happened with the onset of COVID-19.

One of the modules I teach is a public speaking module. As the lecturer for this module, I am responsible for 150 students, but I have a team of teaching assistants who help me run the tutorials. It is a module where affect is not only part of the pedagogy – lectures as well as tutorials are based very much on connecting with the emotions of the students and building an empathetic and supportive learning community – but affect is also a core component of the content. The students learn through a range of activities and routines how to tap into the needs of an audience and respond accordingly. Up until 2 months ago, all this rested very much upon the physical co-presence model. When the virus first started, we were asked to move large classes online. I now had to record my lectures for students to view, and then we would still engage with them face-to-face in the tutorials. I put a lot of effort into these lectures, being as animated as I could, imagining a real live audience. I also used the tracking function to make sure everyone was watching the lectures (or at least accessing them!). There was a simple online quiz at the end of each lecture for students to check their understanding.

Then the virus situation got more severe, and tutorials had to move online as well. We used zoom, and students had to deliver speeches on zoom, with the guided preparation for these speeches also taking place on that platform. While my team faced some technical issues, the one concern that kept coming up was that they didn’t feel they could connect with their students. I think they did the best they could, and we will have to look at the student feedback to see whether the students were affected in any way. But I think it does show that affect is important.

I came across this article that makes a similar point. In it, a professor explores why zoom classes leave her feeling depleted of energy. While some commenters say that it is just a matter of practice, and of course there is always a way to “make do”, I think that it is a point that needs to be taken seriously, especially for those of us whose pedagogy is more embodied and holistic. I also venture to add that gender and race may be factors here as well. Many of the most enthusiastic techno-evangelists are white men. It is perhaps easier to say that one is comfortable in a space when that space has been designed for people very like oneself (see for example this article, which discusses Caroline Criado Perez’s book “Invisible Women”. Or this one, which discusses Ruha Benjamin’s book “Race After Technology”). There is a growing body of work in this area, and I think it should be drawn into discussions about online learning, along with work by minority educators on radical pedagogies. This latter body of work also needs to be part of the conversation, because so often it is ignored when current pedagogy is set up as a strawman in an argument for online learning as a “better” version of the physical classroom.