This is an essay that was created for the “Interrogating Feminism(s)” session of the Feminism x EAP slow conference, 9th – 15th May 2024.

What does it mean to be a feminist educator when our lives are immersed in data? This is the broad question I am interested in, and I want to share with you today some of the ways in which I am trying to approach it. I’m going to use the work of Donna Haraway and Suzanne Damarin, and set that against my own experience and embodied knowledge. My goal just for this presentation, is to answer Damarin’s titular question – as a postmodern teacher, would you rather be a cyborg or a goddess? Let’s start first by arriving at an understanding of this cyborg. Who is she? And from there, I want to move on to a little story that makes me ask the question – who am I? Finally, I want to ask you – who do you want to be? Because if we want to show up in our classrooms as feminist educators, this is the sort of thing we should be thinking about, especially when there is so much that seems to be beyond our control.

Technology has been a focus of feminist interrogation for decades, seen most evocatively and radically in Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto”, written in 1985, where she stated that

“By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.”

In this essay, she exhorts socialist feminists to think outside of the usual ideological binaries and frameworks when considering how they might resist patriarchal technological impositions and structures. She rejects the idea that we should always see technology as masculine and destructive, and that there should always be a distinct barrier between the feminine/natural on the one hand, and the masculine/technical on the other. Arguing for a feminist politics beyond identity, she looks to science fiction for inspiration and births the cyborg that is hybrid in every way.

Such a radical idea has been inspiring to some and the focus of critique for others. In “The Artificial Paradise: Science Fiction and American Reality”, Sharona Ben-tov points out that while “Haraway has tried to turn technology’s mythic project into feminism’s mythic project”, the ideology that forms the basis of her imagining is fundamentally dualistic. Significantly, while Haraway makes mention of “unnatural cyborg women making chips in Asia and spiral dancing in Santa Rita whose constructed unities will guide effective oppositional strategies”, Ben-Tov expresses concern that the cyborg metaphor itself can become a Western imposition, subsuming two very different groups of women. I find this critique as productive as that which it critiques, because it makes me think that there is scope even in the technological present to reclaim as distinct some of the things that Haraway folded into her cyborg, and I will come to that shortly.

It’s okay if you haven’t read “A Cyborg Manifesto” by Donna Haraway. If you are interested in feminist pedagogy, you will come across it at some point. Cited in many papers, you will come to understand it sideways, through other people’s eyes. And then one day you might even read it for yourself. And it will perhaps confuse you and inspire you at the same time. As I tell my students when they are struggling with reading theory, it is confusing because at the time when theorists are writing, they are making up the words and phrases and ways of seeing that don’t exist yet. And so of course they will keep trying to come at it from different angles. If you have read Manifesto, then you, of course, know what I mean. But once you have come across it, you have to decide how it sits with you. And as an Indian woman in Singapore, I have my own friction with the notion of the cyborg, Western or otherwise, which I will try to articulate through a personal narrative in a little bit.

Critique aside, Haraway’s imagining of the cyborg certainly inspired many scholars. In the field of education, Suzanne Damarin ,in her 1994 essay on “being a teacher in a postmodern century” picks up the last line of Haraway’s essay: “…though both are caught in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess”, and turns it into a question. She asks us: “Would you rather be a cyborg or a goddess?” Damarin answers this question by pointing out the issues with both metaphors, and suggests instead that we think of new metaphors for our entanglements with technology in our work as teachers.

The age of algorithms raises specific challenges for feminist pedagogy, and I think it is worthwhile asking the question again in 2024, 30 years later.

I want to revisit this question from a different perspective. You see, I come from a culture that believes in goddesses, and while it can sometimes be a problematic culture (for eg women and girls face sexual violence and other forms of gendered oppression from the same men who carry statues of goddesses during festivals on specially made platforms), it is also a culture that holds rich resources, passed down the generations through stories, traditions, practices, literature, material objects, and many other vehicles. It is breathed into us as we grow up, both limiting us and empowering us. It is an embodied knowledge. We carry it in our bodies. And so while I understand and appreciate Damarin’s objections to the goddess metaphor (for eg she points out how it has been appropriated to construct a compliant teacher in a patriarchal system), I want to sit with it for a while and unpack it here from the perspective of my embodied cultural knowledge. I will try to do this by telling you a story.

*****

My whole body is vibrating with relief and excitement. We have a rare 4-day weekend! Well, no one thinks of it as such because it is Week 10 of the semester. This is when things are heating up. It is an extremely stressful time. For the students, because it is the time when they start catching up to all the assignments that are due at the end of the semester (just 3 weeks away). For the faculty, because we still have things to teach them, and we know they are stressed out, but we are still grading their earlier assignments and trying to release some of their grades to them. They need to know how they are doing on the course, for sure. But there is another, more insidious, reason. This is the time of the semester when the anonymous online student feedback exercise is launched. Students are asked whether they think we are effective teachers. Whether we have advanced their thinking, whether we have provided timely feedback. By week 10, we might be behind on our grading. “She didn’t return our work”, we are terrified they will say. It matters because the feedback scores determine our pay and promotions. These 20-year-olds have the power to decide how soon I hit my retirement fund target. Whether at the end of my contract it will be renewed. Week 10 is simply awful.

I suppose the university knows this, and their solution is to mandate an extra holiday. A day of no classes. It is a day explicitly set aside for the “wellbeing” of the university community. They have kindly set it on a Thursday just before a Friday public holiday. Hence the 4-day weekend. But everyone needs it to catch up on their work. I am no exception. But – I cleverly decide – I will make it a pleasant work-holiday. I will check into a local hotel with a pool and a room with a view of the ocean. If I do have to grade essays and upload a recorded lecture to replace the cancelled Thursday class, I will do so in COMFORT.

 My room is bare of any luxuries. But there is a bed, a desk, a bathroom, a gorgeous view of the ocean, and, most important of all, free wifi! My working holiday is all set to start. I have no doubt at all that it will be wonderful. After all, I have come prepared with all my technological body parts. I am confident in my cyborg identity. I might be 54 years old, but look how well I have learned all this new technology that has been thrust at me!

My laptop – of course. That I cannot go anywhere without it means that it might as well as attached to my body. It needs to be fed – my laptop is not self-sustaining. So it needs a charger. I have a lecture to record. My voice needs to be rendered in a form that can carry well through the machinations of hardware and software and platform and gadget and my students’ ears. So I need a headset with a good microphone.  Is my Cyborgification complete? It is not. What use is the laptop without the smartphone, through which I am granted access to the university’s virtual learning environment? That device needs to be fed too and so it has its own charger. Surely NOW I am ready – this part woman, part machine.

But no. Somewhere after the death of my mother last year, bowed down by grief (does a cyborg feel grief?) I have been diagnosed with sleep apnea. And so going on this working holiday means also carrying the means by which I will breathe at night while I sleep – my CPAP machine. So I pack that. It is not just one item. There is the machine itself, the hose that connects to it, the mask that connects to the hose, and the headgear that connects to the mask. It is a funny thing – with age, some machines are more difficult to merge with, but some are unavoidable and seem to attach themselves to us.

So this Cyborg was ready. She was the perfect worker. On a holiday, she was not only working, but also obeying the institutional injunction (shored up by many emails) to engage in acts of self-care. She was going to work, but in a hotel room with a view of the sea.

Lunch was first. In a beautiful restaurant atop the hotel, with a 270-degree view of the sea through picture glass windows. A cocktail, followed by a beautifully plated salmon, finished with a complimentary dessert sampler. How I was pampering myself on this mandated day of wellbeing. Too hot to sit by the pool right now. I would pop up to the room, record and upload the lecture my students were eagerly waiting for so that they could complete their assignment that was due the following week, and then head back down to the infinity pool to enjoy a well-earned swim in the glow of the setting sun. View of the sea and everything.

Except that that is not what happened. I opened my laptop, and tried to connect to the hotel wifi. It would not connect. No matter. “I am a confident cyborg,” I thought. And tried connecting again. And again. And again. And again and again and again… All my plans for a wellness working weekend would go down the toilet if I could not do this basic thing. Because I needed to be able to connect to Canvas – the virtual learning platform my university uses. That was where my students’ papers were for me to grade online. That was where I needed to upload the recorded lecture. I also needed to be able to open zoom – the web-conferencing platform that I use to record lectures because it automatically compresses the videos for easy upload. I was ready to do all this. But none of it could happen without wifi. No go. Still no connection.

What were my options? Well primarily, I could toss the whole hotel stay and just go home. It would take – what – 30 minutes? And I would be able to do everything beautifully. BUT THAT WAS NOT THE PLAN. I would have to forfeit the money, which was not a small sum. More importantly, I would be admitting defeat. What kind of a useless cyborg would I be?

Aha! I had thought of a workaround. I would record the video offline, using PowerPoint, and then speak to the hotel about their wifi. So I recorded the whole lecture. I quite enjoyed the experience. The updated interface was really quite lovely. The video was taking so long to export that I decided to head out for dinner and a walk, feeling quite proud of myself. I stopped by the hotel front desk and they gave me an alternate wifi login code. With that in my pocket, I strolled quite jauntily to dinner and back.

To my horror when I got back, the PowerPoint video had hung, and there was no saved version. I had to record the lecture all over again. By this time I was so distressed at not being able to solve the problem myself that I was in tears. It was dark outside now. There was no seaview to comfort me. My students had been promised a video and did not get one. What kind of feedback would they give me?

Finally I reached out to a colleague – a young man who had been my student 10 years before when I had been a graduate teaching assistant, and who is now an instructor in the department. Through a WhatsApp video call during which I focused my smartphone camera on my laptop screen, he identified the problem – a program installed by the university on our laptops that had a strong firewall which blocked the connection to the hotel wifi. He walked me through uninstalling it. After I got off the phone with him, I cried even more. I managed to get all my work done but I was undone. What kind of a useless cyborg was I?

*****

The point of this narrative is not to describe what is at one level first-world problems. In fact it was a problem that had some easy solutions. But I want to examine my distress and unpack it, because I think it was rooted in my need to perform a cyborg confidence, to be a good worker, to BE WELL in my chosen place of self-care. But what it shows is that I had internalized a cyborg aesthetic without the politics that Haraway posited would be so liberating. Where was the boundary-crossing? Where was the resistance?

Perhaps, after all, the cyborg does not resonate with me. According to Damarin, Haraway’s cyborg “seeks sites for resistance to the naturalizing of machines and the mechanization of culture”, and she provides some examples of what “cyborgian teachers” might do. They look nothing like the sobbing mess who struggled with her own digital incompetence. With her shame.

As I reflect on how I felt that day, I find myself going back to Damarin’s question – would I rather be a cyborg or a goddess? I suppose we can all be many things, and all metaphors have their limits as well as their possibilities. But I think it matters which goddess it is.

Sarasvati namastubyam varade kamarupini

Vidyarambham karisyami siddhirbhavatume sada

“I salute Goddess Saraswathi who grants blessings and takes forms that she wants

I am starting my education. Please always let me succeed in this, my venture.”

The Saraswati Stotram is a prayer invoking the Goddess Saraswathi, who represents education, creativity and music. As a child I was taught to recite this prayer before going to school. I was also taught never to step on paper, because it was a symbol of knowledge and therefore connected to Saraswathi. To this day, though I no longer actively engage in religious practices, my tongue remembers the prayer and my feet avoid stepping even on a scrap of newspaper on the pavement. The name Saraswati stems from the Sanskrit root “saras,” which means “that which is fluid.” She is known to bring order out of chaos and has a calming and centering personality. She is depicted playing the veena, a string instrument, and in one of her four hands, she holds a palm leaf, which is a symbol of her knowledge.

I spent hours during long religious ceremonies staring at statues and paintings of this Goddess of knowledge and learning. In my body is a deep understanding of symbolism, but also of technologies of learning. What is the difference between her veena and my laptop? Between her palm leaf and my smartphone? I don’t want to engage in facile comparisons, but I am looking for the sites of resistance. Why should I, who hold this deep knowledge in my body, feel shame when faced with a technology I cannot master? What does it even mean to master a technology that is an assemblage – of hardware, software, IT policy, firewalls, wifi, deadlines, expectations, institutionally mandated wellness days? Perhaps just staying calm in the storm is resistance. Pushing away the shame. It is not mine to carry.

I have no answer for this. But I have started thinking about it. And I would like to invite you to join me. Would you rather be a cyborg or a goddess when you think about how you might relate to technology in the classroom? Or would you rather come up with another metaphor that inspires you to resist? To embrace? To engage?

References

Ben-Tov, S., & Muir, S. (1995). The artificial paradise: Science fiction and American reality. University of Michigan Press.

Damarin, S. K. (1994). Would you rather be a cyborg or a goddess? On being a teacher in a postmodern century. Feminist Teacher, 8(2), 54-60.

Haraway, D. (2010). A cyborg manifesto (1985). Cultural theory: An anthology, 454.

Comments from the conference website on this essay, which I also created in audio form here.

“I really enjoyed the audio presentation by Shobha Avadhani (and appreciated having the transcript to follow along) – Shobha has a beautiful gift of storytelling and provoking thought simultaneously. It makes me want to explore how I feel in relation to the metaphors discussed and what other metaphors I could come up with. But also perhaps how I perceive my institution positions me and how all that interacts. It will take longer than today, this week, this year… Thank you!”

“Maybe with an element of audio recording, similar to Shobha’s story telling because there is something deeply moving about hearing a story as opposed to reading it“

I think that the ONL course has left me with more questions than answers, but it definitely has provided much food for thought. For one thing, it has raised in my mind the need to think very consciously and critically about how to create a learning community online. It is not just a matter of using many platforms and tools.

At a personal level, I found the course very stressful. It came on at a time when my work was increasing rapidly due to COVID-19, and there was one point when I thought I would not be able to continue. As one of my PBL group members pointed out, this actually could be a good way for us to gain some empathy about the plight of our students. When the learning is taking place online some things become easier, but other things become much harder. We also cannot ignore the fact that all this online learning is taking place at a time when poor governance and hyper capitalism have led to very devastating effects in the face of COVID-19. So students are coping with many changes, with some of them struggling to make ends meet as businesses close and jobs become defunct.

But that aside, I learned a lot from how the course was structured and facilitated. I have opinions about the recasting of teachers as facilitators, but perhaps I will leave that aside for now. Against the backdrop of such a large, internationally sprawled out group, the PBL groups felt very human. They gave us consistent and sustained human contact. This is unusual for large courses, and it has given me an idea for a module that I will be teaching completely online next semester. Entitled “Sex in the media”, it is a 4th year undergraduate module that runs on deep reading and active discussions that often challenge students’ assumptions. This can leave them feeling rather shaken – not always in a painful way, because even joy can shake us. My idea is to create support groups of about 3-5 students each. These will be separate from activity or project groups. I will have to think of ways to motivate them and hold them accountable, as well as to connect to the module’s learning objectives. But when everything is online, perhaps these support groups can help students feel like they have a “home” that they can come back to with all their messy emotions that don’t find easy voice in a zoom classroom.

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.

The question of what it means to form a community is one that is sometimes taken for granted when it comes to learning spaces and experiences, but in a public speaking course that I teach, it has been a central question. In this post, I talk about how that question has been addressed, and I end with questions about how to recreate this sense of community in an online space.

I’ve taught this course for a few semesters now, and it has been running long before I came on board. So we are talking here about a course that has a history. Part of that history is a focus on small group learning, even though at its start, the course would run with 600 students each semester. How do you make sure every student has a community when they are one among such a crowd? It isn’t enough to think of dividing them into tutorial groups. We know that for many courses, the lecture/tutorial format may allow for the creation of smaller groups, but this doesn’t automatically create a sense of community. It is what goes on in those groups that counts – creating a community has to be a goal, and the design of the lessons has to be directed towards that goal. Here is what we do in the course to ensure each student has a sense of being part of a community:

1. We keep the groups small: Over the years, the tutorial groups have become smaller and smaller. We started with around 20 in a group, and now we have no more than 10. What we have observed is that as the numbers shrink, the students report greater levels of satisfaction with the learning experience.
2. We put in place performance and feedback routines: For most of the weeks, the students are preparing and delivering speeches. While they deliver individual speeches, at the preparation stage they touch base with one another, share ideas, and generally connect very closely. By the time they are ready to deliver the speeches they are rooting for one another to succeed. While each student is speaking, the others are providing detailed feedback on a google doc. There are also sharing circles where they affirm one another’s efforts, suggest improvements, and engage with the ideas that they have brought forth. The stability of the routines for each round of speeches creates a reliable support and feedback structure.
3. We have diverse groups: This is one of the few courses that are open to students from all faculties, and even exchange students. About a third of the students each semester are usually from other countries, and we have students from the medical, business, engineering, architecture, science, arts, and law faculties. This means that there is a range of knowledge, skills, opinions and methods that are brought into the learning space. Students usually come away feeling invigorated by the exchanges.
4. We use an empathetic approach: Tutors on the teaching team are trained to conduct the sessions in such a way that they connect with individual students and facilitate connections among students. Many students experience anxiety when they have to deliver a speech, and it doesn’t help that the speeches are graded. However tutors use various strategies to de-escalate the tension, and even grades are released with detailed feedback that is framed as suggestions for improvement and affirmations of success. This sets in place a model for students, such that despite the unavoidable frame of competition, the classroom becomes a safe space where growth can take place in a very different way than many students may have been used to.

The point is not that this is radical in any way. But that these are some of the methods that we have used to create a sense of community that nurtures the development of empathetic and ethical speakers. What immediately stands out is how embodied this is. Bodies in a common physical space, relating to one another. What happens when this has to go online? How do we maintain that sense of community? This is my challenge for the coming semester. Due to COVID-19, in all likelihood we will not be able to conduct face-to-face classes as we did before, so I have to think about how to create community in new ways.

In our PBL group we talked a lot about the challenges and strategies of building community for online learning. I realise there were other components – the notion of networks, the idea of collaboration. But I think that at the core of networking and collaboration is the notion of community – some sense of a common purpose, of shared goals, of each person being invested in everyone else’s growth. Perhaps some of the things that built community before can remain. We can still have small groups. We can still have diverse groups. But I think it is still the many subtle ways in which we relate to other human beings that are difficult to replicate in online spaces. Perhaps it would be foolish to try.

This semester has been something of a trainwreck. The pandemic has slammed into us and knocked us sideways. As bad as I think things have been for me, I am aware that for many it has been far, far worse. But this post is not about the virus per se. Nor is it about looking for silver linings. Instead, it is about how the virus forced me to think about the value of open educational resources. I honestly found the module on the ONL course rather confusing. Sprawled over pre-webinar, Padlet, webinar, videos, meetings….I have come away from those 2 weeks with only a vague impression of evangelical rhetoric and some jargon. It really raised my critical hackles. But as I said, IRL, I couldn’t avoid grappling with openness. To slightly misquote Shakespeare, some are born open, some achieve openness, and some have openness thrust upon them.

Open references

Before the semester started in January, I spent a very long time putting my courses together. This involved gathering readings and making sure the library carried them, writing lectures, structuring assessment, designing tutorial activities, all the usual things we all do as we plan for a new semester. Working with the library to acquire all the latest books and journals was tedious, but with the help of a wonderful librarian we managed to move the relevant books from the open shelves to the reserve collection, and to purchase books that the library didn’t have. The students did ask – “Could you please upload digital versions?” – because many of them do not have the habit of going to the library, and not all the resources had digital versions. I kept directing them to the library. I like the idea that when they browse for one book they may serendipitously encounter another. They didn’t see it that way. We went back and forth on this.

Then the virus hit us. In stages, our interactions moved online. As more and more of their classes moved online the students had less and less reason to come to campus, so going to the library first became inconvenient, and then – when all classes were moved online and the library was closed – it became impossible. Suddenly there wasn’t a choice anymore. For resources that they were not able to access through the library’s e-portal, I had to find a solution. It’s incredible – how many things are behind a paywall. There was no time to see if the library could somehow acquire digital versions of books they already had on the shelves. So I spent a lot of my own money. I bought whole e-books and screenshotted the pages I wanted the students to read. Then I shared those screenshots with the students. In one case, the author of a book emailed a chapter to me. In another, a kind soul on Twitter had a digital copy to share. And so it went.

What would I do differently next time? Well for one thing, I am going to make it a point to only use open access references. My students can still browse, and can still savor the sweet taste of serendipity.

Open research

One of the courses I teach is a qualitative methods course. Again I had everything all set up. My students learned about interviews, participant observation, digital ethnography, textual analysis, the interpretivist paradigm…they were all set to start collecting data for their group projects. In fact some of them were halfway through the collection. They had conducted a few interviews, spent a few hours in the field. They had reflected on the nature of the body in the field, and the cues that an interviewer could read.

And then the virus hit us. Suddenly everything didn’t seem so certain anymore. I was concerned about sending them out into the field – crowded shopping malls, youth spaces, etc. Some of their interviewees cancelled on them, citing worry about face-to-face contact. But how to make modifications halfway through the semester in a systematic way? How to justify these changes? How to model for the students a narrative of flexibility and contingency?

This was when I came across a crowdsourced document started by sociologist Deborah Lupton. It is now closed, but at the time I shared it with my students, people were still adding suggestions and references related to doing qualitative research in a pandemic. This was eye-opening for my students, and it helped me to show them that qualitative methods are always in flux. It also manifested the spirit of collaboration and open science that powers much social research today.

Open pedagogy

I am used to teaching in a physical classroom. My teaching philosophy is inspired by the work of bell hooks (see for e.g. her book “Teaching to transgress“). Embodiment matters to me. As a queer woman of minority race, my body is always already oppositional, reflective, implicated. My students also I see as whole people – not just learners, but individuals in context. I am generally troubled by imperatives to move classes online, when there is no sound reason to do this. I have always believed that there is an intimacy to the classroom that is difficult to replicate online. I work very hard to ensure that my classroom is a safe space, and there is a high level of trust developed.

So when the virus hit us, and we had to move our classes online, I was really worried. Of course, we have Zoom, which turns out to have its own plus points. But it is hard to replicate the atmosphere of intimacy and trust. Then I came across Jesse Stommel‘s Twitter account, and it opened up my mind to new possibilities. In response to the pandemonium cased by classes suddenly going online, Jesse – a critical digital pedagogy scholar – shared all his syllabi and protocols for online learning. Out there, for anyone to adopt and adapt. He argued that what was happening was not online teaching – but crisis teaching, and so educators had to take into account the realities of their students’ lives as well as their own. Most significantly, he shared his ethos of crisis teaching – that it had to be based on trust.

This open sharing of pedagogical resources and ethos made me realise that at the heart of online teaching (whether in a crisis or not) was the same trust that I valued so much in the physical classroom. I am not going so far as to say that we can seamlessly replace one with the other. But I will say that I have observed very distrustful physical classrooms and, in the last few weeks, I have experienced a high level of trust in my online classes.

So, in conclusion, I think that it will take some time to connect this organic, crisis-driven embracing of openness with the whirlpool of information that the module introduced. But for better or worse, the journey has started.

In this post I want to engage with the idea of what it means to participate online, and to unpack the notion of digital literacies. Most media scholars and quite a number of educators are familiar with the work of Henry Jenkins (2006), who coined the term “participatory culture” in relation to the affordances of the online space. According to Jenkins, fans in online communities are able to speak back to the producers of media, participate in new forms of media production, and even develop a protopolitical subjectivity. This, for Jenkins, is a far cry from the days of broadcast media, when fans could only passively consume media, and the extent of their contribution was to make purchases – think for example of the work of Dallas Smythe (reproduced 2012) who conceptualised the audience commodity. Or of Adorno and Horkheimer (reproduced 2012), for whom television and film constituted the culture industry. Compared to this view of being an audience, the range of activities people can engage in online obviously raises them from consumers to something more.

Yet what that something more is, and whether in fact it gives people the agency that Jenkins argued it does, is the subject of debate. For Christian Fuchs (2013), for example, calling what fans do online “participatory culture” is a perversion of the democratic roots of the term. According to Fuchs, there is little agency in furthering the profit goals of a corporation. For Trebor Scholz (2013), erstwhile passive consumers now producing media in digital spaces – user generated content – raises questions about the exploitation of digital labour.

So the notion of online participation is in fact quite complex, and it is worth thinking beyond the assumption that “doing things online” is necessarily participation. Indeed it becomes even more important to approach this critically when we think about the field of education. As technology enters more and more deeply into the educational space, it creates some possibilities, but it also raises some questions. And this is where I think that we need to look at the imperative to develop digital literacies more critically.

This is especially so when we look at the origins of educational technology. Friesen (2010) tracks the development of instructional technology and shows how it is closely connected to the US military-industrial complex. His paper “[traces] the imprint left by the US military on instructional technology and design…[and] considers how this influence may now extend, like the Internet itself, into schools and the university” (p. 71). What does digital literacy mean in this context?

In thinking about the term “digital literacy”, David Buckingham (2006) asks whether we really need another literacy to add to a very long list of literacies. Noting that most advocates of digital literacy at the time tended to focus on skills relating to information, he argues that this form of literacy in fact should be more critical, expanding to include “asking questions about the sources of that information, the interests of its producers, and the ways in which it represents the world; and understanding how these technological developments are related to broader social, political and economic forces”.

There has of course been much more recent scholarship on the subject (see for example Pegrum, 2019, and the burgeoning field of higher education studies), but for the most part the work tends to go back to the definition of digital literacies as skills/competencies, and avoid the critical component altogether. I believe that there is a need to consider the skills and competencies that are required, but I must confess that I am far more interested in the critical approach. I think it is possible and necessary to consider both as we move into online educational spaces.

REFERENCES

Buckingham, D. (2006). Defining digital literacy – what do young people need to know about digital media? Nordic Journal of Digital Literacy, Volume 1.

Friesen, N. (2010). Ethics and the technologies of empire: e-learning and the US military. AI & society, 25(1), 71-81.

Fuchs, C. (2013). Social media as participatory culture. Chapter 3 in Social media: A critical introduction. Thousand Oaks, Calif: SAGE. Pp. 52-66.

Horkheimer, M., & Adorno, T. W. (2012). The culture industry: Enlightenment as mass deception. Chapter 4 in M.G. Durham & D. Kellner (Eds.). Media and cultural studies: Keyworks (2nd ed.). Malden: Wiley-Blackwell.Media and cultural studies: Keyworks, 53-74.

Jenkins, H. (2006). Fans, bloggers, and gamers: Exploring participatory culture. NYU Press.

Pegrum, M. (2019). Digital Literacies as Lenses. In Mobile Lenses on Learning (pp. 249-274). Springer, Singapore.

Scholz, T. (2013). Digital labor: The internet as playground and factory. New York and London: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group.

Smythe, D.W. (2012). On the audience commodity and its work. Chapter 16 in M.G. Durham & D. Kellner (Eds.). Media and cultural studies: Keyworks (2nd ed.). Malden: Wiley-Blackwell.Media and cultural studies: Keyworks, 185-203.

It is always exciting to enter a new learning community – or at least, to enter what will become a learning community through the efforts of its members to engage with one another and with the material. This week we connected online with the ONL community as well as the PBL group (aside: why does every new thing one starts involve a whole slew of acronyms?), and right out of the gate there are some aspects of this connecting that I find instructive in terms of what they suggest about learning and teaching online. In this post I will cover what I see as three aspects: layering, negotiation, and distribution. To clarify, I believe that all these aspects apply to face-to-face learning contexts as well. What I am specifically interested in here is how they manifest in a different modality.

I noticed that we eased into the course through a “slow-release” process, with information being transmitted in chunks. While some of it does seem overwhelming, the method of repeating the content and instructions in various ways and modes, through a variety of channels, making references to past iterations as well as anticipating where we will go with the module – this method which I will call layering seems designed to deal with the overwhelm. Synchronous communication and physical presence may still necessitate some layering, but I don’t think it requires it to the same extent. I do wonder though whether there may be such a thing as too much layering. Is there a point beyond which there are diminishing marginal returns, when the cognitive load becomes onerous? Does anticipating that learners will have trouble with the material, and designing pre-preemptive interventions to address that anticipation, in fact convey to learners the illusion that the material is more complicated that it is? I suppose it is hard to know where that sweet spot is.

The second aspect relates to the human connection – the relationality that lies at the core of any learning community, but which has to be established in a different way when that community is online. There is a great deal of negotiation that seems to be necessary, as people dip in and out of this community, feel different degrees of commitment to it, bring different values, experiences, languages, cultures… Ostensibly simple things like deciding who takes notes, when to meet, how to complete a presentation, these things require explicit and sometimes tedious negotiation. Tedious, that is, until it becomes normalized. At the beginning of the course, the level of negotiation required is higher perhaps until routines get established. There were some things that were decided for us – what the introductory presentation would look like, for example. At first I wondered why a template had been designed. Surely as an introduction to the negotiation process, putting together that first presentation would have been a good way to ease into the process of collaboration. But perhaps part of the early negotiation is buy-in. At the start of the course, we do not have a sense of how much each group member is prepared to do, and the show must go on!

Finally, I am struck by the spreading of our digital footprint across so many platforms. We have google drive, whatsapp, zoom, wordpress, and I am sure there will be a few more before the course ends. Online learning is something we cannot avoid in the higher education domain, but I wonder whether this distribution of our learning across multiple platforms and spaces, rather than in one consolidated virtual learning environment, helps rather than hinders the building of community. I wonder also if this sort of displacement of content requires more critical attention. One of my PBL group members stated in the google sheet where we were supposed to record our contact details that he wasn’t comfortable entering so much personal information there. That struck me as a valid position to hold, and I think that this little act of resistance is important in online learning – where our content and our identities get distributed is perhaps an issue we could negotiate with our students.

I realize that I have said nothing about problem-based learning or fish, but perhaps that will come up in another reflection. For this week my thoughts have centered on my entry into this space as a learner, from which vantage point I have noticed that starting an online learning community involves layering of modes of information to ease learners into the space, negotiation with and among learners regarding work processes and relationships, and the distribution of content and identity across multiple platforms.