For many instructors, the classroom is the thing.

In a recent post I discussed the dislike that a Canadian educator has for online education. Her essay is but one of a number appearing in 2020 that take online education to task for a lack of humanness. These essays come in two flavours: either the authors dislike online education, or they absolutely distrust online education. Today’s post will look at a couple in the dislike pile, and in tomorrow’s we’ll tackle the distrust pile.

The sudden lockdown of society due to the pandemic necessitated the closure of universities around the world. Many academics took to their pens and wrote about the pivot, often in anguish or in anger. A couple of essays stood out for me in these early days of pandemic pedagogy (panic pedagogy might be a more apt description), though I by no means read them all.

Jonathan Zimmermann’s essay in The Chronicle Review was provocative enough to get a few at home profs to drop their sourdough starter and take to Twitter. And you’re right, it doesn’t take much to get certain academics to take to twitter. Zimmermann is an education historian who has studied the history of televising professors’ lectures for educational purposes. He explained that with the explosion of American universities in the 1950s and 1960s, university administrators looked to technology to find answers about how to handle the onslaught, and thought television might be the way.

Zimmermann points out that students didn’t like it then, and they still don’t like it now. Neither does Zimmermann. He’s convinced that “teaching other human beings requires a ‘conversation of the soul’ — as the author and activist Parker J. Palmer calls it — instead of an exchange of images. And real conversation happens when people are in the same room, not when they’re on the same channel.” That conversation, it turns out, depends on the instructor’s charisma, something that can only be perceived in the physical classroom.

Karen Strassler, an anthropologist writing in the New York Times, also takes aim at teaching per video, though her critique of the zoomification of teaching takes a slightly different tack. She shares Zimmermann’s devotion to the classroom; her opening sentence - “when life was normal, my students and I gathered in classrooms” - has an almost nature documentary feel to it. (I couldn’t help but imagine the scene: a pride of students, lolling about in the tall grasses of the African savannah . . . .).

Strassler’s point about the classroom is important, though: she sees it as an equalizing space which Zoom disrupts by providing access to lives that students could previously keep separate from the classrooms. They come into class as “apparent equals,” an equality that is shattered by the glimpses into the students’ private domains: “As a teacher, I cannot level a deeply unequal playing field. But within the classroom, my students and I can try to forge a community where we listen to one another with respect, where everyone has a right to the floor, and where students share their experiences because of the trust we’ve built together, not because their private lives are on display via Zoom.”

Like Zimmermann, Strassler sees the classroom as a special place. Quoting bell hooks - “The classroom, with all its limitations, remains a location of possibility” - Strassler shifts the focus a little bit away from Zimmermann’s charismatic instructor towards the learner, but it’s clear from the essay that this professor cherishes being in those spaces with her students.

These two essays were not alone in declaring their love for the classroom. They and others see it as a magical space where something special happens. The essays were also not alone in expressing their dislike of online education. Perhaps we should qualify that; Zoom teaching isn’t what online education is really about, or one hopes at least not what online education is all about.

But is the classroom really that special? There can be special moments, but is that the only place where significant and meaningful learning occurs? Zimmermann and Strassler’s essays would have you believe that learning can be condensed and pinpointed to a moment in a classroom when a meaningful exchange occurs between students and prof, or among the students themselves. I think those moments occur in classrooms. But I also think they can occur elsewhere as well, independent of the instructor.

For Fall Term 2020 this blog will be exploring issues informing education during a pandemic. It is appearing as part of a graduate seminar on online teaching and learning. You can read more about the seminar or see the other posts.

Post 17/60.