Humanizing Learning - Part One.
What is the role of healing in the virtual classrooms of the pandemic?
This week is the Technology and Education Seminar and Showcase (TESS 2020), the annual conference hosted by eCampusOntario. It’s virtual, of course, yet it’s exploring the very nature of online education. The conference theme, Humanizing Learning, is explained on the conference website: “Inclusion is the backbone of innovation and is critical to building spaces that reflect the full range of human diversity. As technology continues to advance education, deepening human interactions in online learning environments is critical for success in higher education.”
Photo by John Cameron on Unsplash
Yesterday’s keynote was given by Amira Dhalla, a digital rights advocate who works for Consumer Reports in New York. Her talk, “The big shift: How we transfer connection, empathy, inclusion, and engagement in learning environments online” was well received for its message that we must “humanize our digital spaces and heal ourselves to prepare for the future of online learning and make more inclusive spaces for a diversity of individuals and learning styles.”
Towards the end of her address she made an impassioned plea: “I can't help but feel that I really want to focus on the word human, and what it means to show up as an honest and authentic human and doing so, we have to put people first.” Dhalla outlined four ways of putting people first in education:
deepen connections by creating spaces that allow for real connection with people. She suggested some methods, such as having students introduce themselves at the beginning of term via a PowerPoint slide in which they provide their name, picture and three words to describe themselves. She also brought forth the idea of connecting students through mentorship programs with people from whom they could learn a great deal about how to navigate school, career, and life.
be open for everyone by making students a part of the conversation on how to create more inclusive environments. She made the astute comment that “sometimes we need to adjust the systems we’re using, and sometimes we need to just replace them.” She gave the example of medical students who created an inclusive Hippocratic oath that acknowledges the realities of the present day, COVID-19 and racism chief among them.
centring empathy in the classroom was Dhalla’s way of expressing the “need to allow spaces for a wide range of people to join the conversation, but it's not great, if we're bringing them into hostile environments or places where they aren't able to share their stories.” She went on: “So we can figure out how to help each other, empathy, can lead to understanding and understanding can lead to action.”
designing for engagement recognizes that “we’re all tired of sitting at our screens.” Dhalla suggested that we games, discussions, and apps such as Poll Everywhere, Mentimeter, and Flipgrid can alleviate Zoom fatigue.
Ironically, the suggestions for getting away from our screens included a number of apps that required screens, but to her credit Dhalla mentioned a number of lo-fi activities that she often uses in the virtual environment, such as quiet writing, playing with yarn, and markers (though what exactly one did with the yarn and markers went unmentioned).
Dhalla talked about how difficult she found the pandemic — living in New York City, she was in the middle of one of the worst hotspots. For her, it was very important to practice healing, which she described with a set of questions: “are you eating healthy? are you exercising? are you regularly sleeping? are you meditating? relaxing? getting a massage that I know that you want or you need? are you journaling?” She urged us to bring healing into the classroom as a way of centring empathy.
I was very happy to hear her make such a strong case for inclusion, that every learner in the classroom has a right to be there and to be fully included in the work of the classroom. I also agree with the need for empathy during these difficult times, to exercise patience with and offer flexibility to learners, though I find the language that Dhalla and so many others use — “to practice healing,” “to practice self-care” — in making the point somewhat overwrought. There’s no doubt that everyone has been through a lot in 2020, a year during which so many of our comfortable expectations have been challenged or shattered. My reaction to that isn’t that we need to take time to heal, but rather that we need to take time to reflect on and learn from the pandemic, learn from the protests, learn from the culture wars, learn from the forest fires — and then act on what we’ve learnt. This extends to my role as an educator. I don’t want to ignore or be ignorant of what my students are going through or what their lives may entail. But I don’t want to remain stuck there, either. My way of showing respect for the students’ desire to learn is to do my best to facilitate their learning, and to help them process what has been happening within the intellectual context of education. The point made by Dhalla, that an inclusive classroom cannot ignore how students actually are in the moment we’re teaching and learning with them, is a point well taken, especially if we use that as a starting point for facilitating — and humanizing — their online education.
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.
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