Sunday: I interview The Girlfriend, a public university professor, about how CoronaWorld has altered her semester. I edited our 30-minute talk for clarity.
Me: Tell me about the class you’re teaching this semester.
The Girlfriend: I'm co-teaching a graduate seminar of 12 students that connects two classes, one in a school of cinema and one in a performance and interactive media arts program. Some are getting MA degrees, some MFAs. It clusters around ideas about performance, video, media, and activism.
Me: Describe the transition you had to make once CoronaWorld happened.
GF: We were really lucky compared to most professors. First, we were warned that the transition was coming, and we had a class before the transition where we made a rubric of how we wanted to engage online. Second, the class was small. Third, we were teaching graduate students.
Then, our class was in many ways about the issues raised by moving to online teaching. The class activates videotapes about AIDS in the 1980s that were later digitized. It asks the students to use those digitized artifacts to create performances or other forms of arts-based research and activism. It's a class about the relationship between art and activist behaviors from the past. It was already asking questions about liveness and digitization, about presence, about synchronous and asynchronous modes of action and interaction. What does it mean to engage in education and community by having connections produced by digitization?
Perhaps most critically, the class was about a virus; it was about HIV. So all of the ideas and questions about how do viruses produce activism, culture, community — they were suddenly not nostalgic or metaphoric or distant. The crisis of viruses jumped into people's present in this really unsettling way. And then the class ended up being about, among other things, the connections between Covid-19 and HIV.
So my experience was probably ideal. And it was still awful.
Me: Why?
GF: In another body of my research I work with a group called FemTechNet, a large group of feminists who think about digital technologies in relationship to pedagogy. And that group has expressed vehemently that digital technology can enhance learning as long as safeguards or commitments undergird that technology’s use. And one of those safeguards or commitments is an acknowledgement of the unique, vital, precious realities that define where human beings gather, and that our many different places of learning and living have different needs and strengths. I didn't learn in CoronaWorld that it’s a problem to meet only digitally if you're engaging in education. I knew through FemTechNet and our experiments in online education that the procedures to make digital education work need some place-based reservoir.
Me: Why do we need a place-based reservoir?
GF: My colleague Elizabeth Losh has written an excellent book on MOOCs [Massive Open Online Courses] and digital education. There’s something written profoundly into the educational enterprise where the teacher and the students are responding to each other's human needs and capacities. Years of educational behavior are organized around this. If you have a lecture class, for instance, you have a tutorial, because students can then interact in a smaller group with someone who knows their name, who understands their unique proclivities. Or that might be student-to-student.
If and when MOOCs have worked, those massive groups would have meetups. Losh writes about a MOOC where students drove across the country just for the chance to meet the professor at a picnic. One of the reasons my class was lucky was that we’d already met in person; we had those affiliations as our reservoir. We knew things you learn about people not just from what they say but how they inhabit space; if they make eye contact; are they soft spoken; are they good listeners. These things are nearly impossible to gauge in a Zoom classroom. Anyone who's taught in a brick-and-mortar classroom knows you'll approach Student A differently from Student B because you understand how they are uniquely human.
Me: You can gauge enthusiasm in a Zoom classroom, can't you?
GF: No, not really. It's hard to feel energy. That’s one of the reasons it's very hard to teach well.
Me: You can't gauge it from someone pressing a button or raising their hand?
GF: A lot of the art of teaching is understanding the energy of a classroom. You know when a lecture's going south; you know when a question is too hard. You know it not only from how many people raise their hands; it’s a lived experience. And that’s gone in a Zoom classroom. Students understand this, too. They know when the classroom is engaged. If you're teaching at your best, you are working hard to engage students who aren't raising their hands.
In a Zoom classroom, everything is flat. We ended up breaking our class into small groups, and the students liked that much better. It’s more interactive; you can gather not just what someone knows but their mood, their energy, their motivation. Are they depressed? Angry? These things are all part of teaching and learning. Once we went fully to Zoom, virtual office hours worked better for the same reason: 20 minutes, two professors, one student; it’s much more interactive, livelier, human.
Me: How is your authority as a teacher different in an online universe?
GF: In our FemTechNet white paper, we suggested to all educators that a benefit of going online is that it can allow educators to investigate or challenge the traditional power dynamic in a patriarchal classroom. In a normal classroom, there's one professor looking at everybody and they're all looking at you. On video you’re all flat on one screen; everyone can see each other equally in that grid. And students are seeing each other's faces, not just your face, even if they're not speaking. Now as a feminist professor, I've always taught in a circle, but many professors have not. These are strategies to redistribute or un-cement or try to equalize power relations.
Online teaching makes visible a lot of systems that you might not see or challenge. That's just one example. In our classroom we didn't throw out the syllabus, but we did entertain it as a possibility. Are the conditions of CoronaWorld too troubling, too monumental to teach and learn as we were? And that's also a change in power relations — typically students receive a syllabus and that's that. It's a feminist strategy to remake a syllabus in relation to student need. I have a feeling that more professors are doing that, not out of a motivation to alter power relations per se but to acknowledge the truth of how daunting and nearly impossible it is to expect normal performance from students during Covid.
But any way in which students are interacting and shaping assignments, grades, class expectations — anything like that is a reshuffling of traditional expectations and often, as a result, power.
Me: Have you shifted expectations for your students?
GF: This comes up in the FemTechNet white paper. We are asking for good-enough teaching. We’ve said to our students: we want you to flourish and thrive and be excited about your work; however that manifests, that’s amazing. And if you can't get to that place, we understand. How can you ask more than that of a student right now? They may be sick, they may have someone in their home who’s sick, they may be depressed, they may not be eating. We are trying to facilitate them getting some real intellectual or creative pleasure or energy or reserves from their work. But anything they do is going to be a passing grade.
Many of the students are performance artists, and they’re mourning the loss of liveness and the loss of the performance, which is very much like mourning the loss of the classroom. A lot of their projects are now about that mourning. They've become more like meta projects about performance or community, which were already the meta themes of the class.
Look, they don't have access to normal resources. How do you put on a performance in your home, in your studio? How do you make costumes? How do you engage your band? I have a student thinking about how to do a live multi-instrumental performance; they were supposed to have a show at Carnegie Hall. A lot of their project now is not about outcome but about process. That reflects one of my ongoing theories about activist art: if the outcome is lo-fi, DIY, cheap, poorly made, it doesn't matter, because coming together to create is part of the activism. So this was a teaching moment. And that’s why my experience is better than so many, because what my students are learning in CoronaWorld is relevant to the original subject matter of the class, and we can figure that out together.
Me: Are there habits as a teacher you’ve had to shift in CoronaWorld?
GF: Well, I was sick for three of the Zoom weeks, so I had much less energy. One of my skills as a teacher is being good at holding lots of people's thoughts and feelings in my head, then organizing them and delivering an activity or response or connection. And I was not so good at that when I was sick. So that felt bad. I felt sad.
But it’s hard to do that on Zoom regardless of energy level. A significant amount of my teaching is that my ideas are responsive and co-productive from not just what my students say but also their energy, interests, and affect. So I don't feel as capable in this space.
And I’m not as motivated. And I know if I'm not, my students aren't. It’s hard to maintain the kind of energy that makes all experience good. Whether that's teaching or learning or being an artist — it's hard to find that right now. And that's not Zoom; that’s Zoom written into CoronaWorld. If I was teaching on Zoom but then going out and living my normal life, that would be different. There’s still a way in which coming to class is feeding. But it’s not the same.
Me: When the fall semester comes around classes might still be online. How do you feel about that?
GF: Heartbroken.
Me: Why?
GF: Teaching is a calling. Teaching and learning is one of the world's great commitments and experiences. It's like being a parent; it's hard but very satisfying work. You get feedback instantaneously; it’s often positive. This Zoom thing we're doing is a paltry version of the thing itself. To get through two months of it — okay, fine. But to imagine that this watered-down version is the new reality — it’s recognizable, but it’s not satisfying in the ways that teaching and learning are so empowering because they’re so interpersonal, about what people, teacher and students, can do together.
I know there are people who do all their teaching online. But educators in every sector, particularly higher education, have been fighting against that from the beginning as employees: for us and for our students. We understand that entirely online education is a pale version of something much more magnificent, important, vital, and successful if you do it between people in real lived spaces.
I would be working for a paycheck, not working for a calling.
(New York state numbers as of Sunday: 242,786 diagnosed with Covid-19, up 2.6 percent; 507 dead, to a total of 13,869, up 3.8 percent. Overall U.S. deaths: 1,631, to a total of 35,809, up 4.8 percent.)
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