By Fredler Brave, Wikmedia Commons 

BY AARON BARLOW

We’re learning a lot about distance education right now. As a group, that is, as faculty. Few of us have ever bothered with using digital tools, much less considered teaching solely online or even in a hybrid situation. We’ve assumed, correctly, that distance education is a pale approximation of learning without electronic mediation. But we are learning how to make the best of it.

We are learning that, but more than that. After all, to quote Tennessee Williams, we have recently been living in a time “when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind. Their eyes had failed them or they had failed their eyes, and so they… [are now] having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy” and an unprecedented health crisis. We’ve been as blind as the rest.

We are all learning a lot of things right now, fast and painfully. As teachers, we can’t stop that, nor should we; maybe we can turn it and use it, making us better teachers and our students more able and enthusiastic learners.

Yes, there are plenty of things we can add to the learning experience of our students through the tools that have been developed over the past few years and we are remiss when we don’t take advantage of them, of cloud sharing, of webpages, of social media and more. But the core of effective teaching rests on the personal dynamic between student and teacher, on interactions where physical touch is not only wanted but sometimes necessary. As we gain skills over the next few months, we would do well to remember that the digital is only a temporary replacement for classroom-based education.

The mavens of programmed instruction and teaching machines of the 1950s and 1960s, all of whom were more concerned with teaching than with their machines, had recognized the limits to what they were doing by the 1970s and had begun to move their machines from the forefront of their classrooms back into the broader but now expanded toolkit they could dip into. This will happen again, once the coronavirus crisis is past. Most of us teaching now, raised under the influence of Paulo Freire, distrust the centralizing of educational tools unless students can control them completely; we have seen how the tools and those behind them can take power from the students. The best of us even distrust the power imbalance we take advantage of ourselves to further education within an institutional environment, working to empower students enough so that we can step back and they forward. This can happen in a digital environment, too, but the danger is that power moves from the teacher to those behind the digital and not, really, to the student, something we see playing out within the broader population in social-media imbalances. So, we will insist on the primacy of face-to-face instruction.

Though I hear colleagues say that the current crisis is going to force colleges and universities to place more emphasis on distance learning, I think they are wrong. Yes, many of my colleagues would be better prepared for the current and abrupt move to an online scenario had they incorporated digital tools into their classrooms long ago, but I don’t believe the upshot of the current stopgap is going to be more online and hybrid courses. At most, it will allow an expansion of possibilities surrounding the classroom but will not replace it. Students and faculty are going to be eager to get back to learning in its fullness. Many may even, for a while, want to reject the digital completely, especially students, as they realize how fully their education has been compromised by the coronavirus emergency.

All of us are learning as we go amid such widespread uncertainty, faculty learning even more, probably, than students, many of whom are already more at home in digital environments than are their teachers. Among the questions we are grappling with are ones of grading. How, in a radically different educational environment, can we apply the grading standards we had set out for the semester equitably in a radically different situation? Some teachers are arguing that we should give up evaluation, giving all students As. Others urge us to move to the broadest and simplest formula, pass/fail, for the time being. This is a good conversation to be having. It is one that has died down over past decades and should have been revitalized anyway: How do we best evaluate students?

At the same time, we are facing the need to re-evaluate our own goals for the semester and, underlying that, for higher education generally. Should we be sticking to the narrow tracks of ‘content’ we had established in our syllabi or should we be allowing current events to shape the curriculum—at least temporarily? The numbers of different responses over the next weeks will provide us with a basis for new examinations of expectations, of ‘outcomes,’ as we have come to call them. In my classes, I am abandoning the plans I had made, focusing on the coronavirus and COVID-19, making our quickly changing lives the centers of my classes.

I think my students can learn more through this than through an insistence on the curriculum I had established before the term began. That may make sense for me—as all of my classes this semester are writing classes—but it may not for someone teaching in another field. In recent years, we have been trying to establish a unified framework based, in part, on those definable ‘outcomes,’ on what is known already rather than on what is unfolding around us. Maybe we will come to recognize the need for a more flexible frame once this is over. We will see.

Whatever happens, we will learn from what we are experiencing and from the tragedies that we expect to quickly envelop us—that are enveloping us. When this is over, faculty and administrators should sit down and detail their experiences, not simply to be able to fight the last war if it comes again but to expand American higher education, to move it from the doldrums it has existed in for at least the last quarter-century.

Things are bad, yes. But that doesn’t mean we can only retreat.