A skill any experienced teacher develops is the ability to read a room. You become adept at sussing out vibes, at noticing how things seem to be going for other people, students in this case. Is someone not following the discussion? Is the lesson confusing or, worse, dull? Are pockets of the class distracted? Does someone who is working up the nerve to speak need a nudge or an opening? Has an activity floundered? Time and practice help; I’m definitely much better at [scholar voice] affective-space interpretation now than I was when I first started teaching my own classes in 2008 as a graduate student.
Thanks to the Omicron mega-wave, my home institution, the University of Southern California, is doing online classes until at least January 24. Zoom school again. Now, Zoom—or any live video stream—presents all the usual anxiety of being perceived by others, while your own powers of interpretive perception are flustered and overwhelmed. The screen teems with faces at best, black boxes at worst. There’s too much fractured movement. It’s like looking through the wrong end of a telescope. Like being a cat with damaged whiskers. Like wearing someone else’s glasses. Plus there’s chatter when people forget to mute their mics. You get the picture.
It’s striking how quickly the number of participants in a Zoom session becomes too many. My first-year courses are capped at fifteen students. That’s manageable. But my advanced seminar has nineteen students, so that’s twenty faces competing for space, twenty visages watching one another (and themselves) in miniature, and that is a bit much. Teaching a participatory, discussion-based course in USC’s Writing Program entails a simultaneous mixture of skills: hosting, questioning, responding, lecturing, expanding, unpacking, leading, following, linking.1 This is tricky enough in a “regular” classroom. Add layers of digital complexity and your head starts throbbing.
But I’m reasonably good at this after almost two years of practicing online, distanced pedagogy, and my students are deeply resilient—they’ve had to be. We’ll get through this and back to something a little more like normal soon, sitting in a room together, talking about writing. I like that. Many people do.
Open, lateral, collaborative, kinetic discussion (i.e. not just the teacher lecturing to / at students) is fundamental to a writing class, but importing that model to Zoom is unwieldy. In fact, at the risk of sounding like a curmudgeon who just doesn’t grasp the modalities and realities of twenty-first-century higher education or whatever, I think there are limits to how much any online course can generate the near-magic humanist project of Education, no matter how skilled the teacher or smart the students. You almost always need to be materially emplaced. You need to actually be together, not on a screen with your earbuds in. You need to meet for real, preferably in a small group. Online courses aren’t bad; they’re just curtailed.
Sooner or later USC will return to this generative proximity, because we have a multibillion-dollar endowment, which allows the school to host small writing seminars. It takes serious money to create conditions where teaching and learning can flourish, and most colleges and universities do not have that kind of wealth.2 Besides, plenty of students have hectic work schedules and personal lives that make it difficult to attend classes that convene during the typical academic day.
These are reasons among many many many that the US government should invest in a New Deal for higher education. Imagine high-quality, in-person classes throughout the day and night at public colleges across the country, rural and urban and suburban areas alike, classes taught by well-compensated professors and filled with students who aren’t anxious about tuition. Academic social democracy instead of academic capitalism.
What? Stop laughing like that.
I can’t speak for other modalities like lectures, science labs, and language practicums, which are also part of the curricular blend at any university.
At a city college where I once taught, introductory writing classes had over thirty students. Incredible!