Response

The Journal of Popular and American Culture

Introduction

I came to online teaching reluctantly, having grown fond of saying the now silly sounding “English is a print discipline” and “how can they annotate online?” I was, at that time, far too comfortable rejecting the very idea of online English teaching and learning, prior to ever experiencing it, and I still feel a dissatisfaction with Kafkaesque campus IT support, so desperate to “standardize” the learning platform, that they dismiss differences between, for example, a freshman mathematics class and an advanced literature seminar or writing workshop – expecting us all to work within the same frame.

Not all of the issues of weaving an institutionally defined layer of technology into the work of teaching have been resolved, and it can be frustrating trying to understand English teaching mediated by a technical posture wanting every student in every section of every class, every term, to start, post, test, and view grades, all the same way. This marriage of classroom conceptions, i.e., English studies and Institutional Technology support, is a seemingly oppositional set of cultures, but perhaps we can re-situate McLuhan and consider the classroom as the medium – put resistance on the margin, and place, in the middle of the page, the online teaching and learning experience as valid, if different – but certainly not “less than.”

Marshall McLuhan on Flipped Classrooms

Incompleteness

A wired classroom is, after all, still a classroom, so any critical posture begs a consideration of what it means to teach and learn there. Back in graduate school, sitting in one of  Maxine Greene’s erudite lectures, I heard her rewrite Descartes, saying “I think, therefore I am becoming.” (Greene 1993). I want to move forward by conjuring that philosophical disposition in this context, so this is, and I hope will always be, a work-in-progress.

Yet the existential philosophy of Maxine Greene is not the only catalyst for my dispositional shift. There is an anthropology professor out of Kansas by way of YouTube, with his still startling video, The Machine is Us/ing Us that wrenched me out of ever being able to say again that, “English is a print discipline.” Its use of editing woke me up to the fact that one could only ignore technology’s influence on and place in the English classroom at one’s peril.

The Machine is Us/ing Us (Final Version)

My current position has shifted, then, from a naive resistance to one that imagines possibilities of excellence in online English instruction and excellent online learning, but this new posture is actualized within a place of incompleteness. Through this dialectic between the course content and its technological mediation, to name just two of the variables in this equation, we arrive at a disposition that must learn to be comfortable with the kind incompleteness born from working in an ever-evolving medium.

But being incomplete is a difficult posture when one is expected to be the expert in the room – be that room windowed or wired. Wherever we situate our expertise, or our move toward expertise, when we add technology, we situate ourselves in a less certain landscape because there is always some new adaptation to an application just around the bend. In more practical terms, as my personal Tekserve Guy from the shop on 23rd Street said, when I asked him what kind of computer and phone he uses, “When it comes to technology these days, we are all always behind.”

In wired English classrooms, our disciplinary expertise – and the professional identity adhered to it – can be trumped by a technology that is always new and always controlled by a different office, and that can be difficult to swallow, but perhaps being incomplete and being behind helps keep us awake – to conjure Maxine again, awake to our students’ experiences, just in case we have forgotten what it’s like to not know, awake to getting better at doing what we do. Online English faculty are perpetually becoming.

Blue Guitars: Arts and Aesthetics in Learning

Initially, my driving concern, in moving from a chalk to a wired classroom, was one of translation, so I placed all the emphasis on students responding to the privileged content. Now I don’t think this is unusual – again, we start with our expertise, not just because it’s our academic love affair, but also because there may be a certain amount of anxiety about short-shrifting our literary love in the face of technology, so – quite naturally – we privilege our text. But this natural approach is lacking the kind of connectivity that I want to explore, the kind of connectivity that made me an English major. This, then, situates the critical issue that I am currently grappling with: How can I reconcile the privileged place of the literature within a digital platform that emphasizes connectivity in an incompleteness register? For it is not simply the books that make literature classes exciting places to be. What, I wonder, is it that made my strictly New Critical undergrad lit classes at Pitt so unforgettably important to me still? What made my summer study in Vermont so compellingly transformative? It was not just the literature, although of course the text was never far from hand – quite literally. It was the shared experience of a community around the words – written, read, or spoken. It was the act of being with like-minded yet wildly different people, all falling in love – of one kind or another – with novels, with poems, with plays, and with our ways of engaging with them. English classes were acts of private love connecting publicly over the experience of that love in a way that strengthened it.

The poignant epigraph to E. M. Forster’s novel Howard’s End, “Only connect” has, then, become a guiding force in my digital pedagogy which now emphasizes interactions between students over the literature. The initial duality of my mediating the dynamic between the reader and his or her text has becomes a triptych of reader, text, and fellow readers facilitated by me. Now this isn’t new, the idea that the ego driven English class may be less valuable to students than other, more progressive, approaches. The interesting point here is that the wired class makes this distinction tangible and visible.

Multiple Levels of Discourse

My teaching then, has evolved beyond translation to emphasize teaching students how to engage with each other online over the literature or over their writing in response to the literature. This involves establishing consistent multiple levels of discourse and redefining for the words “exchange” and its descriptors “meaningful” and “responsive.”

This approach of scaffolding multiple levels of discourse in one classroom is what it’s all about. Your own version of netiquette, standard file exchanges, discussion boards, journals, blogs, – both full-class and semi-private engagements – are all structurally in place, thanks to those IT folks, all structurally in place to make this connectivity happen.

So what does that look like?

Well, it is important to remember that though our students might tweet and text like experts and indeed possess a relationship with technology, that does not necessarily translate to their online lit-class skill-set nor their psychological relationship to learning within a community. Working within this platform adds another aspect to the spectrum of ability levels and psychological states that exists in any classroom.

Be it confident graduate students with a facility for the interplay of technology with their scholarship or undergraduates with unknowable abilities, fears, anxieties, and resistance; be it elite institutions or underfunded campuses; we dare not rely on the nature of their unschooled tech-discourse practices, but must define and refine the nature of those practices, must define and refine the nature of the discourse we expect and require in our digital literature classrooms. In short, we must interfere with their relationship to technology.

One way that interference manifests itself is how they “talk” to each other. “Discussion” takes up an entire subheading of my course outlines, equal in heading hierarchy and length to the term’s schedule of readings. Here is a small sample of the kind of specificity required to cultivate connective discussion.

Overly long or overly truncated posts are worth avoiding. Think of sitting in a room with someone who clips off what they say, or speaks longer than is interesting, or walks into the discussion late, sits down, and, without knowing what has already been voiced and without listening, proceeds to dominate the discussion. Think of emails that are too long to be readable. That is not the behavior we are cultivating here.

Here is another example, tapping into that age old question: Does this count?

I want you to feel connected to the experiences of this course, but purely personal responses without serious effort to connect to text cannot “count” toward your required four weekly postings.

This level of explicitness would seem rude or at the very least overstated in a syllabus for a traditional class, but in a distance learning classroom, I would argue, it is essential.

The day-to-day interactions that we take for granted in a face-to-face classroom, i.e., casual comments when collecting or returning papers, chat as students settle into their seats, glances, nods, smiles, pats on the shoulder, basic eye contact, walking in or out together, these are important connective gestures that disappear without intentionality, so we have to be intentional. The way I handle that is to create columns in my grade book that permit me to keep steady track of who I’ve connected with and what the nature of the connection. It’s data collection on my connectivity. This level of explicit documentation has never been necessary for me when I see their faces.

My students would say, and did on the extra questions I added to the official end of term course evaluation, that they feel most connected at the interplay between written voices of their classmates on a set literary topic. All respondents emphasize the interplay on the topic, and no one emphasizes the topic or text alone. I’m quoting now, “the workshops make me feel connected over the compelling prompts,” (#11) or “editing each other’s essays and position statements really makes me feel connected,” (#7) or “the organization of the class allows all of us to feel active,” (#6). Additionally, the recurring phrases of, “several voices,” (#4) “other students,” (#3) “active,” seem revealing to me. The discussions were quite pointed, text-based, substantial, illuminating, and lingering, but most of all they were shared, and students could go back, reread, and revisit an earlier discussion point, connecting it to something later. Students could return to a discussion thread with an important after-thought.

There are many other issues: Procrastinated posting, pulling discussion away from the topic, not answering direct questions that indicate a lack of following up on how your post was received – that time constraints prevent me from addressing here, but they are variations on familiar themes in any classroom that have to be explicitly emphasized or the course deteriorates.

Suffice to say, I’m not championing digital classrooms here, but nor am I condemning them as second rate encounters. I am trying to do what all of us who teach online are trying to do: create – in a new way – that which is important about literature class, that which brought us to our discipline, and in so doing bring others with us into our programs to increase enrollment. I’m trying to make technology work the way I want it to in order to achieve my desired results for my students. I’m not interested in feeling beholden to technology. I like my face-to-face on-campus classrooms, and I like my online classrooms. But I recognize that the ecology of the digital classroom has to be intentional about establishing and cultivating connectivity, and this means being explicit about that discourse

In conclusion, when we create an online literature or composition classroom, we are creating a private world, a society. It’s so new that we can define the rules of the game. These are real places, and though I still hold fast to my affection for face-to-face classroom, the level of explicitness that I have had to engage in for the wired classroom my chalk teaching. Online classrooms are not just an off-shoot that I have to make work. Now each informs the other. It’s just one more campus.