Recent opinions claim that the crisis might motivate higher education to transform via online learning and instruction, but institutions should critically reflect on potential ramifications.
As an educator whose life’s work involves studying the flow of culture and language across national and social boundaries, the potential and concerns surrounding online education resonate with me. Many opinions blossoming right now in the media are thinking through the implications of digital spaces and online learning highlighted by the profound changes to our experiences with physical space and each other as the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) moves through the world. Some of these opinions go so far as to suggest that this crisis predicts the restructuring of higher education around online instruction and learning. We teachers, administrators, students, researchers, and staff members should consider such claims from a wide range of perspectives and carefully weigh our responses in light of consequences to our communities and livelihoods.
Anna Kornbluh’s recent Chronicle of Higher Education article titled “Academe’s Coronavirus Shock Doctrine” explains how our institutions, as capitalist and neoliberal purveyors of professional and academic knowledge, might go about drawing on our COVID-19 experience to reinvent higher education: “The history of capitalist crisis shows how often these reinventions have come at the expense of average workers. But faculty are a creative lot who should be able to anticipate and deflect the risks of coronavirus shock doctrine.” She goes on to encourage faculty further and reminds university mid-level managerial and administrator classes of the broader social justice considerations of such a move:
If instruction is going to be utterly transformed, then other protocols and systems must be too, and faculty members ought to insist upon assurances and protections now. … We must seize this moment to organize for student-debt relief, student and faculty health care, and the public goods of research and expertise. Tasked with conjuring continuity in a pandemic, we find ourselves at a precipice that clarifies how much we have overworked to weather the structural adjustment of higher ed, and how much we have in common with each other — with the hourly employees who make the university and its surrounding businesses go, with our students, with the school teachers who’ve been struggling and striking nationwide.
Kornbluh’s admonition is salient. The transformation of higher education instruction through online and hybrid curricula and learning might promise reduced costs and the salvation of student resources for a fairer, more financially balanced education. This shift might also promise and foster innovative teaching and learning — whole new communities of knowledge- and meaning-making — but these hopes need to be acknowledged within a broader complex of issues.
First, our institutions’ geographical interrelations among local neighborhoods, businesses, and infrastructure, itself, are crucial to local economies. Rhapsodizing, as some educators continue to do, online learning as a panacea to student financial burdens ignores that such a wholesale move could leave commercial, entrepreneurial, and cultural ties unraveling across city neighborhoods. Most of these local folks are not rich landlords or other potentially predatory businesses people but delivery and Uber drivers, convenience store staff, restauranteurs, cooks, printers, construction workers, coffee shop owners and workers, and others, many of whom in Baltimore are people of color, Native people, and immigrants, each with their own, distinct relationship to this complexity. Nothing would signal the arrogance and power of neoliberal and capitalist intent than to virtually (pun intended) abandon these lives and livelihoods because we, the privileged educators, deem it time to redefine the institution.
There’s also little evidence that university systems will reduce actual contributors to the rising costs for university students. If cuts are made to save money, labor history of the university tells us that the inordinate burden likely would be suffered by those lowest in the hierarchy of institutions, including contingent faculty. To confront these dangers, we must hold ourselves answerable to the communities in which we are embedded and avoid weaponizing the soaring costs students face in an attempt to make cheaper spaces of anywhere online.
Moving to more online learning also further disregards the invisible, grossly unacknowledged labor faculty undertake to make their classroom spaces socially just (e.g., accessible, antiracist, anticolonial, gender non-conforming, etc.) and critically rigorous. Moreover, much of the learning at graduate-level professional schools depends on apprenticeship models in which students and mentors practice together before interacting with patients and clients. The humanity and humaneness involved in this learning depends on specific, longitudinal, physical, and geographical belonging that online learning does not afford.
Going online also means shifting more attention to written and multimodal texts to generate, support, and demonstrate learning. But how much faculty development focuses on the fundamental issues of bias around assessment and feedback on these texts? How many students are vulnerable to further erasure of their identities, lived experiences, and language practices in digital spaces that require substantially more investments in faculty understanding of socially just online pedagogies? How many faculty are prepared and how many administrators are willing to insist on required faculty development that illuminates the complex strategies of composition demanded by multimodal, translingual, and transnational texts?
The enthusiasm for online learning recognizes the potential of digital spaces to democratize learning and integrate and expand the possibilities for spanning geographical, cultural, and social distances of difference. These are such important aims for higher education futures. At the same time we dream these dreams into action, we need to consider exigencies and contingencies, especially those that affect the lives of everyone involved, including students, who deserve an education that does way more than just offer convenience, novelty, or reduction of costs. Or more precisely, we need to respond in ways that are accountable to the whole ecosystem of learning within and with the communities that support us in non-virtual, lived-in places on Earth.
References:
Brightbill, Gregory A. (2020) A Post-COVID-19 Higher education. The Elm. https://elm.umaryland.edu/voices-and-opinions/Voices--Opinions-Content/A-Post-Covid-19-Higher-Education.php
Cloud, Dana. From Asterity to Attacks on Scholars. Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2018/05/03/neoliberal-academy-age-trump
Gonzalez, Laura. (2018). Sites of Translation: What Multilinguals Can Teach Us About Digital Writing and Rhetoric. University of Michigan Press.
Inoue, Asao. (2015). Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future. Parlor Press. https://wac.colostate.edu/docs/books/inoue/ecologies.pdf
Kornbluh, Anna. (2020). Academe’s Coronavirus Shock Doctrine. The Chronicle of Higher Education. https://www.chronicle.com/article/Academe-s-Coronavirus-Shock/248238?
Lichtenstein, Nelson. (2011). The Long History of Labor Bashing. The Chronicle of Higher Education. https://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Long-History-of-Labor/126555
Wegerif, Rupert. (2017). Introduction. Education, Technology and Democracy: Can Internet-Mediated Education Prepare the Ground for a Future Global Democracy? Civitas Educationis. Education, Politics, and Culture, 6(1), 17-35.
James Wright, MFA, is the multilingual writing specialist for the University of Maryland, Baltimore’s (UMB) Writing Center and an associate faculty member of UMB’s Graduate School.
Disclaimer: Elm Voices & Opinions articles reflect the thoughts or opinions of their individual authors, and may not represent the thoughts or values of UMB as an institution.