Can’t Get There From Here

It’s possible that some people reading this will remember the Grauniad‘s ‘Readers Recommend’ music blog. The set-up was simple; every week, the writer in charge of it would set a theme – ‘Songs About the Sea’, for example – and people would comment on the blog with their recommendations, arguing both from quality of music and relevance to theme (and occasionally sheer brass neck; I once got Roxy Music’s Avalon accepted as a pick for ‘Songs About Myth’ through an elaborate structuralist analysis that showed the lyrics really were a deep engagement with the Arthurian legend, references to samba notwithstanding), and then at the end the writer would select his/her choices and write a short column about them.

The combination of getting to wax lyrical about one’s favourite music and try to persuade others to give it a try, and the intellectual exercise of thinking of appropriate songs, was a winner; the blog burgeoned in terms of number of participants and number and length of comments, and survived being dropped from the printed paper after five years – and actually continues in a new form today after being axed by the Grauniad altogether. And one of the main reasons for this was the way that it turned into a community: we got to know each other and our obsessions and habits through our different styles of communication, especially when the serious business of recommending songs was over and the blog switched to jokes and casual conversation; we developed informal norms to manage arguments that threatened to derail the discussion, we developed insider language, and then – worried that this might make the blog seem too much like a closed clique – we developed protocols to welcome new people. Some of the people I met on the blog are still friends – some of whom I have still never met.

This is one of my models for online engagement – the other, the politics’n’philosophy blog Crooked Timber, offers deeper ideas but a much less relaxing atmosphere – and I would be delighted if the asynchronous discussion elements of my modules this year could achieve even a faint echo of the combination of serious debate (if arguments over the real meaning of Deep Purple’s Strange Kind of Woman can generate thousands of words over a ten-year period, then interpretations of Thucydides’ approach to recording/inventing speeches can surely generate ten posts in a week..?) and genuine community building (an absolute imperative at a time when students have such limited social possibilities). I’ve made weekly discussion threads a core part of both my modules, and have included an online collaborative exercise in one of them; I’ve explained what it’s all about and what’s expected of them, offered lots of advice on different ways to engage, and emphasised that there really isn’t a wrong way of participating – they don’t have to write a mini-essay, if what they have is a simple question.

It’s not looking good so far; at a rough estimate, participation rates are around 10-15% (which means, in a final-year module of eight students, that just one of them has done anything at the time of writing). Those who have contributed have offered some resources intelligent, perceptive comments, just as I’d hoped – my only complaint would be that they’re sometimes a bit too much like mini-essays, not really opening up the discussion and potentially putting others off by being too good. I feel torn between wanting to rush in and respond and show how much I value these contributions, and fear that this will undermine any chance of the development of a self-sustaining discussion, turning it into a ping-pong exchange between me and individual students instead.

But obviously it’s the absent students – the vast majority who are simply ignoring what I’ve asked them to do – that is most worrying. Okay, it’s only week 1 of teaching, they’ve had lots of other things on, they’re getting used to a new way of life and new forms of studying – but this is a pretty minimal time commitment (maybe too minimal, so it doesn’t seem important?), and it’s one of the bits of technology that actually works reliably and puts relatively little strain on broadband capacity… The problem is that I’ve gone out of my way to integrate the online discussion into the module rather than having it as an optional extra, as a means of trying to ensure lots of active learning rather than just passive viewing of pre-recorded material, especially given reduced synchronous contact time and the difficulty of getting decent discussion going either in a Zoom/Teams session or with everyone wearing masks and distanced – and so this lack of engagement has serious implications for the way I’ve planned my synchronous sessions next week.

In other words, if I can’t work out how to increase the level of engagement, I’m going to have to rethink the entire module set-up – even the students who *are* participating aren’t going to get much out of it if they’re the only ones. I’m seriously wondering about doing a survey – not the usual sort of feedback gathering, ‘what do you like about the module and what would you change?’, but a focused set of questions about why they’re not engaging – but with serious concern that no one would bother filling that in either.

I’ve done a very brief search for relevant discussions in pedagogical research – and if anyone has recommendations I’d be delighted to hear them. There’s plenty on ‘resistance to active learning’ – and one obvious explanation of the current problem is that I’m attempting to force them all to be active learners, whereas in a typical class there are always students who do the minimum participation they can get away with, and however hard I try – given the imperative to get through the material as well – I can never get everyone to join in equally. Thinking back to the Readers Recommend blog: the number of people who participated enthusiastically, substantial in its own terms, was a tiny, tiny proportion of those who read the paper. Generalising from a self-selecting group is never wise. But on the other hand, these students ought to have a prior interest in these issues – and a direct personal interest in learning more about the topic.

Interestingly, on the basis of what I’ve looked at so far, the main focus of much of this research seems to be on teacher fear of student resistance to new approaches, not quite dismissing it as groundless but certainly emphasising the simple techniques that can be deployed to overcome it. There’s relatively little attention to the sources of this (not imaginary) resistance – which is a pain, because I was hoping for something concrete to set against my own assumptions, prejudices and anecdata. I’ve been experimenting with new approaches, especially in forms of assessment, for twenty-odd years, and am well-used to resistance – but some of the things I’ve tended to attribute this to seem much less relevant to non-assessed online discussion.

Another possibility: it’s about the technology, or rather discomfort at the way in which online ‘social’ activity is being co-opted for education – the ‘creepy treehouse’ phenomenon previously discussed on here. I wonder whether this can be subdivided: there is a feeling of discomfort about the online spaces into which I am trying to cajole or order them – and there is a separate sense that university education is not about online discussions. I can imagine an honest answer to questions about why they’re not participating being that that they have no interest in what their fellow students have to say, or what they think about their own ideas, because what matters is the view of the lecturer.

Further: in a conventional seminar/lecture set-up, resistant students can put up with a certain amount of discussion and interactive stuff because it’s bounded; it’s not the whole activity, the lecturer can almost always be tempted to fill the long silences, and it will be over soon. The asynchronous discussion has far fewer limits; it’s threatening precisely because the expectation of participation doesn’t go away, and because no one is going to restrain the students who *do* want to air their views. Is there a fear that this might ‘crowd out’ what they regard as proper learning?

Finally, and even more speculatively: is it possible that this is resistance not to the new forms of teaching and learning per se, but to the current state of the world? Ich bin mit der Gesamtsituation unzufrieden, to quote a comic classic. All the efforts that we have made over the summer to learn new technology, reorganise and rethink our modules and teaching techniques, come up with radical new ways of doing things – all with the absolutely genuine aim of reproducing the real, underlying goals and spirit of a university education – appear to them as a painful reminder of a traumatic year. They don’t, I suspect, share our view of the underlying goals and spirit stuff; the traditional lectures and seminars and unseen exams were university education, rather than just the conventional means of university education, and so we actually appear to be revelling in trashing all of that and going much further than we need to in changing everything, almost as if we’re seizing on the crisis with glee. The online discussion symbolises the ‘new normal’ that they desperately wish wasn’t; it represents the destruction of the familiar world and their expectations about it. No wonder they try to blank it…

This is, as I say, pure speculation – and easily falsified, because if everyone else has massive student buy-in to their online discussion threads and other activities, then the problem is clearly just me. This will become clearer with time; for the moment, I’m wondering if I should break out the tweed jacket and just offer the sort of unbroken monologue that I got in lectures when I was a student, as the kind of teaching that will offer the most reassurance and predictability in radically uncertain times.

I mean this quite seriously; maybe in five years, if I’m still trying to do this job, super-engaged online discussions and collaboration will be the norm, but for the moment what matters is helping the current lot of students cope with the upheaval and uncertainty and get through this year, and if that means ditching all my carefully planned innovations and exciting new ideas then so be it. It’s not appealing – but neither is the prospect of trying to run classes that are predicated on everyone having already been debating the issues when hardly anyone has…

Update: further thought prompted by comment from @IngvarMaehle on the Twitter, that his students happily interact and collaborate during the online ‘lecture’ but absolutely nothing outside that time. I may be under-valuing the importance of the lecture as event, a fixed point around which other things get organised – and, as suggested above, a means of settling limits on the intrusion of academic work into the rest of life. My assumption all along has been that the flexibility of asynchronous interaction has lots of advantages – but this may be just another example of generalising from my own experience and preferences, as I largely shunned lectures when I was a student but would have loved the opportunity to drop into ongoing debate when it suited me, fitting it in around all the other things I was doing. I can imagine – and should remember – that many people like more structure, and like to be given structure rather than develop it for themselves, and in disrupted, chaotic times perhaps even more so. Hence my effective downgrading of ‘the lecture’ as The Event, making it instead just one phase in an ongoing cycle, may be even more problematic than I thought.