During Covid lockdowns I wrote about the need for presence not contact hours. This was a simple way of rewiring thinking about teaching which explained why moving in-building approaches online felt so exhausting.
Recently I’ve been looking more directly at how we employ academic staff for teaching in the UK and the way in which this obscures one of the key ways we work online. This problem extends well beyond academic roles into all types of strategic and operational work.
Being in a room with students
The simple version is that we define ‘teaching’ as being in a room with students at a specific time and ‘teaching related activity’ as preparing to be in that room and/or marking student work. Digging deeper and discussing this with colleagues it became clear that the implication of ‘being in a room’ fell into two major categories, or two modes of activity:
- Delivering material (The traditional lecture)
- Facilitating dialogue (Q&A, seminar, tutorial)
These two could be in any ratio or mixture, for example a lecture might be ‘interactive’ or a tutor might share useful insights in a seminar. The point being (as far as I understand it) that there is a two way thing going on. This exchange might be as simple as ‘being able to see students and them being able to see the tutor’ or it could be in the form of discussion and debate. I work at a specialist creative arts institution so we also have supervised studio time and crits which fall into the dialogue category because it’s assumed that staff/faculty will be discussing the development of work with students in-the-room. This is what constitutes ‘teaching’ as described contractually. Interestingly, feedback is not defined as teaching because it is a one way process, assumed to be in text form and therefore, alongside marking, sits outside ‘teaching’.
Difficult mapping
The reason this construction of teaching and not teaching is important is because it erases, or fails to see, a significant mode of interaction which has emerged with the digital environment. In short, asynchronous activity cannot be defined as teaching within this model. This is not to say that this type of teaching is always not recognised or paid for, it’s more that it’s difficult to acknowledge and define using a model which predates its existence.
It’s difficult to map asynchronous activity back into this model because:
- You are not in the same physical room as students.
- Most people appear to not understand asynchronous exchange as dialogue.
I now see why there was such a desperate attempt during lockdowns to make the online environment into a ‘mirror’ of the physical rooms that in-building teaching took place in. The reason so many people insisted on so much synchronous teaching online wasn’t entirely because we didn’t know any better, it was also because unless we were in a room (or as close to this as possible) with students what we were doing couldn’t be teaching.
The tempo of consecutive exchange
The dialogue point is more nuanced. This appears to come down to how long the gap between statements is, or the tempo of consecutive exchange. Unless it’s close to immediate then it doesn’t seem to count as dialogue. For example, is a discussion in an online forum which takes place over a week a form of dialogue? Is a succession of text comments about a piece of work on a Miro board dialogue? Personally I think it is. It also has the advantage of a certain type of flexibility for all involved. However, our current model of teaching would not register this. It would perhaps be seen as some kind of sequential ‘feedback’ or a collection of one way statements.
Text vs speech
There is another distinction here which comes into play and that is the difference between spoken and text-based forms of exchange. Our formal definition of teaching appears to favour the spoken word as exchange. My sense is that this is because historically we were either talking to each other ‘in the same place and same moment’ or exchanging letters. This is not to say that epistolic approaches are not valued, it’s more that they are seen as a form of academic exchange and not as teaching.
There are many examples of teaching-via-letters but these tend to be on a one-to-many basis (much of the New Testament or correspondence courses being good examples) and it’s probably the one-to-one tradition of letter writing which frames it outside of teaching. It’s also possible that this is where teaching shades into supervision, as academic supervision tends to assume one-to-one.
Not quite real time
A long time ago I claimed that the future is ‘not quite real time’. Here I was highlighting that the web had ushered in new forms of text-based communication which were not necessary in the same place and in the same moment, nor were they strictly epistolic. Discussion forums, instant messaging, posting on Social Media. None of these fall into our well worn categories of exchange.
This is explored by Stewart in her insightful ‘Collapsed publics: Orality, literacy, and vulnerability in academic Twitter’ where she draws on ‘Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word’ by Ong to propose that Twitter could be encountered, or used, both as a kind of oral dialogue, or as a literary form. It is variously interpreted as both of these because we haven’t yet developed a third category.
This causes no end of problems as in any given moment text posted in Social Media, what I’m calling ‘consecutive exchange’ can be thought of as ‘just chat’ or as a published work. This is also the reason why we can’t agree on what constitutes acceptable email practice. Is email a letter or is it a conversation, is it a discussion or is it a formal documenting of agreements? Email is a good example of consecutive exchange in that it fall between these definitions.
We have not culturally adapted to the idea that text can be dialogue or that dialogue can be text. Or, perhaps, we have not yet managed to institutionalize this idea because our institutions are built on the strict demarcation of published/recorded vs chat/informal.
It’s all a bit new
So despite the fact that we spend much of our time working and learning in this hinterland oral/published mode, we haven’t found a good way of describing it. This seems fair given that, as a mode of exchange, it emerged rapidly and very recently. However, it does make it difficult to account for asynchronous (we are moving to the term ‘Guided’ in our model) forms of teaching and learning.
Right now, it means I have to pretend that one of our most valuable forms of teaching is actually an indistinct mix of ‘teaching’ and ‘prep’. That’s fine for now if it’s used as ‘talking with students via text’ (teaching) and ‘considering and reflecting on student work in progress’ (prep). Effectively I still have to slice up all consecutive or asynchronous work into a version of either epistolic or dialogic rather than claiming consecutive exchange is a category in it’s own right, one which gives both staff and students significant of agency over when and how they engage.
I’m going to blame Descartes for all this complexity as mind-body duality seems to be behind it. What’s the difference between thinking about work and doing work? When it comes to teaching, and many other types of work, I don’t think there is a difference. I’d go as far as to say that defining work in these terms is a category error. This unhelpful duality amplifies our inability to define not-quite-real-time forms of text based exchange as dialogue and erases a key mode of work from our institutional consciousness. No wonder we feel overstretched when much of the work we do is difficult to account for.