The New York Sophist

We are told continuously through the pandemic that students are demanding an “in person” experience for their education. The university is not a remote workplace, and online education is not and never will replace the in person teaching experience.

This demand is often couched in the terms of market economics. Education is easily considered a product (I don’t even think there’s a metaphor here, at all) and students are customers there to consume a product. If they are unhappy, and they don’t enroll in courses, then there’s something wrong with the product and it should be adapted to what the customers want.

All of this makes sense if you accept that education is a product, and not the place that allows us to imagine, iterate (and reimagine and reiterate) the principles by which we would like to, should, or fail to organize human experiences in the world. What sort of product is that?

What sort of product or market forces can be used to evaluate the quality of a space that allows for the practice and development of human imagination?

This question, big as it is, is never considered. It’s never brought up. The university sees itself as responsible for making the best possible product for students to pay tuition for, and their satisfaction isn’t necessary connected with this larger question – a blend of rhetoric and ethics that we might term praxis.

What are students claiming is missing? Familiarity. The demand for the in-person educational experience is not a demand for higher quality. It’s demand for a recognizable quality. Very much like how Coca Cola reverse engineers water sources to match the Atlanta water supply (for good and bad) worldwide, and how McDonald’s adds and subtracts elements from food production worldwide for consistency and customer expectation, students want the classroom, for good or bad, for purity or impurity, to resemble what their expectations are. They want to feel comfortable.

This might not be such a bad demand if met correctly. After all, we want our students in a good mental and physical space to be able to find pathways to engage with the material. But this comfort is more of a strategy than anything else. They want the familiar classroom because in there they have access to a familiar politics of figuring out the class – what they need to do and what is mere professor bloviation, wierdness, or eccentric demand. After all, the familiar classroom is a market – students want to buy As at the lowest possible exchange rate, where they exchange their time and energy for points.

The in person classroom is not immediate; it is highly mediated by this philosophy of a currency exchange. On top of that, it’s highly mediated by the expectations that students and faculty enter that space carrying from film, television, and popular culture. As one of humanity’s most common experiences, being in a classroom has been saddled with expectations of all kinds, which modify behavior in comfortable, understandable ways. These modifications, along with the ultimate goal of “buy low” create a difficult environment to encourage any sort of radical engagement of the mind.

When we accept the student demand for the in person course as a request for higher quality instruction, or more immediate and personal instruction, we are accepting the claim on the basis of equivocation. The begged question here is who gets to determine quality? The question of mediation is settled; you can count on one hand the human spaces that are equivalently mediated like the classroom. We have no access to a classroom, or an in person educational experience, that can avoid the weight of expectation. We must understand that students prefer the in person class because it is comfortable, familiar, and well mapped – all the routes are known, and the steps are familiar.

The necessity of education to be a rupture, a transformation, or a classically revolutionary experience requires disruption of the familiar and comfortable in ways that are not distressing, but recognizable as different. Online education has done that to faculty and to students. And for those who have tried to do something that works for this forced environment, they now are wondering if they can ever return to the traditional classroom as it was. For those who tried to replicate the in person experience, this was the most frustrating and disappointing times of their career. What this moment can be is the recognition that the demands of education, a valuable education, requires deep skepticism about the role you have, the role you think you have, and the role that is filtering everything you say and do in a classroom, whether you are a teacher or a student.

Not sure I can cover everything in one post because I haven’t really thought through it all, but here are a couple of ideas that I got after attending my first University Senate meeting and getting a taste of the University discourse there. I believe that the two I’m going to suggest here are the biggest and most important re-considerations for teaching but that might change after I finish off this series of posts (tagged postpandemic teaching if you just want to read these posts together).

The background: Discussing teaching in any pragmatic or practical manner at the university isn’t possible, because we do not have a professional discourse of teaching. What I mean by that is that when someone offers criticism or critique of a teaching performance, it is read as a personal attack. This might not be true at all universities, but it’s definitely true where I work. Since there is not a conversation about teaching, or principles of considering teaching as-such, any critique or commentary, no matter how well-meaning, is taken by the teacher as an attack on their quality as a person.

Most graduate pedagogy avoids talking about teaching in any meaningful way. There’s little to assist the graduate student in teaching except a basket of “what’s worked” whispered unwillingly by a faculty member who would much rather be talking about some esoteric publication opportunity with their grad student. This carries on into the professorship, of which a significant portion will be dedicated to teaching.

The aim of these re-considerations is to attempt to create a discourse about and for and of teaching in order to be able to have such conversations the way we do about curriculum, requirements, credits, and (in our departments) theory and practice. It should be able to move throughout the university by establishing its own principles and it’s own language that is marked: “This is the art of teaching.” We want it completely divorced from the notion that pedagogy is some place of private, soulful struggle best handled in isolation as the fault of failing individuals who should just “know how to do it.”

I’m thinking of pushing for an open forum on teaching with no agenda, where at a regular time people bring their experience and frustrations with teaching into the same room for some time to toss out issues and discuss solutions. This would organically, over time, generate some conversational and discursive norms, which could be expanded to the University community.

Principle 1: Teach Things that Can’t be Looked Up

Teaching online should have caused us all to experience how easy it is to look things up online during lecture, class, or discussion due to the overwhelmingly powerful access to information we enjoy while connected to a University. Even those who do not have University library access have an incredible ability to find information.

Things like grammar rules, historical facts, scientific discoveries, and the like should not constitute a majority of course information. What should be in a course are things that cannot be looked up or referenced. What these would be are practices in defining and redefining problems, critical appraisal of information, formulating and judging solutions to problems, and the discussion of exclusive or comparative advantages. Courses should be about the guided practice of things that cannot be looked up.

The only objection to this principle is that this is “hard to grade.” It’s a lot easier to grade very clear and easy things like following grammar rules or instructions. My point is that we need to reduce our time and concern about these things, unless they foreclose communication (i.e. you can’t access or understand at all the product delivered by the student).

When students go to the workforce they will be able to look up what’s expected in terms of rules for formatting and presentations and such for their workplace. What they won’t be able to look up is how to reframe a serious issue facing their department, leading to the saving of that business, the jobs of colleagues, and future leadership challenges handed to them after they have such success. Let’s prepare them for what can’t be looked up – judgement and appraisal.

Principle 2: Multimodality

It should be pretty clear now that the in-person classroom is a very poor, very weak place to pin the center or the heart of the pedagogical experience. What the pandemic has demonstrated is that the best pedagogical experiences are distributed across modalities – some amount of in person, some amount of asynchronous recording, some about of live video (streaming or conference call), some amount of text, and some amount of student cross-conversation in the course facilitated by various technologies (such as texting or social media).

The trouble here is conceptualizing this as additional labor instead of additional access. The principle does not call for professors to triple or even double their labor. On the contrary, the principle suggests we re-imagine the centrality of the in-class time as a resource that can be packaged and delivered in different ways, changing the nature of that one experience into this multi-layered one.

One thing I’ve recently done (over the past few years) is audio record my classrom and post the audio file to the LMS. This provides students another way to engage what happened in class that day. Perhaps they were in a bad mental place, emotionally fraught, sleepy, hungry, or feeling ill and missed some of the class. They can listen to it and get a different relationship to the “text” of the class which they will “interpret,” or “criticize” in a future assignment. Even those who are attentive and engaged in the course benefit from having recordings to reference in the future to jog the memory, or more likely, create a new memory or relationship to that memory and the person who was there, read by this new person listening to a class they attended, and commenting on it at a different point in the term.

This is just one example of how positionality and audience can create various levels of evaluation and consideration through time as the semester moves on. Blogging the course, or having students share the responsibility of creating a course narrative in Google Docs would be a way of doing this as well, particularly because the history of edits is freely available.

These two principles are large perspective principles of how the pandemic should influence the future of university teaching. This is just an initial foray into the topic for me, but these loom large as governing ways to approach our courses in the years to come. Adherence to both shouldn’t just be to bring pandemic teaching up to some pre-pandemic standard – they should supercharge pedagogy for the uncertain future ahead. Adherence also should help prepare us for the next pandemic, natural disaster, or human-caused event such as war or financial collapse which, no matter the scope or scale, will impact the normal operation of the university which, like it or not, depends on the presence of good, regular instruction of students.

Blue State Coffee Pour from Professor Steve Llano, Ph.D. on Vimeo.

For the greater part of a year I put a short video like this one up every morning on my social media – mostly on Snapchat, since that’s what my students used at the time.

They loved it and we’d talk about the different stickers and things I would put on there and how I would put a motivational phrase on there every day. This video is pretty basic compared to what I used to make in Snapchat.

But times change, and students no longer look at or even use Snapchat anymore. All of them are on Instagram, and that program just never really caught on for me.

Years ago I tried to eliminate Facebook from my life. At the time, it was really the only social media out there so the students used it all the time. I had to return to the platform because students would not respond quickly to other forms of communication – Facebook was the best way to get things to happen when trying to organize people to do stuff related to debate.

Now that reason has evaporated and I think my life will improve greatly just publishing my thoughts here and having conversations. Already since announcing that I’m going to be departing those platforms I’ve had some pretty wonderful conversations with people that were much more in depth and interesting than anything I’ve been posting or reading there in the past year.

In the end I think that I’ll have to keep those platforms open simply because one never knows who or what might come along or happen. For instance, I got in touch with someone who wanted to give away some old debate books through Facebook. Once they get here (more challenging than expected) I’ll be posting their story here as well. I tried in the past to keep them open and unused, but wasn’t successful. I’m jealous of my many friends who have their accounts still open, but their last update or post was from 2012 or even earlier. Occasionally someone who doesn’t pay that much attention might wish them happy birthday or something on their wall, leaving this strange annual pattern of bursts of unliked posts occurring in clusters around the same day every year.

I want to practice writing where I have to develop interesting reasons at length, and Facebook and Instagram do not encourage this. I like to write, and I like the practice of conjuring up a universal audience to address with some claims. I find writing here – even if very few people ever read it – a lot more fun and interesting than posting something on my social media accounts.

I do wonder if pedagogically I’ll need my accounts again. From time to time I have chatted with various students using Instagram recently, but even that has died down. I think that with Discord and the LMS we use (currently Canvas) and some other things like email and Google Voice, online teaching won’t require social media. This is really my only concern.

Still struggling with this question.

The arguments for podcasting are a lot more persuasive to me: Audio is small, easy to produce at a high quality, easy to transport, upload, download, playable on any device a student could possibly have around them (including ancient computers) and you can do other things while you are listening to them, which is how most students study and work anyway, if you have ever watched them in the student center, or talked to them about how they work through a class.

Video is more attention grabbing, more dynamic. It mirrors the classroom more realistically as there’s a face to look at, there’s a human presentation in the visual as well as the aural, and there’s slides and reference material to look at during the course of the lecture. Most computers can play video, and all phones that the students have, with the rare exception, can play these videos. The videos are not portable, but that’s ok: Everyone has access to a free wi-fi somewhere or a plan where watching a streaming video is not going to kill their ability to use their phone for other activities that month.

Of course many are saying right now: This is not a choice, just make the video and then make the audio available separately. This is not an option to a rhetor. At least not to one who cares about the art! Both are very different approaches to both the audience and the topic. The way I deliver, organize, and prove with just audio will be very different than with video, but both will be of the same quality in the end – hopefully attention grabbing, mesmerizing, and great. Of course, the audience gets to judge that, not me.

The trick with video is I think that the big advantage is being able to put up a slide, an image or some text in the background to support what it is that you are trying to say or get them to understand. With audio you can’t do this at all.

But audio presentations are much more intimate and conversational. You aren’t performing so much your presentation to the class, you are having a one-on-one conversation with the listener about an important idea.

I think what I will have to do is make both. It’s time consuming, but over this holiday I will have nothing but time. The term is nearly over, and the late start gives me a chance to produce both types of lecture for my courses in the spring. I think I’ll just listen to the art and let the audience decide which they like better.

But everywhere I go
I see it all, I see it all
‘Cause everywhere I go I can’t even hide my love
I see it all, I see it all
But everywhere I go
I see it all I see it all

Everywhere I go by ALPHA 9

It’s been a couple of years since I put my debate program down like the dog it was. I was very happy to be rid of it, and a lot of that happiness came out in long lists of what was wrong with it – primarily, that I had been deceiving myself that I was teaching rhetoric. Doing it the way I was doing it was nearly purely anti-rhetorical, primarily because there’s just no way around that audience question (or lack of one period).

These long lists of what was wrong have disturbed many friends, readers, colleagues, and the like. I still maintain that I have no bigger regret in my life than the way I operated that program and what it turned out to be.

But just this past week I’ve been feeling some gratitude about the program and some of the things that I did and was permitted to do because of what I prioritized and did. I think it’s just because this was the strangest Thanksgiving I’ve had. Being alone in my apartment here is odd on holidays, primarily because I have never done it in my whole 14 years of living here.

For several years I spent Thanksgiving in Ormoz, Slovenia teaching debate with some of the most wonderful teachers I’ve been allowed to work with so far in my career. I would not have any of those memories if it were not for my hope and/or faith that this debate program would work.

I have been thinking about NCA a bit and how negative I can get about the tropes around it (people talking at the bar about going to write their paper), but if I’m honest I always leave NCA feeling somewhat inspired to work a bit harder next time or to do more research, read more, or think differently about things.

Gratitude is something that isn’t the opposite of anything, it’s bound up in everything. This is how I am experiencing it now and perhaps how I’ve always experienced it (perhaps). Even if things are pretty bad or pretty cloudy, those experiences are ones that later on you reflect on and see that you got something out of it.

These two experiences are ones that, until this year, I didn’t really associate with the Thanksgiving holiday, but they are very much connected to it for me. I didn’t feel alone or sad or frustrated at all. I was just very grateful for my past experiences, my luck, and also grateful for the holiday alone to reflect on how fortunate I was to celebrate this holiday in some pretty unique ways over the years.

The debate program wasn’t a cur, and wasn’t something to kill, but an experience that ran its course and offered much. What the quality of those offerings were depends on the attitude one has when they are approached. I still wish I hadn’t done the vast majority of the things I did in that program, but that feeling is not exclusive to feeling grateful that I had those experiences. It’s not just utilitarian – i.e. “Now I’ve learned X,” it’s also in many ways the definition of just living life.

Debate belongs in a classroom anyway, in all the classrooms, among all the students, the campus community, and so on – all the memberships present and to be formed. It’s not like I can’t generate future regrets and gratitude without the program.