What Matters Now? Course Hero’s Education Summit 2021 (Part 2)

By Zainab Cheema

In my last blog post, I covered the first part of Course Hero’s online Education Summit 2021. Three proved to be the magic number for community building. The third day of the Summit featured three keynote speeches. During each speech, the Zoom chat populated into a buzzing message board of teachers and activists forming bonds and actively responding to the ideas and information being presented. The Summit modeled the successes of virtual education through the connections that were forged between presenters and attendees, as well as between the attendees themselves. As an example, I arrived late for one of the talks because of a meeting. On asking for a saved copy of the Zoom chat, my request triggered a community response of educators sharing saved chats, emails and resources inspired by the talk. Never underestimate the power of educators to connect the seeker with the resources she needs! Here is my review of the third day of conferencing with Course Hero’s #EdSummit21.

Learning Presentation and Video Skills

Barbara Oakley’s workshop on Uncommon Ideas for Energizing the Hybrid Learning Environment offered practical insights and tips on how to craft online presentations and videos—arguably the most important skillset in post-COVID learning. “It’s important to look at ourselves and see how we are conveying information from a student’s perspective,” Barb observed.  I appreciated her way of illustrating how not to make a bad video, by having her husband reenact an anonymous professor’s video fail. The use of humor as a teaching tool gave a callback to her keynote lecture on the Summit’s Day One, which I covered here.

While videos and live Zoom classes don’t transmit the wide range of body language that inform our everyday communication, there are strategies that educators can follow to offset this. Match your words with the right image or body language. For instance, if you refer to a diagram or something else on your right, glance and point that way so that your body is highlighting and reinforcing your words. When teaching on video, we shouldn’t hesitate to use our bodies as tools to highlight the information we are distributing to students. During filming, angle the camera so that students can see your hands. Our hand gestures are immensely powerful teaching aids. Barb referenced her best practices through Richard Mayer’s Multimedia Learning, an important resource for educators looking to amp up their online teaching skills.

I encourage educators to watch the recording of her workshop for practical tips on the best way to position your lights; the most effective microphones; sources for imagery, music and captions; and other resources that will pave the way to making “your first bad video,” as Barb puts it. Even experienced video makers will benefit from her neuroscience-based strategies on how to use multimedia tech to reach new generations of students. The isolation and uncertainty imposed by COVID-19 have made educators all the more central to the lives of their students. Why not learn how to master multimedia to unlock our students’ unlimited potential for learning?

Racelighting and Microaggressions in the Classroom

J. Luke Wood’s talk on “The Effects of Racial Microaggressions on Belonging and Success for Students of Color” is not to be missed for educators committed to building an inclusive and diversity affirming classroom. Wood discussed how microaggressions in the classroom can impact students of color, even when teachers don’t consciously intend to other or harm them. As Vice President for Student Affairs and Campus Diversity at San Diego State University, Wood built his presentation around real life case studies and scenarios in which students of color found themselves to be sidelined or excluded.

Cataloguing microaggressions into types such as ascription of intelligence, pathologizing culture, color blindness, myth of meritocracy, Wood was able to pinpoint how language used by educators in their classrooms can wound and harm students. Wood pointed out that “microaggressions are lifelong experiences in education that accumulate from preschool onwards.” The psychological toll of this language builds up over time, so that by college, the student of color has internalized the negative beliefs encountered in the social environment.

Wood framed these different kinds of microaggressions—both intended and unintended—as “racelighting.” Adapting the term gaslighting, Wood defined “racelighting” as the process where students of color begin questioning their own thoughts and actions as a result of “systematically delivered racialized messages that make them second guess their own lived experiences with racism.” The net effect of this psychological effect is that students begin questioning their own experiences, feelings, knowledge, and even their own humanity. Wood’s research and studies supplied much of the data. His rigor was also reflected in his careful breakdown of how microagressions can translate to the live Zoom class, Zoom chat, and other teaching modalities.  

His insightful lecture also led many educators in the Zoom room to question their approaches to students from diverse backgrounds, illustrating the change making effect of knowledge and reflection. One educator (who was white) shared with Wood her worries about an incident in which she praised of a student of color because of his performance on an assignment. Did she single him out or inadvertently direct microaggression towards him? Wood observed that it’s all about the context—if she expressed surprise at his performance or expressed a sense of him being exceptional or “different” from a stereotype of his group, the praise could become a form of microaggression. If not, it’s part of the affirming teacher-student bond. Wood offered a practical suggestion—link praise to the student’s action rather than to the student’s identity or personality.

Inclusive Learning in the Hybrid Classroom

Jesse Stommel’s talk on Inclusive Pedagogies for Hybrid and Face to Face Learning offered key insights on post-COVID transformations in learning. As Executive Director of the Hybrid Pedagogy journal, Stommel also highlighting diversity as the core of an inclusive classroom. Stommel observed that the pandemic disenfranchised the kinds of students who were struggling before the global onset of COVID-19. As educators return to classrooms this fall—along the spectrum of online, hybrid and in-person—they need to consider how to design the classroom for the disadvantaged student. Stommel’s focus on structural and institutional reform in education channeled valuable continuities from his Day Two talk, which I covered in my last blog post.

Diversity needs to be factored at the very core of instructional design. “We have to design for the least privileged, most marginalized students, the ones more likely to have felt isolated even before the pandemic: disabled students, chronically-ill students, Black students, international students, queer students, and those facing housing and food-insecurity.” In short, as Stommel put it in his co-authored article with Sara Goldrick-Rab, “we need to design our pedagogical approaches for the students we have, not the students we wish we had.”

Stommel’s suggestions centered on assessment, which is being pressured by COVID-era learning. He criticized strategies of surveillance used by remote proctoring systems, a $4 billion market (as of 2019) that is projected to grow to 21 billion by 2023. I especially appreciated Stommel’s deconstruction of the commonly heard allegation that students are “cheating” more in recent years and during the pandemic. Highlighting how data on student cheating is often distributed by remote proctoring industries to justify their surveillance based programs, Stommel compared current data from data in the ‘60s to posit that cheating rates are actually the same if not in a slight decline from over 50 years ago. Stommel incisively framed the problem as lying in “institutions investing in technology that reduce students to data and not investing in teachers.”

Resources for Educators: Watch Recordings from #EdSummit21 Day Three

• Barbara Oakley, Workshop: Uncommon Ideas for Energizing the Hybrid Learning Environment
• Luke Wood, The Effects of Racial Microaggressions on Belonging and Success for Students of Color
• Jesse Stommel, Inclusive Pedagogies for Hybrid and Face to Face Learning (coming soon)