MLA Reflections on Teaching Online in 2021

By Zainab Cheema

On May 19, 2021, the Modern Language Association of America hosted an online Zoom talk about the effectiveness of online teaching with three university educators. Paula Krebs, the Executive Director of the MLA, sat down for a virtual conversation with Annemarie Perez of California State University Dominguez Hills; Jesse Katen of SUNY Brome University; and Lee Skallerup Bessette of Georgetown University. In this blog post, I discuss some of the key ideas that they brought up.

As Paula mentioned, one concern in online learning is how to blend humanity with the technological alienation of distance learning in the pandemic. While the experiences of the three instructors differed on the topic, each was deeply concerned about issues of justice, equity and access. “One of the main lessons of the pandemic is that inclusivity is not something we can take for granted,” said Lee. The pandemic has slashed to shreds the last vestiges of the myth of the college campus as the great equalizer, where students from varying backgrounds of privilege could arrive and access resources to give themselves a fair shot. “What about any of this is fair? None of this is fair. We have conflated fairness as equity [and now we need to separate these two concepts].” As Lee mentioned, education thus far has been designed around the profile of the “ideal” student rather than the variety and number of students in the system.

Annemarie also spoke passionately about issues of equity and justice for students, given that Cal State Dominguez Hills primarily serves a Latinx and Black student population that receives Pell Grants to fund their education. As in Cal State, some student populations are already disadvantaged by structural intersections of race and class. With disease, vulnerable student populations face a new set of challenges. “Our community is one of the populations that was really decimated by the virus in LA County,” said Annemarie. “At one point, out of 20 students in my freshman class, 10 of them had COVID. Some of them were sick enough that they still haven’t recovered. To go back to Lee’s comment on fairness, nothing about this has been fair or just, and we can’t pretend that it has. Certain populations have suffered much more than others.”

Technology and Humanism

Issues of technology and access tended to amplify pre-existing inequalities—students with resources thrived and those without faced yet a new set of challenges. Nevertheless, technology also allowed universities to check in with at-risk students and to speedily act to help them with what they needed. Jesse mentioned the helpfulness of the Starfish, a campus communication and management system that some universities subscribe to. Starfish enabled him to raise a flag whenever a student was having trouble, and swiftly mediated to put the student in touch with a coach or counselor or any other campus resource they might need. The sheer innovation and connectivity enabled by technology has allowed some universities to close cracks in which students could potentially fall through.

Of course, the dark side of the technologically equipped university is surveillance. Lee brought up the controversies around the Respondus Lockdown browser, which prevents the use of urls or other applications while it is running and runs a 360 camera on the student while he/she/they take an exam online.  Annemarie framed the problem of the potentially dystopian high-tech university as a problem of trust. “[Education is about] trusting your students in light of administrative directives about surveillance that imply [lack of] trust.”

Another theme that intersects with justice and equity is the theme of assessment. What is it fair to expect from students given the unique challenges of post-COVID education, and how do we as educators assess that? From his teaching experiences at the intersection of composition and dance, Jesse offered powerful insights about doing away with the final assignment as a “product” towards which the class is built around and instead making assessment about “process.” “Instead of grading that final product, the questions that I ask myself now when I evaluate a student’s final performance [in the class] is asking myself these ‘yes-no’ questions. Were they showing me that they were following a process? Were they showing me that they were making intentional choices as they developed their papers and projects? Were they showing me that they were looking to improve from where they were to where they could be, instead of against some objective standard as we’ve always kind of envisioned [as a touchstone]? I want to explore how to incorporate that into [education] in the new normal.”

As educators, we also should not forget about pleasure and how it can function as a tool for community building. Annemarie stressed the pleasure we have in our identities as digital citizens, the enjoyment of going to online Reddit communities and fandom groups where we can build discussions and socialize around our interests. This aspect of pleasure can be imported into the online classroom. “I was teaching classes this year on Harry Potter, and I wanted my students to have pleasure—to have something in their lives that was pleasurable. I looked at my online experiences and where I had taken pleasure. For me, it was in the fandom communities. I am quite active in the Dr. Who fandom community. I have willingly spent hours writing and playing and making things. I tried to replicate that as much as possible in the digital and the analogue [classroom].” Creating Hogwarts style admission letters with digital stationary or encouraging students to have Spongebob profile photos are small examples where we can replicate the enjoyment of online fandom into the classroom.

For all three educators, tech must be blended with humanity—the playfulness, joy, trust, and human connectivity that define us as social beings.