by Susanna Kohonen
The pivot to fully online teaching and associated concerns about “how to prevent students cheating online” have proven a wonderful blessing in disguise.
I call it a blessing in disguise because it has forced critical reflection upon three crucial points:
- Our understanding of what learning is all about.
- Our understanding of what assessing and evaluating learning is all about.
- Our understanding of what a teacher-student relationship is all about.
This is a moment of truth. The fully online mode has highlighted the need for pedagogical reflection in a way that not many anticipated.
Whether or not we can “return to normal” in the autumn 2021, now is the moment to take the situation seriously.
At this point, we don’t know when or if we can go back to the way courses were organised and carried out before the fully online mode. Or for that matter, if we even want to go back to our pre-covid-19 methods.
Some have started to enjoy fully online teaching and studying and would like to keep doing so. Others are becoming worried about managing hybrid modes of teaching, with students attending both on-site and online at the same time.
Fellow teacher, let’s take a moment and pause for a while.
First of all, let’s ask ourselves how we are doing.
Secondly, let’s ask ourselves whether we feel we have the skills and support we need to teach successfully online, on-campus or both in the longer term. So far, in my teaching life, what has made me tick? How could I uphold and strengthen that feeling, also online?
Thirdly, let’s ask ourselves what training and support we would like to have, and in what form.
Let’s consider together what it is that guides and informs us in our practical, daily choices for online teaching methods, as well as for online assessment methods.
Let’s take time to reflect on our pedagogy, for example with the approach of critical digital pedagogy.
What is critical digital pedagogy? Regarding digital pedagogy, Stommel claims that actually when “looking for solutions, what we most need to change is our thinking and not our tools.” Stommel further stresses that “critical digital pedagogy is more defined by its questions, by the problems it poses, than it is by answers”, and that critical digital pedagogy is “not a stack of content or a bibliography; critical digital pedagogy is a way we treat one another”.
So, what questions does critical digital pedagogy then ask?
Stommel, Friend and Morris (2020) propose the following:
“Ultimately, digital pedagogy is about human relationships, the complexity of humans working together with other humans — the challenge of finding ways to teach through a screen, not to a screen. The work of critical digital pedagogy is to inspect our tools, understanding them — reading them — as part of the world of education. But before we can turn to tools, we must reflect on who we are as teachers, where our pedagogies come from.”
Let’s embark on this journey of reflection together!
(Another version of this text, with a different approach to the topic, was published in Times Higher Education, THE Campus, March 5, 2021. )