It was a crisp, late winter’s day in March 2020. I am unclear as to whether March is officially winter, but it felt like it. Standing in the Chelsea College of Arts of Arts courtyard, talking with my then course leader, it was difficult to foresee what the rest of the year—and indeed, the last two years—would hold for me and my teaching practice.
The Coronavirus was the topic of conversation, this app called Microsoft Teams (that no one had heard of) and Collaborate Ultra (the big name that failed to deliver) and the likelihood of having to work from home to deliver my then Associate Lecturer role, teaching the Graphic Design Year 2 students, with whom I had become very familiar thanks to the warm, personal teaching culture of Peter Chadwick, the Year 2 lead.
New York Times columnist and best-selling author Thomas L. Friedman, speaks to how technology is changing work as we know it. Cultural norms are undergoing tectonic shifts. A global pandemic proves that we are inextricably connected whether we choose to be or not. So much change, so quickly, is disorienting. It’s undermining our sense of identity and challenging our ability to adapt. But where so many see these changes as threatening, McGowan and Chris Shipley (Adaptation Advantage, 2019) see the opportunity to open the flood gates of human potential. I believe that this ‘potential’ can only be realised when people in general, and students specifically, are able to dip into what I term as their humanist toolbag.
Yadav & Pavlou (2014) formally define online social interaction as Internet-enabled communication and exchange activities involving both consumers and firms (businesses / brands). Whilst sounding rather impersonal, I encourage students to transpose those terms with ‘listening’ and ‘producing’ respectively. This, for many students, involves the existential unravelling of doubt, their deep-rooted fears of visibility and being subjected to wider personal critique. None of which is aided by our traditional relationship (if such a term can be applied) with online engagement on the world’s most prominent social media platforms, where aggression, judgementalism and spiralling degrees of negativity have begun to turn even digital natives away from these digital climates, in favour of one-to-one digital engagements with friends.
The pedagogical relationship between teaching, knowing and learning become fluid, for no better reason than to encourage and extract opinions from students that they would be otherwise reluctant to share. Dall’ Alba (2005) regards the conventional student-teacher model as inappropriate, citing Richards Gardner’s cautionary take on the difficulties of teaching without sliding into views that exaggerate both one’s own knowledge and one’s students’ lack of knowledge (1994).
Transferring that authority into group work settings and through working narratives is an exercise that requires practice and scope for interpretation based on collective experiences and acknowledgement from peers in what should be a comfortable work setting.
My methodology often involves reminding students of the power of lived experiences, and auditing and crediting those experiences in their work. I, for instance, am not a digital native. Reminding students of their relationship with tech puts them in a position of authority that I can never assume.
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Gershoff, A. Mukherjee, A (2015) Online Social Interaction
from Part II – Interpersonal and Social Consumer Psychology. Published: Cambridge University Press
McGowan, H. Shipley, C, ‘Adaptation Advantage’ (pub. April 9 2020).
Dall’ Alba, G. (2005). IMproving teaxhingf: Enhancing ways of being university teachers. Publishe by: University of Queensland.