Teaching tough issues: online vs. in-person?

21 June 2013 – Will Walker

At the NCPH annual meeting in Ottawa, Margo Shea and Will Walker, along with other public history educators interested in online teaching and learning, began a conversation about the challenges, risks, and opportunities of having civil and productive conversations about tough questions related to public history (i.e. class, race, gender, and sexuality issues) in an online class setting. Here they reflect on the differences between bricks-and-mortar and online classrooms, online facilitation issues, potential obstacles, and ingredients for transformative conversation and discourse.

Margo Shea has been teaching university courses both online and in bricks-and-mortar classrooms since 2009. She has taught twice as many courses in classrooms than online, but she has had the chance to run the same courses online more times and thus has ironed out some kinks through experience and trial and error. She has also been able to compare the two modes of teaching, having taught several courses both online and in physical classrooms.

Will Walker has yet to teach a fully online course; however, he has employed a blog and Twitter feed in a class he has taught several times. Students in the course engage in discussion, both online and in-person, about tough issues of race, class, and gender.

Margo: In any classroom, online or bricks-and-mortar, the first step is to create and foster a space of welcome, mutual respect, and curiosity.  “Creating the space” in which transformative learning can take place in person is very different from doing it online. I think it is useful to recognize the strengths and drawbacks of both settings.  In my experience teaching public history online, the asynchronous and non-visual nature of the classroom offers opportunities for participation that a bricks-and-mortar classroom does not provide.  Everyone is liberated from things that can dominate physical classrooms—the pressures of immediate response/articulation and the assumptions that can be triggered by visual cues in relation to age, race, class, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability, to name a few.

The online class is less likely to fall prey to becoming a teacher-centered environment in the same way a class that meets in person can; therefore, with effective facilitation, creating a community of learners instead of a group of receivers of information can happen quickly, naturally, and in unpredictable, often powerful ways.  Also, as much as we try to create democratic, open, accepting spaces in classrooms, societally-driven values about appropriate behavior can drive the construction of that space in ways that may be constraining and unwelcoming.  Even at the collegiate and graduate level, students are expected to stay still, to not make unnecessary noise, to maintain restraint in their reactions, to avoid pointed, direct conflict with classmates and their professors, for example.   The online classroom doesn’t come with the same unspoken rules about social behavior that the physical classroom cannot avoid.

Will: This raises a key issue that we discussed at the conference—the importance of establishing ground rules at the beginning of any class that addresses tough issues.  I actually have a long list (three PowerPoint slides’ worth) that I use.  Most of these ground rules are directly related to face-to-face interactions—e.g. “Practice mindful listening” and “Try not to interrupt others.”  Others could apply to face-to-face or online discussions—e.g. “Use ‘I’ statements” and “Paraphrase what others have said in order to clarify your understanding.”  One question I do have is, how does an online instructor handle the problem that I address in this ground rule: “I will speak up promptly if someone makes a distasteful remark even jokingly”?  In other words, how do you police the conversation so it remains civil and productive?  Is this more challenging when, as you suggest above, you’ve already de-centered the role of the instructor?  I’m also wondering how you ascertain student responses to certain discussions without the visual cues of body language.  Is it harder to know when students are angry or uncomfortable?  Instructors have typically spent years honing the ability to “read” their students.  Is this skill useless in an online environment?  Or, are their other ways to get a sense of how students are responding without actually having them state it explicitly?

Margo:   You’ve identified some of the very real challenges associated with online learning.  It is a different mode of communication and requires everyone, students and faculty, to learn a new set of skills.  The first thing I remind students is that typed messages lack the vocal and nonverbal cues that reveal just as much or more than our words in face-to-face conversations – posture, gesture, tone of voice, etc. Without this supporting context, for example, satire or sarcasm can easily come across as meanness.  I build in assignments early on that invite students to clarify course requirements, ask questions about the course and the process of online education and that encourage them to get to know one another.  Last summer’s public history course introductions board started with 10 intros and generated 107 comments, for example. The long introductions — which I could never create space for in the course of a real-time classroom setting — establish relationships among students and between students and me that largely mitigate disrespectful behavior.  Also, being sure to do work very early on in synchronous or real time reminds everyone that their classmates are people, not words on a screen.

Rules and guidelines similarly geared towards the online environment can help.  Some of them are just common sense.  For example, I explain what “flaming” is — derogatory, abusive, threatening, sarcastic, rude, or otherwise mean-spirited messages directed at people – and instruct them not to flame.  If a post provokes a negative emotional response, I suggest students put it away for awhile, then reread it and check in to see if they might have misinterpreted it.  I also recommend that we all ask for clarification from the author of a post interpreted as offensive before replying to a poorly articulated comment. Otherwise, the class might respond to a comment as if it was intentionally aimed to be explosive, when in fact it was just an idea communicated awkwardly.

I’d love to hear more about how being together shapes and creates potentially transformative conversations.  What happens in a room that cannot happen in an online environment, from your perspective?  How can conversations about difficult histories or difficult conversations about histories best be facilitated?  How does in-person interaction build trust, foster openness, encourage people to shift their perspective, to situate themselves differently via those they’ve previously identified as “other?”

Will: Is it acceptable to say that it’s magic?  I’m kidding (sort of).  I guess I’m not really sure exactly how it happens.  I can’t take much, if any, credit for it.  In my case, the readings do most of the work.  Give them W.E.B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, and Angela Davis and they start to think differently even without me doing anything.  From this perspective, I suppose it doesn’t matter if the course is online or in-person.  Your questions have really challenged me, however, to think about how bricks-and-mortar classroom interactions build on the work begun with the readings and how these interactions might differ from what happens online.  I’m not sure I have anything more than an inchoate response at this point, but I’ll offer some preliminary thoughts.

Although I’ve never taught an online course, I incorporate online aspects into my bricks-and-mortar course, so I do have somewhat of a comparative perspective.  I use both a course blog, to which students contribute posts and comments each week, and a Twitter feed.  In general, I find the blog discussions to be civil and interesting, but not particularly illuminating or transformative.  Students seem loath to challenge or contradict their fellow students, except in rare instances.  With Twitter, the students tend to share interesting links, but do not engage in any serious discussion.  Both the blog comments and Twitter do provide, however, a good starting point for our in-class discussions.  As you might expect, these discussions then go off in various directions and lead us places I had not anticipated.  Maybe it’s just my preference for verbal communication, but actually speaking with one another feels freer and more engaging—in its best moments, even thrilling—than communicating through writing.  I’ve felt this as both a student and a teacher, so I’m reasonably certain that this isn’t just the biased perspective of an overly enthusiastic instructor.  At the same time, I recognize that this type of classroom dynamic favors verbal, extroverted students.  It may also lead me to unintentionally overlook alternative perspectives and perhaps even create a climate where students assume they must toe the party line.  I try to counteract these tendencies, but the reflective space of the online environment may, in this sense, be superior to the bricks-and-mortar classroom.  For certain students, the online environment may even be superior to in-person learning.

Obviously, there is much more to say, but I suggest we open the discussion to the blog’s readers at this point.  I’m hoping there are others who are willing to share their experiences as either teachers or students in similar situations.

~ Margo Shea and Will Walker