<i>Après le déluge</i> : Teaching and learning in the age of COVID

Journal of Philosophy of EducationVolume 55, Issue 4-5 p. 621-632 ORIGINAL ARTICLEFree Access Après le déluge: Teaching and learning in the age of COVID David Bakhurst, Corresponding Author David Bakhurst bakhurst@queensu.ca orcid.org/0000-0001-9652-2839 Queen's University, Kingston, Canada Kantian Rationality Lab and Academia Kantiana, Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University (IKBFU), Kaliningrad, Russia Correspondence David Bakhurst, Queen's University, Kingston, Canada. Email: bakhurst@queensu.caSearch for more papers by this author David Bakhurst, Corresponding Author David Bakhurst bakhurst@queensu.ca orcid.org/0000-0001-9652-2839 Queen's University, Kingston, Canada Kantian Rationality Lab and Academia Kantiana, Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University (IKBFU), Kaliningrad, Russia Correspondence David Bakhurst, Queen's University, Kingston, Canada. Email: bakhurst@queensu.caSearch for more papers by this author First published: 29 November 2021 https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9752.12616AboutSectionsPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Abstract In my 2020 paper 'Teaching, telling and technology', I explored the essentially second-personal, I-thou, relation between teacher and student—a relation I take to be essential to teaching at its most effective and inspiring. I concluded that essay with a critique of web-based instruction in universities, arguing that there are features of online courses that undermine dimensions of the teacher–student relation that are profoundly valuable. 'Teaching, telling and technology' appeared just as the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the completion of the 2019–2020 academic year and forced many schools and colleges around the world to teach part or all of the 2020–2021 academic year online. In this article, I consider how the experience of teaching remotely during the pandemic illuminates the position I took in my earlier paper. I find that while we all have reason to be grateful that remote communication platforms made it possible for formal education to continue during the pandemic, there remain reasons for caution about online courses, particularly when taught asynchronously. This, I argue, is particularly, though not exclusively, true of teaching in the humanities. More concerning still is that many problematic features of web-based instruction are symptoms of deleterious trends in higher education in general. Nevertheless, the last year has vividly revealed that online platforms create exciting possibilities for collaborative teaching and research and that there is reason to hope that further innovations in technology can ameliorate existing shortcomings in online education, so long as we do not lose sight of certain core educational values. Drawing on such diverse thinkers as Oakeshott, Ilyenkov and Kant, I argue that, if we are to initiate pupils into the conversation of humanity and enable them to think for themselves, then educational encounters must foster and exhibit the creative movement of thought in conditions of uncertainty, and that our model—our ideal—for achieving this should be real-time, in-person intellectual engagement between embodied beings in shared physical space. In the winter of 2020, I was putting the finishing touches on a paper, entitled 'Teaching, telling and technology', in preparation for its publication in the April 2020 issue of this journal (Bakhurst, 2020). The essay explores the character of the second-personal, I-thou, intersubjective relation between teacher and student—a relation fundamental to teaching at its most effective and inspiring. The relation is second-personal because it is premised upon the parties' mutual recognition of each other's personhood, where the teacher, addressing her students, personifies the discipline she teaches—she speaks 'as the science' in Sebastian Rödl's evocative phrase (Rödl, 2014, 2020)—and the students, trusting her for the truth, address her as initiates who aspire to find a voice in which they too can speak as the discipline. At the end of the paper, I venture a speculative critique of web-based instruction in universities, arguing that online courses often have qualities that can undermine dimensions of the teacher–student relation that we ought to preserve and celebrate. As every reader of this article will know, in March 2020 the coronavirus pandemic disrupted education around the world and forced many schools and colleges to finish the teaching year remotely. Most colleges and universities then were compelled to deliver some or all of their instruction online in the 2020–2021 academic year, and many primary and secondary schools and educational services went online for at least parts of the year depending on local circumstances. So suddenly my philosophical reflections on web-based education took on an unexpected topicality, and I found myself designing and teaching the very kinds of courses that my criticisms had targeted. In this essay, I reflect on my experience of teaching remotely during the pandemic to consider how it illuminates the concerns I raised in my earlier paper and what I have learnt, not just about teaching and learning online, but about teaching and learning in general. In the next section, I outline some of the philosophical conceptions that informed the arguments of my earlier paper. I then describe my experience teaching under COVID and the respects in which this fortified or softened my scepticism about online courses. In the final section, I draw on these findings to expound some of the core values that should inform teaching and learning in general, whether in person or online. DIALOGUE, CONVERSATION, INITIATION Some of the ideas in 'Teaching, telling and technology' first began to take shape almost a decade ago when I was working on Michael Oakeshott's view of liberal learning. Oakeshott famously describes education as 'initiation into the conversation of mankind', an image that many philosophers of education have cited with approval (Oakeshott, 1991, 2001). I was interested in Oakeshott's ideas for their own sake, but also for the parallel between them and the views of some of the Russian thinkers about whom I have written, particularly Evald Ilyenkov, whose neglected writings on education are an important part of his legacy (Ilyenkov, 2002). The congruence of their views is intriguing because Ilyenkov was a Soviet Marxist and Oakeshott a political conservative, but both saw education as a process in which our mental powers are formed through initiation into the culture.1 While I was immersing myself in Oakeshott, there was sustained discussion at my university about the potential of online and 'blended' courses to transform the learning environment. At the time, Queen's offered relatively few courses that could be taken remotely, and the university's reputation was founded in large measure on the quality of its on-campus undergraduate teaching. The advocates of online learning argued that the university needed to adjust its brand, get with the times and exploit developments in new learning technologies to enhance its online and blended offerings, not only because this might open the university to new sources of revenue, but because such courses had genuine educational benefits, encouraging active learning, student engagement and novel pedagogies that would liberate us from the supposedly stagnant, passive character of much traditional classroom teaching.2 Such discussions are often frustrating because the boosters of online learning tend to compare the most dynamic and engaging forms of online courses with the worst kinds of classroom teaching, while the sceptics do the reverse. So rather than engaging in a game of 'Anything you can do…', I set out to explicate just what features of the relation between teacher and student made in-person, face-to-face instruction in real time so important. In so doing, I did not mean to slight the venerable practice of distance education, only to understand what might be endangered by uncritical enthusiasm for web-based courses, particularly those delivered largely asynchronously, and therefore to define which aspects of the teacher–student relation we should seek to incorporate into, or simulate in, online education. To this end, I drew on Oakeshott and Ilyenkov to illuminate the educational practice I know best at first hand, namely university teaching in the humanities, though my hope was that the resulting insights might be extended to other subject-areas and to high school contexts. An obvious starting point was that Oakeshott, with his emphasis on conversation, and Ilyenkov, with his esteem for dialectics, both suggest that dialogue is central to education in the humanities. Dialogue is not just an effective means of encouraging students to engage with the subject and develop confidence and communication skills. The necessity of discussion and debate reflects the fact that the subject-domain is fundamentally open; e.g. that what counts as an appropriate reading of a text is always up for grabs and how to develop or interpret an argument is often essentially contestable. Indeed, the very norms of enquiry that govern the field are objects of critical scrutiny. Understanding the nature of the subject-area means being alive to this openness. The dialogical character of education prompted J.M. Coetzee, reflecting on the complexities and tensions within the teacher–student relation, to write: I cannot resist pointing out that a working through of the student's relation to the teacher figure cannot take place when the teacher is an image on a screen. Education is dialogical. Universities that do away with the old model of face-to-face instruction and replace it with recorded (canned) teaching are making a profound pedagogical error. (Coetzee & Kurtz, 2015, pp. 169–170) But while the necessity of dialogue speaks against 'canned' teaching, it remains to be shown that suitable modes of dialogicality cannot find expression in online courses, even those delivered asynchronously. Written communication can obviously be the basis of fulfilling intellectual interaction, and today, of course, communicating via texting, email, chat rooms etc. can have something of the immediacy of face-to-face discussion. Moreover, written communication can have significant advantages in educational contexts. For example, it typically affords greater opportunity for reflection than real-time conversation. Conversations become awkward if there are long pauses, so participants can feel compelled to speak when they would rather remain silent and reflect further.3 In addition, written communication can be easier for students who are shy or awkward in person; who are deaf; who have conditions, such as autistic spectrum disorder, that can make face-to-face social interaction difficult or stressful. In addition, as is often observed, written media can counter biases that come into play, often subconsciously, in face-to-face interaction. Online interaction can be arranged so that the gender, ethnicity, social class, age, disability, looks and demeanour of the participants are not evident. So it is important not to rush, as Coetzee does, from the premise that education is dialogical to the conclusion that it must be face-to-face. After all, Oakeshott's 'conversation of mankind' is a process of intellectual evolution stretching over centuries and across continents. The same is true of Ilyenkov's Hegelian vision of dialectic. The mode of dialogue internal to such processes is certainly not face-to-face interaction. Why, then, should initiation into them be thought to depend so crucially upon in-person engagement? To address this question, I will briefly address three concepts: conversation, initiation and mentorship. Conversation It is significant that Oakeshott chooses conversation as his metaphor for a historically evolving intellectual culture, and precisely when he is characterising education. The suggestion is that we acquire a sense of the evolution of intellectual culture writ large only if we acquire certain conversational virtues that fit us for the 'skill and partnership' of participation in intellectual life (Oakeshott, 1991, p. 490). These include the ability to attend carefully to a variety of voices articulating views in distinct idioms; to engage with these views with curiosity, generosity and open-mindedness; and to really listen, contemplate and make contributions that are constructive and relevant. On Oakeshott's picture, these aspects of 'the skill and partnership' of conversation are acquired in living dialogue with others, dialogue that models the evolution of thought in the wider culture, discloses to us the norms of intellectual enquiry and engagement, and enlivens and inspires us through the play of ideas. Similarly for Ilyenkov, for whom education into dialectical modes of thinking requires that students be supported and encouraged to confront tensions and contradictions in their thinking. Students must learn not to run from, or be broken by, contradiction, and they must not rush to easy solutions. Hence, they must be fortified by teachers and peers who will help them find both the courage and the intellectual resources to transcend the obstacles they confront. For Ilyenkov, this presupposes attention to the particularities of the individual student's situation and a willingness to engage in joint activity in real time, activity focused not just on the solution to the problem at hand but also aspiring to enhance the student's awareness of what it is to learn.4 Dialectical thinking is learnt in living dialogue. For this reason, it is extremely important that students experience thought in movement, that they can emulate people thinking on their feet—developing their ideas, moderating and modulating them in response to problems or objections (presented or anticipated), formulating and reformulating thoughts with sensitivity to their audience. Students need to see and feel creative thinking going on in a way that reveals to them what real learning is—learning not as the appropriation of some given, but as discovery. This is something to which students need to be exposed in real time and in a context where they are genuinely part of the conversation, but there is no reason why the context cannot be listening to a lecture, so long as they are following, and participating in, the internal movement of thought. Initiation The very idea of education as initiation, central to both Oakeshott and Ilyenkov, might be taken to require in-person engagement, since it presupposes an apprenticeship model of learning—where the initiate is led into a domain through the agency of mentors, whose role is to guide and to teach by example. Initiation, however, is a difficult concept, much used but little understood. We are inclined to think of Aristotle (2000) on the development of moral character, Wittgenstein (1953) on first language learning or Vygotsky (1978) on the zone of proximal development. These are examples of learning by a kind of habituation, where the learner first comes to behave in accord with the norms of some practice and later acquires a self-conscious appreciation of the grounds of her activity. She first learns to act in accord with reasons and then to act in the light of reasons, which she can cite to justify her actions. This kind of initiation involves catching on to a normative landscape, seeing what is a reason for what in some domain. It is not just a matter of acquiring knowledge, but involves acquiring skills and know-how, sensibilities, conceptions of relevance, styles of thinking and so on, and these are picked up through emulating the embodied practice of those more competent in the domain than oneself. In Aristotle, Wittgenstein and Vygotsky, however, the learner is a child in the process of acquiring fundamental concepts, and so obviously initiation involves person-to-person interaction in real time. But here the initiate's situation is very different from that of conceptually mature learners setting out to acquire competence in a domain they happen to know little about. In the latter case, the necessity of face-to-face interaction is much less obvious. Mature learners can, after all, initiate themselves into some knowledge domain (e.g. jazz or wine or architecture or pure mathematics). So in the case of university students, why privilege face-to-face encounters over more impersonal forms of instruction? Oakeshott would likely respond that students starting at university do stand in an analogous relation to Aristotle's initiate in that they enter a learning environment qualitatively different from a secondary school. The university embodies a different attitude to knowledge. It is a place where knowledge is made, where the conversation is advanced (not the only such place, of course). And a good university will make demands of its students unlike those made in school. This does not just consist of asking them to deal with more difficult subject matters, or to motivate themselves to study and so on. It is, or ought to be, a matter of asking students to conceive of themselves as having a different role in the conversation and the opportunity for more authentic and far-reaching modes of participation. Students are to feel part of the conversation in a way they did not before. This demands a willingness to cultivate greater powers of concentration, listening, imagination, initiative and communication through participation in a living community of enquiry, where one can find examples to emulate and to challenge and confront. This forms part of the rationale for the university as traditionally conceived—as a site of in-person, face-to-face, in-the-flesh, real-time educational encounters. Mentorship If I reflect on my own career, it is significant how much the course of my intellectual life was influenced by encounters with people who mentored me in ways that were more than merely 'formative': These encounters influenced the entire course of my intellectual life.5 Two examples: I was introduced to philosophy in enthralling conversations with Jonathan Dancy, who taught me as a first-year undergraduate—indeed, in my very first tutorial. Were it not for Jonathan's generosity in talking philosophy with me on so many occasions, I would likely not have taken up philosophy at all, for in those conversations I learnt something deep about what it was to think philosophically, to be a philosopher. Later, in Moscow in the early 1980s, I was inspired by a very different thinker, Felix Mikhailov, who took me under his wing and helped me find my way into Soviet philosophical culture. Once again, the source of this inspiration lay in our conversations. I couldn't have become at home in that world without a great deal of face-to-face interaction with Felix and many of his friends and colleagues. To get inside the way they thought, which was only intimated at in the available literature, I had to be in their company, to live and work among them. But more than this, my conversations with Felix revealed to me another vision of the philosophical life, in some ways congruent with what I Iearned from Jonathan, but in some ways very different. The mentorship extended to me by Jonathan and Felix involved exactly the kind of in-person engagement that I think is so important in education. In each case, the meeting of minds depended on our being in each other's company, on the fact that we enjoyed that company and the thrill of real-time philosophical engagement for its own sake, notwithstanding all its frustrations and blind alleys, the speed and spontaneity of the discourse, the friendship in thinking together and the lives that formed the background to our philosophical endeavours. In all this, physical presence mattered because so much is conveyed by comportment, expression and embodied communication—glances, looks, frowns, sighs, laughs, gestures—which are important to the interaction of friends and colleagues and part of the mimetic dimensions of learning from mentors. It mattered that we really knew one another in this way; not just that we knew what each other thought, but that we knew each other as real existences. It would be presumptuous to say that one could not achieve anything like that online, but these reflections on mentorship—together with those on conversation and initiation—suggest at least that a dialogical vision of education should profoundly value real-time, in-person intellectual engagement. Of course, nothing here constitutes an argument against online education, except perhaps its crudest varieties (though similar considerations tell equally against bad in-person teaching). The most I have shown is that, as Norm Friesen puts it in The Place of the Classroom and the Space of the Screen (2012), the relation between teacher and student is sui generis and is not simply defined in terms of professional responsibilities, but it also has a non-specialized and personal dimension. It relies on practices and capabilities that are not acquired through specialization or enacted as a set of 'positive', enumerable competences. Understood in this way, pedagogy, in its experiential, relational dimension can certainly take place on the space of the computer screen—with its frictionless efficiency and insistence on explicit activity—but it is much more suited to the place of the classroom, with the possibilities that it offers for receptive interaction. (p. 160) It is therefore tempting for the sceptic to ratchet up the philosophical intensity and aspire to a conclusive defence of in-person pedagogies. But while we can look to philosophy to illuminate teaching and learning, we can hardly expect it to furnish us with knock-down arguments about the superiority or greater authenticity of one form of teaching compared to another. One needs to consider the matter in the light of experience, and the pandemic has of course afforded plenty of that. So let me now discuss my own experience teaching remotely under COVID. TEACHING AND LEARNING UNDER COVID In the 2020–2021 academic year, I taught three courses: a graduate seminar on 20th-century philosophy, focused principally on the work of Elizabeth Anscombe—it had 17 students (all of whom were beginning their graduate degrees, and some were new to Queen's); a second-year undergraduate course on epistemology and metaphysics with 101 students; and a third-year undergraduate course on philosophy of psychology with 37 students. The first two courses ran over 12 weeks; the third was a spring course condensed into 6 weeks. The graduate seminar I taught synchronously 'live' on Zoom; the undergraduate courses were taught asynchronously, with the course content (podcasts, or PowerPoint slides with audio commentary, and other materials) posted to a webpage hosted on the university's learning management system. Notwithstanding—or perhaps because of—my reservations about remote instruction, I was determined to do as good a job as possible, so I took the teaching very seriously, hiring a digital graphics specialist and video/audio editor to do postproduction on the posted material so that it would be, technically at least, of a high standard. So what did I learn? The graduate seminar, which met weekly for three hours, was small enough to work on Zoom. I adopted my normal seminar technique of asking students to prepare a one-page question sheet on the readings and then used a selection of questions as the basis of discussion. There were no formal presentations; either from me or from the students, except for the first class where I set the scene with an introductory talk. Rather to my surprise, I found the Zoom setting had some advantages over meeting in person. First, it allowed me to invite Rachael Wiseman to Zoom-in from the UK to share her expertise on Anscombe as a guest discussant at one session. Second, the breakout room facility enabled me to divide the class into small groups to choose which of their questions to focus on, and then the chosen questions would be allocated to another group to discuss, before we finally reassembled to consider the outcome of these small-group discussions and debate the issues together. This encouraged all the students to get involved, and it also prevented me from talking too much, a vice of which I am often guilty in in-person seminars. The medium also reined in the more loquacious students, in part because the act of speaking, with the ritual of 'unmuting', makes one very aware that one has the floor. One significant shortcoming is that it is not easy to address a wall of little squares, particularly if people have their cameras off. Even with cameras on, it is harder to gauge audience response, to tell if people are following you, approving or disapproving, understanding or failing to comprehend, due to the absence of the usual cues given by body language, eye contact, patterns of breathing, smiles, frowns and so on. A consequence is that it is difficult to create a comfortable atmosphere through the use of humour. People cannot laugh together where everyone but the speaker is muted or where the technology is designed so that only one audio stream can be heard at any time. So you often cannot tell if people appreciate the humour or even if someone is trying to be humorous. Advances in the technology might eventually improve the situation (e.g. if the audio were mixed to give the illusion that the participants were together in a room so that multiple voices could be audible simultaneously). But as things stand, to create an atmosphere of camaraderie, inclusivity and mutual support, the best one can do is ensure that everyone treats one another respectfully, and that they can trust the instructor to be supportive and well organised. In short, it is easier to make the meeting professional than it is to make it fun.6 Another missing element is the informal interaction before and after the class, and during breaks, where students might in normal circumstances wander together to the cafeteria. These casual situations—which clearly depend upon physical interaction in shared space—provide opportunity for the instructor to touch base with students (and students with one another), provide reassurance, show interest, be friendly. In a philosophy seminar, participants often worry that what they said was foolish, or that they are not understanding or not being understood. Online, there are few opportunities for reassurance and when the seminar is over, the participants are thrown back into their respective spaces to worry about the impression they made. Moreover, in the pandemic, all other usual opportunities for casual interaction—around departmental colloquia and social events or chance meetings in the department's hallways—were gone too, and this put considerable pressure on student mental health. Our graduate students used social media to build their own supportive community, but that was essentially invisible to faculty members. These shortcomings notwithstanding, teaching small courses on platforms such as Zoom can be extremely successful, enabling (with cameras on) face-to-face, if not in-person, engagement, and while many subtleties of human interaction go missing, there are compensations in the form of the breakout rooms and the chat function, and there will no doubt be further improvements and innovations that enhance the experience. Moreover, such platforms create new educational opportunities, by, e.g., making possible courses that bring together faculty and students from different universities, just as they can greatly assist collaborative research, inviting scholars around the world to interact in working groups, colloquia, international speaker series with no geographical location and so on. There is no doubt that, post-COVID, a great deal of graduate supervision, collaborative research, colloquia and conferences will continue to happen remotely. The real test of my convictions was of course not the 'live' seminar, but the two undergraduate courses. At my university, we were strongly encouraged to stage undergraduate classes asynchronously. There were two main reasons, both related to accessibility. Our students are distributed across the country and around the world, so some would be in time zones which might make live participation difficult or impossible. Second, live online teaching is hostage to technical glitches and requires the participants to have reliable internet connections, and at least at the beginning of the pandemic there was uncertainty about whether networks could support the amount of traffic coming online. It may also have been the case that administrators who were advocates of online teaching on pedagogical grounds, favouring asynchronous instruction over traditional classroom teaching, saw this as an opportunity to promote their agenda. But in any case, as a result, I found myself teaching the very kinds of courses of which I was suspicious. In designing them, I considered using designated software to stimulate online discussion, for example, by deploying apps that enable students to record and post short video comments on the topic of the day. But I rejected this option for a number of reasons. First, I felt it would be intrusive to require students to make these posts, particularly in video format, and some would find it anxiety-provoking.7 Secon