Online Teaching and Process-Oriented, Trauma-Informed Pedagogy
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RubyT, ‘Socially Distanced Flowers,’ April 2020
As an academic looking at a full teaching schedule in the Fall of 2020, I’m already grateful. I have a job.
As an adjunct instructor that’s no certainty. My semester-to-semester contracts specifically state that I am not being promised future work and that I can be terminated at any time for little cause. It’s nothing personal - the system works this way because every graduate program in the country is producing more people with doctorates than there are jobs, every year, and has done for decades.
But that’s not the point today.
Today the point is this: since I have work in the Fall I’m going to be teaching people, potentially online-only (though my university is still planning as of now to offer in-person instruction). Unlike last semester, when we all just figured it out as best we could at a moment’s notice, this time students have the right to expect us professorial types to be a little better at professing online, and while I’m no digital humanities genius I do care deeply about my student colleagues, as I do about my professorial and administrative colleagues. So the purpose of this blog post is to share two philosophical assumptions about teaching that makes being a professor the most amazing job in the world, and to suggest to my fellow professors and those who support the university some ways in which those assumptions can be enacted in online teaching.
The philosophical assumptions are simple, though they end up having some highly complex implications. I’ll go one by one:
1) I assume that learning is a process punctuated by products like tests, essays, quizzes, and opportunities for discussion and reflection.
Let’s unpack this. In an open-access 2016 article I remain embarrassingly proud of, I start from my training as an early-childhood educator and asked how the lessons of the preschool classroom can be used to improve university-level teaching and learning. One of those lessons is that the environment is a basic constraint that shapes learning, and the other is that a foundational assumption of our education systems – that learning can be reliably assessed solely through the evaluation of learning products – is wrong. Tests, essays, discussions and quizzes all form part of a larger process of learning which any individual product fails to capture in its full complexity and flow, but the learning environments we spend our lives in tend not to reflect that truth.
How do I know? Just consider this – when you look at a very young child’s drawing, do you praise them for their process or for the product they’ve produced?
Do you know why you respond the way you do?
Now consider what it would be like to hear from every adult you know, from before you yourself can even speak, a product-oriented discourse that values what you make but not how you make it. That praises you on your ‘pretty drawing’ but doesn’t praise the effort or creativity it took to draw it. What might the effect be? I’d suggest that the effect is to force you to look for your value outside of your self, to makes your worth extrinsic, and I’d suggest that for a lot of us, eventually it hurts you. As a university professor I know a lot of students who evaluate themselves much too harshly based on their grades, or their GPA, or their professors’ or peers’ opinions of them, and when I was an early-childhood teacher I knew a lot of parents who came to meetings about their children’s developmental processes with checklists of milestones and abilities. While it’s understandable that students act as they’ve been taught to, and continue to do so as parents, these behaviors tell us something about the learning environment we are used to, and I’d suggest these behaviors are symptoms of a larger disease: the product-orientation of the US education system.
What is particularly dangerous about this extreme product-orientation can be seen in the effects it has on college students, many of whom have been in formal schooling since preschool. If one of my students gets a low grade on an assignment, I’ve noticed that they’re likely to feel lesser as a person, if only momentarily, and if (God forbid) they fail a class? They feel like a failure.
If these reactions seem normal and appropriate to you, ask yourself why. Students are so used to being categorized in terms of their grades that they identify with their grades, become their grades, and thus become so product-oriented that they feel like products and treat themselves accordingly. The sick horror my students feel at the prospect of an academic suspension is so intense because being kicked out of the university might as well be equivalent to being kicked out of the universe. This system and its psychological effects have been normalized by nearly everyone they know, especially if they’re ‘high-achieving,’ and finally the system rewards students for viewing themselves as products by giving them the opportunity to sell themselves to other institutions after they graduate. The story goes like this: if you treat yourself like a product (well-rounded, high-achieving, no complaints from teachers or administrators, etc., totally focused on extrinsic markers of value the majority of the time) during middle and high school then maybe a ‘good’ college or university will admit (purchase) you, and if you continue to make yourself the best product you can be, you might get an unpaid internship! Calloo callay!
If you then do everything you’re told, plus a tad more, and don’t require anyone to pay attention to your process if it’s inconvenient for them or the institution, then after your unpaid internship you might get a ‘good’ job where you can continue your product-orientation unfettered by nagging intrinsic desires of your own!
I’m exaggerating for effect, but in broad strokes this is the system I see as a university professor working with incredibly smart, skilled, caring, often-traumatized students. And I think it hurts them, their professors, and their institutions.
Which leads me to my second assumption:
2) I assume that all learners are potentially-traumatized and that I can either exacerbate or mitigate the potential for trauma in the learning community I serve as leader.
First off let’s define trauma, so we can be careful not to trivialize this concept. The United States Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration defined trauma thusly in 2014:
Individual trauma results from an event, series of events, or set of circumstances that is experienced by an individual as physically or emotionally harmful or life threatening and that has lasting adverse effects on the individual’s functioning and mental, physical, social, emotional, or spiritual well-being.
Having experienced parental abuse, having survived a natural disaster or lingering illness, having been bullied all potentially count as trauma if there are “lasting adverse effects” on one’s functioning. Being divorced from your own learning process is a form of trauma too, if lasting adverse effects are present, and I have observed that they often are. That is why my first article was on a feminist approach to process-oriented learning, and now I’m paying close attention to educators in the field of social work who focus their research on coming up with Best Practice guidelines for engaging in what is called Trauma-Informed Educational Practice (TIEP). TIEP allows social work instructors to mitigate student trauma while students are engaged in clinicals, working directly with people having a terrible time, and if these techniques work in such an intense setting I think they can also be used to mitigate student trauma while doing online learning.
Fallot and Harris (2009) describe five principles for promoting a trauma-informed learning environment:
1. Ensure a sense of safety is felt by all members of a learning community
2. Establish and maintain students’ sense of instructors’ trustworthiness
3. Maximize student choice
4. Promote collaboration
5. Prioritize student empowerment
Surprisingly, the first principle is often the one met with most student disbelief. I’ve had students tell me directly that they don’t think a classroom could ever be a ‘safe space’ for them, and I have taken that not as a challenge but as a moment in a process of grieving. Oftentimes these students are dimly aware that they’ve lost something precious they used to have, and as a result they lack trust not only in the instructor and the institution but in themselves, which is why modeling trustworthiness is so important. We can do this by replying to emails quickly, by explaining our pedagogical choices, by modeling an intrinsic pleasure in learning new things and talking about them, and by avoiding changes to the syllabus whenever possible, but we can also establish students’ sense of our own trustworthiness by following Fallot and Harris’ other recommendations. If we promote collaboration and then truly believe in its effects on students we show the that we trust ourselves as well as our student colleagues, and if we prioritize student empowerment over our own needs for control or mastery we further solidify students’ sense that what we’re doing together is truly, transcendently important.
Because it is. Learning is awesome, and being a professor is too.
Similarly to Fallot & Harris, Carello and Butler (2015) emphasize the importance of safety in the learning environment, and they also offer further actionable suggestions for trauma-informed instructors:
1. teach students to employ self-care techniques
2. teach students to mediate exposure to potentially traumatizing circumstances
3. teach students to utilize collaborative networks including counseling, Title IX, and other support services
4. offer and accept both intellectual and emotional feedback when assessing student performance
5. minimize power imbalances between peers and between instructors and students
6. both maintain and teach students to maintain healthy emotional boundaries
By teaching students to care for themselves by mediating their exposure to trauma and by using the helping networks colleges and universities provide, we further communicate our sense of the importance of our student colleagues’ learning processes. By offering and accepting intellectual and emotional feedback we create space in the learning environment for feelings and for an honest dialogue about our whole selves, potentially helping students learn how to have similar conversations with peers, with parents, and with themselves. By attending to healthy boundary work as an integral aspect of learning and by minimizing power imbalances in the learning environment we also help students learn skills that will serve them well in adult relationships, while also creating the best-possible learning environment for a wide variety of learning processes.
Cool, huh? I promise I’ll get to the online stuff soon.
Hopefully the links between the two assumptions I make about teaching are becoming clear: by emphasizing the process-oriented nature of TIEP, Fallot and Harris, as well as Carello and Butler stress what Bernstein (1996, 2000) has called the ‘regulative discourse’ of the classroom, “the moral discourse which creates order, relations and identity,” in contrast with product-oriented pedagogical approaches that overemphasize the ‘instructional discourse’ of learning “which creates specialized skills and their relationships to each other” (46). By acknowledging feelings and skills, TIEP assumes that students are working within constraints formed by their prior experiences as they seek to gain knowledge in the classrooms we share with them. If this approach reduces the potential for traumatization in social work classrooms, then we need to ask how to use similar approaches as we teach online during a global pandemic.
Maximizing safety would seem to be the most obvious and also the most difficult hurdle here. How does one ‘maximize safety’ during a global airborne pandemic? Probably not by living in a dorm room with another person whose actions you can’t control, on a hallway (with a shared bathroom) full of other people whose actions you can’t control, on a campus full of people whose actions you can’t control. But that’s an administrative decision and I’m an adjunct, so I will focus on what I can control to some extent, which is the learning environment I help create for and with my student colleagues.
Creating safety in an online learning environment means policing community discourse for abusive and antisocial behaviors. All the time. Especially for some students who may never have met their classmates, the threshold for unkindness may be lowered, and if we create discussion boards or other online fora we are responsible for making sure they’re used for learning and not for causing trauma. Creating safety in an online learning environment also means being actively empathetic in the language we use to describe assignments and outcomes, as well as in the ways we structure these assignments and communicate on a day-to-day basis, because the TIEP recommendations all work together. Maximizing students’ choice of a deadline may mean the difference between a student having to go to an abusive parents’ home to use the wifi or not. Teaching students to use Title IX or to seek out counseling may empower students to be better bystanders, to actively fight against rape culture, to create their own safety rather than depending on adults or institutions. Offering and accepting feedback may allow students to tell you when you’re inadvertently setting them up for trauma, or making no sense, and teaching students how to employ self-care techniques during a pandemic is obviously a kind as well as a trauma-informed pedagogical goal.
But the point here is not simply to be nice, or PC, though those are both worthy goals. The point here is actually similar to that made by the Hippocratic Oath physicians often take before becoming physicians: first, do no harm. Get out of the way and let students learn, create space in the learning environment for different learning processes to intertwine and support each other through collaborative networks, through honest feedback about areas of growth AND areas of accomplishment, stop making it about our teaching and return the focus to their learning and our learning together with them. Like the tenets of Universal Design for Learning (UDL), TIEP is designed so that students’ learning processes can move forward without being blocked by unnecessary barriers to participation, but it is also designed so that students can get the most out of their learning processes both within the confines of the classroom and beyond. After all, learning that you matter in and of yourself, whatever your grades, may be the most important lesson we could possibly teach our student colleagues.
But how? What tools do we use?
This isn’t going to get hugely technical because I’m not smart enough to pull that off, so this will actually stay as simple as possible. Poor as well as rich institutions are going to have to get this right, so I’m purposely not advising much equipment. That said, we need to assume that every class meeting will potentially either be online-only for everyone or for a sizable minority of class participants, so we need to have a webcam with us in the classroom (or home office) that’s positioned so that viewers can see more or less what people in the room can see, within reasonable limits. If there’s a whiteboard in use this is particularly important, because a webcam allows for higher resolution (and thus easier visibility) than the camera that came with your laptop, and if you’re sharing your screen it’s also important to consider things like the choice of font and the size of the words on that screen. Even if we do end up teaching in-person this Fall, allowing students who are sick to participate in class remotely reduces absenteeism, and making in-person attendance a choice empowers students to consider their learning process more critically. Simply put, making our work more accessible allows students to do theirs with less trauma. For these reasons I will probably have a remote-learning option for all my classes going forward, even once the threat of COVID-19 recedes. Why be limited by physical space when we have the internet?
One of the other principle ways we can make learning more accessible is by using a flipped-classroom approach whenever possible. That sounds too jargon-y to bear but all it means is giving some of the instruction for each class meeting asynchronously - not in the room but before everyone enters the room (or ‘room’). Putting together a powerpoint and sending it out for students to look at allows you to forego lecture and just discuss the information on the powerpoint, and you can even record audio on your powerpoint slides and choose whether to have students click on the icon to hear your words, or simple have the audio begin playing when they click on the slide. This is helpful for visually-impaired students and also allows you to include a greater depth of complexity in your presentations than powerpoint slides allow. You can also turn on Microsoft’s transcription services that transcribe your audio in real time, lowering barriers to participation for people who are hearing-impaired. Powerpoint also has a ‘notes’ feature that allows you to write descriptions of each slide, and I tend to use these as shorthand guides when I’m recording the audio, giving students two different text-only options for participation. While the Microsoft suite has its detractors, including yours truly, it is the most commonplace software on most US campuses, making its use least-likely to create barriers to participation among students of all abilities.
Nor is my use of powerpoint meant exclusively to reduce barriers to participation for students with learning differences, physiological or otherwise. Asynchronous approaches of all kinds reduce potential trauma by allowing students to spend as much or as little time as they want on a given lecture, meaning that students can take detailed notes and come up with deeper questions to ask during synchronous learning. Additionally, asynchronous approaches reduce trauma by offering students more choice: if need be, they can simply attend the synchronous opportunity and make up the lecture when they don’t have a test to study for. This flexibility empowers students and, while some instructors might worry that this empowerment will come with problems of participation and focus, one might consider that a lecture in which students are scrambling to write down what a professor is saying about a powerpoint they may never see again, on which they will be tested as though that actually measures what they’ve learned, also reduces participation and focus in important ways.
Finally, before you begin screencasting or buy a webcam, consider the assignments and the subject matter you’re working with. If there are particularly difficult subjects to discuss in some of your class meetings or assigned readings, offer trigger warnings, and think very carefully about what might be traumatizing to a wide range of people whose experiences you can’t necessarily know. Doing this before you start teaching maintains students’ emotional safety over the semester, and you can also do this as the semester continues. If assignments are particularly likely to stretch student abilities, as first-year writing assignments often do, scaffold students’ planning processes with low-stakes miniature assignments and offer opportunities for revision. Break their product-orientation a little by offering multiple chances to create and recreate. If you have control over your syllabus, ask your student colleagues to produce fewer, better products and to reflect critically on the process of doing so. Generally lower community anxiety levels whenever possible, while still maintaining the intellectual rigor and empathetic engagement your student colleagues have paid for. Make every pedagogical decision after having asked yourself whether the focus of that decision is your student colleagues’ learning processes, or your own need for control and mastery. Once you’re teaching, make comments in class and on assignments ONLY after asking yourself the same question again.
TL;DR? Do your best, love yourself and teach your student colleagues to do the same.
At the end of the day (especially today) we don’t know what the future holds, or what our present actions will produce there. The process can’t be predicted but it can be acknowledged. If we do our best to learn in solidarity with our student colleagues, then maybe something beautiful will grow up through the cracks.