This is the text of a talk that I gave at the Working-Class Studies Association conference earlier this month. This concerns the working conditions of Adjunct Instructors and the shape of virtual pedagogy today.
“After
the Quarantine: Virtual Pedagogy and Virtual Workspaces in a
Post-Pandemic World”
When
I sat down to write out the introduction to the presentation that I
am going to give today, I realized that it has been about a year and
a half since I initially submitted my abstract. Back in January of
2020 we all had hoped to meet together in person in Youngstown but
the events of the last year prevented that from happening. Those
events have also changed the context of what this paper would have
been. I set out to write about the realities of teaching online-only
classes for adjunct faculty members and the difficulties that this
presents. But then pretty much all of us turned into online-only
teachers and a lot of what I was going to say became very obvious to
everyone. Of the two main points that I wanted to touch on from that
abstract, one of these has been completely obviated by the pandemic
that quarantined all of us. The other point, though, is more valid
now than when I originally sat down to plan my abstract and it is
about the interplay of virtual pedagogy and adjunct labor. This
paper, originally about the virtual space that adjuncts must occupy
on the edge of the academic world will now, itself, occupy a liminal
space. As I worked on this presentation today, I found myself
bouncing between the paper that this would have been had I presented
it in Youngstown a year ago and what it is today.
Here
are the two points I originally wanted to make: first, adjunct
teaching is often an under-resourced and thankless job and it is easy
to fall under the radar. This is made worse by teaching online only
because we are also absent from campus and miss out on a lot of the
opportunities to network and maintain important peer relationships
that on-site teachers have. We must also use our own
resources to perform the work without any compensation for
this. Here I mean things like electricity, internet
access, and the like. I think that most teachers have felt
this way after a year-plus of online teaching so I will not really
address this point today.
The
second point is less obvious but isn't much of a stretch to get to:
adjunct teaching, and teaching online only presents a bind that looks
like an opportunity for many academics who hold down multiple jobs.
Many academics such as myself teach online in order to keep current
teaching experience and avoid gaps in our CVs. Many are trying to
earn a living by patching together multiple part-time positions while
trying to wrangle the job market and find a full time appointment.
The flexibility of asynchronous teaching allows us to take on other
work to supplement our incomes. This flexibility also looks like an
opportunity to do the necessary work to build our CVs such as
attending conferences and publishing, but the work we do whether it
is in the classroom or in our other jobs generally is enough to keep
many of us from being able to do this as much as we would like. The
allure of the freedom to continue teaching while pursuing other work
and earn extra money ultimately ends in a narrowing of opportunities
that works to keep these instructors in adjunct positions, or to make
the decision to leave academics completely.
My
original paper would have outlined many of the details of this bind
and would have offered some suggestions for overcoming this
difficulty. But instead I want to veer a little off course
from my original plan. Instead of talking about the nature of online
adjunct teaching and the difficulties that this presents, I want to
expand my scope to discuss the nature of virtual pedagogy and to take
a look at the future of education. I think that this is
important because this is a crucial moment in which we can take the
time to rethink how we interact with our colleagues and to re-examine
some of the values that we have taken for granted in higher
education. This is a moment to push past limiting views of what
virtual pedagogy should be to think about what virtual pedagogy could
be.
Prior
to the pandemic, I had worked myself into a niche with my online
teaching experience. I taught my first online courses in 2010 and
have been teaching online only since 2015 and I have learned a lot
from having to revise my curriculum to meet the needs of my virtual
classroom. At this point, I have taught scores, if not hundreds, of
students whom I have never met face-to-face, and would never know if
they were to pass me in the street. Yet we have shared a space
together and worked together. They have told me about important
things in their lives and I have told them about myself. I have
endeavored to gain their trust and to build rapport through the
course structure and the public and private communications that we
shared. I have developed some specific strategies for doing this
that have helped immensely.
I
think that my transition to teaching online has largely been
successful and I have become a better teacher for having to
re-evaluate some of my assumptions about learning and communicating
expectations. But for all of this, online teaching always had a
cloud over it. Some of my students did poorly because they
were unable to manage their time the same way that they would in a
traditional classroom. They didn’t feel the same sense
of accountability because they didn’t have to walk into a physical
classroom and tell a real person that they hadn’t done their
work. Others took my classes because they thought it would
be easy since it was online and “not a real class.” I
know this because some of them have admitted this in their end of
semester evaluations. In those same evaluations, students have
commented on the difficulty of my class or expressed surprise at
actually learning something.
My
students often commented on the workload in my courses and on the
number of readings I assigned. One exercise that I use is to provide
my students with a forum for offering suggestions to improve the
course or to critique parts of the course they find unhelpful. In
this forum, students would complain about the number of readings or
about the work that I assigned. What they don't know is that I have
cut a lot of readings that I would assign in favor of having them
produce and express their own ideas. They also didn't know that I
have streamlined the writing process so that every assignment that
they complete contributes directly to larger projects and guides us
toward our learning outcomes. I trimmed out what I have come to
think of as extraneous work. In other words, some of my students
were unhappy with the amount of work that I asked them to do even
though it was less than what I asked my students to do in a more
traditional setting.
But
here's the thing. The problem wasn't with the work that I was asking
them to do. The problem was the work they were being asked to do for
an online class. I know this because I have gotten end of semester
evaluation with phrases like “for an online class” in them.
Students are surprised to learn in an online class, surprised that it
can be helpful, surprised that they had to work in one. There was a
disconnect for them such that taking a class online was not the same
as taking a class in a physical space. And again, I know this
because I have had students tell me this. What this indicates to me
is that, up until now, we have done a poor job preparing students for
the demands of an online class. We haven't shown them that a virtual
classroom is a real one even though it is not a physical space.
I
want to go back and take a moment to explain the original title
because there was a metaphor in it that I was going to use. My paper
was originally titled “Navigating the Virtual Zone.” As I worked
on the abstract for that original paper, I had the idea of drawing a
metaphor from my work. At the time, I was working in a regional
distribution warehouse for a national hardware store coop doing
inventory and quality control. The specifics of the job are
unimportant. But what is important to my way of thinking about it is
the way that virtual mapping is used in the warehouse. The WMS
(warehouse management system) that we used is actually a layering of
systems of varying age. The warehouse was built in 1977 so
all of the inventory was kept on paper and then eventually it moved
into computers and as the computers and the programs that the company
bought became more sophisticated, they found that it was easier and
less expensive to overlay the new programming on top of the old
rather than build a new system from scratch. This lead to
gaps between the layers that were only discovered later
on. Eventually, the programs that were built in the 1990s
and earlier were unable to keep up with the new order-filling
assignment programs that were installed in the 2000s and to bridge
this gap, the system constructed “V-zones” or virtual zones that
are virtual computer mapping of physical space. It is the stopgap
that allows the mainframe to give instructions to workers in a
physical space. But the stopgap became a permanent solution.
In
my job, I had access to number of these different systems and I had
to find ways of using the different systems to find information where
there were gaps in one or the other. I became highly aware of the
limitations of the overall system because there was no way to
navigate it holistically but it had to be approached piecemeal. I
adopted the metaphor of the virtual zone for this paper for two
reasons. First, the “virtual” nature of the warehouse mapping
seemed to match up pretty well with the “virtual” classroom.
Both virtual spaces correspond to actual work being done and describe
a certain relationship between the physical space and that work being
done. Second, and more importantly, I saw the overlay of multiple
systems in the WMS as parallel to the expediency-driven stopgap that
is virtual teaching. This is not a system that has been built from
the ground up to take its unique challenges into account. Instead, it
was a thing that was thrust upon many teachers with little to no
training. I don't know if we have the ability to undergo a wholesale
revamp of higher education in America but we at least need to
recognize the overlay of systems and really examine where they do not
mesh.
If
I have anything like a thesis to argue today, it is this: we are at a
critical juncture in our educational careers and in our lives in
general. As we move back toward unrestricted life we can choose to
return to “pre-pandemic” life, a return to the normalcy where
faculty members such as myself find themselves without a place at the
table, or we can take this opportunity to recognize that the
difficulties that all of us faced during quarantine were not new for
many of us. The isolation and disconnect that has lasted for a year
for some of us has been an ongoing problem for many of us for much
longer than that. We can also extrapolate this to our relationships
with our students and use this same isolation as an object lesson in
what some of them have felt like for their whole lives. Then, I hope,
we can use this to also think about our lives out in the rest of the
world. We have to seriously question whether or not “pre-pandemic”
is good enough. I don't think that it is. I think that there is an
opportunity here to do better and to be better.
Until
now, virtual teaching was largely seen as an adjunct to traditional
teaching. I use the word “adjunct” very deliberately here
because of what its true meaning is and the impact that it has on our
colleagues. To be adjunct is to be supplementary. It is, by
definition, non-essential. Virtual learning had been non-essential
until it wasn't. As so many of us know, adjunct teachers are
anything but non-essential. We are the essential workers of the
academic world. In the post-pandemic world, we have to question
whether or not we can afford to return to this “pre-pandemic” way
of thinking. My argument, then, is that we cannot. My argument is
simple but it needs to be stated to be clear. I do not think that a
return to normalcy is good just as I don't think that all aspects of
quarantine-driven changes to education have been bad. In some ways
it has caused a reckoning of how others live and work. As I stated
above, I think that we can do better. My argument is that we need to
continue the work that we have done over the last year in re-thinking
our strategies in teaching and our relationships with our peers and
students. We need to use this as a starting point and not as a point
of return.
In
the interest of doing better, I have thought of some suggestions to
carry forward with us when we return to our respective campuses and
other places of work. These suggestions are based upon a lot of the
things that I have been thinking about while working on this paper
and sum up some of the difficulties that I think may face us going
forward. This list only has four items but I think that this is a
start toward being more deliberate in our engagements.
1-
Zoom meetings and asynchronous pedagogy have leveled the playing
field in some respects. It can mean that students who have difficulty
with some subjects or don't know how to ask questions about things
they don't understand will have the opportunity to learn in a
different modality. Asynchronous teaching specifically can help
students to ask the questions that they may find intimidating to ask
in class because they are worried about their peers' judgment. We
should be ready to embrace these styles of teaching going forward and
ask what our connection to the classroom is and what it should be. I
still think that the classroom is an important site of learning, but
it does not have to be the only site.
2-
Think about what participation looks like in different modalities.
This doesn't just mean classroom participation, but it can include
this. What opportunities are there for students to be active in
student life that do not require a physical presence on campus? What
opportunities are there for adjunct teachers who are either on-site
or online to engage with other faculty members and to network? This
is a time when we can think about all of the virtual events that we
have participated in over the last year and ask if this makes our
institutions more diverse and accommodating.
3-
We need to be sure that we recognize virtual work as real work.
Teaching online requires a lot of the same preparation that
traditional teaching does and it also requires a great deal of
special preparation. The needs of students in a virtual classroom
will be different from those in a traditional setting and we have to
take the time to re-adjust our thinking to accommodate this. This
means that we also have to work to teach our students how to make
this change as well. We cannot assume that they know how to navigate
our virtual spaces or that they will know where to find instructions.
Also, being clear about what students can expect from us is vital.
When not working around class schedules students may try to reach out
at odd times and expect immediate response. Being clear about our
working hours is a useful way to avoid the creep of work taking over
our personal lives and reinforces the concept that staying in
communication is work for us. The converse of this is that we need
to be vigilant in teaching our students that the work that they do in
a virtual space is also real work.
4-
I think that this is a key moment for all of us to examine the
difficulties that we have had over the last year and to really
reflect on what it means to go back into a physical classroom. As
teachers, we have had to overcome a lot of difficulties, and our
students have done a lot to meet us there. We need to recognize that
the massive educational shifts that we have undergone have also
served to decontextualize our work. This means that we are in better
positions to examine the assumptions that we brought with us to the
classroom. This is a point where we can question the status quo of
higher education and be deliberate in how we move forward.
