The COVID-19 pandemic has brought about rapid and dramatic changes to higher education. In this article, I reflect on the transition of a graduate seminar composed of 30 students from more than a dozen countries. A third of the way into the semester, and with only a few days’ notice, faculty were instructed to move teaching from on-campus seminars to fully online. With my colleagues, I worked to provide a new model of education built on inclusivity and care. It would be easy to lament the problems involved in this transition. Instead, I focus on what we can learn from the experience and the new possibilities that emerge.
I highlight two interrelated lessons that have long-term relevance. First, emergency e-learning presents an opportunity to take stock of advancements in politics teaching and to actively reconsider the pedagogies, strategies, and tools through which we teach and learn. Second, to address inequalities in our classrooms—which are accentuated in online learning—it is important to foster collaborative, nonhierarchical, and reflexive scholarly communities. Both of these lessons highlight the need to cultivate a culture of care and inclusivity in our classrooms—regardless of how our courses are comprised, whether face to face or online.
…emergency e-learning presents an opportunity to take stock of advancements in politics teaching and to actively reconsider the pedagogies, strategies, and tools through which we teach and learn.
Learning from Emergency e-Learning
When I reflect on my experiences, it is clear that the shift to e-learning provided important opportunities that conventual “business-as-usual” teaching models could not. I had to reassess my course material as well as my mode of teaching and learning. I also had to consider how virtual learning tools could foster critical analysis, self-reflection, and scholarly rigor in graduate scholars.
The move to e-learning was an opportunity to use innovative techniques and develop new analytical skills. I replaced on-campus seminars with a mixture of prerecorded “mini lectures,” blogs, and virtual Zoom seminars. Lectures were made available at the beginning of each week. This provided flexibility to view them, asynchronously, before the online seminar later in the week. Key also was to ensure that the new learning activities corresponded to a similar workload. I kept lectures short, making them appealing and allowing time for other activities. Seminars then were conducted via Zoom, all students together and in breakout groups. In these seminars, I used “Padlets” to facilitate discussion. These are web-based applications that can be populated with text and images simultaneously by teachers and students; that is, a type of virtual “whiteboard” to summarize key points and assign tasks before or during discussion.
My students and I were forced to learn new software and technical skills: video-based lectures, Padlets, blogs, and feedback software such as survey tools (e.g., Survey Monkey). Technical options will continue to change and improve, which entails effort to remain current. However, these tools also open up new possibilities for collaborating and relating to one another. I sought in particular to use tools with a distinctive cooperative, nonhierarchical spirit. The aim was to promote a culture of self-reflection, mutual learning, and contingency, emphasizing a type of collective journey that often mirrored the ethical topics covered in the course.
These changes made me acutely aware of one crucial factor for effective e-learning: communication. Without the ability to clarify issues through dialogue in a classroom setting, communication between faculty and students assumes far greater importance. It distilled in me the need for a clear and constant line of communication, particularly in written form.
These changes also brought exciting results for students. The necessary reassessment of course-delivery techniques meant that students also engaged in more regular written communication than previously. Their analytical skills improved as the course progressed—more so than usual, I believe, in a semester. Technical tools and activities provided another way to create an innovative learning community, despite the distances among us. Although these innovations are predominantly virtual, they offer important lessons that will remain useful even when teaching eventually returns to university campuses. They demonstrate the so-far-untapped potential of flexible course-delivery modes and education tools, which not only enhance the learning and analysis of politics but also bring together disparate individuals and scholarly communities in new ways.
Cultivating an Ethics of Collaboration, Inclusivity, and Care
In addition to opening up new opportunities, the shift to e-learning confronts us with challenges. Central among them is the accentuation of structural inequalities in student cohorts. Inequalities, of course, always exist: they emerge from differences in gender, race, culture, class, sexual orientation, and a range of other factors. In the case of online learning, these differences manifest in new ways. Not all students have equal access to fast, reliable Internet or a comfortable place to log in and safely participate. Moreover, not all students feel as secure and relaxed online as they do face to face (Casey Reference Casey2020).
Given the inevitability of inequalities, I sought to develop an ethics of collaboration, inclusivity, and care. This involved being explicit and upfront about structural challenges and including self-reflection as part of the learning process. We collectively discussed our privileges, our limits, and our disadvantages.
Key to accomplishing this was the establishment and cultivation of a sensitive and reflexive learning community. In this context, I perceived myself less as an instructor and more as a fellow learner whose key task was to set up a safe, collective online space—and, in doing so, elicit the best from the inevitable differences that exist in classrooms. In my case, this involved students from several different cultural contexts. It entailed providing the opportunity for them to draw on and share their own experiences so that we could all be challenged and enriched. This aligns with the type of nonhierarchical and student-focused learning that excites and prompts students to “transgress” conventional analysis and create new, transformative political ideas and practices (hooks Reference hooks1994).
Finally, an ethics of collaboration, inclusivity, and care requires more than a performative teaching technique or strategy to recognize and work through inequality. It also entails logistical aspects of teaching: it demands flexibility and sensitivity, for instance, with course feedback, deadlines, and individual learning needs of students.
Looking Forward with Emergency e-Learning
My two takeaway points from orchestrating a rapid transition to online learning, then, are largely positive. They question the business-as-usual model of conventional learning and create learning possibilities that go beyond what has been termed a “pandemic pedagogy” (Smith and Hornsby Reference Smith and Hornsby2020).
First is the obvious but important point: online teaching forces instructors to rethink teaching and learning pedagogies and tools. This involves assessing our courses and our learning aims and acquiring new technical skills, from video-based lectures to online seminars and other supporting software. Many of these rapidly changing techno-pedagogical opportunities are not relevant only to online learning but also can be used in future teaching activities, regardless of how our classes take place.
Second, faculty must be conscious of and work to address structural inequalities in our classrooms. These inequalities may become accentuated in an online setting; however, emergency e-learning provides opportunities to consider and foster more self-reflective and inclusive learning environments. We can reimagine our politics courses in ways that not only engage and excite graduate students but also recognize them as fellow scholars with unique experiences—both privileges and discriminations—and thus often unique needs. Doing so will have benefits that far outlast the rapid and improvised shift to online learning.
Acknowledgments
For insightful feedback, I thank this spotlight’s guest editors Michael M. Murphy and Eric D. Loepp. I also thank Roland Bleiker and anonymous reviewers at PS: Political Science & Politics.
