It sucks. But we’ll make it work.
Hm. Nobody pointed out the fact that I was running a day ahead of everyone’s schedule with yesterday’s update. So here is 23 March for a second time.
I promised I’d explain how I try to transpose an in-class activity to the online world. I feel bad for my students, because I know this activity worked really well, even with a group of 24 students last semester, and I already know it won’t be as fun. Probably if I give it enough time I’d come up with a good solution, but time is the one thing you don’t have when you only have two days to figure out the tech to go remote for more than a third of the semester.
A lot of the Japanese premodern history survey I teach focuses on arts and culture, rather than politics, big names and government stuff. So this week I opted to keep the section on late Muromachi arts. Last year, I had three or four work stations with large colour prints of objects and locations that were mentioned in our textbook: some bowls for the tea ceremony, the Ryōanji dry garden, sumi-e (ink wash paintings) etc. The students had read the chapter, and seen grainy pictures, but in class they had stickies and pens and they left their impressions at each workstation, and engaged in written dialogue with their colleagues. As they revisited the stations, they saw responses to their initial comments, and reflected some more on what they saw: connections with the textbook? materials we covered elsewhere? Japanese aesthetics as we encountered them earlier? What about the assertion that Zen Buddhism played a role? It made for a fruitful conversation and journey of discovery of many aspects of traditional Japanese culture as we imagine it nowadays.
In the transition to remote teaching, I’ve opted to get class-discussion onto Canvas discussion boards: first post by Tuesday, two responses to fellow students’ posts by Wednesday, Zoom-session on Thursday to deepen our insights based on what comes to the fore in the discussions. For a text, that’s easy enough. But for a gallery walk, or stations where the generation of ideas depends on people returning and responding again and again, that is not the best format: how do you capture the spontaneity of wandering from table to table, adding a few notes, floating back to a previously visited station, the funny drawings that started to appear, the references to memes, the quick explanations to each other or my succinct interventions, and all that goofing around that happens in a class context? I don’t know. But I knew I did not want to change the new structure we’re trying to get used to, as we’re still finding a new weekly rhythm with the posts and the Zoom sessions.
In the end, I went for a relatively low-tech solution: a google slide show, with three sets of images. I ask students to look through all sets, and then respond in the discussion with their ideas about two sets. I encourage them in the second round of responses to engage with students who focused on other materials, so that peer-learning can happen. As they explain how the sets of their focus complement or differ from the original poster’s, they have to verbalize their ideas more clearly. But that means I need to provide the correct information to identify the objects, and if possible links to additional information. And so instead of pulling out last year’s big print outs and spending 10 minutes on prepping the materials, I spent an hour or so putting together the slides, adding information in the presenter notes, and then I also recorded a brief video explaining how to find those notes and how to follow the links. (Many of my students work better with a “show, don’t tell” approach, and I can’t blame them!)
I’ll find out later this week how this went, but I already know that it’s not the same. #PandemicPedagogy in the trenches of the worldwide #Covid19Campus in action: it sucks, but somehow we’ll make it work.