1 Caring Online A Justice-Oriented Approach to Online Pedagogy

Teaching Online before and beyond the Pandemic

As the COVID-19 pandemic began to open up new requirements for teaching at our local universities, we found ourselves faced with the complexity of teaching online from a variety of different angles. At the time of proposing this chapter, both of us had experience teaching online. Jenna had five years of online teaching experience with five different courses that implemented vastly different pedagogical approaches to activate various mad and disability studies curricula. Once the pandemic shifted classes online, Jenna was able to help transition her one in-person course online with relative ease while also supporting her teaching team to implement online teaching tools with which they had less familiarity. Fady had experience teaching online in three courses over several years, and post-pandemic he was an instructional designer at a teaching and learning centre at a major Canadian university that helped faculty and students to transition to emergency remote and then online teaching and learning. In our various roles, working with experienced educators in learning new ways of teaching (new and old material) forced us to ask questions about the significance of the context of doing this work online. Many of our taken-for-granted perceptions of teaching difficult knowledge online were opened up and illuminated in new ways as we worked with others through their questions, worries, fears, hesitations, and excitement. It is in this shift, in which more and more faculty and instructors are teaching online, from emergency response to intentional pedagogy, that we perceive the importance of our project. Our intention in this chapter is to provide faculty and sessionals with an approach to teaching difficult knowledge online that does not abandon the significance of care. Care must be rooted, however, in a political orientation that connects to the communities that we are a part of, informs our curriculum development and pedagogical approaches, and is responsive to the people present in our classroom spaces (see Grant-Smith & Payne, 2021; Shelton, 2020). We thus propose a justice-oriented approach to online teaching and learning.

Teaching Difficult Knowledge Online

Central to our conversation about teaching online is the nature of what we teach online. We hold true to the notion that classroom spaces are political. One of the many components that make our learning environments political is the nature of the knowledge explored, often referred to in the literature as difficult knowledge. For our purposes here, it is important to outline what we mean by difficult knowledge and how it affects the online classroom. Difficult knowledge refers to “social and historical content … that is traumatic or hard to bear as well as learning encounters that are cognitively, psychologically and emotionally destabilising for the learner” (Bryan, 2016, p. 10).

Working with this definition, Bryan (2016) then helps us to explore the concept of difficult knowledge through the element of emotionality—a component of learning that she claims is undertheorized, even with a significant affective turn in education. When considering emotionality alongside the concept of difficult knowledge, it is important to consider the discomfort that both learners and educators experience within the classroom space. As Bryan outlines, there are multiple ways to frame the cause and effect of this discomfort. For instance, when teaching how racism materializes in education, she discusses how she initially perceived the students as being defiant while framing herself as the educator lacking control or professional competence. This, however, as Bryan outlines, frames the relationship between student and teacher within the banking model of education, as if teachers are making deposits in their students, as outlined by Paulo Freire (1970/2000). For Bryan, emotionality allows for a shift in this framework.

By considering the experiences of difficult knowledge in the classroom through emotionality, Bryan (2016, p. 11) allows us to think through the role that ignorance plays in the learning process, as resistance to “confronting difficult truths in ourselves and the world.” Ignorance, as she explains, goes against the very intervention of what she refers to as “the pedagogy of discomfort,” a process of discovery that alters deeply embedded ideas about the world and how it operates. As Bryan explains further, introducing emotionality into the theorization of difficult knowledge in the classroom allows us to consider our proximity to the injustice around us and our complicity with these systems of power and oppression. Emotionality disrupts the edifice that students are just learners and replaces it with a new reality: some students are also implicated in the production of injustice.

Alternatively, Zembylas (2014, p. 390) argues that “affect theory enables the theorization of difficult knowledge as an intersection of language, desire, power, bodies, social structure, materiality, and trauma.” Through a conversation about vulnerability and trauma, Zembylas outlines the limited theorization that exists on how difficult knowledge, in the form of traumatic representations, is both received and handled by teachers and learners. Pitt and Britzman (2003) are central in theorizations of difficult knowledge, helping readers to work through the representation of difficult knowledge, ethical obligations, and radical hope. However, what Zembylas (2014) offers to this conversation is a shift from what the author considers too much focus on issues of representation that takes away from the political and activist potentialities of difficult knowledge within classrooms.

Difficult Knowledge as Political Pedagogical Intervention

Shifting our concerns from the issue of how we represent difficult knowledge, and how it opens up space for radical hope, we position such knowledge as a political pedagogical intervention. The difficult knowledge brought into our mad and disability studies classrooms is born from social movement organizing. To disconnect this knowledge from its activist orientations and political engagements is both to decontextualize the foundations of where the knowledge comes from and to limit its potential to create justice-oriented change. Although as Zembylas (2014, p. 408) argues “the affective turn enhances our vocabulary to recognize the psychosocial complexities for teachers/learners—of living with trauma in the midst of powerful social, affective, historical, and political legacies”—it does not adequately consider the political implications. In conversation with the work of Zembylas, in this chapter we are particularly interested in centring what it means to teach difficult knowledge in the online classroom while considering the role of care and justice within the work that we do. In this way, we heed Zembylas’ contestation that “good pedagogy and good curriculum are those that accommodate difficult knowledge in ways that both console and provoke in order to engage learners ethically and politically with the consequences of difficult knowledge” (p. 408).

Affect and emotion, largely rooted in psychoanalytical theories, are central in much of the literature on difficult knowledge (Britzman, 1998, 2013; Pitt & Britzman, 2003). Beyond this, one way that difficult knowledge is framed is through the concept of trauma (Britzman, 2000; Pitt & Britzman, 2003; Simon, 2011; Zembylas, 2014). Trauma, in complex ways, is deeply relevant not just to the content of the knowledge that we explore within our classroom spaces but also within the communities in which we engage and/or belong. It is through trauma that many teachers and learners think about how to set up appropriate learning environments to tend to the emotional and psychical experience of engaging difficult knowledge. Trauma, as Carter (2015) explains, should be considered a political issue and not equivalent to being pushed outside one’s comfort zone. Through trauma-informed approaches, teachers and learners highlight the need for creating safe/r spaces (Boostrom, 1998; Holley & Steiner, 2005; Sherwood et al., 2021). Although there is a wide array of literature available on the topic of safe/r spaces, one thing agreed upon is that they are contentious at best (Arao & Clemens, 2013; Barrett, 2010). Some of the multiple ways that safe/r spaces are described are as necessary to teaching with and about trauma (Carter, 2015), as a point of privilege (Carter, 2015), and as a practice that undermines academic freedom and rigour (Robbins, 2016).

Content Notes, Trigger Warnings, and Embracing of Discomfort

One method utilized for creating safe spaces is the practice of trigger warnings or content notes. According to Robbins (2016, p. 1), “trigger warnings originated in feminist blogs and online forums to alert readers that the posted material contained content that might exacerbate or trigger post-traumatic stress disorder or other extreme emotional reactions that might be stressful to victims of sexual abuse.” As a practice, trigger warnings are similarly contentious in creating safety within learning environments. In one way, trigger warnings can be seen as a practice used to avoid retraumatizing students. Thus, though educators not in favour of their use fear the possibility of limiting students’ engagement with difficult knowledge outside their comfort zones, Carter (2015) considers it through the lens of access and accommodation. Seeing trigger warnings in this way shifts the conversation away from the creation of safe spaces. Instead of seeing it as avoidance, Carter references the work of Price (2011) by taking up the practice specifically through a disability studies approach. In this way, Carter specifically outlines the experience of being triggered in the context of psychiatric disabilities. Doing this removes the question of whether the issue is about the avoidance of difficult knowledge and instead sees trigger warnings and content notes as ways to provide accommodations to those who have experienced trauma in their lives.

When we mobilize difficult knowledge within the disability and mad studies classroom, our inclination is to consider the practice of content notes and trigger warnings as an effort of inclusion. However, as we have written elsewhere, inclusionary practices are not in fact central to our own pedagogical impulses (Snyder et al., 2019). In this way, when we begin to open up the conversation to access, care, and justice, we are working alongside literature such as Carter (2015, p. 122), in reference to Knoll (2009), suggesting that access is in fact “about analyses of systems of power and oppression.” This is, when we engage in these practices online, and in particular when teaching difficult knowledge online, as Carter aptly puts it, we are not making claims about creating safe spaces. As such, teaching online while engaging difficult knowledge is never about avoiding discomfort. Furthermore, it distinctly approaches the practice of access within its own realm of political possibilities. In this way, we turn to scholars such as Dolmage (2017) to indicate that our practices of access—whether framed through safe space, care, or universal design—are always centred on the messiness of access. Dolmage refers to the work of Price (2011), in which access is understood through its potential to “collide” and “conflict” with the learning environment (both between the learners and between the teachers). We agree with Fritsch (2016), who describes access as friction, as both a method “enabling contact” and a “kind of attack.”

Turning to the work of Price (2011) and Kafer (2013), Carter (2015) thinks through trigger warnings as enriching and expanding with the recognition that our disability studies classrooms are distinctly colonial sites. In this way, we can root our understanding of the online classroom not as spaceless and landless but as spaces where systems of power exist and unfold through how we engage difficult knowledge in active ways (see Cheuk & Ignagni, Chapter 7, this volume). More than just unfolding in the online classroom, systems of power are mobilized and exacerbated. The online classroom is not inherently less racist or less colonial and certainly is not more accessible. Online classrooms require the equitable distribution of resources by the state to ensure that all students have access to the internet. This is simply not a guarantee. An online curriculum designed for an imagined middle-class family home with separate spaces, access to computers and printers, and other “common” household materials ignores the lived reality of so many students living in different and more complex arrangements.

Situating the mobilization of difficult knowledge, and the pedagogical practices taken within and in relation to mad and disability studies, we are particularly interested in the literature that values knowledge as being both unsettling and disruptive. Again, we have written more about our curricular approach elsewhere (see Snyder et al., 2019), but to provide some context here we note that disability and mad studies are disruptive pedagogies because they reimagine loss and pain in ways that push back against the social script. Loss becomes potential, and pain is both embodied and embedded—an affective and material quality. Histories are rewritten in these disciplines that unearth the taken-for-granted conception of the normal and normative human bodymind. In fact, through disability and mad studies, the human is rewritten in relation to other humans, non-humans, and more-than-human elements that shift our collective perceptions of where our bodyminds begin and end. Unpacking these ideas with students in the classroom—in-person or online—is disruptive. More than simply evoking a sense of discomfort, our discipline can reconfigure students’ reality and sense of wholeness. We are inviting them, in a clear act of justice, to think of their bodyminds in relation to others, animals, nature, and the planet. This is disruptive knowledge.

Although difficult knowledge and disruptive/unsettling pedagogy are cornerstones of our pedagogical praxis, it is important to differentiate them from unnecessary and harmful use of damage-centred knowledge. The latter, in direct reference to Indigenous communities and experiences, is understood as research that remains focused on the pain and pathology of Indigenous communities. As Tuck (2009, p. 416) explains, though this type of knowledge creation and translation is intended to mobilize resources and changes, it is flawed in how it maintains flattened narratives of Indigenous communities that reinforce stereotypes of Indigenous people as broken. In a similar way, representations of madness and disability can take on characteristics of what Reid (Costa et al., 2012) has written previously about, patient porn—the overreliance on stories of madness that benefit those in positions of power and fail to address issues of social justice relevant to mad communities.

For this reason, when we teach difficult knowledge, our focus is not on telling histories of trauma and loss alone; we also tell stories of resistance, change, and possibility. As Tuck (2009) and Calderon (2016) suggest, as a way to challenge damage-centred research, knowledge creation and translation can cultivate desire, develop complex narratives, and challenge colonial framings through multiplicity and complexity. In order to do this, it necessitates that we address the issues surrounding not just the content of what we teach but also the impact of how it is mobilized in the classroom and the navigation of how it is taken up by both teachers and learners. Through this, we consider literature such as Ejiogu and Ware (2019), hooks (1992), and Razack (2007) to unpack the role of whiteness within classroom spaces and how it affects both what we teach and how we teach it. In this chapter, we work from the starting point that difficult knowledge is a necessary part of our teaching strategy. The authors named above remind us that what is important is how we teach difficult knowledge.

The Challenge of Caring Online

In this section, we aim to outline some of the difficulties of teaching difficult knowledge online—those that we have seen unfold over our years of experience, those that we have supported our colleagues through in our various positions, and those that we perceive as shifting in the context of a pandemic. Although we cannot presume to know what post-pandemic teaching will look like, we can consider a breadth of complexities as we frame the problem as we see it now. One thing that we know, as we compare our experiences of in-person and online teaching and learning, is that teaching difficult knowledge online adds a number of challenges given the distance, the loss of immediacy within the style and format of interactions, and the loss of capacity to interject, mediate, respond to, hear, or challenge students directly and at the moment. When providing content notes and/or trigger warnings online, we have options such as leaving students written notes and recorded messages within our video lectures. When in-person, one of the authors invites students to interrupt lectures with how they are feeling so as to work through the emotions together and as a class. Although this is still possible in online synchronous classrooms, it is impossible in asynchronous approaches.

Online teaching takes away our opportunities to provide students with moments of reassurance or to console them after class or in the hallways following a difficult session, and it changes students’ ability to access or engage us through informal discussions in office hours or more relaxed settings. Finding these “moments” in an online environment is challenging since learning management systems are not designed to reproduce those moments or even care that they exist. We do not suggest that the above-mentioned spaces of caring happen without fault; as the literature points out, teaching difficult knowledge is difficult. The above musing is a recognition of three things: (1) transferring our skills of caring to online teaching environments requires creative adaptations, (2) doing so must take into account how our approaches affect the students themselves, and (3) our approaches to how we teach difficult knowledge ultimately must align with the values, goals, and purposes of teaching difficult knowledge.

Herein lies one of our core values of teaching difficult knowledge: care. As we understand it through our community-based work and our pedagogical praxis, care is a way to approach what we do through a centring of justice. Centering care in the work that we do is a way of attending to the larger social and political calls to create system-level changes in our institutional spaces. In consideration of the foundational theoretical underpinnings of care as outlined by Maynard (2017), it is necessary to ground this conceptualization of care within the frameworks of black feminist thought as a way to respond to a rich body of work that comes before us. Maynard provides meaningful details in how she integrates this approach not just as an analytical framework to approach the content that she teaches but also as a tool for creating communities of learning as she teaches students about the role of police forces and prisons in a carceral state. Care is a way to attend to teaching differently as well as a way to attend to content critically. We also see an ethics of care as a central praxis within mad and disabled communities (Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018), one that attends to bodymind differences in a way that aligns with the core values of our pedagogical praxis.

Care in a mad and disability context necessitates interdependent relationships, centring of the experiences of those most marginalized, attention to and dismantling of power hierarchies, and an intersectional approach to how we work together across experiences of difference (Berne, 2015). By turning to such thinkers and community organizers, we aim to acknowledge the labour of black feminist thought when thinking through our practices of care. Engaging an ethics of care in this way, with a consideration of its implications for intersectional communities, requires us to attend to care not just as a pedagogical tool but also as a contested political praxis. Caring, then, in this context, is mobilized as a tool for teaching difficult knowledge as a practice rooted in justice. Acknowledging the role of an ethics of care as central in education is not new (see Noddings, 1984/2003). We believe that the work of caring in our teaching practices is even more pressing in the online classroom.

We find ourselves left with the question of how we transfer the essential quality of teaching with care—especially for those students most affected by the course content—now that we are all online. Although practices of care in-person are not inherently simpler or more straightforward, most people have less familiarity with how to cultivate and nurture care in virtual spaces. The extant literature seemingly reduces the concept of care to an instructor’s ability to communicate adequately, keep up with emails, provide effective feedback, and ensure a safe learning space, more often than not left undefined (Grant-Smith & Payne, 2021). And though there is no doubt that these practices matter, equating care with base-level administrative duties fails to get at the core issues at hand. Caring online, we believe, is about more than adequate communication. Through this approach to care, we also mean a deprivileging of Western and neo-liberal conceptions of knowledge. Furthermore, power, in justice-oriented models of care, is reorganized and distributed much more equitably. Care for us involves the ongoing acknowledgement from everyone in the classroom of our differences and an openness to engage with these differences as possibilities that can shape the classroom for the better.

Radical Love: A Justice-Oriented Online Approach

Up to now, we have discussed the significance of a pedagogy of care for teaching difficult knowledge online. We want to extend our conception of care to include two important themes: love and justice. Our focus is on the latter, but we do not think that it is possible to discuss a justice-oriented approach to online teaching—one that cares for students—without first describing our understanding of love and its intimate connection to teaching and liberation.

Discussions that tie together love and teaching are not new, of course. Love is a tenet of teaching and a central part of the canonical workings of education’s critical pedagogy figures: Freire (1970/2000), Gómez (2015), hooks (2000). Their main arguments are the same: love, specifically radical love, reorients our relations to one another and demands the removal of hierarchies and the establishment of a different way of communicating and dialoguing. As hooks (2000, p. 121) argues, “domination cannot exist in any social situation where a love ethic prevails.” Taking up radical love might be difficult for individuals invested in traditional models of teaching because it requires some risk from them: that is, to “relinquish oppressive practices in the classroom” (Douglas & Nganga, 2015, p. 64), practices that sustain hierarchical models of knowledge and learning. Love, therefore, acts to re-/establish our relations with one another in the classroom or online. Certainly, love works to remove possibilities of the domination of one group/individual over another.

Caring and radical love, therefore, share an approach, that of undoing traditional ways of teaching and learning. They are both focused on the inclusion of knowledge and ideas from other sources, not just the instructor or a specific canon. It is an opening up of ways of knowing and being and learning in the classroom. We could end our theorization of education here with a connection between caring and love, but that would continue inevitably to situate education within the confines of university spaces—classrooms, learning management engines, and labs. Orienting toward justice, as we will discuss, is necessary to open up ways of learning about difficult topics that does more to critique university history, traditional teaching approaches, the co-opting of access, and most importantly the imagined contemporary university student. Let’s start with access.

As Mingus (2011) argues, “we must understand and practice an accessibility that moves us closer to justice, not just inclusion or diversity.” We contend that accessibility as a practice itself might be lost. And, if not lost, then co-opted to such an extent as not to resemble the accessibility that Mingus was referring to over a decade ago when she wrote those words. Access is now everywhere. It is all over our institutions of higher education, and it is certainly part of the discourse in going online—before and even more so after COVID-19. Going online, for many disabled students, faculty, and staff, was an example of successful accessibility practice. However, this access has not, in any real way, moved us closer to any real sense of justice. Access, when we experience it in higher education, is often just a slightly better version of the accommodation model. Instructors include accommodation or accessibility statements; they are more flexible regarding due dates; they might even include materials that describe or discuss disability/mental health from critical viewpoints.

We do not deny that these are significant, important, and hard-won changes, but they occur in only certain parts of higher education. There are still too many corners of the institution that continue to practise a bygone age of disability exclusion that has no place in the contemporary university. Still, this accessibility is not moving us toward justice, and it certainly is not steeped in pedagogies of care or love. Even after global shifts in education following the COVID-19 pandemic, we are seeing and experiencing three-hour synchronous lectures, adherence to deadlines, reading lists unchanged since the pandemic, assignment instructions that fail to reflect our time and place, and demands to keep things as they are—to prevent a loss of rigour or academic integrity (see Jungic, 2020).

For all of these reasons and more, we want to abandon access and accessibility as models for thinking about teaching and learning online and consider approaches informed by care, love, and justice. We define a justice-oriented approach to teaching and learning online as one that acknowledges the role that universities played in excluding bodyminds¹ of difference from spaces of learning for centuries and that continue to do so through the adherence to traditional pedagogical approaches that stem from the Industrial Revolution and are perpetuated through neo-liberal logics. We envision a justice-oriented approach that challenges its learners, recognizes their expertise and possibilities for contributions, and cares for them deeply, knowing that their pasts are more complex, their current times competitive and anxiety inducing, and their futures more challenging and unknowable than ever before. This is an approach that sees in students possibilities for change, revolution, and acknowledgement that some of them are already engaged in these efforts in their communities. It is an approach that foregrounds love—knowing that our work in teaching and learning is not about preparing students for future employment. Our task is to create a caring space where students learn how to learn—including how to learn about difficult knowledge—so that they will continue to do so forever.

Unlike traditional methods, a justice-oriented approach imagines within learning spaces disabled, d/Deaf, mad, and chronically ill students; black, Indigenous, and people of colour students; women, queer, and trans students; fat students; and students of all types. Their histories are acknowledged, their personal/political stories are recognized, and their desires are supported and encouraged. A justice-oriented approach, therefore, requires faculty and sessionals to understand that the decisions they make, the materials they use in class, the assignments they create, and their synchronous approach versus asynchronous approach are not apolitical. Regardless of the subject matter or the disciplinary approach, we have to unearth and acknowledge the histories of exclusion in our fields of study so as to communicate this difficult knowledge to our students and to ensure that our field grows in the direction of justice. This process does not take place at one point in time but is ongoing, constantly in motion. In the online space, it has meant legitimating students’ personal narratives (Migueliz Valcarlos et al., 2020) by acknowledging their homes, families, partners, or children; their work schedules; and their access to materials, computers, the internet, or other technology. It means considering the role that online teaching, and other forms of educational technology, can play in remaking educational spaces when their use is informed by a crip technoscience (Hamraie & Fritsch, 2019) and histories of tinkering and hacking within disability communities toward crip futures (Kafer, 2013). It also means that we need to acknowledge the material things that make up teaching and learning outside the institution that allow it to perform its central task. We have learned that it is not just the buildings or the land or any of the physical parts but also our relations with one another and the sharing of space (digital or otherwise) that comprise the university in which learning takes place.

Many reading this will imagine that a justice-oriented approach involves more work. This, in fact, might be true at first. However, this work is not accomplished in silos or alone. It is work that should be conducted across all levels of the university and through the online tools that we share. It must also not fall on the most marginalized or those in precarious positions of employment (Grant-Smith & Payne, 2021). It is also not all on the faculty or sessionals but it must include the students and the community. After all, this approach is founded upon conceptions of love that move away from acts of domination. Therefore, we must reimagine relationships within teaching and learning as interdependent, in which students contribute to the development of the course and to each other’s learning as well as that of the instructors. At the start of the pandemic, several authors, in some thought-provoking articles, invited instructors to reimagine student contributions. They suggested asking students to develop course learning outcomes. Others suggested having students co-facilitate courses, especially graduate courses, in which this practice is already popular. In massive online open courses (MOOCs), especially those designed rhizomatically, students not only select the learning outcomes but also co-write the course outlines. In Chapter 8 of this volume, Stevens and McCall speak to leveraging participatory design as a way to make first-year writing courses more inclusive. In addition to these examples, we can imagine a more even redistribution of responsibility for teaching and learning when it comes specifically to the production of access in the practice of shared notes or note taking, in peer-reviewed grading, and in student-versus-student engagement. Decentring the expert is not just good teaching practice, or a clever way to manage or eliminate overwork for the instructor, but also a more caring and just teaching and learning space since it acknowledges everyone’s possible contributions. Students from different social locations, experiences, and ideologies are invited to engage in dialogue and debate understood by everyone as inherently valuable.

Conclusion

Surely, one of the benefits of the pandemic will be that it offers many of us a chance to think deeply about our teaching practices. Going online, as troublesome as it was and continues to be, did unsettle our taken-for-granted approaches to teaching and learning. This shift felt uneasy. It stirred feelings of dread by having to understand a new learning management system, to distinguish synchronous and asynchronous approaches, and to determine ways to ensure students’ participation and engagement. It also exposed the inequities between teaching positions. Full-time faculty were paid to prepare for this transition and given support through the hiring of TAs, whereas sessionals often had inadequate resources to prepare and were not compensated for the additional hours that they worked. These inequities, among many others that we have not named or unpacked, have significantly affected people’s lives. Yet we also know that the feelings of discomfort often attached to major change can be productive. Much like teaching difficult knowledge as a disruptive pedagogy, we need to sit in discomfort as we transition from traditional pedagogical models to a justice-oriented approach founded upon a pedagogy of care, steeped in radical love. We need to remember our embodied responses to change and understand that, like getting through these past few years, we can orient ourselves differently to teaching and learning to make higher education—in-person and online—a more caring, loving, and just place for us and our students.

A justice-oriented approach makes things uneasy. It is troubling and disruptive. But rather than seeing these as bad qualities, we cherish the generative possibilities that flow from their upheaval. After all, universities were never designed for individuals with bodymind differences. For centuries, universities have continued to operate as white supremacist organizations of knowledge. This has not changed since going online. What is exciting, of course, is that it could change.

Note

1. 1   See Clare (2017), Price (2015), and Schalk (2018) for more information on the term “bodymind.”

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