3 Critical Digital Pandemic-Based Pedagogy A Conversation with Jesse Stommel and Sean Michael Morris

In the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic, when once-optional online pedagogy became mandatory and we were, strangely, becoming accustomed to the unpredictable governmental and institutional responses that directed how and when we could teach, Curtis Maloley and I reached out to Jesse Stommel and Sean Michael Morris for an interview to gather their reflections on pandemic-led pedagogy. Stommel and Morris are the authors of An Urgency of Teachers: The Work of Critical Digital Pedagogy. Their collective work is recognized in teaching and learning circles as the panacea of critical digital pedagogy, and as co-producers of the podcast Podagogies: A Teaching and Learning Podcast Maloley and I found ourselves continually reaching for their books, blogs, and Twitter advice as our online pedagogy took on the bleak aura of the “difficult, imperfect, physically and mentally draining, and profoundly time-consuming” genre of emergency online teaching in late capitalism (Samuels & Freeman, 2021, p. 246). Our talk took place following the inception of this book, at a troubling time when my previous understandings of online praxis—and “trouble”—were being eclipsed by unpredictable but undeniable fundamental changes to life and work.

Here, grounded in the widespread dissatisfaction of online teaching (plus the realization that it had suddenly been thrust on us all), Stommel and Morris reflect on the craft of teaching as one that can forefront the actions of trusting students and teachers, being in the moment online, and tapping into our individual and collective vulnerabilities even as a pandemic amplified the social inequities already inherent in traditional, pre-pandemic online pedagogy. We offer this interview excerpt, available in full as a Podagogies episode,¹ as a reminder of how it felt to be at the centre of a massive pedagogical shift. We position the interview early in this volume to honour Stommel and Morris’s foundational work in the area of critical digital pedagogy—a launching point toward the broader discussion about accessible online pedagogy. This discussion was made possible, in part, by their work resisting the conventional transfer of ableist, disembodied pedagogy into online and hybrid spaces and instead advocating for online pedagogy as social justice (Stommel et al., 2020). Below is a snippet of a recording from January 22, 2020, a conversation between experienced online pedagogues navigating that strange time between panic and praxis.

Curtis Maloley: What were your first thoughts about the way that postsecondary institutions were very suddenly doing this transition to remote delivery?

Jesse Stommel: The first thing that I remember thinking about and kind of feeling some ire about, to be honest, was the very frequent use of the phrase “pivot to online.” And the reason that this bothered me is that for years, in our work and sort of a central tenet that runs through our book, An Urgency of Teachers, is this idea that what happens in a face-to-face class, and what happens in an online course, are fundamentally different that you can’t just take what happens in a face-to-face course and neatly pour it into an online class.… My other issue with this idea of the pivot was it suggested a neat and tidy pivot back … [as if we] would all just pivot back and get to see each other once again. What we’ve seen to be true … [is] that there has been no neat and tidy pivot back to face-to-face.… I think that our work has fundamentally changed. And this moment is continuing to change our work in ways that we couldn’t have anticipated.

Sean Michael Morris: I think the first thought that I had was just, “Oh, no.” Jessie and I have been working on this for a very long time. We’ve been working together for about 20 years and through developing this whole idea of critical digital pedagogy and the kinds of online design that go along with it, the kinds of teaching methods, and that sort of thing that can kind of go along with it. And it’s really been very much a grassroots effort.… So, when we saw this happen, one of the first things I mentioned to Jesse was that this is probably the worst thing that could have happened to the work that we do. Because what was going to happen was everyone’s going to shift online without any thought, without really figuring it out. And so many people who don’t want to teach online, never want to teach online, students who never wanted to be online, are now suddenly going to be in a space of teaching and learning that, frankly, Jesse and I have always sort of considered less than the best possible.

Stommel: Well and also the idea of choice. I mean, so many of the people and students who are suddenly asked to learn online didn’t make a choice to do that. The truth is that not everybody is born to be an online teacher, not everybody is born to be an online student. There are different people who learn in different ways at different times in their lives. And one of the most important things is us getting to choose how we approach our education. And so, so many people being thrust into situations they had never planned for.… And then the other piece is that we’re also dealing with institutional crises that are affecting our work in such drastic ways, funding crises, students who are facing food and housing insecurity before the pandemic are now facing it even more. Students who have experienced chronic trauma or chronic illness suddenly now also dealing with an acute feeling of trauma and illness on top of that, so our work isn’t what it once was. And, again, I’ll say I don’t know that it is ever going to be or maybe never was what we thought it was.

Chelsea Temple Jones: What needs to happen now then? Where do we go from here?

Stommel: I think that there’s a really obvious answer for me, and I don’t see a lot of institutions jumping at this call that I’ve made pretty frequently, which is that institutions need to be investing in faculty development, and they need to be investing in student support. They need to stop investing their money in remote proctoring solutions and plagiarism detection services, in student retention, algorithmic student retention software packages, learning management systems. We need to recognize that what we didn’t have in this moment that we desperately needed was a robust emphasis on teaching and learning pedagogy, faculty development, teacher preparation. That was the disaster of this moment.

Morris: I have been this person during the entire pandemic saying I don’t believe in silver linings. And I’m not trying to say there’s a silver lining of the pandemic at all. But I do want to point out that—as proctoring services and as everyone’s been online and starting to encounter these same problems that a lot of the community around critical digital pedagogy had been talking about for a while, proctoring services, Turnitin, and surveillance—all of those sorts of things that have been common practice for a long time, but only for a portion of people who are learning because only a portion [are] … learning online, are now suddenly exposed to a lot more people. And we’re seeing that conversation widen now. And so people who were never even concerned about what was happening digitally are now suddenly very concerned [about] … what’s happening today.… I want to say too that a lot of the work that Jesse and I have done, maybe this sounds weird, … actually rises out of a sense of dissatisfaction. Neither of us actually like[s] teaching online. And that’s why we teach online. And that’s why we do this work. What we love about classroom teaching is not happening in online space. And so what we’re trying to do is figure out ways we can make that happen online.… So one possibility that might be coming at us is that dissatisfaction is much more widespread now. And so there’s a chance for bigger conversations to take place around what kind of pedagogies are necessary for really making online learning work.

Maloley: Do you want to maybe say a little bit about the theoretical foundation of that and how you approach learning in an online environment?

Stommel: [Our] work started our foundational research, and reading and encountering of pedagogy started with the ideas of critical pedagogy, and particularly the ideas of Paulo Freire, and the ideas of bell hooks, Henry Giroux, quite a few others working in that area, and then also tossing in who aren’t necessarily traditionally thought of as critical pedagogues. People like John Dewey, people like Peter Elbow. And so thinking about those ideas and sort of what’s at the heart of that work. So reading your world, teaching students to be critical observers of their world, toward the end of making change in their material circumstances and in the world more broadly, thinking about the relationship between students and teachers. And the fact that the hierarchical relationship between teachers and students is not particularly effective and doesn’t create a community that is hospitable [to] the kinds of learning that we want to have happen. And also thinking about student agency and how do students become full participants in their education? And what needs to happen? What barriers do we need to knock down? And, ultimately, our project with critical digital pedagogy was to think how does that work happen in digital space? And how do our digital technologies in some ways frustrate that kind of work? And also how does the digital provide affordances to support that work? An example … [is] the learning management system, Sean and I wrote a piece, it was a two-part blog post, and it was cheekily titled “If bell hooks Made a Learning Management System.” Ultimately, we argued that bell hooks wouldn’t make a learning management system.… She writes about connection, she writes about critical hope, she writes about joy, she writes about excitement, she writes about us seeing one another bringing our full selves to the work. And you think about the discussion forum inside the learning management system. Is that a place where we bring our full self? Is that a place where we see one another? Is that a space of excitement and joy and critical hope? The answer is no, it’s not. It’s not built to be that.

Morris: … One of the other aspects of the ways that critical pedagogy intersects with the digital is critical pedagogy in a Freireian tradition really wasn’t just about classrooms, it wasn’t about schooling. It was very much about helping people, especially oppressed people, people who are in lower classes, labouring classes, sort of begin to understand their world and be able to work toward change. That translates into a classroom environment in certain ways. But, ultimately, the work was social justice. It was work that took place outside of schools, … so teaching should sort of address that; when we’re in digital space, too, the idea of like an open pedagogy of a sense of learning happening on the actual web is really important. Because we have to recognize that what we’re doing is we’re not teaching students, we don’t want to teach students, to work inside of a [learning management system]. There’ll be no purpose behind that once they graduate. What we do want to do is help students learn how to be on the internet.

Jones: One piece of your work that I’ve come to really connect to is your writing on digital learning as a third space. It’s not this binary that we can move between, but it’s a third space, it’s something a little different. And I’m just wondering if you can speak about that more, … what you mean by a third space when you write about it that way.

Stommel: One of the things I think is really important is that we not only bring students into a process by which they help build their education but also that they help build the environment in the space for their education. And the idea of space when you’re talking about digital space is complicated. Where does it live? Where does the course live? I have a course assignment that I do with my students in a digital studies course where they have to rebuild the internet. And I asked questions like where is the internet? Who is the internet? Is the internet a person? Does the internet just have people? And you’re asking these kinds of questions to start to get them thinking about how it functions. It isn’t just a geographic location; the web is people. And so, if we think about how we move about in a space, like the web, it functions very differently than a college campus, there isn’t a neat and tidy corollary, you can’t go to, for example, the website of a college campus and have it in any way reproduce the physical space of the college campus.… And it’s one of the reasons why I like the idea of a third space, because it forces you to ask questions about how this space might function significantly differently. And also how we might engage and find one another in different ways in that space.

… I love those few minutes before class starts in a face-to-face classroom, where there’s just a hum in the room, and you’re maybe not talking to students, but just kind of overhearing a bunch of conversations, saying hello to people as they come in. And then I love that moment at the end of class where some people stay, and they linger, and they want to continue conversations. And maybe you’re talking to them as you walk out into the hall. Those are such idyllic kind[s] of classic college moments. But those are moments I love. And so, if you think about when you’re teaching online, and you’re learning and figuring out how to teach online, stop putting so much energy into reproducing the content, delivering content to students. Put all of your energy into thinking about how do I find those moments with my students? How do I do activities with my students that feel like that? … There aren’t easy answers in the learning management system, because those systems are not designed to reproduce or even care that those moments exist.

Maloley: I’ve been in some focus groups with both students and faculty members, and almost all of them brought up that exact point—those 10 minutes before class, the moments after class, in many ways, those are the most central to the learning. Those are the moments, you know, when learning feels most tangible and real for sure. Sean, what are your feelings about this?

Morris: I very much agree with what Jesse’s saying. I think the experience over 2020 has been interesting, because Jesse and I have been talking about this stuff for so many years. And yet here we had to practise what we preach in a way that we’ve never had to before. We’ve both given digital keynotes now, we’ve done digital workshops now, we’ve done all these things that we never thought we would have to do. And it’s been, even for us, … there’s been this kind of an adjustment, that adjustment comes again, from that sort of critical looking at what am I doing? Where am I? What is this space look[ing] like? What are the affordances? And what are their limitations? So, when COVID happened, one of the first things that sort of was my alarm was—I’m the director of [the] Digital Pedagogy Lab (DPL)—and the lab is traditionally a very much on-[the-]ground event, so much so that I call it a gathering. It’s a wonderful kind of learning experience to have. So now I had to try to bring that online. And I found myself thinking the same things that so many teachers I’ve talked to think: “Well, okay, if I do that, can I move it here?” … And I’m going to work with faculty all the way through and try to figure out how this is going to work. And so much of it did occupy that kind of third space. And one of the ways that I sort of describe that third space I think is sort of coy, but I talk about things being “synchronish.” So things aren’t synchronous or asynchronous but synchronish. And digital pedagogy learning is very much a sort of synchronish thing, it takes place over a single week, but over 20 different time zones. So people are not attending at the same time; no one’s attending at the same time. But they’re all kind of learning at the same pace. They’re all experiencing the event in the same ways across those time zones. And in different spaces. I also really encourage people to bring whatever space they’re in into whatever they’re doing, into whatever learning they’re having, whether that means that they don’t have as much time to do the thing they need to do or they want to do. Or that means that they’re bringing their kids in, or they’re bringing their spouse in, or whatever that might mean. Or they’re doing Digital Pedagogy Lab on this side of the screen, and they’re doing their work on that side of the screen, kind of thing.… But to try to really think about, well, what space are you actually in? How does that then become part of the learning experience?

Stommel: I think a really good example of this is suddenly students are learning online, from their childhood bedrooms.… And yet we demand things of them, like you have to turn your camera on. Well, what does that mean for a student who’s learning from their childhood bedroom, what kind of invasion of privacy is that requirement? It has a good philosophy potentially underlying it—we want to be able to see each other, that’s valuable—but you can’t want to see others [at another’s] expense. And then, interestingly, I know folks who turn on those virtual backgrounds, and sometimes those virtual backgrounds are about screening that private space that you don’t want to share. And that’s a really valuable thing to be able to do. On the other hand, I think sometimes people put those screens on because they’re being asked by their teacher, being asked by their boss, being asked by even just the culture of an organization to not let their private light bleed into their professional life or their academic life. And right now that’s impossible. My daughter has Zoom-bombed so many of my meetings, so many of my classes, and to try and keep her out would be to basically try and imagine myself as a not full human being right now. I have to work in an environment where my kids and my dog and my husband are there, and they’re part of the work. And so, yes, like, we have to be attentive to the idea of creating the option of privacy and protecting those private spaces.

Maloley: If I’m an instructor, and I really want to begin to practise some of the things we’re talking about today, what would be your advice to me in terms of how I might start doing something like this, in particular if I have a huge class or a class that has so many boundaries and barriers that are not of my choosing?

Stommel: I just have a short answer.… Several years ago I challenged people on Twitter to come up with their four-word pedagogies, try and see if they could explore their pedagogical approach in four words, and inspired by the idea of a six-word story where someone writes a narrative in six words. Tons of amazing, amazing responses to that. But mine was “start by trusting students.” And I’ve stuck with that sense. And it continues to resonate with me almost any paragraph of my syllabus, almost any decision I make in my teaching, I can bring it back and let it sit next to the idea of start by trusting students. And it becomes almost a test of whether or not my approach is going to work, really. And I think the one thing about start by trusting students is that it scales. Trust scales. There … [are] lots of things that don’t scale, but trust does, and it scales immensely.

Morris: Whenever someone wants advice, it’s often a best practice they’re looking for, something that they can plug in and play. And that just doesn’t exist in critical pedagogy. So something like start with trusting students is what I would refer to as a habitus, the habitus of critical pedagogy, the place from which you teach, the place from which you make up the new rules, and the place from which you improvise. And getting in touch with what that is for you, as a teacher, recognizing how do I teach what’s really important to me, about my students, about my subject, and then teach from there, and don’t give that piece up, but then teach from there.… Just blow the rules out the window, because essentially, if you’re teaching from there, students will learn, you’re going to do your job, everything’s going to go okay, as long as you’re teaching from that spot.

Stommel: I guess I would say one other thing, which is that the advice that I would have for institutions is kind of a corollary to my advice for teachers, which is start by trusting teachers. Teachers’ work is deeply idiosyncratic; teaching is a craft. It’s something that people have worked on over many, many years and honed, suddenly telling all of your teachers you must teach inside the learning management system. That’s not started by trusting teachers. It’s not started by trusting the best instinct of teachers who know their students way better than the institution does in many cases.

Jones: … I think we should go back and think a little bit about what we were mentioning earlier, what you were saying earlier, about the institutional responsibility around this. I mean, you’ve described this process of online teaching that isn’t particularly appealing; it’s not always very desirable. And a reason for that is because these traditions, these pedagogical traditions that many institutions have sort of built up and held on to so tightly, are still being enforced. So how can institutions be accountable for what is happening now? And what can they do to create an environment where critical digital pedagogy is possible?

Stommel: Maybe this isn’t quite to answer that question, because I kind of did. Pay teachers better is my immediate answer.

Morris: I rarely speak at the institutional level. Generally, I’m much more concerned with teachers and students and, from that grassroots perspective, the idea of change coming from the bottom and going up. But one example actually comes out of the University of Colorado, Denver, where I work. We have a new chancellor, and as soon as she came on the first thing she did was … what she called a listening tour, where, essentially, she had open Zoom sessions where people could just come and talk to her. And it was really cool. And, of course, there were certain things that needed to be said, and certain ideas that need[ed] to be conveyed in those, but that listening is actually really, really key. It’s something that we do for students, it’s something we should be doing for teachers, we should be listening to their needs.

When this happened, when the pivot occurred, at least in the States—right?—we had no leadership from the government around it. And so there was no “Here’s how we’re going to respond. Here’s the things you need to be concerned about.” So every university was doing a different thing. And within universities, different departments were doing different things. And so it was complete chaos. What could have happened at that moment was for people to sort of say, “Okay, we’re taking a pause, let’s get together and talk, let’s figure this out.” And there wasn’t that kind of community situation, there was a kind of control.… I mean, faculty development is great. But some of the best faculty developers are people actually in class teaching and talking to each other about how teaching happens. I mean, obviously, pay them more, and pay them so much more. And give people secure jobs. That’s absolutely essential. But let’s really start dialoguing about all of this.