Robert Squillace (Clinical Professor and Educational Technology Liaison, Liberal Studies, New York University)
Years before the sudden mass migration of higher education online brought about by the COVID-19 virus, instructors of courses that largely met face-to-face had begun to experiment with video conferencing. In the instances I know best, instructors on two or more different continents would conduct periodic joint sessions, bringing together students in specially-equipped conference rooms for what were meant to be globally enriching discussions. Excitement soon yielded to a recognition that connecting students in distant cities per se brought no special value or interest to the class. While instructors who remembered when a mere transatlantic call was almost prohibitively expensive got a certain charge out of seeing and speaking with students on the other side of an ocean, for students the mere act of real-time video conversation across the world was routine. Unless such courses were carefully managed to provide students with a particular reason to speak with others who were far away, the experience could prove merely awkward, discussion feeling as forced and artificial as conversation with a group of strangers with whom one has unaccountably been assigned to sit at a cousin’s wedding. In particular, the goal of enriching students’ learning by providing a global experience was defeated by the very means of connecting them. Rather than bringing students in New York to Paris or Shanghai, the video conferences connected one classroom with a similar-looking classroom on the featureless plane of the internet.
The nature of online meeting spaces is atopic, and has not been made less so by innovations in web conferencing. The Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, and Zoom rooms in which remote instruction occurs are blank spaces with none of the accumulated meanings and associations that transform a space–even a temporarily-inhabited space like a physical classroom–into a place, to use a formulation developed by the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan (Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, University of Minnesota Press, 1977). Online spaces are marked by the same sorts of power differentials as physical places; indeed, the hierarchies are even more profound, as permission to act in certain ways is conveyed not by symbolic codes that influence behavior but by digital codes that absolutely restrict or permit certain behaviors based on one’s identity in the space. (Zoom’s response to the bad publicity it received for instances of what quickly became known as “Zoom-bombing” was to reset the default permissions on what visitors could do in a session and to redirect coding work to security features.) But the spaces of online connection remain atopic because they are all and always the same, unmarked by any of the accumulated history and the deployment of semiotic objects that differentiate physical spaces. The atopic nature of the online spaces of remote instruction may explain the extreme popularity of virtual backgrounds, which playfully restore a sense of difference and location to the blank slate of online space. But, of course, the sense of place introduced by such images can never be anything but ironic, a covert reminder that we are not in the location depicted in the backdrop, which serves as a presence reminding us of the absence of physical place.
Paradoxically, however, I feel that my ongoing experience of remote instruction during the COVID-19 quarantine provides a model of global difference that the physical classroom disguises. While the online space in which we meet our students is in itself a featureless, ahistorical, neutral atopia, it provides a glimpse into the physical places from which each of our students is accessing the space. Less a window than a pinhole, the views we have of students’ living conditions in their homes nevertheless reveal differences in circumstances that the communal space of the physical classroom occludes. Even when a student chooses not to activate their camera (an option I hope everyone affords their students), the quality of their wifi and the time of day at their location introduce difference. While one student may join from a well-furnished, spacious, and quiet room, another may be in cramped quarters with poor wifi and family members passing continually in and out of frame. For me, remote instruction has reminded me that our students silently bring very different worlds into the classroom. This is knowledge I cannot bring directly into my teaching, whether in a virtual or physical location, since every student should have the right to determine for themselves how much of their identity they choose to reveal or not to reveal, but the shape of global inequity subtly modeled in the online atopia of remote instruction will always remain a reference point for my pedagogy.