“It’s the spacelessness that gets you. You’ve been staring at the screen for months since the virus hit. Your students were flat, or seemed to be, just as you appear to them. But Fall, you tell yourself, will be different. You’re acquainted with Zoom now. You’ve read a few articles on ‘best practice’ in online teaching: More asynchronous activities. More time in breakout rooms during class. More use of tech as tech. You sign on and summon your best teacher-of-the-year manner. You hope that what you do will remain three-dimensional even as your students appear as tiny thumbnails, the listening heads or black boxes to which you appeal for attention. The reality, though, is that your own flatness is as apparent to your students as theirs is to you.”
Photo by Blake Nissen for The Boston Globe via Getty
Do NOT fret! The shift to online learning and teaching has left many stumbling to create a cohesive learning environment; one that enriches both the students and the teacher despite the digital void that exists between. In this essay recently published in Psyche, William Germano and Kit Nicholls challenge the idea that learning and teaching in a 1-D classroom will create flat responses from students, and instead offer the notion to close the distance between not only students and teachers, but between students and the course material.