Remote teaching has revealed the importance for students of learning new skills and taking creative risks without being watched, argues Maggie Melo // September 29, 2021
This fall semester is invoking a familiar distressing level of uncertainty as colleges and universities navigate the implications of the highly transmissible COVID-19 Delta variant. Compounding the troubling upticks in hospitalization and positive COVID-19 testing across the United States are questions about how the academic year will unfold. A recognizable conversation about the possibility of an abrupt transition from face-to-face to remote learning during the semester is re-emerging across social media.
In addition to these concerns, I’m worried about losing a feature of virtual learning: our ability to turn off our Zoom cameras, our power to shut down the gaze. In 2020, I was anxious about teaching a special topics course on makerspaces virtually — a class that is centered on shared tools, hands-on building and in-person collaborations. Fast-forward to 2021, and I am trying to imagine what it would look like to turn video off in a face-to-face classroom.
Remote teaching revealed an important variable that I didn’t think too much about before: the importance of students learning new skills and taking creative risks without being watched. Having a virtual classroom with the ability to turn off our cameras offered a generative, unusual sweet spot for learning. It’s an environment where students were not only together but also alone. It’s an environment where students were supported but also weren’t being observed by their instructor or peers — one where we could take a collective exhale from the performative demands of the classroom with a simple click of the “stop video” button.
Continue reading: Importance of letting students work without being watched (opinion) (insidehighered.com)