Looking at the online experience through a different lens
By Ben Pack – August 26, 2020
I’ll admit, I was nervous going into the first week of class this fall. It doesn’t matter that this is my tenth year being an instructor at USC, I still get anxious meeting a new group of students and that anticipation has been exacerbated by the shift to online instruction. Some of this stress is familiar – first impressions matter in my opinion – but the stakes for my lower division course this fall have felt higher because it’s not just these students’ first impression of me, or the class, but of USC overall. Would they feel part of the university without being on campus? Since online instruction is still new, I think it’s been easy to feel as though what I’m doing is somehow less-than in-person instruction – that this digital environment is a problem to be overcome or worse, endured. I want to challenge that kind of deficit thinking though, especially in myself because I know how harmful it can be.
In the writing and community engagement course I teach, one of the issues we examine is how to navigate differences and persistent social problems. In addressing K-12 education, post-incarceration, and homelessness, it can be tempting to focus on the problems our partners and their communities face, as opposed to the assets they possess. That deficit thinking sets up a destructive power dynamic though – one where we in the university might be tempted to come in to solve someone else’s issue. But that denies the dialogue that I want to foster and the agency that’s inherit in all people. Learning and help are not one-directional. My students and I learn so much from these partnerships, because our partners have so much to teach and share. They enrich our experiences and my goal is that we always enrich theirs too. For that mutual engagement to happen though, we have to think not in terms of deficits, but in terms of assets. We have to recognize the strengths that everyone is bringing to the table.
So too in online education. Because it’s new to many of us, I find it still easy to focus on the negative (the glitches, the struggle to read body language, the fatigue of staring at a screen all day). Still, there’s a lot of assets to online education too, and focusing on those assets can be an exciting way to learn. One of the assets I’m really appreciating is that I get to work with many students in their homes and there are opportunities to connect our work more easily to the context they’ve grown up in. For my writing and community engagement course, I emphasize that our home communities possess a lot of knowledge already, and this knowledge is just as valuable as anything they will learn in college. Now, that local knowledge is at their fingertips instead of “back home,” and my goal is to help them more easily see that knowledge and draw from it. In this way, experiential learning is not just about a situation, but about the self. Connecting to where students are right now is an opportunity to link academic knowledge to their everyday lives in a way that hasn’t always felt easy in the ivory tower of our campus. Shifting from a deficit mindset to one that reflects upon and considers the assets of online education feels like a powerful way to seize this moment and find excitement in the work ahead, even if those first-day jitters still linger.