IV

Face, Space, and Place

Manifesto Points Covered

Figure 4.1

Introduction

Part IV challenges perspectives that see online and, in particular, distance, education as structurally and pedagogically inferior to education that takes place on-campus or face-to-face. This discussion is framed by the overarching argument, set out in the chapter 15, that distance and online education is not the deficit mode it is often cast as—a second-best option for when embodied presence at a college or university is impossible. Rather, it is an opportunity for teachers and students to work with different forms and mediations of face, space, and place that have the potential to create better ways to do teaching and learning. Online can be the privileged mode. Distance is a positive principle, not a deficit.

Teachers who emphasize the value of teaching and learning on-campus, as opposed to learning in online spaces, often present compelling lists of the opportunities that traditional forms of engagement with students offer—opportunities that are often assumed to be absent from digitally mediated forms (Schaberg 2018). Teachers may refer to the importance of informal conversations with students in corridors and coffee shops and emphasize that co-presence within the classroom provides them with minute-by-minute feedback on the success or otherwise of their teaching through the immediacy of body language and eye contact. They may add that by making themselves available at the end of class, teachers enable responsive and individual communication with students and that by keeping regular office hours, they allow students to predict when their doors will be open for contact and consultation.

These are indeed all instances of the social and intellectual interactions with students that teachers enjoy. But in chapter 16 we argue that they are not inevitable and essential to what it means to do good teaching. Rather, they are enactments of the underlying academic values of accessibility, approachability, flexibility, and sensitivity to the personal and individual needs of students. Different teachers, depending on personality, experience, and material circumstances, enact these values in different ways. Here, we argue that what is important is not how they are enacted but that they are enacted. In exactly the same way that the sociomaterialities of the classroom and corridor provide campus-based teachers with opportunities to engage and interact with their students, the virtual spaces and places of the online mode provide ways for digitally mediated interactions between students and teachers to occur. There need be no stark divide. Contact works in multiple ways. Face time is overvalued. We also argue against the idea of the “online version,” suggesting that by understanding online courses as versions of those delivered face-to-face, we limit them often—without necessarily intending to—assigning them to the second-best position. Online education needs its own “born digital” teaching methods that complement the pedagogies of co-presence, without trying to replicate them. Digital education reshapes its subjects. The possibility of the “online version” is overstated.

We then move on to argue in chapter 17 for a more nuanced understanding of what makes “place” in digital education. We suggest that the built spaces of the campus—traditionally seen and understood as the place where authentic higher education happens—need to be viewed through a more varied and nuanced description of what makes a place of learning. We use aspects of mobilities theory (Urry 2007) to challenge the ways in which we have traditionally aligned authentic education with physical co-presence in a built space. We argue instead for seeing the university as a place that is produced in multiple ways by the activities of its users, online and off—a space of flux and flow rather than a stable, bounded institution. New conceptualizations of presence are required in such a space, by which teachers and learners can build a new, shared imaginary of contact. Place is differently, not less, important online.

Finally, in chapter 18, we turn to distance education in particular, suggesting that we need to rethink what we mean when we talk about distance. Rather than emphasizing only the physical separation of objects or people in space, we foreground other, often more important, dimensions of communicative, temporal, and affective distance and their effects. In doing so, we move beyond a focus on distance education as a form of geospatial distancing that can be smoothed over by communications technology. Instead, we emphasize the potential challenges and opportunities that emerge when we work with the differences and distances that come with teaching online—time zones, political differences, cultural disjuncts—and argue that these are equally, if not more, important in building critical ways to do online teaching. Distance is temporal, affective, political: not simply spatial.