How Did We Get Here: On Week One, Remote Teaching, Surveillance, and Care

We did it Canadian Higher Ed folk. We made it through week one. So how are you doing right now? If your answer is not great, then you are definitely in the majority.

I ended my day Friday with sheer exhaustion. The kind of exhaustion that comes from being pulled in many directions at once and not really knowing which to prioritize except all of them. In the middle of the week I also listened to some of the Scholar Strike Canada teach-ins and recordings. They were all very powerful, insightful, and honestly framed the sheer amount of work to be done in such an urgent and important way.

  

I want to highlight Dr. Rinaldo Walcott’s talk here because what he mentioned really coincides with all the extremely yucky video tape your lap for posterity posts that have been posted on Twitter in the past few days. This surveillance passing as pedagogy highlights a need to reassess and reflect on assessment strategies and the honest to goodness goals and outcomes of courses. If you did not see his talk please go here and watch for the whole 90 minutes.

One of the things that Dr. Walcott suggested in his teach-in is that it is a pedagogy of care that actually got us to where we are right now with this heightened surveillance via ed tech. He encourages us to think about how much the need to not disrupt students’ educational life and thus to rush through what remote pedagogy would look like, led to a lack of reflection and creativity and thus this push to make remote pedagogy the same as face-to-face pedagogy but online. Which of course is not what the research says is how online learning is done. This meant ed tech companies providing eproctoring “solutions” instead of critical pedagogical reflection on what teaching and learning can and should look like online.

I will be honest and say this point really blew my mind. As someone who supports an inclusive pedagogy, an ethical pedagogy, it never occurred to me that the very same pedagogy of care could be used and framed as the reason for all this unnecessary surveillance. Yes, we certainly want to support students and not disrupt their educational paths more than they already were by COVID, but not reflecting and using evidence-based practices in pedagogy meant that in fact we have built more barriers to learning and access. 

I am still very much working through what this all means and how I can support the need to step back from this push towards surveillance tech (more than I already do). As a queer woman all of this makes me very uneasy and I acknowledge that I have privilege as a white cis woman. For Black students, for Indigenous students, for students of colour, for students with ADHD, for autistic students, and all the intersections, the stakes of this surveillance are high. When moving one’s eyes away from a screen for a moment means the tech will flag you as possibly cheating, when you are taking care of your younger sibling because your parents are working and you need to step away from the computer and that flags you as cheating, when you have to “sanitize” your space for things that could be a flag (like say even a Pride flag), what are we really “teaching” here? 

I know there are many instructors who feel strongly about this issue (on both sides and boy do I dislike how that phrase has now been ruined). However, I strongly encourage you to reflect on your pedagogy and outcomes and see why you feel surveillance in this way is the solution. I have seen posts on Twitter questioning whether this means those who are anti-eproctoring are anti-summative assessments and no that is not the leap that should be made (in fact that is a fallacy).  In-person exam proctoring does not mean that as a proctor I am privy to that students’ home environment, or to their family dynamic, unless they choose to disclose this to me because we have built a relationship of trust. Online proctoring is very different and comes with a whole different set of inequities.

As someone passionate about accessibility, as someone who has worked as a coordinator for an Autism and Behavioural Science program, as someone who has many friends and former students where this kind of tech would flag them instantaneously for just being who they are (including myself with a cat who has no boundaries), ethically this is really bad. I am sure I am not the only one who is kept up at night because of this. Maybe we need to talk about next steps, the steps that should have happened in May. Can we do this now? Please