Pandemic Pedagogy and the Sensory

 How will I know that they are learning if I cannot see them? I have seen many Twitter posts like this in the past few weeks since school has started for the fall semester and it caused me to of course go back to the connections of the sensory to the pedagogical.

I wonder why these visual cues are prioritized so much by educators in the learning space. It makes me also question the interconnectivity of ableist discourse and pedagogy. What would you do if you were a blind educator and you did not have visual cues to signpost learning?

There are many other ways to explore whether students have understood the content. The remote learning environment that we are in brings many tools that can be used to support these knowledge checks, like polls, quizzes, surveys, or feedback forms. Reflection as part of the formative activities of your course can also give the feedback that educators need to make sure to address gaps. A lot of this feedback can be just as instantaneous as any sort of visual cue that nodding or facial expressions can give. Yes I acknowledge that it is not exactly the same, but none of this is, and nor should it be. The more that we expect a perfect 1:1 relationship between what happens in f2f classrooms and remote classrooms, the more we are setting both ourselves and the students up for failure. 

There are many creative solutions to this need to see the learner’s face prompt. Solutions that don’t re-embed inequities by forcing cameras on. Moving away from the visual as a primary sensation of engagement is very difficult in remote pedagogy when in fact everything we do now has been translated visually through video conferencing and more engagement with LMSs. This is also why now, more than ever before, accessibility cannot be an afterthought. It has to be part of the design or you will exclude students. It is unethical to not think outside of only the visual. What other senses can be brought forth? How would a Zoom class go if everyone only used their microphones to engage (including the instructor) and that everything was provided as speech to text for Deaf students? These situations are not outside of the scope of possibilities. 

How much trauma are we creating by this emphasis on the visual? (See Karen Costa’s work on this). This week I listened to a podcast that said that Zoom fatigue comes from the fact that,  even in a synchronous situation, there are small lags between what is on the screen and we perceive as real time and what our brain perceives. These lags build up over time so that at the end of a 7-8hr work day brains are overtaxed.

Our pedagogy needs real engagement with the sensory, and I am not just saying this as a sensory scholar. If we are going to continue with remote teaching and learning for at least another semester, we do ourselves all a disservice to not think of the other senses besides the visual and the auditory. What role can the tactile have in our remote learning, especially in a time where closeness and touch is risky? I know these are things I think about every day. How can the experiential be embedded in learning from a far? I don’t have all the answers but I truly believe being open to these other sensory modalities is one way for pedagogues to build accessibility and inclusive frameworks into their teaching.