Not so much this year. Most of the conferences I usually spend my summer at — all but one, as near as I can figure — have either gone explicitly back to fully in-person meetings or included a very vague reference to “hybrid” in the CFP that didn’t offer any details or allow a submission to be flagged for online only. Of course, mask mandates and vaccination expectations are a thing of the past, so safety plans for these gatherings, which are almost never available at the time you have to respond to a CFP, will likely be limited to handwashing and hope.

I know we’re supposed to be pretending the pandemic is over, but where I live currently 1 in 17 people has Covid-19 and the excess death rate is astonishing, especially in people under 44. The BC Human Rights Commissioner (who evidently no one listens to) is flagging the equity implications of the race to unmask.

I am at a point in my career (more about this later) where I can decide to put a pause on conference presentations until such a time as I feel safer being in a room with infinite unmasked humans — I don’t know when that will be, but it isn’t soon. I manage and mitigate risk as best I can with a school-aged child, which means that to minimize the viral load we are all exposed to, I mask indoors (including at the office), we don’t eat indoors at restaurants, and our playdates are outdoor affairs. We use our whole risk budget up on our kiddo going to school, and organize our lives accordingly. If I do travel, it’s to see my mum, not to sip lukewarm coffee while a man asks me a comment-not-a-question. Conferences — which, I confess, I barely enjoy — absolutely don’t make the cut.

The truth is that travel for conferences has always disadvantaged some in the academy, whether because they are disabled, underwaged, or have caregiving responsibilities. But right now, as an active pandemic rages, the choice to return to in-person programming is even more explicitly a choice to exclude.

That said, I don’t actually expect or even necessarily want everything to be online. I know people like to meet in person, and I know that for some there are benefits. And the reality is that I’d rather have no hybrid than bad hybrid, which is a uniquely miserable experience.

But it’s a hell of a privilege to just say, “No thanks.” Neither my CV nor my presence in the discipline will be meaningfully harmed by my decision to not engage in conference travel for the forseeable, and I have three virtual keynotes lined up in place of whatever conferencing I might have done instead. Which isn’t to say I won’t miss out — I will. On collegial conversations, on engaging with critical, in the moment interventions, on those kinds of special collections and book projects that seem to spring to life at conferences. I’ll miss out on all of that. But I will be okay.

It’s important to be honest, however: we can’t pretend that moving away from online conferencing doesn’t contract the available opportunities for many people, and, depending on the discipline, may erase them entirely. This raises a question, though, for all of us in the academy:

What’s The Plan?

I am asking this non-snarkily of all who are attending conferences with many missing colleagues, but more significantly and earnestly about those who sit on hiring committees, or performance review committees, or tenure and promotion committees? As conferencing opportunities dry up for members of our community, how are we working to actively shift our expectations of what a productive academic summer looks like?

I think we have to be able to talk about this, because silences in the university are a breeding ground for inequity. When I see troubling language around the return to on-campus events and a defensive rejection of online options, I worry about all the unsaid assumptions and who will be unmoored by them. If we remember that the academy’s default mode is ableist, it can help us to work harder to fight against it and offer other options. But if we don’t remember that, if we just reconnect with old ways of doing things because we’ve missed them without looking around to see who isn’t in the room, we will exclude more and more of our colleagues.

So how will you advocate for those colleagues when you hire or review or adjudicate? How will you remind people that voices in the room are missing? Where will your equity lens be when someone asks why a candidate seems to have a gap in their CV, or questions how they mobilize their research? How will you respond when someone circulates a job posting at a conference or flags a promising candidate from an in-person event? Will you be a voice for the folks who aren’t in the room?

For me, the biggest change in my practice is that I am committing to posting all my speaking notes and slidedecks here, going forward. It was always a good practice that I neglected to get around to; it seems to me that it’s now urgent. I hope others will consider doing the same.

But mostly, I hope we keep noticing who isn’t in the room and finding ways to mitigate those absences and make visible the hidden opportunities of the conference space. The second we stop, we’ve already done irreparable harm.

Increasingly, it seems like both educational technology companies and our own administrators are interested in outsourcing the judgement part of our teaching to algorithms. I have written about these algorithms before, and my most significant concern with them is this notion of outsourcing something which is, for better or for worse, a bit part of what it means to teach — at least insofar as evaluation and grading goes.

It’s intuitively clear to most of us, I think, that what we use to train an algorithm matters, and that biased content in will result in biased content out. But recent research into algorithmic recommendation suggests that the mechanism itself, not simply the content used for training it, can be the source of bias. This is especially dangerous in a culture that pretends at the neutrality of algorithmic tools for it own convenience.

Perhaps the greatest source of harm is that the illusion of neutrality algorithms have can be exploited in attempts to roll back protections against discrimination. Appeals to the neutrality of algorithms as a cover for discriminatory outcomes has become a fairly common trope.

Catherine Stinson, Algorithms Are Not Neutral

The truth is that I think a lot of learning analytics are pointless but hopefully largely harmless at the level of collection (I’m talking, like, who clicked where in the Learning Management System stuff), but I’m still troubled that we hand so much data over to faculty without any kind of training on how to make use of it. I give this maybe-trivial example all the time, but if I can track when my students do their homework, and I have an in-built bias for morning people (because of our inherent superiority, obviously), how do I ensure that doesn’t impact my evaluations — and is anyone checking?

But that becomes much less trivial when what is given to faculty moves out of the realm of data and into the realm of judgement. For example, some tools profess to tell us what kind of a student someone is based on this kind of data and some kind of secret sauce algorithm. So we get told the student who submits all their assignments one minute before the deadline is in trouble or in need of some kind of intervention when what they maybe just are is busy.

Of course, the ideal is for us to know our students, so we know when someone’s behaviour changes significantly or what pressures are weighing on them. But of course, most of us don’t work at institutions where that is possible, because we design universities not for learning, but for scale. 300-student lectures and precarious faculty teaching eight sections across three universities to make ends meet. These are not the conditions where it is possible to know our learners. And so, instead of fixing the real problems, our senior leaders are drawn to shiny technological solutions.

Let’s outsource judgement.

I don’t love any kind of learning analytics, but I do see a world of difference between giving faculty the means to micromanage or microanalyze student behaviour — an ill-advised zero-sum game — and giving faculty a label on a student, whether that label is “at risk” or “strong collaborator” or “solitary worker.” I worry that once that label is heard, it’s hard to un-hear.

And then there’s the question of where those labels go. It would be one thing if they were course-specific, but what if that label gets to the next class you are taking before you do? Listen, in elementary school, a teacher read the roll and looked directly at me and said, “Oh no. Not another little Gray.” My big brother’s performance as a student prejudiced that teacher about how I would be in her class. (Sorry to throw you under the bus, Simon.) As it was, she was wrong about who I would be as student in a different course, but we never got along after that. Indeed, her preconception reframed who I was and how I behaved. How do algorithmically-defined labels on students circumscribe them any less than that?

And of course, as more enterprise-level tools masquerade as teaching and learning tools, we should ask if this data captured by Microsoft and LinkedIn and these other corporate-first products we’ve invited into our classrooms is going to follow our students into their working lives. And whether they have the right to make mistakes, to start again, to fail — all things we’re supposed to make room for as educators. And when all else fails, do these tools give students the right to be forgotten?

I always caution faculty that we should be mindful of what data we ask for, because once we have it, we become responsible for it and for its ethical use. When in doubt, don’t look at it. And I think that’s doubly true of the algorithmic judgements that are increasingly sold to us as some kind of neutral truth. The algorithm ain’t neutral, and neither is the judgement.

Just don’t look. It’s not radical, it’s not transformative, and it’s not the whole answer. But it is a start. When in doubt about what you will do with the information and how you will make ethical use of it, just don’t look.

I am going to start this post by pointing you to someone brighter, smarter, and more coherent today, because Tim Fawns theorizes everything I am about to rant about in his thoughtful “An Entangled Pedagogy.” Honestly, you can read Tim and skip the rest of what I have to offer here.

But if the ravings of a social media addict are more your speed, please, pull up a chair.

Okay, so the conference scene has been wild these past couple of weeks, if by wild you mean the silent nightmare of watching people talk about accessibility in spaces that are violently inaccessible to disabled people or really anyone who isn’t in denial about the pandemic we are living through, but Ann Gagné has you covered on that analysis. But it was also wild because there were a bunch of overlapping teaching and learning discussions happening, and in so many of them — at least the part of the discourse that filtered onto my corner of Twitter, anyway — the idea of “pedagogy before technology” kept coming up, as in we must approach teaching and learning from a pedagogy-first perspective (as opposed to, presumably, a technology-first perspective, which for the record no one is suggesting).

This is one of those phrases in education that we are encouraged to repeat without unpacking. It is a very popular concept in teaching and learning centres, especially those without a particular interest in the digital, because it asserts that true pedagogy is this thinking that happens separate from and in advance of our engagement with the sullying influence of technology.

It is not a phrase I have a great deal of respect for, not least because it seems to me that at least thirty percent of the time I encounter it, the person saying it acts like they are sharing some shattering new insight. I think part of the appeal of this phrase is as a rallying cry for folks who think a certain kind of way about education to find each other. Signals and signposts are necessary, but —

The Wikipedia definition of a thought-terminating cliché is actually excellent:

A thought-terminating cliché (also known as a semantic stop-sign, a thought-stopper, bumper sticker logic, or cliché thinking) is a form of loaded language, often passing as folk wisdom, intended to end an argument and quell cognitive dissonance.^{[1][2][3][4][5]} Its function is to stop an argument from proceeding further, ending the debate with a cliché rather than a point.^[2] Some such clichés are not inherently terminating; they only become so when used to intentionally dismiss dissent or justify fallacious logic.^[6]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A9

We are supposed to accept “pedagogy before technology” because we are supposed to accept prima facie that pedagogy is good and technology is less good and that the two operate in separate realms. It ends an argument I’m not interested in ending: namely, it defines a supposed hierarchy in how we think about the arrangement of our thinking about teaching. But if we think about it for even a second, surely it’s obviously untrue.

Technology shapes my pedagogical choices every single moment. If I walk into a classroom and there’s a whiteboard — or more frighteningly, if I’m expecting a white board and there isn’t one — this shapes my pedagogy. If I arrive in class to find that not one student has brought paper or pens to class, this shapes my pedagogy. These technologies are ubiquitous and non-digital, so we don’t think of them as technologies, but they impact our teaching and learning in myriad ways. It’s asinine to pretend otherwise.

I’m not being intentionally obtuse here. I get the intention of the phrase, that the technology we have access to shouldn’t drive our pedagogical choices. I understand that premise: I just don’t buy it. To me, the two are so deeply intertwined and the only reason to hold up one over the other is ideology.

The truth is, as Tim points out in the article linked above, when we assert pedagogy first, even as we do it to eschew a kind of technological determinism, we are suggesting that technologies are neutral, waiting to be folded into any pedagogy. That’s simply untrue, but it’s also dangerous: imagining that technology is unproblematically being led by pedagogy because we will it to be so is denying the power of algorithm and analytic to impact and shape practice. If you are thinking critically about the technological tools you are using in your classroom, you can’t put it last in your analysis; you need to be clear-eyed about the changes the technology makes to your teaching. Because it does.

The LMS circumscribes your choices; the learning curve on any tool is access-limiting; the choice of video or audio or text has an impact on the user. Considerations of these factors happens alongside pedagogical planning, not as an afterthought — if we’re doing it right. There’s simply no way to engage in critical digital pedagogy if you always already think that technology is on the backfoot.

“Pedagogy before technology” comes from a good place, but it lacks nuance and it also lacks faith in our colleagues to be able to have complicated conversations. It’s not “pedagogy before technology.” It’s “technological considerations need to be made alongside pedagogical ones because ultimately the learner experience cannot extricate one from another,” but then I’ve never found myself accused of constructing my own thought-terminating clichés.

Two. Kids these days are [fill in the blank here]. No they aren’t, you just got old, and if we’re lucky that’s what happens to the best of us. It would be nice if people tasked with educating the next generation didn’t fall into the same thought-terminating clichés as the last generation of garbage teachers adopted, but here we are.

Three. I don’t have time to teach [writing, grammar, study skills, etc]; my content is very important. If you evaluate for it, you have to teach it. That’s the rule. Otherwise, your course becomes an opaque mess of a game of “guess what’s in the professor’s head” and that’s not actually learning. Stop it. Oh, and when you outsource this work to your colleagues, recognize the specific skillset you are tapping into and stop treating so-called service departments like they are departments filled with your own literal servants.

Four. Accommodations are a workload issue / impinge on my academic freedom. I have empathy for the former — institutions download work onto those least able to resist, it’s true, and I don’t know of a single Accessibility Services office that would say, “Hey, we have enough money to do everything we need to do.” But access is a value and a commitment, and often by the time we get to the point of accommodations, there are changes in practice that would benefit the whole classroom (and, often, the instructor). The idea that accommodations are an academic freedom issue is a load of horseshit.

Five. Ranting about my students is a necessary catharsis. That’s an argument for talking about your rough day with your close friend or spouse, not for your anonymous social media account with 15.7M followers where you post excerpts of student writing, you absolute soggy Rice Krispie of a person. Students are humans who you should treat with respect. Why is that controversial.

It makes me think about a lot of EdTech, honestly — these feature rollouts for more and more and more and more surveillance that no one actually asked for. Great, I get to know what time my learner usually opens their word processor. I never asked for this, and no one is teaching me how to use this data. Sure, it’s not a VR helmet that kills you, but it opens the door to potential bias. And again, much like the opportunity (?) to die inside a game, it’s not something anyone actually asked for.

Meta just got legs and this guy wants to take your head off.

Virtual Reality has been the “next big thing” in Educational Technologies for as long as I’ve been in the discipline and longer, and most of it is really bad. Like, the number of times I have seen the most straight-ahead lecture replicated, but I don’t know, we’re in space now, and we’re all supposed to pretend its innovative. If I could VR my way into a Magic-School-Bus-style fieldtrip, you could probably talk me into it. But investing in a VR headset so some guy can lecture at me, but from a cloud? Nah.

It feels like the educational equivalent of making fetch happen.

I actually kind of want to channel my inner Audrey Watters here to reflect on how positively Skinnerian this whole thing sounds. Someone somewhere is building a VR headset that shocks a kid if they close their eyes for too long. You know I’m right.

Anyway, while Joe Oculus there was explaining why I should pay him money to very literally explode my brain for me, I got to thinking about how much power we give technology entrepreneurs in education when they are walking around saying ideas like this with their whole chests. Like. I don’t understand why we don’t look at stories like this and laugh these folks out of the room when they offer us engagement clickers that also take attendance (I didn’t ask) or a productivity score for every student (I didn’t ask) or an AI-graded essay tool (why am I asking students to write an essay I don’t want to read, exactly?). Over and over again, the pitches show that there are never any educators in the room.

Get these doofuses out of the room where we’re trying to do the teaching and learning.

No one wants to die in real life if they die in the game. Literally no one asked for this.

Not if you read that Times Higher Ed piece, which was penned by an edtech executive who once travelled in pedagogical circles. The thesis of the article seems to be that about five people in the world — conveniently, established names in the field of faculty support and conveniently, white-presenting — are doing ungrading right and everyone else is doing it wrong.

I mean, it’s a patently absurd thesis and I don’t need to spend time debunking it. Twitter did a good enough job in the intervening days. Learning is contextual and learners need greater or lesser amounts of structure depending on all sorts of factors (read the brilliant Karen Costa for more on this). And educators range dramatically in the freedom around assessment and grades that they can access. There are many ways to challenge the supremacy of the numerical grade.

But I instead want to look at the impulse underlying the article itself, and why it’s unhelpful: the impulse to assert that some people teach “right” and others teach “wrong” in a postsecondary system where almost none of us were actually trained to teach at all is prima facie alienating. Working in faculty support, even more than my life as a classroom teacher, has taught me that the number one thing I can do to facilitate learning is to be a safe place to utter the phrase, “I don’t know.” We implicitly understand this in the classroom: foregrounding the impossibility of or rampant failure to achieve a task is wildly counterproductive. No one likes to feel mocked or derided, but this dynamic can be even more acute when working with faculty: while students might at least reasonably expect to not know something, many faculty are acculturated to really fear admitting that.

So when I read an article that purports to tell the story of a better way to approach learning that is entirely framed by the premise that only a small handful of people are even in the ballpark of worthiness to use the term “ungrading” (which is a term and concept much older than that article suggests), I wonder who it is trying to reach.

Many pedagogical innovations in their early moments feel, and sometimes are, impossible for so many of use, due to curricular requirements, relative power or role, department culture, institutional policy, or a zillion other factors. No one is swayed or supported by someone descending from the mount to say, “If you don’t ascribe to my vision, you’re doing it wrong.” Turning it into a zero sum game means that the potential benefits of critically reflecting on learning or accurate self-appraisal or increased empowerment — all of which can be achieved with shades of ungrading, or with babysteps towards any number of innovative practices — are abandoned.

As so often occurs, perfect is the enemy of the good.

Anyone purporting to help faculty revise practice needs to recognize the importance of words like “support” and “development” in our titles. They also need to recognize the very real structural issues that stand between well-meaning faculty and ideal practice. And they need to recognize that they may only be seeing one part of the picture. (Like, as an example, if the only positive examples you can think of are white people, you might possibly not have the broadest possible perspective on the topic.)

It’s not only our learners we meet where they’re at. We meet our colleagues there, too.

Or, I guess, we don’t. The edtech executive in question works for Course Hero, which as an organization has shown much disdain for faculty: there’s no collegial process for getting your work taken down once Course Hero has it (unless you find the DCMA a collegial process) and they flatly refuse to engage with their critiques in any meaningful way. I appreciated Matt Crosslin’s outline of those issues. The approach of this article seems similarly disinterested in actually engaging with faculty or any meaningful effort to revise practice.

I don’t want to tell people they’re wrong: I want to be the safe place to disclose the real difficulties many of us experience in the classroom so that we can solve the problem together. I don’t respond well to scolding. Does anyone? I ask this after a fight to retrieve two pairs of socks from the mouth of the family dog. Scolding didn’t work there, either. A chewy milk bone though? Magic.

Am I asking you to be the chewy milk bone you wish to see in the world? Maybe. I think mostly I’m reminding all of us who hope to revise, renovate, or burn down the institution that we cannot do it without friends, and we cannot do it from a limited scope.

Holier than thou feels great sometimes, but it doesn’t move the needle in the places where it matters.

There’s a giant poster over my desk in my home office that reads, “Do the work.” The work is meeting people and conversation and iteration and gentle nudges. Save “you’re doing it wrong” for the people and policies and systems that are causing real harm — not the well-meaning folks aligned to your cause and trying hard within the same unforgiving system.

Be the chewy milk bone. Do the work. And don’t tell me you’re the only one who sees clearly, especially if you’re demonstrating a studied attention to whiteness. I simply will not believe you.