Lecture as an Event in Postdigital Education: a Dyadic Teaching Diary

ORIGINAL ARTICLES Open Access Lecture as an Event in Postdigital Education: a Dyadic Teaching Diary Olli Pyyhtinen 1 &Juha Suoranta 1 #The Author(s) 2020 Abstract In this experimental text, we reflect in the form of a dyadic teaching diary upon a course we recently taught together on the ‘sociological imagination’. One of the main aims we set for the class was to ponder how the social scientific imagination could be enriched, and figure out ways to stress its social and political relevance. From the pedagogical point of view, we wanted to create a course which would disrupt the students’oftcriticized routine of rote-learning, and in which they would learn to use digital platforms for the purpose of producing and sharing knowledge, meet each other, and have their social scientific thinking refreshed and perhaps even renewed. In pondering the weeks spent together with our students, we suggest that what gradually happened in our ‘postdigital classroom’and outside of it was an Event—something surprising and unexpected that could not be controlled entirely. Keywords Teaching .Postdigital education .Teaching diary.Flipped classroom . Postdigital event .Sociological imagination CLOV (wearily): Same answer. (Pause.) You’ve asked me these questions millions of times. HAMM: I love the old questions. (With fervour.) Ah the old questions, the old answers, there’s nothing like them! Samuel Beckett, Endgame (1957) Postdigital Science and Education https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-020-00104-9 *Olli Pyyhtinen [email protected] 1 Faculty of Social Sciences, Tampere University, Tampere, Finland Introduction: Mixing the Dyad This is an experimental text, a duoethnography (see Norris et al. 2012), if you like, a teaching diary, and a dyadic study of teaching. It can also be read as a confession in the ‘postdigital moment’(Jandrićet al. 2018; Knox 2019) or as a critique of the ‘the neoliberal university syndrome’(manifested for instance in the marketization, entrepreneurialization, de-publicization, de-democratization, and in-equalization of the university; see Zuidhof 2015,alsoHayes2019) and as a plea for the ‘co-operative and caring university’(see Neary and Winn 2015). For us, the postdigital context, as we have proposed elsewhere, refers, firstly, to ‘the multiple use of both digital and traditional information as an ordinary practice’;secondly,to‘the mixing of digital and face-to-face interaction inside and outside the classroom’;thirdly,to‘the fruitful solution of the teacher-student contradiction’; and, fourthly, to ‘the expansion of learning via open digital platform such as Wikiversity’(Arndt et al. 2019:460;see also Jandrić2017). The text results from a course that we taught together in Autumn term 2019 at Tampere University in Finland. It is a case of teaching-led research (see e.g. Harland 2016) with a duoethnographic twist, as we did not merely use the course to develop our research in another more or less unrelated context, but the article is precisely about what happened during teaching: we turn our analytical gaze upon ourselves as teachers and reflect on and write about our own personal experiences. Our motives for doing this were not confessional, but we rather wanted, in a synecdochist manner, to extend the personal to the general by connecting it to wider cultural, social, and political constellations, such as the neoliberal university and the postdigital condition. We have chosen this kind of experimental approach for the simple reason that ‘much sociological writing’, as Berger and Quinney (2005: 10) laconically propose, ‘is, quite frankly, dull and turgid’. Disrupting conventional means, forms, and narrative structures of academic writing may spark creativity and imagination. Writing differently may allow scholars to think differently; it may ‘unsettle, elude, and perhaps even transform conventional analytic perspectives, explanations, and modes of knowledge production that have become too automatic, stale, and stereotyped’, and thus it may ‘increase our sensibilities’and open up new ways of perceiving the world (Pyyhtinen 2019:6–7). The course we taught centered on the notion of the ‘sociological imagination’by C. Wright Mills that he develops in his famous book of the same name published in 1959. We felt that while Mills’book ‘is often ritualistically praised’(Swedberg 2014:195)— when the International Sociological Association carried on in the late 1990s, an opinion survey on the most influential sociological books of the twentieth century, The Sociological Imagination came on second place, just after Max Weber’sEconomy and Society—the role of imagination itself in social science and how it could be cultivated and strengthened has received surprisingly little attention in the reception and uses of the book. And that was our main focus in the course: how the social scientific imagination could be enriched and figure out how it could be made to matter to our students. One of our chief motivations for the course was a concern that theorizing and research are too often understood in an overly narrow and technical manner both in standard courses and textbooks in the social sciences as well as in the scholarly community alike. During the course, we aspired to ‘bring the sociological imagination back to life as an adventure of ideas and experimental creation of concepts’(Pyyhtinen Postdigital Science and Education 2015: 2). Thus, we focused on what the social scientific imagination is and what it could be. From the pedagogical point of view, we wanted to create a course which would disrupt the students’oft-criticized routine of rote-learning, and in which they would learn to use digital platforms for the purpose of producing and sharing knowledge, meet each other, and have their social scientific thinking refreshed and perhaps even renewed. Furthermore, as a teaching dyad, we set out to deconstruct the sovereign and omniscient teacher subject and build a new form of a teacher subject no longer reliant on the single individual. We acknowledged that, as sociologists, we are somewhat different, the one being more a radical public sociologist and the other an unorthodox theorist. But this was not to assert our identities, but we rather wanted to break them open and lay stress on the productivity of differences. Our aim was to no longer be two individual teachers and become a ‘production studio’(Deleuze and Parnet 2006: 7) instead. This aim manifests itself also in this text methodologically, as we may sometimes write both in unnamed fluctuating first and second persons and at other times as a communal ‘we’, acquiring a single voice. It is important to acknowledge that ultimately the text, just like the course itself, is irreducible to either two of us, any more than to the supposedly superindividual imaginary ‘we’. The thoughts were not in the one or the other before their manifestation and expression, but stemmed from the give-and-take in-between. So the text rather disrupts or deconstructs a unified author than affirms it. The between, the place from where the text speaks is not itself localizable; it is not here or there but here and there, in the movement from pillar to post. And yet, the moment we announce that there were two of us, it must be acknowledged that of course we were not alone. It would hardly have made any sense to talk to each other just among the two of us. For this, we would not have needed any course, but we could have done that anywhere we wanted outside the classroom, too, like over a cup of tea or coffee, a lunch, a beer, or by the doorway of the office of either one of us. The teaching dyad is therefore actually a triad or a triangular constellation. It was not solely a relation between Me and You, self and other, ego and alter, but a Third was involved as well, just as any relation is in fact a configuration of at least three elements. A relation can be adequately thought only by acknowledging the Third, included or excluded, present or absent. The relational withness between-two always assumes or requires a Third, which either precedes the relation, mediates it, or (potentially) disturbs it and is thus excluded. Hence, a relation designates not only directedness toward something other than the self, for the being-toward-another always already implies a Third. So what/who are the Thirds in this case? Most importantly the participants of the course, the students as our captive audience and interlocutors. Without them there would have been absolutely no point in teaching the course at all. The course actualized as and in a triadic or triangular constellation between You, Me, and the ‘instructed Third’(Serres 1997), that is, the students. But there were other Thirds as well. First of all, technological devices and spaces (e.g. the computers, screens and videprojectors in the lecture hall, and the Internet as the channel of distribution of our reading materials, present such a Third; the notion of the postdigital itself nicely emphasizes how technology is constitutive of the learning environment. Digital technology is an integral part of the postdigital lecture without, however, amounting to a perfectly loyal, Postdigital Science and Education transparent means. Instead of vanishing into immediacy, it translates and transforms what it mediates and transmits. Yet the Thirds did not stop here. Other Thirds that were present ranged from scholars and their ideas we referred to, the lecture hall itself, as a meeting point between the learned and the novice, and the history of sociology we all carry with us, reproduce, and perhaps sometimes also renew—just to name a few Third partners. Teaching in a Postdigital Learning Environment Usually the students connect to the current neoliberal university by the ear (see Back 2016:18–19). They are supposed to sit down and listen, as the silent yet (hopefully) attentive Third, though the university management wishes that they do not spend too long a time on their seats listening but move fast on in the school-to-workforce pipeline. Another variation from the theme is that the students sit silently by their computers or handheld devices and obediently do their assignments. This is perhaps what the university management expects from the technological devices: to speed up the studies and thereby save resources. In our course, we wished to undo the conventional, business-as-usual authority structure of the lecture hall by offering the Third an opportunity to speak and have a voice (although we realized that it may also very well refuse to have one) in the classroom and in using digital tools as constitutive parts of our postdigital learning environment. We wanted to flip the classroom by turning the participants from an assumedly passive and silent ‘audience’to active co-producers, interlocutors, junior colleagues, and companion teachers, teaching themselves, their fellow students, and us two, too. Whenever the teacher does all the talking, a lecture easily turns into an exercise in intellectual masturbation: a process that may be very pleasurable in itself, but awkward, tiresome, and even appalling for those who have to attest it, and it hardly ever accomplishes anything—pedagogically or otherwise—at the end because of being so self-absorbed. Moreover, we believe that sometimes the conventional classroom situation effectively prevents the students from thinking, as they pass from one lecture to another in a rush. We aspired to turn our course from a listening exercise to an experiment in collective thinking and collaborative learning (see Suoranta 2008), where the outcome can be controlled only partly. From the two of us, this required that we lay down the academic armour and become vulnerable to some extent. It was essential that we put ourselves out there and accept and deal with all the discomfort, fear, risk of failure, and possible shame that comes with it. We had already taught this course once before in Autumn 2018 (see Arndt et al. 2019: 459–461). So we did not have to create it from scratch. On the contrary, it was already quite well organized and planned in advance. The pedagogical frame was already there. We had our thoughts straight. And yet there was this anxiety and certain nervousness in the air. Are not we all natural-born social constructionists nowadays? And for good reasons. Take the students’point of view. Look at them as they study. We love their group work in our course and we embrace the meaning-work they do in their groups as we do in our discussion lectures and when writing a draft of this text together in the openness of a Wikiversity page. 1 Wikiversity, one of Wikipedia’s sister projects, is an open, multilingual 1 See https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Wikiversity:Main_Page. Accessed 20 January 2020. Postdigital Science and Education digital educational resource in the Internet devoted to learning resources, projects, and research for use in all forms and levels of education. What we thus did in practice was ‘blended education’in which ‘the students access readings, images, and videos on the network while still meeting in class to listen and discuss’(Feenberg 2019:8).We acknowledge that in such a setting much of what happens in terms of students’learning takes place behind our eyes and ears. And that is perfectly alright. We need not have absolute control. We see that letting go of the idea of perfect control is a necessary part of the notion of the flipped classroom. It is also a way of allowing the students to be active, thinking subjects, capable of organizing themselves. It is about having trust in them. About giving space to lines of flight. The top of the iceberg of learning is visible in the lecture hall, but the rest, the vast magnitude of learning takes place beneath the surface, under the sea, as it were. The tectonic plates move slowly, but occasionally their movement may result in sudden eruptions and earthquakes in the life of mind. Or that is at least what we hope for. As the participants study, they have their devices ready, and through them they literally have the world of information (in good and bad) in their hands. We figure that the more we let the students study together in their own spaces, digital or in flesh, the better. In a sense, this was an attempt to turn the lecture from a ‘depositing information mode’ (Freirean banking method) to an ‘oasis mode’in which the metaphor of oasis calls for such images as restfulness, peacefulness, and refreshment of learning—something that the Danish term hygge tries to capture (see Larsen 2019). This emphasis linked our course also with the tradition of critical pedagogy (see e.g. McLaren and Kincheloe 2007;Giroux 2011). In the context of critical pedagogy or ‘digital sociology pedagogy’(Selwyn 2019), we meant to support ‘individuals to learn how to make connections, develop the capacity to know more, nurture, and maintain connections to support continual learning, and be able to choose what is best to learn at any particular time’(Selwyn 2019:99),whichis something we think is also at the heart of the Millsian sociological imagination. In the words of Paulo Freire, a founding figure of critical pedagogy, our aim was to encourage the students to ‘read the word and the world’(see Freire and Macedo 1987). Perhaps we are ‘postdigital’teachers-students-scholars, all at once, as we like to mix in our teaching practice digital-spaces and meatspaces, that is, learning activities both in digital platforms and in classrooms. At least our method as university level adult educators demanded that we define ourselves not as ‘legislators’who always already know (of course there is no denying that we do know some things), but more as ‘interpreters’, who do not play ball only together but pass it to our students, too. And this is a crucial starting point. We cannot really know what our students will learn, or what are their personal and social meaning-making practices pertaining the ongoing course. We can set our own aims and express our wishes, but what else? In terms of pedagogical technology, we had a multimodal approach: In addition to Wikiversity as our main digital platform, we resorted to the university’s password protected Moodle learning environment only as a storage of the copyrighted readings. In addition, we organized discussion lectures in the meatspace of Tampere University’s campus. The students had independent study groups for their weekly assignments and they set up the Wikiversity pages for the groups as we, too, did for the two of us (we wrote the first draft of this text on it as the course proceeded). Alongside, these practices the students were expected to form reading groups to read a sociological biography of C. Wright Mills (Suoranta 2017). So, the students had to read, search the Internet, do group assignments, upload their small group minutes to their groups’Wikiversity pages, and Postdigital Science and Education participate in the discussion lectures. Thus, they were able to practice most of the social scientific craftsmanship Mills sorely emphasizes in The Sociological Imagination. We gave special emphasis on Wikiversity, for we wanted the students to learn the value of studying and learning together, and how the results of that epistemic collaboration should be publicly available for all as in Wikiversity. In addition to its free and open source policy, part of the beauty of Wikiversity is that eventually all the courses will comprise an archipelago of free and public learning resources. (Suoranta 2010.) Besides trying to create a sociologically imaginative course in terms of its pedagogical form, we wanted to explore the realms of the sociological imagination in the course contents. We think that there is no such thing as social sciences 101, or any other sociology as already thought anymore. Thus, the contents we introduced were not ready-made packages, but more like invitations to think and reflect. Sociology and its objects are in constant flux and the sociological era is—to say the least—‘postmethodological’and ‘multiparadigmatic’. In these apparently messy conditions, we divided our course topic—social scientific imagination—into seven themes as follows: intellectual craftsmanship of social scientists; action and the problem of social order; power and social classifications; a sense of possibilities and the politics of imagination; enriching the imagination I: sounds, voices, and images; enriching the imagination II: fiction; and enriching the imagination III: sociology of feelings. Every week the students had their group discussions, based on readings, which they then uploaded into their own Wikiversity pages for all of us to read before the discussion lectures. Reflective Teaching Diary Week One After the general introductory notes and information on how the course would proceed, we briefly took up the topic of our discipline by reminding the students that it is hard if totally impossible to grasp the current condition of the social sciences from the point of view of sub specie aeternitatis, that is, timelessly and atopically, but always sub specie temporis,thatis, in relation to a certain time and place. But still it makes sense to assume that there are some qualities of thought that in our field could be captured under the notion of the sociological imagination. In trying to demonstrate what is meant by imagination, we asked half of the students to imagine a situation in which a student had received a positive feedback of their Master’s thesis from their supervisor and the other half to imagine an opposite case. In this, we used the method of empathy-based stories in which the respondents are asked to write short essays by picturing themselves in a situation that is described to them in a sheet of paper as a ‘frame story’(see Wallin et al. 2018; Särkelä and Suoranta forthcoming ). A certain undercurrent of the course was the fight against ‘a belief in which all social and economic problems can always and only be solved through a free market economy’ (Denzin and Giardina 2015: 12). One unfortunate result of this state of affairs in the university sector and societies at large, especially when associated with the present-day right-wing Manichaeism and its assault on public reason, is that the abilities and spaces to practice different forms of imagination—social, sociological, political, transgressive—are in danger. Without skillful and hopeful use of imagination and critical reflection, life easily turns into an empty mechanical performance of random operations. Postdigital Science and Education Week Two My impression is, based on students’notes in their Wikiversity group pages, that they found interesting the text ‘On Intellectual Craftsmanship’by Mills that we included in the course readings. At the same time, I felt that we would do well if we discussed the methodological ‘seasons’in social sciences to paint a broad picture of the cycle of the methodological shifts in social sciences. An established account of these seasons or changes throughout the decades has been given by Denzin and Lincoln (2018). Perhaps we could use that? Or maybe we could also talk about the politics of research methods—a direction taken by Denzin and others who argue that qualitative researchers are under conservative challenge and have become almost like an endangered species in the methodological discussions and debates in the social sciences over the past years (Denzin 2009). As I pondered this question, I remembered Mills’s note on the ‘new practicality’and the administrative approach in the social sciences that prevailed in the 1950s. He writes that the new practicality leads to new images of social science—and of social scientists. New institutions have arisen in which this illiberal practicality is installed: industrial relations centers, research bureaux of universities, new research branches of corporation, air force, and government. They are not concerned with the battered human beings living at the bottom of society—the bad boy, the loose woman, the migrant worker, the un-Americanized immigrant. On the contrary, they are connected, in fact and in fantasy, with the top levels of society, in particular, with enlightened circles of business executives and with generals having sizeable budgets. For the first time in the history of their disciplines, social scientists have come into professional relations with private and public powers above the level of the welfare agency and the county agent. Their positions change—from the academic to the bureaucratic; their publics change—from movements of reformers to circles of decisions-makers; and their problems change—from those of their own choice to those of their new clients. (Mills 1980:108.) Does not this sound a lot like social sciences and scientists of our times if we expand the private and public powers also to various supranational organizations such as the EU and OECD? Anotefromtoday’s meeting with the students (a.k.a lecture): The power of a group. Our students are well prepared and qualified to do their weekly group work, that is, they get the point of the assignments—and they far exceed our expectations. What is it then that does the trick as they start to relax and speak their mind in the meetings? The answer may be the power of the (study) group, their group discussion, and collaboration before the weekly meetings. For they indeed are meetings, not traditional lectures: we converse and change shifts almost as if in jazz. Collaborative teaching as jazz. Week Three Today’s topic was the concept of action and how to understand social action. However, it happened to me in the weekend before the class and at the end of the last week as I Postdigital Science and Education was preparing our next lecture/meeting that I froze. I felt that I have nothing to say, that I do not know anything. Finally I will be exposed as a fake Professor! The students had their group assignments as in the week before, and they had done them. But the topic itself proved simply too large to talk about within the confines of one class. Damn! Was I a victim of an imposter syndrome—an anticipation of shame and a fear that others will finally see our weaknesses and shortcomings and how dumb we actually are, ‘that around the corner is an unforeseen but cataclysmic event that will reveal us as frauds’ (Brookfield 1995: 230)? The gnawing feeling will not go away. It cannot be wished away. But I have found out that teaching with a colleague, with you, eases the pain and the psychological burden amidst the terror of ‘neoliberal syndrome’inside the present university. Collaborative teaching brings me comfort, safety, and very often joy. Let me add something. Even though it was not my turn to be in charge and take the lead, I was prepared to speak a little of how action is always relational, that is, how no agent is the origin of the things achieved or even of one’s own action, but any action is to some extent received, a response to an invitation, as it is conditioned and constituted by others. There is thus no ‘pure’action, but any action is a mixture of activity and passivity. Action is always dislocated, distributed, influenced, and translated. But today’s class took another course and I never got to say any of these things at any point. At first I felt disappointed of myself. I sensed that we—or rather I—had failed. We had not really succeeded in helping the students to understand what action is. But afterwards, to me this only illustrated what I was planning to say. Teaching, just like any action, is subject to unforeseen twists, interruptions, disruptions, and changes of direction. I also realized that when you put yourself out there, it is inevitable that sometimes you are just bound to fail. You cannot have absolute control over the outcome, and that goes for any action. So at least, to me this failure taught something about action and teaching. And I was reminded of the fact that while the students are our fellow teachers, to really learn with them we need to preserve or enliven what is young in us and become their fellow students. (Thus it is possible, as Burawoy (2005: 9) has stated, that ‘education becomes a series of dialogues on the terrain of sociology that we foster—a dialogue between ourselves and students, between students and their own experiences, among students themselves, and finally a dialogue of students with publics beyond the university.’)—And in the end, could it be that we had dropped the ball for the simple reason that action is one of the core concepts of the social sciences, and we faced the same destiny as Saint Augustine (2006: 242) in trying to capture the meaning of time: ‘What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.’ Week Four This week it happened: the class became truly interactive. There was a lively dialogue; the students not only asking questions from us, but also sharing their ideas directly with each other and commenting on each other’s comments. This also changed our roles as teachers: we two stopped being those who talk at students and instead became more like hosts offering a space for discussion and overseeing it. As much as I occasionally enjoy lecturing, I find the Slavic inexpressiveness of the audience—which is something that just happens every now and then, especially in our home country—very uncomfortable. You are hungry for signs, but you cannot read Postdigital Science and Education anything from the facial expressions of the members in the audience. You cannot tell whether they understand at all what you are saying, whether they are following you or not, or whether they are just bored. In those moments, in the absence of dialogue and feedback, the lecture theatre becomes a very lonely place. This always makes me think of Gèrard Petitjean’s interview with Michel Foucault in Le Nouvel Observateur in 1975, where he speaks of that loneliness: ‘Sometimes, when the lecture was not good, something, a question, was needed to bring it all together. But the question never comes …And as there is no feedback, the lecture becomes a piece of theatre. My relationship with the people who are there is that of an actor or an acrobat. And when I have finished speaking, a feeling of total solitude.’(Macey 2019:245.)Buttoday,wewere saved from the metaphysical loneliness of the academic actor or acrobat. And I would say that it was not so much thanks to us as to the students and the topic of discussion which seemed to resonate in them. We discussed the reception of a book on the economic elite in Finland, freshly published by our colleagues (Kantola and Kuusela 2019). There was nothing extraordinary in the first part of the class that would have suggested in the direction of a great discussion to come. In fact, we started off by a fairly traditional short lecture on classification and power. I even showed some PowerPoint slides, although I had understood that we had tacitly agreed on not using them during the course. But still there was this fantastic, lively dialogue, while ‘death by PowerPoint’(Back 2016) (where technology may at worst only serve the aforementioned intellectual masturbation) could have equally taken place as well, maybe even more likely. Perhaps this just shows how you can never anticipate and have absolute control over whether a dialogue takes place or not. It catches you by surprise. Perhaps all you can do is become ‘worthy of the event’(Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 160). Week Five The purpose of the social sciences is not only to show how things and people are, but also how they could be. This emphasis comes from young Marx (1845) who famously stated that philosophers have so far only interpreted the world, but the point is to change it. Changing the world is at the same time a natural and enormous task for a social scientist, and it too demands interpretive work. Thus, both objectives, those of accurately presenting the world and changing it, can be creative and imaginative effort, depending on how talented a sociologist is. In recent decades, especially if compared to the 1970s, the target of changing the world has been disappearing from the social science curricula (of course, we only speak from our locality). Therefore, in today’s class, we wanted to discuss the methodology of activist research strategies and approaches such as participatory action research in connection to the tradition of conflict theories in sociology. We did not so much bring up dry and worn out methods as give examples of actual research practices. 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