Category: Teaching and learning

Suman Gupta

Pedagogic Context

I continue here with the argument of the earlier posting on Direct and Mediated Contact in Literary Pedagogy. I do so at a similar level of generality, without as yet nuancing the argument along the lines of Richard’s Response (for which I am grateful).

Effective teaching and learning of literature – and of other Humanities areas – depend upon a shared awareness of the pedagogic context among teachers and students. In other words, teachers and students need common reference points for the cultural context within and with reference to which pedagogy is undertaken. Conventionally this has been ensured by direct contact, grounded in the culture of the classroom or peer group, of a university, of a geopolitical location, and so on. When pedagogy is undertaken through mediated contact, typically through digital means, those conventional markers of the pedagogic context are dispersed. Each student and teacher meeting on a forum may be located in vastly different cultural and linguistic contexts, without the conventionally shared reference points to inform their pedagogic engagement. Hence a question: in mediated-contact literary pedagogy then, what features of a shared culture could inform teaching and learning? It is necessary to pause on this question instead of rushing into ‘strategic transformations’ from direct- to mediated-contact pedagogy. That was the gist of the argument made earlier.

The obvious answer to that question is: literary pedagogy would need to draw upon the shared culture afforded by the internet, the online forum, the digital form themselves – that is, the culture that has developed around the means via which mediated-contact pedagogy is conducted. Let’s call this the culture of a digital habitus. There are complex negotiations of linguistic, regional and social difference involved in the digital habitus. Numerous scholarly publications have explored these, and research is ongoing. There is, however, comparatively little research into the particular sort of digital habitus of interest here: the digital pedagogic habitus, within which mediated-contact teaching and learning is done. As observed in the previous posting, the drivers for scholarship have focused on how to do it (hurriedly and cheaply) rather than on what it involves for disciplinary practices (thinkingly). Scholarship into the digital pedagogic habitus wherein literary teaching and learning might be effectively done is very thin indeed. That could be a meaningful dimension of the otherwise nebulous buzzwords ‘digital humanities’ so beloved of university managers, research funders and HE policy makers.

Contemplating literary studies apropos of the digital pedagogic habitus necessarily calls for some grasp of the architecture of that habitus. That is, teachers and students need a shared sense of this habitus’ underpinning technological and sociological principles, the various agencies involved in it, its economic arrangements, the legal regimes governing it, the distinctive communicative practices it has engendered, etc. These are yet to be inculcated within literary pedagogy to any significant degree. But emerging scholarly frameworks could be productively recruited for the purpose, especially from analyses of ‘the posthuman’ and of e-literature ….

… I had intended to set forth tentatively in that direction for this posting. But I took a break and went for a leisurely chat instead with a former student in the university café. Several years of direct-contact pedagogy preceded these regular meetings, liberated now from pedagogic aims and objectives. These meetings are rituals of friendship now, and I look forward to them. So, I put the above thoughts to my former student, and he raised a few posers, and I mulled them, and he dissected my mullings, and a bee was set buzzing in my bonnet. The idiomatic bee hovers before the project of exploring the digital pedagogic habitus, and this posting is addressed to its buzzing.

Data Matters

The exchanges involved in direct-contact teaching allow for necessary transience and forgetting, much as in everyday exchanges – as in friendly conversations in a café. The detritus of irate remarks, inadvertent and misjudged comments, ill-expressed sentiments, lapses of memory, errors, talk at cross purposes, incomprehension and so on are largely negotiated out of existence through communicative exchanges to leave teachers and learners with a mutual crystallization of what is relevant. Space is made for these mishaps to be accommodated and to be forgotten gradually in the process of direct-contact pedagogy. There is an agreement between teachers and students and the institutions providing the pedagogic space that those mishaps are inevitable, and overcoming them is what teaching and learning consist in. It is also understood that pre-agreed junctures will be appointed wherein a record of performance will be knowingly obtained – that’s the assessment juncture. The periods, contents and rules of assessment are clear to all parties. Performance is evaluated at the pre-agreed junctures. The rest of the learning process, with its inevitable mishaps, remain unrecorded. In brief, a ‘right to forget’ some parts of the process of direct-contact pedagogy is built into educational programmes – that is, a right for students and teachers. Those unrecorded parts are left, as everyday conversations are, to the vagaries of living memory. This foreknowledge gives both students and teachers confidence in the integrity of the programme they engage in.

Mediated-contact pedagogy through digital interfaces necessarily comes with the possibility that nothing will be forgotten, that all exchanges will be recorded. Digitization is for recording and is in itself a formation of record. It is a mode of disposing all information that passes into its form such that it can be easily stored, retrieved, and transferred. Thus every text that is digitized, every exchange on a digital forum, anything that is input or uploaded in any programme (whether networked or in-house, publicly accessible or secured) is immediately a record, already recorded and retrievable. Mediated-contact pedagogy takes place, then, in an environment of potentially total recall and absolute accountability. The only kind of forgetting and transience that is possible is by the voluntary act of deletion; and it is also possible that any part of that record can be modified by a voluntary act. However, in mediated-contact pedagogy the ability to delete or modify the record of exchanges is largely not in the hands of the main digital interlocutors, the students and teachers. It is usually in the hands of the institutions that administer pedagogic programmes: university managers and those who maintain the university’s servers. The digital record of what teachers and students say and write is not owned by them, it is owned by universities – and it is a total record that the university, as an institution, can use in various ways. It is exploitable data.

From a student’s perspective, two kinds of data can be elicited by the university from the record that accrues through mediated-contact pedagogy. On the one hand, data to profile each student individually can be obtained. This data may potentially incorporate information which the student didn’t intend for recording or would prefer to be forgotten. On the other hand, data to profile cohorts of students collectively in relation to various factors may be obtained. This sort of data appears to be of little concern to students since individuals are anonymized or lost in aggregates. However, such data may be used in ways which do concern all students. For instance, such data may be used to design or engineer the performance of cohorts in ways which are not obvious in the ostensible rules and mutual agreements of assessment. Such data may also be used to structure public perceptions, design entry and learning pathways, massage the student experience, and attract investments in various ways which neither students nor teachers may be aware of – may not consent to if they were.

Insofar as a student may exercise some prerogative on data relating to herself individually, the prerogative is usually legally enjoined by requirements of ‘information disclosure’, erasure upon request, or consent for use, and a promise of maintaining the security of such data. This calls for considerable awareness of what sort of individual data may be generated and held, and anticipation of how it may be used. Active intervention from the student is necessary to find out what individual data is held and seek its removal, akin to actively unticking an option which has been ticked in advance by a service provider.

Insofar as collective data are held there are no significant legal provisions to enable students – or teachers – to be informed. It is considered that such data are the university’s business and property.

In all cases, much depends on students trusting the integrity of the university apropos of the use of such data, in the absence of any proprietor-like control on their own part. However, universities are now necessarily rival institutions in many respects, competing with each other to meet targets in the ‘student market’ and vying for limited resources from funders. Some sceptical students might feel that competitive interests could possibly supersede responsibilities to students or teachers.

Similar considerations apply regarding such data from the teacher’s perspective.

These are significant considerations since the integrity of any educational programme depends upon mutual understanding between students and teachers, clarity regarding the assessment process, and conviction in transparent institutional support. Students need to feel they are in possession of their learning to be able to engage in the pedagogic process with conviction. It is critically important to institute procedures for ensuring that the integrity of the pedagogic process is unquestionable at the commencement of any programme with mediated-contact pedagogy. That involves giving comprehensive advance information for students and teachers on data generation and usage, and making robust arrangements for protecting students’ (and teachers’) interests. External regulation, audits and open-to-public reports on how institutions gather and use data – both individual and collective – would help garner the confidence of students in mediated-contact pedagogy. Such regulation is also necessary for quality assurance of educational programmes in the digital habitus.

Insofar as mediated-contact literary teaching and learning goes, wherein the digital pedagogic habitus needs to be explicitly in view, understanding the ins and outs of data elicitation and usage is as much a scholarly obligation as a practical necessity. That’s where engagement with the culture of the digital pedagogic habitus could begin.

Richard Allen

The analysis and the questions raised in the previous posting on Direct and Mediated Contact in Literary Pedagogy are pertinent to the future of Literary Studies. My comments here don’t dare to provide answers but raise two issues which I think are relevant and which might require Suman’s questions to be posed in a more nuanced or variegated way.

First there’s a tendency to see Literary Studies and Higher Education in a somewhat monolithic way in Suman’s piece. In fact Higher Education has had and continues to have a strongly social class related hierarchy. So, do universities which attract and accept applicants from private schools and have significant endowments face the questions you raise in the same way as universities which are struggling to achieve recruitments and maintain income and whose managers then feel they need to ‘restructure’? Certainly some of these elite universities have found already methods of keeping the costs of direct contact pedagogy down by dint of employing junior researchers and others with ambitions to be academics in a way that is close to the ‘gig’ economy which has spread so much in recent years in the UK. There perhaps isn’t either a simple relationship between high status and direct contact pedagogy since a good number of the FE Colleges that have developed HE streams have found ways of teaching HE students in a quite intensive ‘direct contact’ way. This is to a significant extent because their teaching staff aren’t involved in research — another factor that is relevant to the issues here. But perhaps as relevant here is the fact that these FE colleges do not share/enjoy the massification and growth in student numbers that are found in most middle ranking universities. So perhaps the questions Suman raises are particularly pertinent to the middle of the hierarchy. Or maybe one should also put things onto a time dimension and say they are particularly relevant to the middle of the range now but the question will come to others in time?

The second issue here is the relation of study and employment and the ideological frameworks within which English Studies sit. The dominant framework for government policy makers now seems to be that the study of Humanities subjects should be subsidised less than the study of, for example, Medicine or Engineering. A higher government subsidy for these latter ‘useful’ subjects might — the Panglossion argument recently advanced goes — enable universities to reduce the fees for Humanities subjects. More likely any reduction in fees would be matched by a reduction in resources allocated to Humanities, hastening the shift to mediated contact pedagogy learning which Suman describes.  What is the result of thinking through the issues Suman describes in this frame? Is English Studies taught by ‘mediated contact’ likely to produce a social group competing for middle ranking ‘white collar’ jobs — just the group that some predict will be most detrimentally affected by increased automation and artificial intelligence? Research done by Suman and myself with others in India has perhaps a potentially intriguing relevance here. There we found that in the group of elite universities, studying English Literature was seen as valuable by students not just because of the skills they learned but because it would provide them with the skill and knowledge to position themselves within a high status social group. Can the whole range of what Suman calls ‘cultural formations’ be directed to a simple model of what students will do after they graduate or are different approaches required? How do those creating courses understand and place themselves in a ‘cultural present’ formed in such a variegated environment?

Suman Gupta

Teachers and researchers in literary studies at The Open University have delivered Higher Education (HE) programmes using up-to-date methods and technologies for almost 50 years. In this they have followed the mission of the university: in particular, to make HE accessible to constituencies which may otherwise not benefit from it. Reaching and enabling students across distances, in different locations and under varied circumstances, is vital for the university’s mission. Of necessity that has entailed both making special arrangements for direct contact with students and using the available technological means for mediated contact. The Literature and Creative Writing Department has enjoyed remarkable success in this, and met all the standards of academic excellence appointed for the HE sector as a whole (including old and new universities).

Members of the English and Creative Writing Department at The Open University are therefore uniquely placed to engage with questions to do with teaching and learning literature by using multiple means and across multiple locations. Such questions are now becoming salient for the HE sector at large. Teachers and researchers in the department are accustomed to asking difficult questions about literary pedagogy before they are posed in conventional HE settings, and resolving them.

This posting is devoted to raising and clarifying such a question, of moment to present-day literary pedagogy in the HE sector generally.

The HE Sector

The HE sector, in widely dispersed locations around the world, is contemplating a significant shift in pedagogy. The shift is from the dominance of direct (face-to-face) contact towards foregrounding mediated contact via digital networks in teaching and learning. The latter is no longer the preserve of what was conventionally regarded as the ‘distance education’ part of the HE sector. It is being considered or incorporated to varying degrees across the sector. Policy moves to facilitate this are widely evident; significant investments are being made in the technological means to enable this; and large-scale publicity campaigns are underway to encourage it.

The sector-wide shift is contemplated predominantly for economic reasons. In brief, it is held that the costs of direct contact in HE pedagogy are now too high to be managed by public funding or fee regimes, such that HE can be provided equitably across disparate socio-economic strata and territories. Should conviction in direct contact be dislodged, a greater number of students in widely distributed locations (potentially globally) can be processed at low infrastructural and staffing costs – putatively without compromising the academic and pedagogic quality measures that exist.

This sector-wide drift has naturally excited the enthusiasm of education policy makers, university managers and corporate investors in HE. In broad outline, the following points cover the thrust of investigations underpinning the shift so far:

1. The shift is between two pedagogic poles: full direct contact (in classrooms and tutorials; between students and teachers, amongst students and amongst teachers) on the one hand, and no direct contact (fully technologically mediated teaching and learning) on the other. The shift is not contemplated as abruptly flipping from one pole to the other. Rather, it consists in a gradual process of reducing direct contact and correspondingly increasing mediated contact.
2. The factors that determine this process are: (a) development of internet-based technological affordances/capacities which may approximate expectations grounded on the norm of direct contact; (b) gradual reduction of infrastructure and staffing resources to acclimatise students to pedagogy by technological mediation; (c) installing measurements of academic quality and pedagogic effectiveness such that this process garners confidence amongst student populations, academic communities and broader publics. Thus, research has focused largely on two issues: first, how to make it technologically possible?; second, how to convince all that it is desirable?
3. The success of moves in this shift are ultimately always measured in monetary terms: i.e. the financial investment in providing HE should be reduced, while maintaining confidence in the HE ‘product’ such that returns on investment should increase.

However, the norm of direct (face-to-face) contact in HE pedagogy is a powerful one, not easily dispelled, for three reasons:

1. It continues to be the unquestioned basis of formal school education. The transition from school to HE is therefore likely to be rendered disjunctive/unsettling by this shift.
2. Conventionally, in HE the entire received system of pedagogic practice (and therefore knowledge production generally) has developed on the precondition of direct contact.
3. Consequently, the existing measures of pedagogic quality have been firmly based on direct contact. These are embedded in factors such as ‘resources’ or ‘environment’, and in practices such as ‘tutorials’, ‘lectures’, ‘seminars’, ‘conferences’, ‘workshops’, ‘supervision meetings’, etc. The very language of HE pedagogy is premised on direct contact.

Literary Pedagogy 

All the above issues are being intensively researched and investigated to facilitate the sector-wide drift. The thrust of this research is: how to make the shift happen across the sector so that it becomes economically profitable without becoming socially disruptive? The ongoing research is strongly determined by the need to make it happen as a sector-wide strategy. Contrarians articulate their interrogations accordingly, more to question this process in general conceptual terms (and sometimes to highlight inequities) rather than to examine the methodological nuances and integrity of this process from discipline-specific viewpoints.

There is therefore a discipline-specific space in contemplating this process which calls for more attention than it is currently receiving. This discipline-specific space is of especial significance or, rather, appears variously fraught from the perspective of humanistic disciplines, and particularly with literary pedagogy in mind.

That does not mean that the process of this shift should be resisted by literary scholars. It means that the process urgently calls for more careful and deliberative reckoning from the perspective of literary pedagogy than might be the case for some other areas. This reckoning could be with a view to either appropriately informing or carefully adapting the process so that literary pedagogy remains sustainable. The very substantial existing market of literary studies could then not only be suitably catered but expanded further, and the vitality of literary scholarship enhanced.

To convey why the disciplinary perspective of literary pedagogy calls for particular attention apropos of the shift, the somewhat overloaded term ‘culture’ is called upon in a reduced sense here. For present purposes, ‘culture’ refers to social references, allusions, preconceptions which render communication collectively meaningful (i.e. to large or small collectives, at broader or contained levels).

In some academic disciplines – such as mathematics, many areas of the natural sciences and some of the social sciences – there is a high degree of pre-existing consensus on the relevant terminology, evidence bases and inferential methods among scholars. Therefore, scholarly and pedagogic practices for such disciplines generally have a low sensitivity to context-specific cultural characteristics. Their integrity is not indifferent to cultural factors but work relatively consistently across a wide range of cultures.

And in certain academic disciplines – including most areas of the humanities, and particularly literary studies – consensus is sought by constant clarification and negotiation of the relevant terminology, evidence bases and inferential methods among scholars. A continuous interplay between distinct cultures of production and reception and analysis and pedagogy is entailed. Necessarily, a high sensitivity to and awareness of context-specific cultural characteristics is called for. That includes the cultural context in which pedagogy itself is undertaken.

In literary studies, this necessity is embedded in the very structure of disciplinary pursuits and organisation of disciplinary knowledge. Thus, for instance, critically engaging with literary texts calls for joined-up reflection on one or more of the following at the same time:

• The cultural factors which bear upon the writing of a text in its historical context
• The cultural circumstances of the historical context wherein the text is made public (the process of publication)
• The cultures of reading in every period in which the text is perused and discussed
• The cultures of translation, adaptation, publishing, criticism, pedagogy to which the text is recruited in various periods
• The present day cultures in which the text is studied again, where its continuing relevance is registered – which is really a way for students to come to grips with and become productive within the cultures of the present in all their complexity and immediacy.

Insofar as literary pedagogy goes, this calls for a clear sense of where, when and why teaching and learning takes place: an immediate apprehension of the social, economic, political, everyday realities amidst which the rigorous discussion of literary texts is undertaken between students and teachers, amongst students and amongst teachers. In this sense, every literary pedagogic space, every classroom, lecture session, tutorial group, seminar group, workspace, etc. forms an immediate cultural grouping. Each of these exist within wider cultures – institutional, regional, and so on — and bear upon the rigorous teaching and learning of literature. Whenever a text is engaged in a tutorial group or a classroom, an immediate set of shared cultural references between students and teachers is called upon, which radiate out to wider collectives. That is the literary pedagogic enterprise.

The Question

In literary pedagogy the norm of direct contact has thus been particularly salient. Direct contact has generally provided the immediate living cultural references that inform teaching and learning. Literary pedagogy has developed through an extended period of disciplinary professionalization, well before ‘literary studies’ in its modern sense emerged in the 19^th century, through older teaching and learning practices to do with rhetoric and philology. The real expectations of students, teachers, employers, and society at large with interests in literary studies have been formed accordingly – and these are, in every sense, very large interests.

In contemplating a HE sector-wide or even institutional shift towards increasing degrees of mediated contact (towards a horizon of  minimum or no direct contact), it would be imprudent to consider that mediated contact can replace direct contact on the same terms. The direct-contact teaching space (e.g. classroom) allows for literary pedagogy in a way that a mediated-contact teaching space (e.g. internet forum) cannot. But equally — and this is important — the mediated-contact teaching space might be able to offer modes and models of literary pedagogy which are unavailable in the direct-contact space.

However, the latter possibility has been too little investigated in relation to literary pedagogy. The putative and short-term economic advantages of this shift seem so tempting that HE policy and governance drivers, in government agencies and in educational institutions, are hurrying into precarious, half-baked pushes to make it happen. Breakneck drives for transformation and insistence on embracing change are accordingly enforced. In this vein, it seems expedient to simply try and make mediated contact approximate direct contact as quickly as possible, and to focus on how to do it across the HE sector rather that on what needs to be done for particular parts of the HE sector – such as, for pedagogy in specific disciplines.

Insofar as literary pedagogy goes, it is important that the classroom is a particular sort of cultural formation and the internet forum also a particular sort of cultural formation. They are not the same. The kinds of cultural referents offered by the former are different from the latter. For each, literary teaching and learning have to be arranged accordingly so as to be effective and productive. The direct presence of persons in a classroom allows for relatively easily accessible common cultural reference points. The dispersed presence of participants in an internet forum — perhaps under different political regimes, with different linguistic idioms and abilities, acclimatised to varied social customs – calls for a different way of registering the cultural present. Literary pedagogy is undertaken within and with reference to this awareness of the cultural present.

Given the direction being taken across the HE sector as a whole outlined at the beginning, this situation raises a pressing question for all who participate in literary teaching and learning. The question is best expressed as three questions, but it is really one:

1. How does direct contact work for literary teaching and learning practices in cultural terms?
2. How does mediated contact work for literary teaching and learning practices in cultural terms?
3. In shifting from some element of direct-contact pedagogy towards mediated-contact pedagogy, what needs to be done in practice to ensure that literary pedagogy is enhanced and works in the best interests of students, teachers and society at large?