Pastoral Care Online

For Cathy, this was something to do with the practice of stillness, listening and using the silence in the room. Unfortunately, on a video call, any stillness is quickly misinterpreted as a loss of internet connectivity, leading to panic and uncertainty and distracting from the question or problem at hand. For Emily, it was the energy she brings to the classroom – running round, chatting to students, dropping her pens – which had been drained and dampened by the static experience of addressing students from a little box on a screen. Everyone seems to have their own examples of the ways that relationships on screen are different, forcing us to rethink how we make connections, how we use our bodies, how we manage emotions in our newly online classrooms.

Emotions are absolutely critical to learning and there are lots of emotions in classrooms whether we are on screens or within walls. If we take teaching seriously as a caring profession, then we want both to ensure that our students are not experiencing emotions that are beyond their capacity to manage or will inhibit learning ­– which may arise if they are constantly discouraged or endlessly on the end of micro-aggressions – and also that they are experiencing the emotions that will support and enable their intellectual development. This is emphatically not the same as protecting students from any kind of unpleasant experience – which in any case is not within our power to do – but instead is about awareness and acknowledgement of the power of emotion and its unavoidable presence in all learning experiences for good or ill. For students and their teachers to learn, they must be able to be vulnerable, to make mistakes, to admit they got it wrong, to challenge someone else. Inevitably, any kind of learning may well involve a dollop of shame or embarrassment, as well as those exhilarating emotions associated with discovery. Therefore, we are all going to need resilience, confidence, a sense of belonging even in disagreement, kindness and a fundamental sense of safety. None of this is easy to navigate – but on screens?

How should we think about this? Our theoretical perspective is that emotions are not individualised, biological impulses, but rather are social, relational and produced by broader emotional regimes. We are therefore curious about how emotions materialise in our classrooms and what the possibilities are for us to intervene in them. Eloise Symonds has usefully distinguished two of the reigning regimes in contemporary Higher Education. On the one hand, neoliberal regimes position students as (happy or otherwise) individualised customers whose interests are understood to be in conflict with ours. We have seen this, for example, in the calls for students to have a reduction in their tuition fees if they are ‘only’ getting the university experience online, whilst we all feel as if we are working three times as hard as usual. As a customer is on the outside of an institution, it is more difficult to produce a sense of belonging and common cause in the relationships constituted by this regime. It is therefore a set of relationships too often characterised by anger, mistrust, perceptions of entitlement and so on. On the other hand, though inextricably linked to neoliberal regimes, more collegial regimes are marketed to students with promises that they can play a full part in the institution and be involved in knowledge production. If this were to be realised, it would need trust, support, strong relationships and vulnerability – all emotions discouraged, if not precluded, by the customer model.

The Virtual Learning Environment adds another dimension still to this complex set of tensions. As more of our teaching inevitably moves online with the pandemic this becomes more visible, but all of us were already using these digital tools as part of our teaching. Have we been focusing on making snazzy trailers for our modules and editing out every mistake of our ‘bite-sized’ videos? Are we investigating every bell and whistle available to us, getting carried away by the possibilities afforded by technology? Or are we perhaps in a despair because nothing ever seems to work quite as we hoped and the automatic speech recognition captioning thinks we mean ‘cheaters’ when we say ‘teachers’?  Notice how the student has disappeared from all these considerations and worries. Not only are the emotions of our own teaching experiences primarily invested in our relationships with technology, but by using the latter as a set of gimmicks to sell our classes to students – rather like a Hollywood movie  ­­– we are participating in positioning them as customers, rather than engaging empathetically with how we want them to learn.

We therefore think that pedagogical values – and everyone will have their own – are where we need to start as we figure out ways to navigate the university’s emotional regimes. What sort of emotions do we want in our classrooms and what sorts of relationships would we ideally want within the group? In making decisions about whether to narrate over PowerPoint slides or talk intimately to the camera, stand up or sit down whilst online teaching, require students to switch on cameras, or ‘post one and answer two’ in the discussion forum, the starting point has to be our own position on the emotional regime we want to foster and privilege.

The other really useful thing we can do for students is to make these regimes visible to them by talking about them. For example, we might ask them to discuss the norms they have encountered in online learning so far. This is a great way of helping them understand that a rule is not the same as a norm and also unearthing some of their habits and preconceptions, the better to challenge them. Is it a norm to have their cameras switched off? To talk in the chat rather than on mic? To watch your carefully crafted videos at 2x speed? Can you get them to talk through what those norms are doing for their learning? Do they help or hinder? It can be surprising how often just talking about these unspoken practices can disrupt them and put us on the path to more helpful learning experiences, especially if we find a way to laugh at how silly they often are. You might want to continue to make space for students to reflect on how they are feeling in response to whatever they are learning, to support them to see that emotion is central to our ability to process and evaluate what is going on in the classroom. Reflective writing or weekly blogging can be a great way of making emotion explicit and encouraging conversations about it.

The move online might help us all learn some new habits and unlearn some old ones that aren’t working. The broader emotional regimes of marketised Higher Education can’t be overcome by individuals on their own, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t do a lot to foster care and collegiality in our own digital learning spaces. Some simple things are much easier online. Remembering a student’s name just got a lot easier now that it’s written at the bottom of the little box they inhabit on your screen. Those quiet students might find easier to participate if you let them type their questions in the chat or have a separate running Google Doc for everyone to contribute to. Everyone is going to have chance to take a moment out from the hurly burly of the classroom or craft their answer a bit more carefully. These little bite-sized videos are going to be much better than long lectures in stuffy rooms for learning at students’ own pace.

Alongside setting practical expectations, then, we also have a lot of latitude for how we set the emotional tone of our online classroom. A clearly worded statement about what your students should do if they aren’t well or are struggling will help them and also show that you care from the get-go. Showing students your face and letting them hear your voice and see you smiling or making a joke will go a long way. Think about how you use your body and what that communicates to students. There is an intimacy to your pre-recorded videos when you talk direct to camera which is different from the drama of a lecture theatre, but just as powerful. And it’s always fantastic (if nerve-wracking) when you get something wrong and have the chance to be vulnerable, apologise, correct yourself, put it right. If no-one in the class is perfect or infallible, we all have permission to learn and grow.

We can put effort into making sure that everyone has chance to build relationships both with us and with other students by ensuring there are ice breaking exercises and social spaces. Let students know what office hours are and why they should come along. If you usually do a simulation in a half day exercise, you could run it online over a few weeks to create incentives for students to interact with each other. Open-ended Teams or Zoom calls can act as drop-in common rooms, either just for students, or at set times with you. The whole class could read a novel together and talk about it in discussion forums or video calls. All of this not only affords opportunities to get to know each other, but also to talk about how we are feeling perhaps through the medium of thinking about characters in our role plays or book.

The caring work we do as teachers is not incidental to learning. It is central to it and makes it possible. Heading into winter in the midst of an ongoing pandemic, our students are going to need our care and support and they will appreciate it. Teaching online is still about relationships, not how high spec your mic is or whether you learned how to do amazing transitions in iMovie or what great bits of stock video you found.

Finally, we would recommend slowly twirling your hair or adjusting your glasses when you’re listening intently – or everyone will think your line has frozen.

Image credit: Pixabay

Cathy Elliott (UCL) and Emily Robinson (University of Sussex) have written this blog alongside the webinar they delivered as part of the Teaching and Learning Network's webinar series 'Teaching Politics and IR Online: Design Matters'. To watch the full webinar recording click here.

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