Tag: technology

The end of this week brings to a close another academic year, and this one was a doozy in many respects. But the issue most present to mind now, as I sit steeped in exams and papers, concerns my students’ well-being and classroom performance. To use a technical term, students were busted: they struggled with attendance, they struggled with reading, and most notably they struggled with assignments and exams. Levels of distraction were off the charts.

The conspicuousness of the problem may have to do with the fact that I was on sabbatical for most of last year, which afforded me fresh eyes on the classroom now, but the problem isn’t new, and others have called it out well before me. Three years ago, for example, The Chronicle of Higher Ed published a feature story about the disengagement crisis among what the Chronicle terms “The COVID generation,” which sourced the matter in a few things. There was the switch to online teaching during the pandemic, but also, more generally, the growing economic and social precarity that students have faced over the past decade (a contemporary crisis much longer in the making). No doubt occasioned by the time of year, a handful of recent articles and blog posts have also linked student disengagement to the encroachment of technology into the classroom, taking a long view that begins with mobile phones, laptops, and tablets, moves through MOOCs and pandemic-era Zoom schooling, and into the current moment of generative AI. This generation of students, perhaps more than any other generation, has been run through a technological grinder constructed in large part by same forces responsible for broader conditions of precarity.

Anyway, as I said, there are plenty of very good analyses of this situation, which I expect to share and reflect on in the coming months. But in the meantime, I’ve been making a list of possible ways to address issues of student engagement at the level of my classroom. Even knowing full well that there are larger forces at work, it still seems possible to make meaningful interventions in pedagogy that may help students now, and perhaps facilitate energy and movement toward addressing those larger, structural problems in the future. Here is a running list that I’m hoping to spend some time thinking about over the coming summer months:

• Tech in the classroom: I used to bristle at the thought of “no tech” policies, often for no other reason than my own lack of interest in enforcing them. However, preliminary reading suggests this can have significant changes and that many students may actually want this but are unable to make the move themselves.
• Ungrading: I’ve experimented with this in the past, and students have reported that my “ungraded” courses helped to ease some of anxiety they typically feel around writing assignments. At the same time, students’ grades in other classes remain a powerful motivator that pulls their attention away from my classes, which are often GEs and so perceived as less important. Students are very open but also very apologetic about that when they have discussed their performance with me. Still, I think ungrading has a lot to contribute to this project and is worth re-engaging.
• Developing print materials at low-to-no cost to students: One way to get students off of laptops is to have them work with print materials. I often long for the kinds of course packs I used in graduate school, some of which I still have. They were cheap and easy, but concerns over copyright have made it nearly impossible to implement them in a classroom, especially with the quick turnaround time between quarters. The more radical approach would be to reconfigure an entire class so that readings could be distributed to students on a weekly basis–so, moving away from novels and toward things like poems, short fiction, and film.
• Disengaging from Canvas: The LMS may not be contributing as much as, say, classroom tech and PDF readings toward student disengagement, but it’s a part of the problem nonetheless.

There are other areas, too, and each of the above is a massive project in and of itself. Moreover, it would be immensely difficult to implement them all in one quarter. Still, I’ll be thinking and writing more about each over the coming months.