Earlier this week, during the virtual Fierce Education conference titled, Higher Education: Helping Faculty Navigate top Challenges in this New Blending Learning Environment, I had the opportunity to take in a talk presented by Sean Michael Morris, vice-president, academics at Course Hero. In his presentation, “Teaching through the Screen: Engaging Imagination to Engage Students,” Sean spoke about critical pedagogy as a humanizing pedagogy; that our focus should be on “seeking the human behind the screen, the human behind the bureaucracies of education, the human behind behaviorist technologies.” So, put another way, we should not teach to the screen (after all it is just a digital tool!), but look through it to those behind the screen who we are teaching. Only by changing our perception of online learning will we be truly able to engage our students. Wow, what a revelation!

Sean introduced us to Maxine Green who wrote in 2000 that “Our obligation today is to find ways of enabling the young to find their voices, to open their spaces, to reclaim their histories in all their variety and discontinuity” (Releasing the Imagination, 120). Imagination, as a “practice of freedom,” can inspire us to change the way we reach our learners. With the COVID-19 experience and our two-year pivot to online learning, this is more needed today than ever.

He then reminded us of what Jesse Stommel said about starting by trusting our students and emphasized that students are producers of knowledge, not just consumers of knowledge. Remembering that the more we know, the less we imagine, can be a powerful learning concept. Engaging students in a learning partnership is empowering for both learners and instructors. In a 2014 interview, Stommel commented:

Learning is always a risk. It means, quite literally, opening ourselves to new ideas, new ways of thinking. It means challenging to engage the world differently. It means taking a leap, which is always done better from a sturdy foundation. This foundation depends on trust – trust that the ground will not give way beneath us, trust for teachers, and trust for our fellow learners in a learning community.

-Jesse Stommel

So, what if we trusted our students as co-learners and used our imagination to see through the screen?

While this may have been true pre-pandemic, it is even more true now. The days of students coming to us to attend in-person classes in university lecture halls have probably changed. An increasing number of students will probably be seeking online courses, be they synchronous, asynchronous, or blended. They will be the new traditional learners in post-secondary or tertiary learning. We will need to trust them and encourage their learning by “seeking the human behind the screen.”

I am ready!

-Clayton Smith