With All Your Heart: To Learn and Teach in a Time of COVID-19: Education 'commonplaces' and online teaching
Mateo’s Room
In April 2019, a video originating in Argentina went viral. Its unsuspecting hero was Mateo Peluso, captured on screen falling fast asleep in his bed in the course of a Zoom class. How must the teacher have felt? Was the class too boring? The students too passive? The hour too early?
One of the greatest challenges of teaching is the tension between what teachers believe they are doing and what the students think is taking place. A distinction is often drawn between the intended and the learned curriculum (Cuban 1992) – often the two are radically different from each other. In the picture of the Argentinian student falling asleep, the teacher is afforded a rare insight into the student’s life and the student’s room. Along with the teacher, millions of viewers glimpsed into Mateo’s room, sympathized with both teacher and student, and perhaps also reflected on our own situations – the detachment and upheaval which has been thrust upon so many.
In a learning context, there is also a distinction to be made between different kinds of presence. All over the world, the pandemic has forced educational systems and institutions to grapple with enormous challenges. Many teachers and students have experienced great frustration and a sense of loss while trying to maintain educational momentum. Like every crisis, this one may serve as a wake-up call. We are presented with an opportunity to consider what has changed – not just to list the adjustments forced upon us by coronavirus restrictions, but to reflect on changes in societal needs. Only by reflecting on these changes might it be possible to plan for changes in our own patterns of behavior.
In looking for a structure with which to anchor these reflections, I fall back on the four curriculum commonplaces coined by Joseph J. Schwab, often employed when thinking about pedagogy and curriculum. Teaching and learning at this time calls us to redefine the interactions between teacher, student, subject matter and milieu.
Subject Matter – what should be taught and learned?
It is through the prism of subject matter that most educational discourse occurs. We tend to ask what it is we have come to learn or teach, and we classify the kind of study taking place: this class is about history, and this is a Talmud class. This continues despite the fact that recent decades have seen a revolution in the accessibility of information and communication, which can be reached with unprecedented ease.
It has never been easier to access information, but such access does not make the accrual of information the purpose of instruction. Rather, the emphasis now shifts to methods of gleaning, shifting and making meaning out of raw data. It is possible to turn any learning experience into an active process of constructing knowledge. In the terminology of the philosophy of education known as critical pedagogy, one of the aims of learning is known as “mapping reality,” a joint enterprise of understanding the world around us through dialogue and the asking of questions. This kind of learning involves observing and assessing the norms, political and social contexts of our reality with a view to effecting change. From this perspective, the learning of subject matter is undertaken not for the sake of memorizing facts, but rather in active pursuit of self-understanding and the promulgation of meaning. The understanding of texts, traditions and concepts takes place every time learner-based curricula encounter content.
Constructivist approaches tend to regard interaction – between a learner and a text, between one person and another, between my earlier understanding and my developing consciousness - as a necessary ground for the cognitive process of learning. So understood, learning calls for interaction between varying perspectives. “To reach an understanding in dialogue is not merely a matter of putting oneself forward and successfully asserting one’s own point of view but being transformed into a communion in which we do not remain what we were.” (Gadamer 2004, p.371).
“In the practice of learning, we will need to be ready to change the world and to be changed in the process. ”
In this time when the world is in urgent need of knowledge about ways of contending with COVID-19, it is more crucial than ever to develop capacities for inquiry, decoding, trial and error. In the practice of learning, we will need to be ready to change the world and to be changed in the process.
Teachers and Instruction: Attention and Connection
The move from data-based learning curricula to curricula emphasizing the acquisition of competencies necessarily has an impact on the educator. More than ever, they must be attentive to their learners, and they need to become better acquainted with student needs.
To employ the method made famous by Socrates—posing generative questions—means to invert the familiar model whereby the teacher lectures and the student is lectured to. In this alternative model, the teacher must ask questions likely to prompt students in that specific context to thought and reflection. As the seder night demonstrates, learning can be resonant when the learner poses the questions and the teacher or parent attempt to respond. Rabbinic tradition is founded on an approach of interpretive negotiation and the active posing of questions which blurs the line between the teacher and the learner. In some modern schools of educational thinking, the teaching of foundational disputes at the heart of various disciplines is important in bringing the learner into the continuum of knowledge construction. Rather than provide set answers, learning of significance happens when significant questions become the heart of the process.
Martha Stone Wiske argues (1998) that one measures a good teacher not by the content she teaches, but by what she inspires her students to do. The theory of Teaching for Understanding spells this approach out by placing at its center the nurturing of students’ performative capacity; the creation of a learning environment focused on generative questions, solution of problems, and activities privileging inquiry. All these together, she argues, encourage students to take responsibility for their own learning.
This time of COVID-19 has transformed the choreography of learning. Most teachers no longer stand at the front of a crowded classroom. Teaching through a screen or a facemask, in smaller or virtual classrooms, provides an opportunity to think not only about teaching techniques but about the very concept of a class. The timeframe and physical context in which a class takes place have changed. The possibilities of both synchronous and asynchronous instruction have both limited teachers’ options, and yet also increased them. It is possible that new approaches to class teaching will promote small group learning and the widening of the circle of partners engaged in the process of learning.
Social distancing has made the need for connection between teachers and students even greater. Increasing connectedness requires a closer familiarity of teachers with their students' realities and areas of interest so they can support students as they learn. Teachers must initiate contact in different ways when not encountering student face to face every day. The availability of new technologies offers alternatives, although probably they will not replace physical proximity completely. When face to face meetings do take place, it makes sense to emphasize dialogue, attentiveness, and the creation of the sense that we learn together in a community.
Learners and Presence
How can we encourage learners to take responsibility for their own process? How can we learn to spark curiosity and motivation, thus inviting students to enjoy learning?
For as long as classrooms and schools have existed, many students have been physically in the classroom while their heads are somewhere else. The great Hebrew poet Hayim Nahman Bialik described his experience learning in the cheder:
I had no luck at cheder. I felt isolated from my classmates and they from me. I was shrunk within myself, building an entire world in my heart without anyone noticing. Even the rabbi and his assistant suspect nothing. (Bialik, Chapter 3)
Bialik sits in a classroom full of pupils and feels quite alone. His fellow students are unaware, and his teacher remains similarly oblivious. Perhaps today the young Bialik would be diagnosed with an attention challenge or psychological difficulty. But then as now, who can say what our students think and feel? Or how we may best connect them to what we teach?
It seems to me that the great challenge of education has always been the challenge of presence, of being fully conscious and aware of this particular moment, which includes deep attentiveness and an openness to that which is beyond regular assumptions and customs:
Presence is defined as a state of alert awareness, receptivity, and connectedness to the mental, emotional, and physical workings of both the individual and the group in the context of their learning environments, and the ability to respond with a considered and compassionate best next step. (Senge et al, 2005, p.11)
Ergas has argued that in most cases, classes involve the acquisition of knowledge that relates to a world external to the learners. One directs only a small amount to internal reflection. At a time when we stay socially distant, teachers are forced to teach online, where the concept of student attendance has become increasingly difficult to gauge. A student may register presence while being inaudible, invisible, distracted – or fast asleep. Against this backdrop, the perennial question of the student’s “soul,” her deep self, is raised with particular urgency. How can we bring the learner’s heart and soul into the process of learning in such challenging circumstances?
Setting performative goals can only be one part of a strategy to encourage students to take responsibility for their learning. In order to turn inquiry and investigation into profound experiences, the teacher has to contextualize the pursuit of knowledge and invite the learner to wrestle with key questions. For students to truly engage, learning has to matter.
The words of the first paragraph of the Shema, verses from the sixth chapter of the Book of Deuteronomy recited at night and in the morning, set out a description of engaged education:
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. Take to heart these instructions which I charge you this day. Impress them upon your children. Recite them when you stay at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you get up. Bind them as a sign on your hand and let them serve as a symbol on your forehead. Inscribe them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. (Deuteronomy 6:5-9)
The Shema speaks to each individual, calling for the engagement of different senses and capacities, from dusk until dawn and on again.
Only by being present with all one’s heart and soul might one replace the partial and the distracted—perhaps only in fleeting moments—by the engrossing and the engaging. Bialik, who we last saw alone and alienated in a crowded classroom, describes a redemptive experience in the cheder, the classroom of Rabbi Meir:
Just as the name Meir means “one who brings light,” so the cheder of Rabbi Meir was enlightening. I see a path leading from one end of the earth to the other still my eye is not sated. …Little me, a chick just hatched, a nothing, sits here hunched over and gathered into myself on a hard bench in a narrow room in a little low house, precarious and gloomy, subsiding into a valley in the middle of nowhere, and yet my spirit wanders and looks across millennia and centuries in other and distant worlds. I can only make out the blurred letters of the faded books – Bible, Rashi, – sporadically and inaccurately, but from within those letters I see before me generations and epochs…. I am in conversation with all those who have come before, and I am a partner with them in their lives and their deeds. I build their demolished world for myself, even from among truncated verses – in moments of need, Rashi lends a hand – and the words bring light and joy, order and beauty. [Safiach, Chapter 9]
Rabbi Meir’s classroom keeps the young pupil fully present, body and soul. Caught up in the great spirit of generations and epochs, Bialik begins to feel a sense of involvement in the lives and deeds of those who have gone before. These days, our classes take place in all kinds of classrooms and kitchens and bedrooms. Any screen or makeshift learning space can become a portal through which learners can construct new worlds – so long as we manage to link their hearts, their wills, and their souls.
Milieu – Zoom In / Zoom Out
Learning and teaching are contextual activities. The new prevalence of distance learning has created two fascinating – and exasperating – new contexts. The home environments of the learners appear in the classroom. On the other hand, learning seems often more anonymous in nature.
The Hebrew poet Zelda was a beloved teacher in Jerusalem – Amos Oz has written movingly of the experience of learning from her. Decades before the advent of Zoom, she described how in her experience every pupil would 'bring' their home into the classroom. Every learner carries with them their homes, their feelings, their love, their pain, their habits – and these stay with them in class. The teacher also brings her home with her to class.
These days we expose one another to domestic realities. In the background of every Zoom square we find much information. Some blur or conceal the true background with a picture. For many, this change to the milieu in which home, family, class and work co-mingle makes learning almost impossible
We can now learn and teach from everywhere, from anywhere. The limitations imposed upon us by the pandemic have also served to widen the circle of learner, include those usually consigned to the periphery, and widened the range of learning opportunities available to many. New vistas have opened for older people and those with challenges to their health or their mobility.
This new moment impacts the way in which we see and are seen, we hear and are heard. My mother, who lives in central Israel, participates in a Mishnah class. She sits in her home in Petah Tikvah while her teacher lives far away in the Galilee. For the first time in her life, she has participated in this kind of learning. Sitting at the screen with her camera off has allowed her to cross a barrier she would not otherwise have dared traverse. She can participate as much as she wants. When she tires, she steps away. She tells me that she greatly enjoys the wealth of Torah, and the possibility of learning as much as she can, as much as she wants.
This new Zoom moment allows many of us to decide how deeply to engage and provides a spectrum of engagement rather than a simple binary choice between opting in and opting out. In this way Zoom restores a degree of agency to the learner and increases the ranks of voluntary students. On the other hand, this new moment diminishes the teacher’s control. They often do not know who has attended or whether the darkened video screen denotes shyness or absence. Is the learner really there, heart and soul? Is she engaged in some other activity at the same time? Is she asleep?
It may appear paradoxical to yearn for full presence at a time of enforced absence. Perhaps teachers must now find ways to invite learners to come closer. We have to strive for education which gives meaning to life by inviting learners to engage with Great Questions – remembering all the while that we cannot force learning whether on the screen or in person; students must generate it.
Because the settings in which learning occurs are so variable and unexpected, maintaining the routines of learning can become an anchor. Therefore, we should not abandon routines of our classes, even when we feel sometimes disappointed, or face low student attendance. At these times especially, we should try to keep our routines, strive for relevant teaching and learning, presence and connectedness.
“Education is first and foremost a matter of presence – presence in the moment, presence in the task at hand, creating a living connection between what we learn and who we are, and between the teacher and the learner.”
Education is first and foremost a matter of presence – presence in the moment, presence in the task at hand, creating a living connection between what we learn and who we are, and between the teacher and the learner. The words of Jonah, recited each Day of Atonement, resonate this year with especial clarity, rousing somnolent students and inspiring beleaguered teachers:
…מה לך נרדם? קום קרא
How can you be sleeping so soundly? Rise up, and call out… (Jonah 1:6)
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