Occasional Paper Series #46
Shifting Skins: Becoming Multiple During Emergency Online Teaching
by Bianca Licata & Catherine Cheng Stahl
At the end of March 2020, teachers across the United States, ourselves included, were forced to reorganize our rooms and prepare two weeks’ worth of emergency remote lessons. We left notebooks on desks, projects hung up on walls, jackets that kids forgot to take home. We would be back, we thought. This would be little more than an extended snow day. But soon, we found ourselves jettisoned into a world where we could no longer be who and what we had come to believe a teacher was. Slipped into the in-between of students’ worlds and ours, feeling our way across screens and voids, through the pain, desolation, and loneliness of isolation; through the outpouring of calls for racial justice in the face of heightened racism, violence, and political upheaval; through the sonorous drone of endless New York City and Newark, New Jersey ambulance sirens, we tried to reach our students. Yet, as we struggled to find our footing in this new and, what seemed to be, crumbling world, we saw neoliberal education, with its demand for high-stakes accountability and constant monitoring of student and teacher productivity, fold beneath the chaos, and saw our mechanistic teaching roles and restrictive student identities slip, slide away.
Ejected from this landscape of formal schooling, we found ourselves navigating the online learning space through a structure familiar to us and our students outside of typical learning space—that of virtual gaming. This unexpected relationality showed us the possibility of a learning environment open to multiple and expanding ways of being and learning. Yet, in the months that followed, we have seen a reclamation of neoliberalism in online learning and heard the call for resuming testing, surveillance, and controls when we make our return to in-person learning. In what follows, we argue instead that we cultivate the relationality we experienced in the game-like and game-infused world of emergency online learning.
Bianca Licata is a doctoral student in the Department of Curriculum & Teaching at Teachers College, Columbia University, where she is also a professional development associate at the Center for Technology and School Change (CTSC) and a research assistant at the National Center for Restructuring Education, Schools & Teaching (NCREST). Her research examines how neoliberal learning spaces dehumanize and mechanize teachers into dehumanizing and monstrocizing youth. She draws upon storying and critical narrative methodologies to explore how teachers construct identities of resistance, and how they take action to center students’ humanity. Her work is inspired by her experience as a middle and high school educator, and by teachers across New York City.
Catherine Cheng Stahl is a doctoral student in the Department of Curriculum and Teaching at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her research explores youth identity constructions in, through, and across digital spaces. She engages in multimodal, ethnographic, and participatory methodologies to elevate youth digital identities by exploring the complex ways young people come to know and (per)form themselves in technology-mediated, connective worlds. This research interest stems from both her own lived experiences as a t(w)een immersed in virtual worlds in the early 2000s and her seven years of hanging out with Gen Z youth as a high school and undergraduate educator.