As the last months of 2019 slipped into the dawn of 2020, the novel coronavirus radically remade human relations across the globe, from our homes to institutions of higher education. TAs and tenured faculty alike were forced to pivot under direction to transfer courses, teaching, and learning online almost overnight – or, at UNT, over an extended spring “break” – operating with the assumption that the pandemic would pass by summer allowing us to share physical spaces of learning together by the fall.
Yet, here we are, the last months of 2020 slipping into the dawn of 2021. Many of our classrooms are on still Zoom, our staff meetings are on Microsoft Teams, and we socialize via FaceTime, Instagram, and other digitally mediated platforms of communication. Effectively, our homes have become spaces of higher education. It feels impossible to imagine what the future might hold for academia at large, no less our positions within it as leaders and learners. How are we to proceed?
From my standpoint as TA and a graduate student engaged in a semester of 100% online teaching and learning, that is a difficult question to even begin to address. With little certainty to frame the future, there is much left to the imagination right now – a messy myriad of what ifs.
What if mass-produced virtual learning environments are the future of higher education? What if our students do not have access to stable internet connections or necessary technological equipment to succeed? What if I cannot successfully adapt/adopt a pedagogical practice that upholds my commitments to what Paulo Freire (2000) terms “co-intentional education” (p. 69) between students and teachers...online? What if my favorite parts of teaching and learning – the cultivation of visceral knowledge via shared time and space, the relationships fostered in physical classrooms and hallways, the smell of dusty textbooks and crisp papers, the sound of loafers clicking down halls and the feel of bustling bodies blocking campus sidewalks – are facets of the past? What if, what if, what if...?
#ImaginationWork
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| SpongeBob SquarePants creates a rainbow over his head and the word "imagination" hovers above it |
I contend that we must embrace what Deanna Dannels (2015) terms “imagination work” (p. 217) to traverse the virtual Rubicon of online education. Imagination work is a world-making practice driven by “imagining new possibilities and narratives” (Dannels, 2015, p. 217) in service of creating better ways of being in a world that is ever-changing. It is our imperative, as critically-engaged students, instructors, and citizens to engage imagination work as an intervention to transform the educational challenges provoked by the pandemic into opportunities to co-construct new narratives of virtual teaching/learning.
“[Imagination is] an embodied intellectual faculty that, with careful attention and specific strategies, can effect personal and social transformation.” - Gloria Anzaldúa
Foregrounding imagination as a world-making practice is not new to the context of the classroom. Chicana feminist and scholar Gloria Anzaldúa (2015), for example, theorizes imagination as “an embodied intellectual faculty that, with careful attention and specific strategies, can effect personal and social transformation” (p. x). Freire (2000), too, advocates for a co-intentional educational practice whereby “teachers and students (leadership and people), co-intent on reality, are both Subjects, not only in the task of unveiling that reality, and thereby coming to know it critically, but in the task of re-creating that knowledge” (p. 69). As these scholars suggest, imagination is not only useful, but crucial, to achieve social and educational transformation. And, amid the novel challenges of teaching/learning online, it is increasingly more critical.
Perhaps the first step to engaging imagination is to define it. I appreciate the citation Dannels (2015) provides, quoting Eric Liu and Scott Noppe-Brandon’s definition of imagination as “the capacity to conceive of what is not” (p. 217). Further, according to the scholars, the very two words that all too often tickle my unease are the two words necessary to unlock imaginative ways of interpreting and navigating the unknown...what if.
Welcoming the “What Ifs”
According to Dannels (2015), living out the words what if “involves practicing imagination actively [and] finding ways of being in the world inspiring imagination” (p. 217). With this is mind, what if, instead of dwelling on the anxiety of the uncertain future or nostalgia for the past, we practiced embracing the messy present without trying to untangle the what ifs, but rather, befriending them?
What if we actively and radically (re)imagined our online classrooms as co-creational spaces, rich with potential, rather less-than-ideal locations of educational interaction? What if we engaged pedagogical practices that inspired imagination in our online classrooms and beyond? What if we reflected on what we have learned so far and created new narratives with “careful attention and specific strategies” (Anzaldúa, 2015, x) to improve education beyond the pandemic? What if, by engaging with our students through collective imagination, we began to forge new and better ways of being in the world?
I do not have the answers today (and most likely will not by blog post five) but have posed a few questions (thanks, Freire) that I plan to reflect on throughout the semester. Actively re-imagining the coronavirus classroom online requires we think toward the future while taking concrete steps to create it today. #ImaginationWork will involve practice, certainly. What if, however, actively practicing imagination is the portal to radically connecting, leading, learning, and world-making together to create a better future?
References:
Anzaldúa, G. (2015). Light in the dark/luz en lo oscuro: Rewriting identity, spirituality, reality. Cambridge University Press.Dannels, D. P. (2015). 8 essential questions teachers ask: A guidebook for communicating with students. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed: 30th Anniversary Edition. New York: Continuum.
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