On Virtual Corporeality and Heterotopia - 'What if' We Stopped Trying to Make URL Feel IRL?

From series ‘Heterotopia’ by Fiona Ackerman 
Retrieved from: http://www.fionaackerman.com/heterotopia-2012

Teaching and learning via digitally mediated platforms of connection/communication during COVID-19 is a motivating force to (re)imagine our roles and experiences in the classroom as students and instructors. A great amount of #ImaginationWork has been invested in trying to simulate the experience of in-person co-construction of knowledge through online platforms - complete with Zoom breakout rooms booming with think-pair-share activities and team-building exercises involving digital whiteboards. And still, as I touched on in the first installation of my #ImaginationWork blog post series - I’m struggling. There...I said it, I own it. In black and white, digital print.

In installation two of #ImaginationWork, I briefly chart my own positionality, posit the virtual classroom as a “heterotopian space,” and weigh our options for how to proceed, guided by the goal of education to be a practice of freedom and liberation. In so doing, I begin to unpack the question: what if, instead of holding online learning to the same standard of experience as the corporeal classroom, we stopped trying to make URL feel IRL and simply...went with it? 

Hooks (1994) reminds teachers that asking our students to be vulnerable puts them at risk, and should not be asked if we ourselves are not willing to also accept that risk (p. 21). For this reason, I want to briefly chart my own positionality as it relates to my practices and struggles with online pedagogy. As an interdisciplinary scholar with roots in both women’s and gender studies and communication studies, I have been shaped deeply by embodied pedagogies that welcome bodies - full to the brim with lived experience, spirit, soul, and emotion - into physical classrooms, places bound neatly by time and space and designated for learning. I recognize my privilege here; as a white, cis-passing, (mostly) abled-bodied person, with relative economic stability, I benefit from the access/ability of physically attending classes with relative ease. At the same time, I am a queer person with mental health challenges. And, like so many others who choose to trek the ever-shifting terrain of higher ed with/in marginality, I approach and experience school as “the place of ecstasy--pleasure and danger” (hooks, 1994, p. 3) mixed with the potential to cast off old ways of being and “through ideas, reinvent myself” (hooks, 1994, p. 3) and adopt onto-epistemological perspectives oriented toward creating a better future. 

In my experience, education is liberation. Education is freedom. And I long to gift this to my students. 

Heterotopia: "Other" Spaces

However, the academy (and beyond, of course, though the variety of outside contexts is beyond the scope of this particular post) during COVID-19 has spent the past 7 months in varying configurations of quarantine, operating within a strange sense of suspended time and space. The virtual education system, including the digitally mediated classroom, is a disorienting experience in which private and public places, so clearly designated before by places we live (home) and places we learn (school), now inextricably share space and time. It is important to point out, as well, that this experience of virtual learning is occurring within a context of global crisis, rendering it a markedly different experience than choosing to complete a degree online or work remotely.

"A New Heterotopia"
Retrieved from: https://treveena.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/1-the-journey.jpg

In this sense, I have come to conceptualize the virtual (and perhaps physical, though I cannot speak to it) university classroom in COVID-19 to Foucault’s (1984) heterotopia, a location “outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality” (p. 24). Heterotopias are locations of hybridized in-betweens, haunted by liminal subjects shifting between physical and imaginal realities. Time and space are both flattened and expanded, nonlinear and nonphysical. In his 1984 essay, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” Foucault delineates six principles of heterotopias (“other” sites with “real” locations) which mirror and distort notions of utopia (“perfected” sites of no “real” place). I cite the six principles below, as well as some basic connections to the COVID-19 classroom in parentheses:

1. Heterotopias are reserved for those in crisis or deviance (e.g., teachers/students navigating education during the coronavirus)
2. Heterotopias function is affected as history unfolds (e.g., we are living in rapidly changing socio-political times)
3. Heterotopias are formed from juxtaposing spaces (e.g., virtual/discursive learning environments merging public/private)
4. Heterotopias are linked to slices of time (e.g., March 2020 in the U.S. to the present)
5. Heterotopias presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable (e.g., the hybridization of IRL/URL interactions creating discursive spaces of living/learning)
6. Heterotopias have a relationship with the wider society (e.g., higher education, be it online or face-to-face, does not exist in a vacuum)

So, why the theory lesson? Well, in the words of hooks (1994), “to name what we hope to know...might be most useful” (p. 94). I contend that naming the virtual classroom a heterotopia is helpful in so far as it provides a heuristic to contextualize online education in the era of coronavirus while wrestling with the slippery and constructed boundaries between “real”/”unreal,” corporeal/incorporeal, embodied/disembodied, URL/IRL. Given Foucault’s criteria and my abbreviated parenthetical connections, I argue the hybridized, liminal learning experiences of virtual education, populated with teachers trying their best to educate a slew of zombie students (trying their best), fit the heterotopian bill. 

In terms of how to settle the bill, I contend that it is imperative not to pivot to the banking model of education, but rather to engage #ImaginationWork. Yes, we are in crisis and operating within what is, at best, controlled chaos. Still, let us not settle for dispensing knowledge to students on the other side of the screen in hopes that they receive it and file away, but rather seek to creatively - and collaboratively - question the bill. I, as a person deeply invested in embodied pedagogies, would really like to know: what if we navigate the heterotopian, virtual, coronavirus-produced classroom with commitments to education as a practice of liberation and freedom at the fore?

My answer last week would have been striving to achieve “virtual corporeality,” or curating online educational experiences inducing “a state in which a user of new media technology becomes so cognitively immersed in their digitally mediated experiences that they perceive them to be just as tangibly ‘real’ as their sense of corporeal embodiment” (Blank, 2013, p. 109). If we cannot locate ourselves in the physical classroom, why not fake it, right? Maybe with enough iClicker questions, virtual Zoom handclaps, and breakout room activities the screens between us will begin to feel like a simple feature of heterotopia, as penetrable as they are prohibitive. 

I do not think this is the “wrong” answer, per se, but rather one approach in a kaleidoscope of options for how to navigate this heterotopia and perhaps a limited application of #ImaginationWork which asks us to actively imagine the future in ways that are better than where we began. Instead, I contend we must “face the fears teachers have when asked to shift their paradigms” (hooks, 1994, p. 36). To me, this means suspending the expectations of educational experiences based on physical bodies sharing corporeal classrooms and, instead, embracing the radical potential for virtual learning. This begins to get at my original question at the beginning of this post: what if, instead of holding online learning to the same standard of experience as the corporeal classroom, we stopped trying to make URL feel IRL and simply...went with it? 

From Embodied Pedagogy to Engaged Pedagogy

Rather than wrestling with investments in embodied pedagogy, I am choosing to adopt/adapt what hooks (1994) describes as an “engaged pedagogy”  and “recognize each classroom as different, that strategies must constantly be changed, invented, reconceptualized to address each new teaching experience” (p. 10-11). (Re)imagining the virtual classroom with a focus on engaged pedagogy honors the fact that heterotopias are strange, but they are also transformative.

From series ‘Heterotopia’ by Fiona Ackerman 
Retrieved from: http://www.fionaackerman.com/heterotopia-2012

So, I will end here, having at the very least named the virtual classroom in the context of coronavirus, heterotopia, and charting a way forward, engaged pedagogy, that hopefully leaves some unhelpful expectations behind. From here, I aim to activate #ImaginationWork to develop some concrete strategies of engagement in the virtual classroom guided by Freire, hooks, and other critical pedagogues with attention to the educational inequalities and diverse perspectives of the heterotopia’s subjects. 

References:

Blank, T. (2013). Hybridizing folk culture: toward a theory of new media and Vernacular Discourse. Western Folklore, 72(2), 105-130. Retrieved October 19, 2020, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/24551663

hooks, b.  (1994). Teaching to transgress:  Education as the practice of freedom.  New York:  Routledge.

Foucault, M. translated Miskowiec, J. (1986) Of other spaces. Diacritics, 16(1), p.22-27.