Sphinx

Here comes the fear… I continue to be excited and energised by thinking about how to embrace the positive possibilities of teaching next year, and not too alarmed (which is not to say, not also infuriated) by the mismatch between universities’ bold promises about face-to-face-in-person (f2fip?) teaching and what a lot of emerging research is saying – hey, if we suddenly have to switch to 100% online, that’s just more of a challenge, right? – but now I’m also scared. Not about my courses, but about what happens to students in the times in between.

If our answer to the question “where are students supposed to be all week, and who are they supposed to spend it with” is “in their room, alone” we have a monumental mental health crisis coming.

That’s one of the many pertinent comments in an excellent new piece by the ever-reliable Jim Dickinson of WonkHE, which takes its cue from sarky newspaper articles about freshers missing out on booze and sex to make some important points: *our* sense of what is more and less essential in a university experience may not be terribly reliable; in any case, the different components can’t be easily separated, and actually support one another in unexpected ways; and once we start disassembling the package anyway and cancelling some bits of it, new contradictions can emerge.

For example, if teaching is going to be totally online, what’s the rationale for students being expected to be in residence? How does a bio-secure campus mesh with the fact that many students live out in the community, travel on public transport etc? What are their living conditions going to be like – given that student accommodation, as far as I can gather, presumes a significant role for shared, communal and public spaces to offset the tiny study-bedroom?

These are not issues that have suddenly appeared out of the blue; at departmental level, we’ve touched on quite a lot of them in our discussions so far – insofar as they relate to teaching. Limited or no access to library: make sure resources are online. Privacy issues for Teams/Zoom meetings: blur backgrounds, allow ‘no video’ participation, include asynchronous options. And so forth. We focus on these issues in these terms because it’s our job, obviously, and the wider problems and decisions are above our pay grade – but it also offers the reassurance that they are solvable, and we can do things to solve them. We are in control, we are prepared to master chaos…

This is a comforting illusion, and we need to recognise it as such. Our teaching is likely to be seriously impacted by what’s happening with/to our students beyond the classroom (virtual or not), in ways that we can’t hope to control or even mitigate. Think of the time that gets taken up in a normal year trying to support the student who struggles all year with juggling coursework and job and health issues, and in trying to contact the students who just drop off the map for a couple of weeks – and then imagine that it’s the whole class, and some of them have terrible broadband…

My immediate reaction on reading the story this morning was to think, okay, what else can I do? Get them to check in every day for online discussion, put them into pairs or small groups and order them to support one another, create lots of fun online activities..? But, let’s be honest, this is trying to frame the issue as something that I can solve to make myself feel better, fending off the panic and calming the anticipated guilt at something going horribly wrong on my watch. It’s not at all obvious that it will actually help anyone else. But what will, absent the magical normality-restoring vaccine?

I spent an awful lot of time in my room as an undergraduate – working occasionally but mostly doing other writing, recording music and the like, and I also decided at an early stage that I could cook for myself much better and cheaper than frequenting the cafeteria – and if I think of those days, that’s my immediate association. But actually I also spent plenty of time in the student bar, at student union meetings, rehearsing with an assortment of mostly terrible bands, playing sports, going to pubs, listening to choral evensong, just hanging out with friends in gardens or out in the countryside…

And the last thing I wanted, in my periodic bursts of depression, was a lecturer checking up on me; when the postgrad who was supervising my essays for one course (the lovely, late lamented Jonathan Walters) raised concerns with my Director of Studies, I simply reassured him that everything was fine. What did make a difference to my mental state was being dragged out of the room occasionally by friends. Which of course presumed (1) that I had somehow acquired some, despite everything, and (2) that they were allowed to do that. How’s that going to work for this year’s freshers?

It’s a solid rule of thumb for academics never to develop policy on the basis of our own experiences as students: it was a long time ago, and we were by definition not typical. And perhaps it is true in this case also, and I’m getting needlessly worried because I was, let’s be honest, a very delicate and socially inept little flower. But the principle when it comes to student welfare surely has to be that we’re concerned about all our students and especially about those most likely to struggle – and I would certainly be in that category…