Pandemic Pedagogy 2023, by Alexandra Juhasz
NOTES: Origins and Context | See Also
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Origins of this content
This texteo was the conclusion of a talk I presented "Pandemic Pedagogy, 2023," at NYU as part of a graduate student conference, Socially Engaged Archives: In Theory, In Practice
Contextualization
Some of the Theories and Practices of Pandemic Pedagogy presented at the After After Conference at NYU, February 24, 2023.
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More videos related to the content of this page
I learned from students in LFYT 2022, and then thinking about this and writing about it for a keynote address a few months later:
A class or a lecture is a temporary community; a theory is not a cure; social engagement in school is as complicated and real as it is anywhere; practice and pedagogy are what happens now between people in shared space; paper and digital formats can hold some of that, but after after, these documents demand an intentional praxis of context-specific social engagement to let them be real and true and live and be used again.
(pandemic) THEORY
Good theory does not try to be sovereign over other kinds of knowledge.
Theory could have an interstitial role, showing the gaps and tensions between languages.
Theory does not create concepts on its own.
Theory is a practice in language that seems to work best
when it works alongside other practices that do other things.
Theory, to me, is a kind of meta-practice.
It is the one that is curious about what practices are in general,
about what they can know, what they can do, what they want.
McKenzie Wark, "Theory in a Pandemic," Revista Rosa 1: 3 (July 27, 2020)
My understanding of "theory" understands that chicken and rice at Carmen's house is not simply a part of putting theory into practice but is a part of theory itself. Knowing about the details and difficulties of her life alter my ideas about her, and my ideas about her relationship to the WAVE (Women's AIDS Video Enterprise) project and video production. Alexandra Juhasz, AIDS TV, 1995
(pandemic) PEDAGOGY
Things to Consider as You Move Your Teaching Online
-Uneven resources always exist, but the move online makes this structural inequality more obvious.
-A variety of needs for privacy should always be accommodated in learning communities.
-An online class is not the same thing as a class with physical persons gathered to learn together in a brick and mortar classroom in real time and physical space.
-You don't have a "flipped classroom." You no longer have a classroom at all!
-Reject calls to highlight prestige, peer institutions, and imitation of star systems on other campuses and instead explore what is needed and best about where you work and then also foster connections across difference.
-Embrace DIY peer-to-peer improvised faculty and student connections
-Reject the push and rush to "learn" the technology; do this in your own way; admit that you are learning as you go.
-The supposedly "born digital" generation needs just as much help as others.
-Your online course is not simply about imparting information in one direction.
-Consider what co-presence means in any learning situation and how we relate to each other newly through screens and with various technologies.
-Consider how international students can be supported in a time of widespread anti-Asian racism.
-Consider how to recognize and thank everyone who is participating in the class.
-Online experiences can be unsafe.
-Online experience is as racist and sexist and homophobic as anywhere else.
"Feminist Pedagogy in a Time of Coronavirus Pandemic," FemTechNet, 2020
(pandemic) PEDAGOGY: We need to see the complexities of our students' lives, to hear their voices, to understand their pain and what they have endured, and to help them create the lives of purpose they desperately want. Our teaching and activism will have to push against the right-wing nihilism that undergirds this push for a "new normal" … we look forward to more teaching and activism that continues to push for "other educations" that center the rights of those made most vulnerable by neoliberalism and the politics of austerity, the precarity of work … other worlds are possible, including other kinds of educational environments, ones that deal with the realities of the worlds we have created and now inhabit.
Other Worlds and Educations Are Possible: Lessons from Teaching and Learning During Covid-19, "Introduction," Neil Meyer and Jocelyn Wills, Radical Teacher, no. 124 (Fall 2022)
SOCIALLY ENGAGED (in a pandemic)
-Life is absurd, expendable, anxious, and beautiful
-Consider positive impact: how it makes people feel
-Focus on gratitude
-Don't avoid the darkness
-Try to share and hear context
-People perceive differently
-Art produces perception, feeling, memories
-Make it outside of capital flows (not decontextualized, not serving capital or power)
-Originality is not all, the act of doing is something too
-Inspiration over fear or doubt
Stay real or true
LFYT, October 19, 2022; Class co-authored 10 Working Points
A class or a lecture is a temporary community; a theory is not a cure; social engagement in school is as complicated and real as it is anywhere; practice and pedagogy are what happens now between people in shared space; paper and digital formats can hold some of that, but after after, these documents demand an intentional praxis of context-specific social engagement to let them be real and true and live and be used again.
(pandemic) THEORY
Good theory does not try to be sovereign over other kinds of knowledge.
Theory could have an interstitial role, showing the gaps and tensions between languages.
Theory does not create concepts on its own.
Theory is a practice in language that seems to work best
when it works alongside other practices that do other things.
Theory, to me, is a kind of meta-practice.
It is the one that is curious about what practices are in general,
about what they can know, what they can do, what they want.
McKenzie Wark, "Theory in a Pandemic," Revista Rosa 1: 3 (July 27, 2020)
My understanding of "theory" understands that chicken and rice at Carmen's house is not simply a part of putting theory into practice but is a part of theory itself. Knowing about the details and difficulties of her life alter my ideas about her, and my ideas about her relationship to the WAVE (Women's AIDS Video Enterprise) project and video production. Alexandra Juhasz, AIDS TV, 1995
(pandemic) PEDAGOGY
Things to Consider as You Move Your Teaching Online
-Uneven resources always exist, but the move online makes this structural inequality more obvious.
-A variety of needs for privacy should always be accommodated in learning communities.
-An online class is not the same thing as a class with physical persons gathered to learn together in a brick and mortar classroom in real time and physical space.
-You don't have a "flipped classroom." You no longer have a classroom at all!
-Reject calls to highlight prestige, peer institutions, and imitation of star systems on other campuses and instead explore what is needed and best about where you work and then also foster connections across difference.
-Embrace DIY peer-to-peer improvised faculty and student connections
-Reject the push and rush to "learn" the technology; do this in your own way; admit that you are learning as you go.
-The supposedly "born digital" generation needs just as much help as others.
-Your online course is not simply about imparting information in one direction.
-Consider what co-presence means in any learning situation and how we relate to each other newly through screens and with various technologies.
-Consider how international students can be supported in a time of widespread anti-Asian racism.
-Consider how to recognize and thank everyone who is participating in the class.
-Online experiences can be unsafe.
-Online experience is as racist and sexist and homophobic as anywhere else.
"Feminist Pedagogy in a Time of Coronavirus Pandemic," FemTechNet, 2020
(pandemic) PEDAGOGY: We need to see the complexities of our students' lives, to hear their voices, to understand their pain and what they have endured, and to help them create the lives of purpose they desperately want. Our teaching and activism will have to push against the right-wing nihilism that undergirds this push for a "new normal" … we look forward to more teaching and activism that continues to push for "other educations" that center the rights of those made most vulnerable by neoliberalism and the politics of austerity, the precarity of work … other worlds are possible, including other kinds of educational environments, ones that deal with the realities of the worlds we have created and now inhabit.
Other Worlds and Educations Are Possible: Lessons from Teaching and Learning During Covid-19, "Introduction," Neil Meyer and Jocelyn Wills, Radical Teacher, no. 124 (Fall 2022)
SOCIALLY ENGAGED (in a pandemic)
-Life is absurd, expendable, anxious, and beautiful
-Consider positive impact: how it makes people feel
-Focus on gratitude
-Don't avoid the darkness
-Try to share and hear context
-People perceive differently
-Art produces perception, feeling, memories
-Make it outside of capital flows (not decontextualized, not serving capital or power)
-Originality is not all, the act of doing is something too
-Inspiration over fear or doubt
Stay real or true
LFYT, October 19, 2022; Class co-authored 10 Working Points