Presence and Pedagogy: Musings on Remote Teaching

I tore my tricep this past May, doing what I now blithely refer to as rage push-ups. They weren’t in my repertoire, but long-term isolation alongside mass social grief does funny things to a person. The back of my arm swelled, turned red, and a little bump of painful scar tissue appeared before ever so gradually disappearing over several weeks. I had to listen to it, had to be responsive to it, or it would flare up. I would flare up. I’d simply manifested my rage in another part of me: a part I couldn’t not notice; couldn’t not attend to. Our bodies are the most humbling, the most communicative, perhaps, when we accept that they are us. Dancers learn this early on: we are our bodies. Descartes be damned.

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I’m teaching my ballet courses from home this fall semester while my university’s campus has reopened. No one knows how long this “reopening” will last; this scenario might be no more in a week—who knows. Most of the students, for now, are participating from inside the on-campus dance studios that I’ve called home for more than eight years, which makes this remote teaching situation a bit unique: I’m at home while they’re in person. They’re confined to taped-off boxes on the floor, 10 feet x 10 feet, to preserve distance. Their necks seem to hold a bit of extra tension in response to the masks they wear. The luxurious angling movements of the head and shoulders in ballet, the épaulement, is restricted. Breathing is a challenge. But they’re there, together, in the space of the studio. Despite the COVID-19-era limitations, their joy is apparent after the last several months of dancing at home, alone. 

In the before times, I could modulate my body while teaching a ballet class based on my interpretation of students’ bodies. I’d use the volume of my voice and occupy the physical space in a way that demanded focus and encouraged them to match or surpass my energy, or I’d back off a bit, scaling down my presence and giving them some space to make their own choices. I could stand on a bench, or sit in the windowsill, or crouch down on the floor to see them from different vantage points. I’d demonstrate the details of positions, movement dynamics, coordination, and musicality. My body in the space was as important as theirs. Our togetherness was essential to the process.

Now, I can’t control my physical presence in the room. My vision is two-dimensional, limited by a robotic proxy eye: a now-permanent camera in the downstage left corner of the studio ceiling. (Cue utter dismay at the current proliferation of surveillance technologies in education.) My body is projected onto the stage left wall of the room in which I, according to the behaviorists, hold the authority. At a mere five feet tall, I’ve never been the most physically imposing person in the room before, no matter how much power I’ve held. Now, I’m a full story high—nearly ten feet. I loom over the space with my non-present presence. I am both everywhere and nowhere. 

My pedagogic identity is unsteady in this space; my communication skills are stretched. The students must know it—must feel it. My humor and attempts at banter, to establish the casual class environment that I’m known for, fall flat. Shifts in my tone or posture are magnified to a frightening degree. The audio configuration doesn’t allow me to speak when I usually would. I feel myself dramatizing reassurance and support, sometimes; overcompensating to bridge the distance. Am I smiling too much? Will it make them nervous if I don’t? I can’t look them in the eyes to ascertain or communicate trust—we look past one another. I am hoping that they feel seen and acknowledged, but I fear that they feel spied on or surveilled instead. 

I look like the Wizard of Oz up on the wall, with giant plumes of flame flanking my floating omnipresent green head. (Maybe if I brought sparklers to class one day it would lighten the mood?) There is no curtain to pull back in this awkward space for that most famous of Hollywood reveals, though; there is only pedagogic exposure. My failures are, quite literally, larger than life, and yet somehow in this space I feel more authentically myself than ever before. I am struggling and I am vulnerable.

In my virtual body I am both more and less human, and all at the same time. 

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In academia of late, faculty are told to bow to the awesome power of marketing departments that attempt to keep unethical leadership hidden behind slick, shiny curtains, amid lots of fanfare. We are parts of the great gaslighting machine, expected to promote business as usual, nothing to see here, toxic positivity so we can all feel good about institutional choices no matter who they harm. In deference to accreditors and all manner of corporate edtech, we are told to assert our pedagogic power through rubrics and grades and surveillance and anti-plagiarism software; through learning outcomes and no-late-work-accepted and dress codes and show-me-an-obituary-for-your-dead-grandparent-if-you-had-to-miss-a-class-for-their-funeral policies. We’re supposed to puff out our chests, pontificate, expound, bloviate, and with great sanctimony prove that we own the knowledge—we are the knowledge—so that we may judge those who have less experience with impunity. We’re supposed to justify the hierarchy that keeps us in our proper place and keeps the students in theirs. We’re supposed to avoid the mess of humanity that feels so essential right now. University counsel would shudder at bell hooks’ “engaged pedagogy.” We’re not supposed to be human with students—it’s too risky. Institutions fear the realities of us when we let ourselves show in the classroom; when we share who we really are. What a loss for us all.

This past summer, as I was being gradually disabused of the notion that institutions put their people first, I lost my ability to silence myself—to filter. I blurted it out, whatever it was, in classes, in meetings, in my home by myself yelling at the computer screen or the television. I slung the most glorious profanity in some contexts and wrote the most appropriately needling responses in others. I lost my willingness to sit silently in the face of that box-checking, oppressive mission of what the system so desperately needs us to do; I found a purpose for my pedagogy that went beyond the classroom. Students learn, whether or not we are present to confirm it. Just ask them. 

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In pre-‘Rona times, I loved writing syllabi and planning classes. I loved envisioning what a course would look like, and what we’d do together across the semester. I loved considering the ways we might look at the facets of our subject or certain related themes, and I loved finding openings in the work for student autonomy and choice. I loved writing TBD as a class, or you’ll fill in this part, or we’ll figure it out on a case-by-case basis. I loved asking out loud: how can I help, or what other ideas do you have? I’ve always favored Constructivism. I’ve always started by sharing what I found important and meaningful in an area of inquiry, and then deliberately opening up that decision-making space to the students. Inviting them in and partnering with them so we could find value in the work, together.

But just one week before classes started this fall, I had no syllabi and no ideas. There were so many days when I just couldn’t—call it a pedagogic existential crisis—imagine how we would go forward. I stared at the computer screen (not yelling this time), wondering how I ended up in a position where anyone would look to me for guidance when I couldn’t make a decision about what was best or what was needed; when I couldn’t gauge the value or meaning of the work in this context. Or maybe I just didn’t want to initiate a course without the community’s collective genius.

So I punted. I wrote them letters that now masquerade as syllabi. I waited for the students to initiate, to remind me of why what we do matters, and to share with me what of it matters to them. Now, as I see their persistent desire to dance as a community in the space of the studio, and as I’ve become privy to their constant gratitude for the chance to do so in the face of fear and restriction, I see them discovering themselves anew in their work; I see them finding new meaning in it. They are, as I knew they would, leading me to see how we move forward, together. We are kindred in this space. They are embodied and present. And albeit differently, so am I.

Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash.