The Incidental Pedagogy of the Coronavirus: Reflecting on Spring 2020

I don’t go searching for silver linings. I’m not a pessimist, but I have no patience for toxic positivity. Especially now, and especially in education where talk of “business as usual” and replicating face-to-face learning in an online environment is running rampant. It’s dishonest, frankly. It’s saccharine, it’s The Truman Show, it’s Stepford. There’s too much reality to acknowledge; too many important reasons for us to keep our feet firmly on the ground. We know little more than we did when this pandemic was declared, and it seems that we’ll be in a not-knowing state of flux indefinitely. “Business as usual” in a pre-Coronavirus way is not coming back; face-to-face learning cannot be replicated online; and students know it. We’re just not giving them enough credit for being able to handle a difficult reality. Or perhaps we’re not really facing it ourselves.

This ‘Rona moment will teach us if we will stop to listen; it has an incidental pedagogy. This crisis has made things visible in ways they weren’t before—maybe most importantly the systemic inequities that plague us. One plague exposing another, as it were. Education, for its part, was inequitable pre-Coronavirus, and it’s even more inequitable now. Students who are required to attend synchronous online classes are sitting in their cars in parking lots for the high-speed WiFi that they don’t have access to at home. Women academics’ research agendas are suffering as they bear the greater brunt of domestic labor and childcare while keeping up with professional responsibilities. There are countless articles about the racial disparities and injustices befalling communities of color and the LGBTQIA+ community, both within the walls of educational institutions and without.

In the dance world, dancers with small studios in their homes—with a barre and appropriate vinyl flooring for pointework—are at a far greater advantage than those taking Zoom classes holding onto the back of a chair and standing on the slick hardwood floors of their dining rooms, or using the bannisters in the carpeted hallways. As I teach ballet classes online, I can visibly see students’ varying degrees of privilege in ways I would never understand if we were on campus together in our shared studios. I am in their homes now, and they are in mine. Inequity is standing downstage center, upstaging all of us.

I also notice how the Coronavirus has quieted the noise of teaching, for better or worse. While it has taken away the actual noise—the laughter, the magical din of a busy classroom, the overlapping contributions in a lively discussion—it has also quelled the pressure of “the way we’ve always done it” that rings in my ears as a series of “shoulds” every time I revamp a course. As an educator in pandemic times, I am beholden now to no one but the students. Nor should I be. I am grateful to shed the pressure of what came before. I have finally gone full radical in my understanding that all courses are pedagogy courses now. Put another way: “the medium is the message,” as Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner say in their Teaching as a Subversive Activity (Delacorte Press, 1969). My courses during this Coronavirus era have made it clear that how a course is taught is more communicative to students than what it contains. 

In March, during the now clichéd “pivot” moment when all of education went online in a week’s time, I sat in my home, unable to function. Frozen. Despondent at times, and terrified at others. How was I supposed to lead a group of equally despondent and terrified students into this new environment with any certainty, when I had none to offer? As I sat in the silence of that week, I felt certain that my relationships with students were more important than any other element of the courses I was teaching. Like so many educators during that moment, I was far more concerned about their wellbeing than I was about whether I’d be able to cover my course content. 

In optional synchronous meetings on Zoom and in emails I sent the same day, I asked the students what they needed. I asked what was possible for them. I asked what they valued with regard to their education. And I kept asking, and asking again, and asking again. Because the moment kept changing, and they were my partners. We adapted. We stayed grounded and didn’t go on a hunt for silver linings. What worked one week didn’t work the next, so we changed it for the third. We agreed to not plan too far in advance. Instead, we listened to ourselves and to each other, and made collective decisions about how to move forward. 

We learned a lot. I certainly did. About supporting our communities; about living in the unknown; about listening openly; about speaking honestly; about feeling time; about navigating the world in, with, and through our bodies; about dancing and learning as more essential now than ever before.  

I’m in no position to judge the “success” of Spring semester’s transition to emergency remote learning; I’m still reflecting and trying to parse out what actually happened. But after reading students’ anonymous course evaluations and their eponymous self-reflection essays, I more fully understand how pedagogies that put people and relationships first—before content or pre-determined learning outcomes—make education meaningful. As much as I’m reluctant to say it because of the gravity of our collective loss, I have grown as an educator because of the Coronavirus. I’m not thrilled that it took a pandemic for me to get here, but I’m thankful to be here now.

With gratitude to the remarkable Class of 2020 and to the students who stuck with me and trusted me in this unknown. Your presence gives my work meaning and purpose. Sending love to each of you.