Post-pandemic is time to ask what teaching means in HE

If someone had said back in 2019 that most university teaching could go online within a few months, no one would have believed it. They would have been told that it would take years for academics and universities to prepare.

The pandemic of 2020 showed that it was possible to move teaching online fast. A pragmatic decision made necessary by a government lockdown changed university teaching almost overnight.

Some excellent university technicians facilitated huge technical changes to teaching. This was very impressive, but it was merely a technical shift that had no basis in professional or curricula development. The argument for online learning had not been won.

A few universities went ‘online only’, but others went for a blended approach. The blended universities recognised that students wanted face-to-face teaching. But this was another pragmatic decision aimed at keeping students and avoiding the conflicts that erupted over fees and accommodation costs at the online-only universities.

The blended approach worked, even if it meant only three hours on campus each week and ended only when the government imposed further lockdowns, but it had no basis in professional or curricula approaches. The argument for face-to-face teaching had not been won.

An argument began but ended

In the summer, before the new academic year (2020-21) was about to start, the leader of the United Kingdom’s University and College Union (UCU) argued that all teaching should be online. There had been no consultation with members about this new policy. It was defended in the interest of community safety and it was claimed that student movement around the country could cause 50,000 COVID-19 deaths.

The wild claims about deaths were refuted by the BBC and others. In response, lecturers committed to the importance of face-to-face teaching wrote an open letter setting out the educational case for intellectual engagement between academics and students and students with students. They gave a Socratic defence of the intimate interpersonal nature of education.

There the debate ended almost before it had begun. It must be fought out after the end of the pandemic for the sake of the future of higher education.

Students recognised their Agora

What became clear in many informal internal university surveys and anecdotal accounts is that students wanted more time on campus, more face-to-face teaching.

It was not just that they discovered they were not the ‘digital natives’ in the educational world that those without iPhones or Instagram accounts thought them to be, nor was it that they had become ‘Zoomed-out’.

Both were true, but students also recognised, however dimly, that education is, in the philosopher Michael Oakeshott’s famous phrase, ‘a transaction between the generations’. This transaction took the form of a ‘conversation’ between the generations.

Only glib philistines could suggest that this can be done on Zoom. A conversation involves knowing one another in a deep intellectual communion. A good student might say of a tutor ‘I became educated through knowing him or her’.

Some students campaigned and organised to get more online teaching than was formally on offer without breaking any COVID-19 safety regulations or advice. It seems likely that the experience of the academic year 2020-21 will consolidate in students their recognition that the university is their Agora, and they must go there if they are to have an education.

The argument for teaching subjects

For some academics, the move online challenged all that they had been taught in their teacher training and in-service professional development. Group work was out, and they were faced with the realisation that they had to teach and not facilitate. They had to know something that they could offer to students.

We saw in those talking heads on Zoom or Teams a return to traditional teaching with the lecturer in front of the class. We also saw it in the socially distanced classroom, with the lecturer two metres in front, facing the class. But there the return to tradition ended. The argument about teaching subjects was not won.

The argument for education was put aside

Of all the arguments that the pandemic forced academics and others to face was the argument for education. That argument was not won. The return to education was defended in terms of protecting the well-being and mental health of students.

The argument that what students needed above all else was an education was bypassed.

Students were defended not as human beings who need to have that conversation between generations, but as diminished vulnerable victims of the pandemic who needed schools as a therapeutic place.

The arguments that we must have now are about the importance of face-to-face teaching and the teaching of subjects with serious intellectual content.

Above all, we need to win the argument for education rather than support the idea of the university as a therapeutic safe space for vulnerable students.

It is time to put the pragmatism of the pandemic behind us and have the arguments. But, if academics cannot win the arguments for education, then they have no future.

Dennis Hayes is professor of education at the University of Derby in England.