Tag Archives: COVID-19

Of necropolitics and “writing as a geologist”

The 12th Conference of the Nordic Latin American Research Network (NOLAN) took place last week at the beautiful South Campus of the University of Copenhagen in cooperation with FIEALC (Federación Internacional de Estudios sobre América Latina y el Caribe). Chaired by Georg Wink, Director of Iberian and Latin American Studies Forum, the conference was superbly organized and packed with an impressive number of thought-provoking keynotes, panels, and round tables. Two interventions made a big impression on me.

The first one was a presentation by Isidro Morales (Universidad Autónoma de Puebla), who analyzed Mexico’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Mixing statistics and discourse analysis, Morales showed how Mexico had one of the highest per capita numbers of fatalities in the world because of a lack of infrastructure (i.e., enough hospital beds and health staff), political decisions, and an irresponsible communication strategy. Despite the existence of a competent health expert in charge of the crisis management efforts led by the federal administration and promises that Mexico’s response would be as “good as Denmark’s,” the populist president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known colloquially as AMLO, continued with austerity policies and constantly undermined science-based recommendations aimed at the general population. AMLO, for example, refused to wear face masks in public events and acknowledge the severity of the virus for risk groups and marginalized populations. In Morales’ view, to avoid mass panic, AMLO tapped into Mexican religious culture and its relationship to death by for example wearing escapularios, an amulet worn by devout Roman Catholics, and stating that was all he needed to fight the virus. Encapsulated in the common saying “You need to die in order to let live” and epitomized in the country’s Day of the Dead, the acceptance of death has deep roots in precolonial Mexico. All these factors, according to Morales, created a context where the government’s necropolitic strategies fused with Mexican culture creating a context where marginalized populations, those working in the informal economy, for example, were left with little room to maneuver. Having to choose between the virus and not having food on the table, people stoically developed the saying “elige tu riesgo,” choose the risk you want to take. Morelos’ work on necropolitics makes me think of racial capitalism and Nancy Fraser’s (2019) emphasis that we need to understand the specific “landscapes of racialization,” to, among other things, untangle the relationship between racial capitalism and the state.  

A second intervention that I found inspiring, was the keynote by Cristina Rivera Garza (University of Houston), recent Pulitzer winner for Liliana’s Invincible Summer. In her talk – based on her book Autobiografía del algodón – Rivera Garza presented the story of migrant agricultural workers along the US-Mexico border at the beginning of the 20th century. Escaping drought in central Mexico, the workers were part of an agrarian experiment to expand the ecological boundaries of the desert to plant cotton. Looking at the “land as archive,” “forces embedded in ruins,” and personal family history, Rivera Garza uncovers how cotton became a life-giving resource, providing the foundations for an autonomous way of life. (In contrast to the stories of cotton in the United States). I found fascinating how Rivera Garza described her intervention as a piece of fiction/nonfiction. She encouraged us to practice “writing as a geologist,” uncovering layers and contradictions, and using our personal stories mediated by research. The approach reminded me of the “global intimate” (Fonseca Alfaro, 2021; Pratt & Rosner, 2006) and the call to write bodies and embodiments into academic texts advocated by, for example, Donna Haraway (1988) and Juanita Sundberg (2005). Rivera Garza’s call is central to present the geographies of Latin America in more nuanced ways and practice what Walter Mignolo (2009) refers as “epistemic disobedience.”

References

Featured image: Photo by Nicholas_Demetriades on Pixabay

“Zoom meetings frustrate me, I don’t get anything out of it”: From emergency remote teaching (ERT) to kind collaborative learning environments

Like probably all other lecturers at Malmö University, I have been heavily relying on a myriad of educational apps and software to teach and supervise since we switched to online teaching in March 2020 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. While these technologies have worked well and we (teachers, students, researchers, and administrative staff) have demonstrated what can only be described as digital resilience, I have also experienced the hiccups of this new way of interacting with students. Lecturing into a void of black screens; learners that log off before class is over ; voiced frustration during supervision meetings (e.g., the quote in the title of this piece); anxious emails from students that find it hard to study in a context of worry (e.g., the fear of them or their families getting sick), isolation (e.g., forced lockdowns) or cramped spaces (e.g., small student dorms or apartments). While, of course, most of us lecturers are operating in an environment of emergency remote teaching (ERT)—in other words, teaching courses that were originally designed to be taught face-to-face—and some issues are unavoidable aspects of a pandemic, it does not mean that we are powerless. I began to ponder: What strategies can be put in place to decrease frustration and promote collaborative learning? I would like to share two concrete tips that I am trying to put to use:

Remember that a group is not necessarily a community

David McConnell (2006: 1) advocates in his book E-learning Groups and Communities that a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) should be an event that brings people together to “give them a strong sense of belonging, of being a community of like-minded learners.” While groups can work effectively (i.e., communicating, collaborating and cooperating to get a task done), a sense of community—or “people striving for a common purpose”—is harder to achieve (Siemens 2002 in Brindley et al., 2009). Most of the students that I work with are part of the international Master’s in Urban Studies program and some have been prevented from coming to Malmö and experiencing the thrills and challenges of being a student abroad. Constrained to an online environment, the possibilities for them to feel they are part of a learning community decrease. What I mainly put in practice to try to address this limitation is to make time for chitchat during our lectures and meetings. Simple questions like “How are things going?” make a difference. (This, of course, works better with students that you meet regularly.) Other strategies include: a) giving plenty of breaks to avoid Zoom fatigue (grumpy or tired students participate less), b) making time for Breakout Rooms so that students can discuss issues on their own, c) encouraging interaction in discussion forums in our teaching platform and the chat feature in Zoom, d) allowing them to form their own groups when possible, and e), promoting what McConnell (2006) calls “self-peer-tutor assessment processes” to improve communication skills.

Understand and acknowledge the difference between online and in-person interactions

In the article “Creating Effective Collaborative Learning Groups in an Online Environment,” Brindley et al. (2009) remind us that “the social milieu of online activities is quite different from in-person interactions, thus requiring new skills and behaviors.” This is, of course, perhaps obvious but easy to forget when the expectations and aims of a course were created around face-to-face interactions and not online learning. While, for example, Capdeferro and Romero (2012) show that the greatest cause of frustration among online learners working with collaborative learning experiences is lack of commitment from fellow group members, issues like “communication difficulties” caused by technology and having to deal with asynchronous discussions can also create exasperation. In my view, a way to address these potential problems is to give clear housekeeping instructions and etiquette rules when using a platform or communication app for the first time (and make sure to repeat this information every now and then in subsequent meetings). As Brindley et al. (2009) show us, students need structure and clear guidance balanced with a degree of flexibility to promote learner autonomy. Finally, empathy and patience are key. Thrown into emergency remote teaching, not everybody might have internet connections that are fast enough to support the online tools that we use. Time zones are another issue as there might be students that are forced to log in at irregular hours to attend meetings or lectures that are scheduled according to the local time in Malmö. Unexpected caretaking duties are also a cause of concern in these stressful times.

As we continue teaching in emergency mode, let us actively seek ways to promote effective, but kind, online collaborative learning environments.

References

Featured image: “Laptop Keyboard” by Peter Huys is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

This post was originally published in my student blog “Teaching and Learning in the Field of Urban Studies”, a project within the course Collaborative Learning in Digital Environments (spring 2021).

Emergency remote teaching (ERT) and digital resilience in times of COVID-19

“We’re doing the same but just online”—a colleague said to me in a discussion about the COVID-19 pandemic and the challenges that we have encountered as lecturers. As we agreed that most of us were carrying out what Hodges et al. (2020) would refer to as emergency remote teaching (ERT)—adapting and teaching courses that were not originally designed as online learning—our discussion moved on to the topic of endurance after a long year of remote teaching (Malmö University moved to online teaching in March 2020). Reflecting about my own context, the Department of Urban Studies, I realized that we—teachers, students, researchers, and administrative staff—have shown digital resilience. A term from ecology which refers to the ability of a system to “absorb change and disturbance” while maintaining its integrity, resilience has been reformulated by Weller and Anderson (2013) to think metaphorically about the relationship between digital scholarship and higher education. According to the authors, 

In terms of higher education practice then, resilience is about utilising technology to change practices where this is desirable, but to retain the underlying function and identity that the existing practices represent, if they are still deemed to be necessary.

(Weller and Anderson, 2013, my emphasis)

The resilience perspective allows us to think not only about a flow of change while keeping an essence, but also about the underlying characteristics of a system that need to be monitored: latitude (i.e., the maximum amount of change that a system can take); resistance (i.e., how much a system is ‘willing’ to change); precariousness (i.e., how close a system is running to its limit); and panarchy (i.e., the influence of external forces on a system). Analyzing the current challenges through this lens we can see that COVID-19 has, of course, been a force of panarchy in our educational “system.” The fact that classes have continued uninterrupted in a digital environment shows that our resistance to change has been low. However, what remain unknown are the issues of precariousness and latitude. How close are we to reaching our limit? How much can we change without losing our “underlying function and identity”?

As we plan for an uncertain fall where we hope for a combination of digital teaching and on-campus activities (see MAU’s policy), it will become important to assess the “system” not only in terms of endurance but also in terms of health (collegial and individual). If we think about the change-balance-integrity trio needed to achieve digital resilience, I can imagine questions such as: what worked during our online learning experience and should be kept? What should be recovered from the pre-pandemic period? What hindered our ability to successfully engage with students? (Based on a definition of “success” from different stakeholder perspectives). What type of extra resources are needed to support burned out teachers and help students that might have lagged behind during the pandemic? We can’t simply stop our emergency remote teaching (ERT) without an evaluation argue Hodges et al. (2020) (see their article for an evaluation model that higher education institutions can carry out). As we recover from this period, and perhaps even prepare for the next emergency, digital resilience will continue to be a necessary quality to foster in higher education settings.

References

Featured image: “Resilience” by neil cummings is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

This post was originally published in my student blog “Teaching and Learning in the Field of Urban Studies”, a project within the course Collaborative Learning in Digital Environments (spring 2021).