In 1960, the University of Missouri published a short “Guide for Television Teachers.” Across the country, over 100 different colleges offered nearly 500 televised courses to a half a million students. So professors needed pointers about the best way to teach in this burgeoning new medium.
“Relax,” the Missouri guide underlined. “Try to be yourself.” Male professors should wear “conservative” ties, the guide added, while women should avoid necklines or hemlines that might “cause discomfort or embarrassment” if they leaned over a counter or sat in a low chair. Once they were properly attired, they could loosen up and let their real character shine through. “Remember that the TV camera projects your natural personality best,” the guide urged, “and the more relaxed and natural that you are, the better you will reach your viewers.”
Six decades later, you can find similar advice all over the internet. It’s for online professors, of course, now that the coronavirus has sent all of us to our computers to teach. But the heart of the guidance is the same as it was for TV instructors: Easy does it. Act natural. Be yourself.
Indeed, a set of 10 pointers published last month in The Chronicle lists “be yourself” as the second most important suggestion (bested only by “show up for class”) for online teaching. It’s not easy to pull off, the author Flower Darby acknowledges, particularly for professors who are instructing asynchronous classes and interacting with students mostly by text. But it can be done, she insists, if you’re deliberate about it.
“Recording yourself whenever possible” is a “great way to bring your whole self to class,” wrote Darby, an instructional designer at Northern Arizona University. “Whether by audio or video, capture your expertise, your empathy, your teacher persona. … Look for ways to be yourself via technology, just as you do in person.”
I’m grateful to experts like Darby for coaching all of us through this abrupt nationwide transition to online teaching. But I’m also skeptical about whether we can transmit our “real” selves with our laptops. We’re people, not pixels. And teaching — and learning — are personal acts, which simply can’t be simulated on a screen.
Social distancing is necessary to preserve good health, but it’s not good for education.
Sure, you can go to the movies and get pulled into the gravitational magnetism of Hollywood stars. But we can’t all have the charisma of a Brad Pitt or Scarlett Johansson, let alone of your local evening newscaster. These people are chosen precisely because they can charm you from a distance. Mere mortals — that means you, professor! — usually can’t do that.
Most of all, the stars of the screen are paid to entertain rather than to educate. Teaching other human beings requires a “conversation of the soul” — as the author and activist Parker J. Palmer calls it — instead of an exchange of images. And real conversation happens when people are in the same room, not when they’re on the same channel.
That’s the moral of the story of educational television, which was touted as the solution to an earlier crisis: the sudden overcrowding of American colleges. Aided by the GI Bill, military veterans flooded into college classrooms; by 1947, just two years after World War II ended, they made up fully half of all students. Other middle-class Americans joined them over the next decade, buoyed by the overall prosperity of the postwar economy. In 1940, only one in 10 Americans between the ages of 18 and 21 went to college; in 1958, one in three did.
How could our universities cope with this huge influx of students? One obvious answer was television, which a University of California official called “the most efficient, the most economical, and the most personalized teaching method available.” A single professor could instruct thousands of people at the same time — no matter where they lived — and every student would get a “front-row seat,” he added. “A televised lecture can ‘bring the instructor close’ even when the students have no personal contact with the televised lecturer,” an enthusiast at New York University gushed.
Some of these students were taught via closed-circuit sets on campus; others tuned in on broadcast TV, which featured a wide array of university-sponsored courses. But most of the students concluded that television could not substitute for the human touch of the actual classroom. The medium was indeed “personalized,” insofar as you could often watch at home and see the teacher clearly. Yet it was also highly impersonal, because nobody could convey their real self over the airwaves.
“Having a TV class does not add to my learning,” an Ohio University student flatly declared, after taking a closed-circuit course where he watched the professor interact with students in a television studio. “I felt as if the teacher was talking to them and not me, giving a feeling that I was looking thru a window at the class.”
As colleges and universities have struggled to devise policies to respond to the quickly evolving situation, here are links to The Chronicle’s key coverage of how this worldwide health crisis is affecting campuses.
Professors got the same feeling from the other side of the imaginary looking glass. At Penn State, where 3,700 of the school’s 14,000 students were registered for a televised course in 1959, one instructor said he missed the “person-to-person contact from the teacher-student relationship.” Students in a closed-circuit-TV class on campus “felt no need to pay attention out of courtesy to the instructor,” a second Penn State professor observed. They read newspapers, slept, or stared into space rather than at the flickering screen in front of them.
None of that prevented university administrators from singing the praises of educational TV into the 1960s and 1970s. “The business of learning demanded that we embrace the electronic goddess and that we voice extravagant claims of her miraculous powers,” a former television instructor at New York University recalled. “Never mind that the students went to sleep. Never mind if this experiment destroyed rapport between teacher and student. Every emperor chooses the clothes with which to cover his nudity.”
I’m teaching two 15-student seminars this term, so I was able to get to know my students before the coronavirus crisis began. But the move to online has placed a wedge between us, nevertheless. We can’t experience the same warmth or humor or group bonding. We see each other, but only through a window.
And we’re the lucky ones. In their big lecture classes, my students tell me, any semblance of real connection with their professors has been lost. It’s all fine and good to say that students should get “a sense of who you are and what kind of person you are,” as the Australian remote-learning expert Keith Heggart recently recommended, advising online teachers. It’s quite another to give them one, and to have them believe it.
“Without student contact, I don’t want to teach,” one professor told researchers in 1967, denouncing televised classes. “Students need personal contact because, after all, learning is a spiritual process.” That sounds mystical and ineffable, I know, but all of us have experienced it in our classrooms. And it’s a fool’s errand to pretend that a television — or a computer — can replace it.
Social distancing is necessary to preserve good health, but it’s not good for education. And if you think otherwise, just ask your students. Online instruction might be our new emperor, at least for the moment, but we shouldn’t deny what’s right in front of our eyes.
