Caludio Sopranzetti
Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology
Online Teaching beyond the Classroom: a pilot
Online teaching has become an undeniable reality for higher education worldwide. And yet, it is often seen as uninspiring, suboptimal, and a hopefully temporary hiatus between the present and when we will finally get back to what we “really” do. This is partly because we tend to think about online pedagogy simply as our usual teaching moved on-line. Even in discussions about “flipped classroom” the attention is on how to replicate the experience we have in face-to-face learning behind a screen. As such, teaching online will always remain a frustrating and imperfect enterprise, much like trying to open a can with a knife. With this project we propose to develop a model for online teaching that focuses instead on accepting we have a knife in our hands, stop trying to open cans with it, and figuring out what it is actually good for.
This exploration starts from a basic realization: teaching online does not need to mean exclusively teaching behind a screen but could provide an opportunity to move out in the works, to open the classroom and to allow teaching to happen elsewhere. In this sense, if the flipped classroom model proposes a form of students’ learning that happens outside the classroom, we are proposing a format that moves a step forward and explore teaching that also takes place beyond the classroom.
In concrete terms, our proposal is to take the Urban Studies course, traditionally offered in the Sociology and Anthropology department in the winter term (and this year taught by Professor Sopranzetti) and reorganize a part of it so to take advantage of the teaching opportunities offered by distance learning. Specifically, this would mean integrating traditional pedagogical experiences (readings, discussions, break-up groups) with experiential teaching based on field visits, interviews, and practical case studies. This would play out over the course of the term in a number of ways: when the class explores questions of housing and gentrification, we may structure half of the class around students’ asynchronous engagement with an hour long visit and interview with the Vienna housing authority that the teacher and the TA would have conducted, recorded, and edited in advance; similarly when dealing with urban social movements, we could conduct and record online interviews with activists from Thailand who are currently taking the streets of Bangkok and integrate those with video material that Professor Sopranzetti has collected in his research; moreover, when studying food provision in cities, we may spend a day in Vienna’s general market and then drive around the city in one of the trucks’ of Vienna biggest fresh fish provider to see first-hand how a city gets fed. Ideally, we would build a third of the class (4 out of 12 meetings) this way, so to be able to evaluate the effects of this experiential teaching on students’ participation and engagement, when compared with the flipped classroom model that we will adopt for the other classes. With this objective in mind, the role of the TA will effectively be that of a research assistant as well as a video editor in terms of designing classes, recording and editing videos, providing a thinking partner with whom to think through the unexplored possibilities offered by the online format, and being part of the final evaluation process. This is why we are proposing employment that goes beyond the classroom hours and include further 60 hours of extra employment. Naturally, the other necessity for this project to succeed is for specific pieces of technology that allows us easy and high-quality video production without disrupting these encounters with larger equipment, such as the ones already available at CEU. We are aware that, due to the ongoing pandemic, some of this “out in the world” explorations and interviews may become difficult to conduct in person, but we believe that it is quite unlikely that a complete lockdown will happen and, even in that case, we are confident that even without physical presence we can conduct these activities online, taking part in a day of distant work of a city office, or using local partners elsewhere to record small videos of their activities. Ultimately, this is and remains an experimental project and as such we will need to adapt it to changing circumstances yet, we are confident, the rewards could be significant. The objective, in fact, is not simply to create an exciting new course at CEU, but rather to build a pilot class and a model for what online education that accept the challenges ahead of us may look like, and to share that we learn in the process with the larger CEU community.