Teaching in the Time of Covid: One Year on
Zero hour hit on Friday, March 13, 2020 around 3.30 in the afternoon. The Swiss Federal Council initiated a lockdown. Higher education and EFL in higher education changed on that day. There was no hurricane or flood. But it felt as if an atomic bomb had hit my profession. It was a ‘gale of creative destruction’ that struck with the immediate result: things have changed!
Pause for moment and reflect. This profession, EFL, has always required a certain dynamism because teachers need to engage their students. Unlike other subjects, topics relating to communication, and specifically English, demand flexibility in both engagement and pedagogy. Clients and students demand more interaction with louder bells and shriller whistles because if they don’t, they can always find another teacher. They expect the FL teacher to come to them. And because there is proliferation of marginally qualified professionals drowning the market, pay is low, expectations are high, and hours are odd. But this was different.
Beginning with location, the commute changed. From one day to the next, there were suddenly 100 extra minutes each day that were previously spent traveling between home and work. And yet with all this free time, there were more demands for refocusing lessons to an online format. This led to reconceptualizing material and lesson structure. It demanded integrating software and platforms for a fully interactive course. More than ever, students needed focused attention, which led to considering how larger groups were taught. It also demanded that exams were redesigned.
But not all change has been positive. There is a certain element of non-verbal communication missing. Previously, if something was not working, students would express it in their body language. Their eyes would roll, or they would cross their arms, or they would register a confused expression. Reading people is now more difficult. Often and especially in the beginning, students did not turn their cameras on. It was and sometimes still is not clear how much they have understood. While there has been progress, there is still a way to go.
So this is life in the matrix: a mass of flesh sitting before a terminal connecting to others electronically. It is unappealing and it should not be a pattern for the future. Teaching was always about people. From time immortal, it involved personal interaction. Post-Covid, platforms seem to have risen beyond being mere tools. In some cases, they have eclipsed and dominated lessons. This approach is wrong, and it is dystopian.
When colleges and universities open again, these three, hopefully not four, semesters were valuable. Though student interaction was limited, online platforms and teaching offered new alternatives. It was possible to engage students using multiple tools with little time delay. Yes, there were issues involving connectivity, but they occurred rarely. In instances such as coaching, tools such as Zoom when combined with GoogleDocs were useful and will still have a role in the future. With exams, yes, the pandemic forced changes. But they were long overdue. Some of the most useful lessons involved simplifying processes for them to work seamlessly in an online format. For example, running oral exams over Zoom was a lot less complicated than in person. While some of the changes wrought demanded time and effort, the results were valuable.
For a long time, education had a degree of security and was cut off from the outside world and the ebb and flow of the business cycle. Methodologies changed slowly and innovation was not required. But the pandemic upended it and it now must embrace technological change. For a profession famous for lecture halls, outdated practices and budgetary constraints, the present has created chaos. While Foreign Language Teaching and ELT have not followed the same trajectory, the pandemic still offered new challenges. Though not surprising, the situation still came as a shock.