My colleague Rachel Buurma and I have been talking off and on for years about how hard it is to find good representations of classroom experience. (She actually studies teaching with her co-author Laura Heffernan, so I’m sure there aren’t a bunch of great examples out there that we just haven’t heard about.)
Campus novels hardly ever see the classroom as an interesting fictional setting in its own right. Films, games or television series that go into classrooms are there either to track how a protagonist endures or escapes a classroom or they’re there for phony dramatics that just feels completely wrong (usually featuring a heroically inspiring teacher who is saving his or her charges from poverty or conformity) or is based on an extremely specific, often archaic, pedagogy, as in The Paper Chase.
Scholarship that represents classroom experience often has to settle for the archival trail of teaching, which most faculty either throw away or keep private, or for a kind of anecdotal extraction of a single illustrative example of a classroom discussion that never feels quite right—often because the names are changed and the details generalized so that the anecdote fits the analysis and (entirely properly) to obscure the identifiable details of a real class session. Or the description of the experience of being in a classroom is so technical that all the vivid specificity of it drains out entirely.
There are scholars who write about teaching in a way that does seem descriptively present in classrooms—Ken Bain and Susan Blum read that way to me, for example. There are scholars who write about the history of teaching in higher education who frame what happens in classrooms in ways that enlighten my own experiential understandings—William Clark, Jonathan Zimmerman, Jennifer Morton, Buurma and Heffernan, and others.
It’s just really hard to find either faculty or students who write about the experience of being in classrooms teaching or being taught that feels accumulative, granular, comprehensive—that isn’t just an extraction of a single defining moment. It’s hard to remember teaching or being taught in that sense: it’s like remembering the everyday routine of work and yet it’s not. I can remember some conversations from my undergraduate classes even now in a tremendously vivid and embodied way, and not all of them were classes where anything important or dramatic happened. Sometimes there was a great conversation—reading Michael Thelwell’s The Harder They Come in a class taught by Hazel Carby where we ended up talking about whether one should immersively experience Jamaican patois or one should use the glossary at the back. Sometimes it was frustration: I can remember being deeply annoyed at how plodding one literature course was even with material that fascinated me, like reading Addison and Steele. I remember the intense dilemma of being in a three-student course on Roland Barthes where the other two students were French majors who hated the material but needed the credit, so it was more like a directed reading with an audience. I remember the only time I grade-grubbed, with the historian Jeffrey Butler, because he complained that he couldn’t detect “the blood and guts” in a research paper I’d written on the Anglo-Asante War of 1873-74. (It really wasn’t grade-grubbing as much as it was an extension of an argument I’d had with him continuously throughout the semester.) I can look at my copy of the Codex Nuttal and still remember the entire discussion from that class session—the historian Ann Wightman asking us what the images meant and all of us incautiously venturing naively representational answers (that’s a warrior, that’s a mountain, that’s a fish) which she proceeded with great Socratic relish to challenge and force us to complicate. I can remember the feeling of some classes blurred into a kind of rhythm, and others I remember as a succession of sharply conversational or narrative moments. Still others I have forgotten completely (both where I was a student and as a teacher).
It’s even harder to find visualizations of classroom experience that feel vividly real and yet are also watchable. When I first got to Swarthmore almost thirty years ago, the college had just inaugurated a new semester-long orientation program for new faculty. One week a colleague had arranged for us to watch videos about how to do inclusive teaching that were staged representations of teaching. The problem was that they were so ineptly staged, so instructional, so removed from how it feels to be the target of marginalization in the classroom or to be the person who is struggling to get it right. (Kay and Peele get it a million times better in “The Substitute Teacher”.) One video had a political science professor talking about the Lincoln-Douglas debates who just wanted to talk about federalism and when the one Black student in the class wanted to talk about slavery, the professor shuts him down and says “we’ll get to what your interest in this material is next week”. The videotape stopped at that point and we were asked “What could that professor have done differently?” I couldn’t help myself: I raised my hand and said, “Well, not being a complete idiot might have helped him out.”
It’s not much better to just turn a camera on a classroom and look at it later. You can film a lecture pretty well (we’ve all had to experiment with that in the last two years), and that’s what promoters of ed-tech have been flogging as the great hope for online teaching for the last twenty years. But as we’ve also all discovered over the last two years, just filming a discussion (whether in Zoom or in a physical classroom) just doesn’t cut it as a substitute for being there. It’s not just being there, it’s being there with other people while it is happening—that embodied experience of looking around the room and trying to figure out (am I the only person really interested in this? am I the only person really annoyed by that last comment? oh what does that mean that the quiet guy is looking like he’s going to say something? hey I just figured this out for the first time because of how that student explained this! is the professor ever going to interrupt that guy who just keeps talking and talking and talking? I wish I could get into this but I have to stay focused on the organic chemistry exam later today) what the gestalt of the whole class is at that moment, what’s going to happen next, and whether you have a role in that or not. You get carried away, you become mindful, you fight off being dizzy or disenchanted. You improvise, you plan. There is something profoundly unwatchable about even the best, most dramatically-intense classroom discussions—something lost by not being in the simultaneity of it, in the accumulative contingency of a course as it goes along.
Or is there? This is where I at last come around to Dungeons and Dragons, if that title was what grabbed you. Many years ago, I had a colleague who was teaching an upper-level class on visual ethnography where the students had to settle on a topic and do a project together in the last half of the class. One year, I think to his dismay, they decided to do an ethnography of pen-and-paper role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons. Since I taught a class on the history of play and leisure (and maybe because they’d heard I knew a bit about D&D) they asked me if I would agree to be a “talking head” interviewee. Sure! So I got to talking with them and asked if they’d filmed some actual gaming sessions, as you imagine a visual ethnography project would want to do. Awkward glances. Yes, they’d tried, but it was so slow and boring to watch that they couldn’t figure out what to do with it. I had to concede they were right: I couldn’t imagine being a spectator to any of the role-playing game sessions I’d participated in.
Fast-forward to today and you can view a lot of live-streamed role-playing (both filmed and podcasted) and it’s fun and interesting to watch or listen to (yes, ok, you have to be something of a nerd for that to be completely true). You can see bits of role-playing sessions in shows like Community and Stranger Things that seem right (compared to how often classroom representations in fiction usually seem not at all true to the experience).
So what changed? It’s not just that tabletop role-playing games became less subcultural, less marginalized, more familiar. If that was all it took, representing dynamic classroom experiences in a vivid and watchable way would be even easier since just about everyone has spent at least some time in a classroom.
I think it’s more:
Recruiting people who understand how to play on camera or to a podcast—e.g., people with some skill as performers.
Understanding how to lightly edit a live experience to preserve the you-are-there feeling— while not featuring the long boring parts where someone’s off getting a snack from the fridge or is trying to read the Player’s Handbook because they disagree with the GM about whether a ranger can track a spectre or not.
Imagining an audience—and in some cases, figuring out ways for the audience to participate or interact with the game session.
Paying or compensating performers—or at least figuring out what other reasons someone might have to be willing to play in front of an audience in a skilled way.
Picking scenarios for play that are both typical/representative and that are creatively excellent and suitable to be performed—e.g., you want adventures that are genre-evoking and maybe even referencing classic modules, films, etc., but that have also been written with this format in mind (and avoid some of the cringy/nasty dimensions of RPG writing in the past).
(Other things those of you who have watched or listened to streaming role-play think they’ve figured out since the old days where doing this would always have been boring?)
So apply that to filming or live-streaming classrooms and I think what you get is that you have to think representationally. Not the way that film and television often do, by using the classroom as a setting for dramatic or comedic scenes that don’t actually feel at all like they arise out of a classroom. Imagine instead recruiting students who are prepared to perform being students—who have a performative sense of what being a student is like. Imagine editing the experience so you have a continuous narrative sense of watching a classroom but where there’s some compression or ellipsis around the procedural moments where nothing’s happening or everybody’s waiting—you don’t need to see the syllabus being handed out or the review of next week’s assignment. Imagine understanding the classroom as spectatorial—I think that’s the hardest ask in all of this because most faculty and most students think of the classroom as a shared private experience, where being watched is a threatening feeling associated either with evaluation by supervisors or hostile attention from assholes looking for political scapegoats. But it could be done, I think—not only imagining an audience but finding ways for them to interact live with the classroom. Think about a performed classroom where the course or the class session is chosen for its adaptability to that purpose, and where everyone involved is both being compensated and has ownership over the resulting product (rather than it being created by some ed-tech or media company that will use it to flog some terrible transformation of education as a whole).
The analogy isn’t precise, but it does make me feel as if there might be a way to make some classrooms into a more shared, performative and public experience that remains vividly true to and instructive about what classrooms are like.
Image credit: Diacritica, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
This is an interesting idea, but I wonder if there are ANY professions where the average media version of what they do all day is both watchable and reasonably accurate. To some extent, this reminds me of watching LAW AND ORDER with Kate, who interned with the Manhattan DA during law school and would grind her teeth about how terrible the courtroom scenes were as actual legal practice, and how none of the offices looked anything like the sets for the show.