lecturing, bodily presence, neoliberalism

In general I’m in favor of the idea of defending the lecture, but this piece in Jacobin by Miya Tokumitsu blurs some useful distinctions.

Tokumitsu’s argument that the common critique of academic lecturing amounts to an unwitting prop for neoliberalism — “The attack on lectures ultimately participates in neoliberalism’s desire to restructure our lives in the image of just-in-time logistics” — is, first of all, surely the ne plus ultra of the Jacobin ethos. And it’s not on the face of it a convincing claim. But when you read through the essay you discover that Tokumitsu isn’t primarily interested in defending the lecture — her chief subject is quite other than what she says it is.

Here’s a key passage:

The best lectures draw on careful preparation as well as spontaneous revelation. While speaking to students and gauging their reactions, lecturers come to new conclusions, incorporate them into the lecture, and refine their argument. Lectures impart facts, but they also model argumentation, all the while responding to their audience’s nonverbal cues. Far from being one-sided, lectures are a social occasion.

The regular timing of lectures contributes to their sociality, establishing a course’s rhythm. The weekly lecture, or pair of lectures, draws students together at the same time and place, providing a set of ideas to digest while reading supplementary material and breaking into smaller discussion sections. Classrooms are communities, and typically lectures are the only occasion for the entire group to convene physically. Remove the impetus to gather — either by insinuating that recorded lectures are just as effective or by making the lecture optional — and the benefits of community disappear.

One common lament among university students is a sense of social isolation during the school year. While lectures won’t necessarily introduce students to their best friends or future partners, they do require attendees to get dressed, leave the house, and participate in a shared experience. This simple routine can head off lonelieness and despondency, two triggers and intensifiers of depression.

“Oh,” I thought when I got to this part of the essay, “this isn’t about lectures at all, this is about going to class.” See the full paragraph that first brings neoliberalism into the story:

The attack on lectures ultimately participates in neoliberalism’s desire to restructure our lives in the image of just-in-time logistics. We must be able to cancel anything at the last minute in our desperate hustle to be employable to anyone who might ask. An economic model that chops up and parcels out every moment of our lives inevitably resists the requirement to convene regularly.

But lectures are only one of several reasons students “convene regularly”: they do so for labs and discussion-based classes too. So when Tokumitsu writes,

But lecture attendees do lots of things: they take notes, they react, they scan the room for reactions, and most importantly, they listen. Listening to a sustained, hour-long argument requires initiative, will, and focus. In other words, it is an activity. But today, the act of listening counts for very little, as it does not appear to produce any outcomes or have an evident goal.

— I think, yes, indeed, but all this happens in discussion-based classes too.

So Tokumitsu consistently confuses two phenomena that are conceptually distinct, even if they sometimes are blurred in practice:

1) The critique of the residential college that advocates for its replacement by online learning;

2) The critique of the lecture that advocates for its replacement by other ways of using class time — e.g., the flipped classroom model.

The latter argument assumes that students will “convene regularly” and will be bodily present to and with one another while engaging in collective learning; it just argues that lectures are a poor use of that shared space and time. The former argument is more radical in that it dismisses the need for bodily presence and instead celebrates individual learning and, occasionally, the use of digital communications media to connect people to one another. If you’re going to get anything out of Tokumitsu’s essay, you’ll need to realize that sometimes she’s responding to the first argument and sometimes to the second; and that it’s only the first that can with any plausibility be connected to neoliberalism as Tokumitsu understands it.

More on lecturing in another post.

Text Patterns

February 27, 2017