Emergency remote teaching: What’s inclusivity got to do with it?

This post was written by Dr Milena Marinkova, lecturer in EAP at the University of Leeds and School Academic Lead for Inclusive Practice (Languages, Cultures and Societies)

The Covid-19 outbreak happened. One day it was a situation somewhere far away, someone else’s problem that individuals and institutions here were hoping may not affect us. And then, it was, is, here, and likely to stay with us, and everyone else for that matter, for a while. But then, for some of us here, the crisis hasn’t been such a sudden occurrence. Working primarily with international students at a UK Higher Education Institution, and myself not really from around here, accounts of what was happening elsewhere have been on my mind since mid-January. From my East Asian students wearing face masks, keeping their distance, worried about relatives back home, and staying away from my classes – even more so after I had a spell of what my GP told me in mid-February must have been “just the flu” – to relatives and friends scattered all over the world expressing concern about my health and safety here and theirs wherever they were, especially if holding the infelicitous status of a BAME/foreign-born national, I have been hovering over my not-so metaphorical “Alert” button for months. A disrupted sleep pattern, recurrent bouts of anxiety and heightened sense of who’s around me at any point in time are probably just few examples of my body and mind’s extreme response to a sustained state of stress.

And yet, I do realise that I’m fortunate to be in a country with a developed healthcare system, in a city with a reasonably reliable supply chain and in a job with a guaranteed salary. A lot of colleagues and students of mine are not that lucky.

After months of waiting it was here: the inevitability of the pandemic followed by the certainties of lockdown. The physical restrictions of my movements arrived with a breakthrough into the online world. Spared the everyday commute, I could now deliver teaching and complete most of my professional responsibilities from the relative comfort of my home, in contrast to a large number of key workers and precariously employed people in the UK and elsewhere. But even remote working is not that straightforward. Ensconced safely at home, I seem to have the rest of the world at home with me, which is an anxiety-inducing experience in its own right. Whereas once the nine-to-five timeframe of the working day and the physical boundaries of the University campus were clear demarcations for the stage where I performed my professio nal “self”, these are nowadays blurred. Is the background to my interactive online teaching sessions sufficiently neutral, stripped of any signs of personal whimsy that might distract or offend others? Does my posture at the makeshift standing desk, built from a table and a stool on which my laptop is dangerously perched, transpire enough confidence? Are my non-sequitur queries after colleagues’ and students’ well-being, whereabouts or hobbies having an adverse impact on the efficiency of our precious time together?

Again, the above is mitigated by the fact that I can afford to live in a house with a garden, which I have to share with my partner only. Each of us can have our own workspace with a reasonably good access to the necessary resources – from books and furniture to equipment and Internet connection. I am aware that not everybody can.

The reason this blog opens with a somewhat navel-gazing exposé is because I’d like to think about teaching during the Covid outbreak as an experience with sentient beings – students, tutors and their relatives – at its heart. In the urgency to respond to the overwhelming effects of this global pandemic, the pragmatism of expedient “emergency approaches” to teaching is rightly prioritised. And this makes sense in the context of having to move all teaching, assessment and support activities online with limited time or capacity to develop a fully-fledged online programme. I do wonder, however, whether the rush for quick-fix, low-cost and hands-on practical solutions risks perhaps throwing by the wayside the breathing space we might need to deal with our own emergencies and the thinking time we might need for the main principles informing our “emergency teaching”. If the overriding characteristics of the emergency remote teaching outlined by Hodges et al. (2020) is “to provide temporary access to instruction and instructional supports in a manner that is quick to set up and is reliably available during an emergency or crisis”, it is crucial to define whose “access”, need for “instructional support” and “availability” we mean. Could there be a risk of tacitly prioritising the needs of a particular type of learner in the name of expediency, i.e., those of the able-bodied, emotionally stable and digitally savvy, with regular access to equipment and Internet, with sufficient time and resources to invest in their learning, and an appropriate safety net in their country of residence? Could there also be a similar kind of assumption about “the average tutor”, reducing their needs to fear of/resistance to technology or finding the solutions to their problems in the digital world only? To be fair to the authors of the above piece, Universal Design for Learning (UDL) – probably more familiar in the UK educational context as inclusive academic practices designed to avoid retrospective adjustments – merits a sentence in their blog and a footnote to the Centre for Applied Special Technology (CAST) webiste. But these asides seem to be a bit of an after-thought, and in line with the overall emphasis on speed, effectiveness and pragmatism – not necessarily the holistic experience that teaching and learning should be.

In my specific teaching context – that of English for Academic Purposes at a UK HEI – inclusivity considerations do underpin the foundations of our discipline. After all, we as EAP tutors aim to support learners in the development of appropriate knowledge, skills and discourses that will help them complete their academic journey in the UK. In this sense, our objective is to eliminate some of the barriers that learners coming to the UK context from the outside might encounter: be it to do with discipline-specific discourses and professional praxes; academic conventions, literacies and socialisation; or English language proficiency. This is often done in collaboration with learners by putting them at the centre of the learning process, recognising their varied needs, but also the vast repertoire of expertise and experience they already have. The move to remote EAP teaching, however, has brought to the foreground another skillset, which may not have been such a priority before – that of digital literacy. If previously all teaching was mediated primarily by the teacher, with digital technologies being deployed as a useful tool facilitating a range of academic and language-related activities – from spellcheck and thesaurus work to referencing software and library search engines – nowadays the online world is the only environment in which teaching and learning can take place. And while it might be the only conduit for learning, it is certainly not used only for learning; this is why a holistic inclusivity audit is vital.

What might this audit include? Taking into account access to suitable broadband, hardware and software; availability of space with appropriate privacy levels; and access to necessary financial and technological resources are a starting point. These are all circumstances that might have huge impact on whether teaching and learning can even start taking place, for both students and teachers, who – let's not forget – might be living, temporarily based or stranded anywhere in the world. Making the most of familiar and widely available online tools, limiting the number of required platforms (clicks and downloads), and opting for technologies that don’t demand a steep learning curve (for either students or teachers) might make more sense and mean more engagement with learning. This is particularly relevant to the temporary, albeit intensive, nature of the summer pre-sessional programmes that most UK universities run. Course designers have to adapt syllabi, materials, assessment and working practices to the new online environment, arguably with some notice to do so; for pre-sessional students and fixed-term tutors (most of whom will be hired to deliver teaching over a 4- to 11-week period over the summer) the digital learning curve is likely to be even steeper. More than ever, the familiar mantra of less is more is true; and instead of a smorgasbord of online tools  that could replace the range of face-to-face interactions we’d used in our teaching before, I'd rather think of emergency remote EAP teaching as a pedagogically sound safety net that can support the very basic motivation, socialisation, knowledge-exchange and personal development needs of all students.

Furthermore, individual characteristics and affective dispositions are factors that shouldn’t be ignored in such an inclusivity audit. Existing structural inequalities – for BAME and LGBTQ groups, individuals with disabilities and foreign-born nationals, those with caring, family or professional commitments, individuals in vulnerable or volatile situations – are likely to be exacerbated in times of crises. Seen as a minority, the needs of these groups might sometimes take a back seat to those of a notional majority, especially when resources are stretched. Thus, trying to anticipate how remote teaching (materials, activities or assessment) might or might not work for individuals other than the imaginary “average student/tutor” will be crucial. It might be worthwhile considering what the textual bias of online learning materials might mean to someone with a print disability or the impact of a 4-hour-a-day 5-days-a-week learning cycle might be on someone with ADHD and/or children to homeschool. This is even more pertinent to the EAP sector and the student cohorts we work with; data from the Equality Policy Unit of the University of Leeds shows that international students are on average five times less likely to disclose a disability/identify as disabled. Requesting reasonable adjustments or individual support from tutors may not be something international students are aware of, have prior access to or perceive positively for a number of individual or cultural reasons. Rather than reacting to an individual need retrospectively with what is likely to be time-consuming adjustments, it might make sense to anticipate such differences at the design stage. Educational research has concluded that what improves the accessibility of teaching practices for a specific cohort is ultimately beneficial for everyone: for instance, transcripts of videos benefit not only those with hearing impairments, but might also support the development of listening and reading skills in language learners or provide a back-up for learners with poor Internet connectivity for video downloads. This could be another argument for scaling down learning objectives and simplifying tasks so as to allow course designers and tutors time to embed flexible formats of delivery.

In a recent blog about her experience of emergency remote teaching on an in-sessional EAP programme, my colleague Clare Maxwell also highlighted the importance of flexibility when trying to tackle the exponential increase in the “unexpecteds” in students’ and teachers’ lives these days. A number of the key lessons she so eloquently discussed zoom in on the radically different experience of time today, and what inclusivity scholars have referred to as “temporal equity”. It is vital to remember that time is not structured, owned or prioritised equally, even in the best of times; the extent to which individuals can organise or “make” time is not so much a function of personal disposition but of social, economic and cultural contexts. In today’s climate of uncertainty and suspension of schedules, there might the lingering illusion that we have all this extra time; however, this will not necessarily result in  “productive” use of time. Learners and tutors alike might choose, or be forced, to spend their time differently and unevenly: on self-care, care for others, employment, religious observance, or … just doing nothing. And the impact this uneven distribution might have on their well-being, focus, expectations, preparation for, engagement in and outcomes of teaching and learning might be significant. If a regular summer EAP pre-sessional is built on the assumption that every day students and teachers can invest a fixed amount of hours in teaching and learning, this certainty is no longer with us. Even though physically isolated and temporally suspended, both students and tutors may not be able to temporally or spatially isolate their teaching and learning from everything else going on in their lives. Rather than proceeding with the usual “either/or” approach – e.g., complete the assignment in this format and with this word count or fail; attend this synchronous session or be marked as “absent”; deliver this session using this tool and in this time slot, or get someone else to cover – it might be necessary to allow for more flexibility and an “and” approach. Managing own and others’ expectations (i.e., scaling down), providing learners and tutors with choice without overwhelming them, and creating some kind of safety net for those that might struggle (e.g., streamlined mitigating circumstances/resit procedures, revised attendance protocols, portfolio-style coursework rather than a final summative) could be some of the alternatives to consider.

In the final analysis, this is not a plea for inclusivity considerations to trump the expediency priorities of emergency teaching; neither is it a proposal for another list of things for tutors to add to their remote teaching “to do list”. Rather, in the lead up to the next period of emergency teaching, I’m hoping this reflection can offer some thoughts on the possibility of planning for and delivering remote teaching that is humane, flexible and responsive to the needs of both students and tutors.