A Possible Motivation for Resisting Online Teaching.

In "Arts of the Contact Zone, "Mary Louise Pratt writes that, “The lecturer's traditional (imagined) task" is "unifying the world in the class's eyes by means of a monologue that rings equally coherent, revealing, and true for all, forging an ad hoc community, homogeneous with respect to one's own words” (39).

I can't shake this image of the lecturer in control, creating a community in his or her own image. Ah, it's what all of us long for. Yet, is it the best way for students to learn, particularly if our goal is for students to think for themselves? 

I remember one of those experts that the administration periodically invites on campus, usually for large sums of money. He insisted that critical thinking consisted of teaching students to think like us. I was always uncomfortable with that idea. 

If our goal is to teach students to think for themselves, certainly what I mean by critical thinking, then the measure of our success are those students who disagree with us, who think differently than we do, who reject our assumptions. If students all come out of our classes thinking like we do, we have failed. 

Yet, if we go online, there is the danger that we might lose control, that students might have a different "take away" than we envisioned, that they might actually be able to think for themselves instead of letting us do that for them.