How do I engage with (my own) perspectives?

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Teachers everywhere find themselves in rapidly changing contexts driven by global forces. These globalized forces co-construct and propel each other, resulting in unique contemporary challenges. Most recently the world experienced the drastic effects of a global pandemic on all areas of life – including (higher) education. We witnessed an acceleration in the transition to online education as a result of safety measures that were taken to protect the health of students and staff. The experiences of COVID-19 lockdown education show that individual students were affected differently by these measures. Those in particularly vulnerable situations were disproportionately compromised by the adaptations made to education, putting precisely those groups that were already in a precarious position at an increased risk of exclusion (Mhandu et al., 2021). Data at the institutional level as well as regional and European research provide hard evidence that inequality of opportunities persists all throughout higher education online as well as offline. Characteristics such as sexual orientation, gender, ethnicity, skin colour, religion, able-bodiedness, or socioeconomic class among others often influence access to, success, and belonging in higher education (Heide, 2022).

Concept

Teachers thus find themselves in continuously changing contexts within as well as outside of the classroom that influence each other. Situating oneself on a personal level in these ‘contexts within contexts’ can be daunting, overwhelming, and difficult.

Yet, it is important to reflect on the relationship between our individual attitudes and these contexts because our fundamental beliefs shape what values we uphold, our understanding of the world, and how we assign meaning to all that occurs around us (Marsen, 2008). Moreover, it informs the rationales that we carry with us into the classroom and our conduct in that space. The way our behaviour influences classrooms and the interactions taking place in them are complex because of the myriad of factors at play. The act of situating oneself on a personal level in a given context refers to an awareness of the ways in which one’s presence and positionality – including personal values, preferences, and power – produce certain dynamics that affect an environment.

Positionality is a concept through which to understand what role we take on in certain social interactions. It is the social, cultural, and political context that create your specific identity, and how that identity influences the way you view and understand the world. For digital education, positionality entails the awareness of the ways in which our personal experiences and background influence our interactions and perceptions in the digital classroom environment. In this way, positionality helps putting into words the invisible social dynamics of the virtual classroom. Reflecting on positionality, by exploring your perspective of a given situation and how this shapes your behaviour, helps better understand how your personal background and lived experience shape – and bias – that situation. The identity wheel (Figure 1) can be useful for reflecting about your identities. It shows the multiple and different ways that people socially identify themselves.

As a teacher, it is important to reflect on the effect you have on the digital classroom environment, especially considering how much influence teachers have in comparison to students in the hierarchical structure of educational institutions. Put differently, in comparison with students, teachers generally have more agency in the classroom context, which is the ability to actively govern one’s experience through specific interventions that produce desired outcomes, as opposed to being passively subjected to circumstances.

Figure 1. Reprinted from Kalish, C., Medley, T., & Adams, D. (2021, June 3). How medical practices can continue the journey toward diversity, acceptance and inclusion. MGMA. https://www.mgma.com/resources/human-resources/how-medical-practices-can-continue-the-journey-tow

Scenario

This year you are teaching an online course with a colleague who you have not worked with before. The colleague kindly invited you to get to know each other over some tea at lunchtime. During the conversation you discuss your approaches to comment on certain social and political themes in the course with students. You are shocked to discover that the colleague has very different views from you regarding those themes, which makes you very uncomfortable. It seems that the colleague too is a bit taken aback by your viewpoint.

After lunch, you find it curious that your colleague seemed shocked at your views, when they clearly had the shocking views in your opinion. This encounter makes you reflect about the fact that your views can be experienced as shocking to others, which leads to reflections about your perspective and what lies behind it.

Challenge (15 minutes)

Write a small reflection based on your identity where you address the prompts below. The goal of this writing exercise is to become aware of the social, political, and cultural contexts that shape your world view. There are no wrongs answers, and you may focus on multiple identity characteristics.

Prompt

What are your different identities?
Under which context do your identities fall: social, political, or cultural – or combinations?
When, where and how did you come to learn about your identities?
When did you first ever feel or experience a social, political or cultural identity?
How have one or more of your identities developed or changed in your lifetime?
How do your identities and their contexts shape your identity, i.e., what makes you uniquely you?
How do your identities influence your perception of the world?
What do your personal background and lived experiences mean for your awareness of or unfamiliarity with certain experiences?

Example

I am a student whose parents did not complete a higher education degree, which makes me a first-generation student. Yet, I am also a white male attending university in my home country and do not understand the difficulties of belonging into a new country, system, and culture – such as not having shared experiences with people around me – that a first generation, migrant student of colour experiences. I am aware of what it is like to experience first-hand the different barriers that first-generation students can encounter during their studies. However, I do not share the experience of the hindrances students with a migrant background can face – such as being rejected for jobs and internships because of assumptions about their language proficiency. However, I also am a passport holder of the country I am residing in and, consequently, I am not familiar with the experiences of migration that requires a visa and the risks of deportation.

Learn

To gain a better understanding of the multiple, overlapping contexts that shape the online educational environment, teachers need to be equipped with knowledge of the broader dimensions relevant to the virtual classroom, besides knowledge of course content. Particularly, it requires an awareness of online classroom environments as embedded within institutions, which, in turn, are influenced by their local respective societal contexts, which in turn are situated in a globalised context. From this awareness, teachers may then develop the competence to situate themselves in these ‘contexts within contexts’ in order to effectuate education that is inclusive of the diversity of students in the classroom.

The micro-learning module ‘Explore How Your Biases Affect Digital Learning’ is a learning resource which helps develop the competence to recognise your own biases and how to deal with them in a digital education. It invites you to think about how you relate to social dimensions of the micro (classroom), meso (institutional), macro (societal), and meta (global) contexts. Also see Guideline 1 ‘Develop awareness and practice self-reflection ‘in our Handbook of e-Inclusion.