Introduction

The UN Policy Brief – Education during COVID-19 and Beyond, August 2020 states:

The COVID-19 pandemic has created the largest disruption of education systems in history, affecting nearly 1.6 billion learners in more than 190 countries and all continents (2020: 2).

 In India, there is a sudden and forced shift of traditional classroom-based teaching/learning, characterized by the physical presence of teacher and students in a defined space, into virtual class, where each participant is physically remote from the other and connected only through the internet. This is the new normal. It is true that online classes have already become the mainstream, but this pandemic universalizes its relevance in situation of tremendous health risk from physical proximity between individuals. While discussing this transition at the higher education level, my reference point is my personal experience of teaching in the conventional mode for years at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, and then a forced and somewhat hesitant shift to online teaching and my students’  feedback on the same. I will restrict myself to the experience of two primary stake-holders: teachers and students. My analysis will not be exhaustive but merely illustrative. This may or may not represent the situation of other institutions.

Withering Away of Campus?

Jadavpur University’s free-flowing and lively milieu (almost without any restriction for anybody to move in and out of campus, despite being gated) nurtures a liberal, critical and often a radical atmosphere, dialogic conversation and protest. Here diverse boundaries have frequently been questioned and sometimes transcended like that between academics and extra-academics (politics, aesthetics etc.); between the eminent professors[i] and fresh students; students of senior and junior classes; between classroom interaction and canteen addas[ii] ; and also boundaries between different age-cohorts, class, caste, ethnicity, gender, or rural-urban backgrounds, This has a tremendous impact on character-building.

I wonder about the impact of the forced dissociation from such a milieu in present pandemic time. I am sure the physical and mental space the campus offers can never be reproduced in the virtual classroom. Do social media offer a real refuge to the students, where they may reconstruct a virtual campus community? The campus space itself offers contested meanings. It is the site of ongoing interactions rather than the mere result of such interaction. Human beings produce spaces by attributing meanings to them – the social production of space (Lefebvre 1974. 1991). The conceived physical space (planner’s space) of the university campus, with its greenery, water bodies, imposing buildings of libraries, laboratories, departments, canteens, union rooms, open-air theatre, staff quarter etc., definitely influence how we experience it.

Our experience is always loaded with symbolism, but it occurs only in conjunction with our own perception of it (perceived space) and how we make use of it (lived space). The campus space is objective and given, but its meanings also depend on how it is perceived and lived by students, teachers, and non-teaching staff, who study, work and also stay in the hostel/ staff quarters located within the campus, and the general public, who too regularly use campus roads and fields for morning walk/jog or short-cut route to reach the nearby railway station. Hence the meanings of campus space conceived by the planners have often been completely altered. Real embodied usages of the space have always bridged the dialectics between objectivity (conceived space) and subjectivity (perceived space) by people, which, I am sure, will never be experienced virtually. 

Is Mentoring still possible?

It is not only in classrooms and libraries that we find our students. They are found everywhere in the campus – corridors, staircases, individual teacher’s office, and they are found doing so many things – studying, chatting, singing, debating.  This may signify a relative lack of discipline, but it also ensures a deliberate promotion of accessible flowing communication and cultivation of self and social awareness.  This atmosphere is conducive for mentoring a student with intimate guidance. The teacher offers knowledge in the classroom, but as a result of personal one-on-one contact beyond the classroom, he/she provides insight, perspective, or wisdom to a student in the context of a relationship of trust and values, which goes beyond duty and obligation.

Mentors do not just teach but listen, collaborate, challenge and uncover ways for students to become self-directed. Mentoring is a fundamental requirement for higher studies. Is mentoring possible through online learning where there is absolutely no scope for casual everyday physical encounters between the student and the teacher, which naturally blossoms into a deep relationship over time without any deliberate design?

 Conclusion

 With a forcible shift to online education, the teacher-student, student-student relationship gets depersonalized. The transmission of knowledge and broad human values are losing ground. Interestingly, Recommendations of UGC  Golden Jubilee Seminars, 2003, set the target of building a new society by the year 2020, where justice and human values prevail, and not merely to make India a vibrant economy driven by knowledge (Higher Education In India : Issues, Concerns and New Directions, UGC, N Delhi, Dec 2003).

But we experience India today as a society, where access to the internet and device, essential for online education, are denied for reasons structural; the threat of pay cut and recession disturb the stability of mind, and the lack of trustworthy and enduring relations between teachers and students probably makes mentoring impossible.  Hence we long for the conventional educational system, which at least can offer a support system by providing ready access to books in the library, to lecture notes taken personally in the class, or teachers, seniors and peers sharing, discussing, reflecting together in and outside the formal channels of communication, thereby generating a camaraderie, which may wipe out any sense of isolation and deprivation.  The conventional classes may resist the disenchantment on both the students and the teachers as knowledge here is transmitted through a relationship between real actors in a real set up.

[i] 30 faculties figure in the list of top 2% of the scientists in the world, Study by Stanford University, 2020

[ii] free-flowing casual discussion

Reference:

Lefebvre, H. (  1974, 1991). The Production of Space. ( D Nicholson-Smith, Trans.) . Oxford, Cambridge: Blackwell.

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Dalia Chakrabarti is a Professor of Sociology at Jadavpur University, Kolkata. Her research and publications address visuals, culture, city, market, education and the social history of Bengal.