The Skillful Teacher

particular features that need to be recognized. Because students and
Teaching Online
209
15_980668 ch11.qxp  7/27/06  3:27 PM  Page 209

---

210
T
HE
S
KILLFUL
T
EACHER
teachers can’t see and hear each other speak their words, the ability
to write clearly and appropriately becomes doubly important.
Stripped of tone and gesture, some comments can seem abrupt, con-
frontational, rude, or disrespectful. But such comments are hardly a
rarity in face-to-face classrooms. What is crucial is that teachers take
the lead in modeling online contributions that are thoughtful, dis-
ciplined, and self-critical.
A final comment. Online education is sometimes caricatured as
an alienating, disembodied process in contrast to the warmth and
fluidity of bodies gathered together in face-to-face classrooms. But
the assumption that traditional classrooms are relaxed and conge-
nial arenas brimming over with interpersonal empathy and respect,
while online classrooms are lonely and isolated, needs hard scrutiny.
Many face-to-face classrooms I have participated in as both student
and teacher have been (from my perspective) lonely, isolating,
uncongenial, and disrespectful. As a learner I have suffered in such
classrooms from disrespectful, unresponsive, and uninterested teach-
ers and from being expected to study disembodied content in a
lonely and stress-inducing competition with peers. In her critique
of this false dichotomy between supposedly warm face-to-face class-
rooms and chilly online environments, Hess (2005) argues that “we
actually have more to fear and critique in our current classroom
practices of disembodied learning than we do from our experimenta-
tion with online learning” (p. 68). Castigating learning online as
the poor cousin of face-to-face learning in “traditional” classrooms
allows teachers a convenient opting out from the need to ask hard
questions about their practices in both environments.
15_980668 ch11.qxp  7/27/06  3:27 PM  Page 210

---

12
T
rying to understand why and how students resist learning is
probably something I’ve spent more time pondering than any
other facet of my life as a teacher. Early in my career I believed that
by sheer force of will I could galvanize the natural learning energies
of students whose spirit had been cowed by the system. Needless to
say, this conviction suffered a series of severe experiential shocks.
My constant efforts to dismantle the formal curriculum and encour-
age students to take responsibility for their education (by asking
them to design and evaluate their own learning) were met with a
mix of bemusement and resentment. The bemusement was caused
by my not bothering to explain what I was doing and by my not
bothering to check that students did indeed feel the sense of frus-
tration I assumed was inhibiting their learning. The resentment was
produced by my apparent unwillingness to do the work I was being
paid for—to teach them. This was compounded further by some stu-
dents’ belief that by showing up for class they deserved an automatic
A. For someone like me who tends to assume that everything that
happens in the classroom is my responsibility, encountering this
kind of resistance is particularly troubling. If I’ve caused resistance
(so my thought process goes), then it’s my responsibility to dis-
mantle it. It has taken me many years to realize that resistance to
learning is not something that can be removed from the classroom