I was struck recently by how much Erich Fromm can offer in understanding online learning. In his To Have Or To Be? Fromm distinguishes between two orientations to the world, the eponymous having and being, which manifest across the full range of human activity. The former is a matter of possessing, with a substantial subject relating to external objects in terms of ownership: I have these things which are mine. The latter is a matter of opening out, what Nicos Mouzelis described as apophatic reflexivity, through a creative engagement with reality: I live in a world and grow through my engagements with it. This is how Fromm describes learning in the having mode:

Students in the having mode of existence will listen to a lecture, hearing the words and understanding their logical structure and their meaning and, as best they can, will write down every word in their loose leaf notebooks—so that, later on, they can memorize their notes and thus pass an examination. But the content does not become part of their own individual system of thought, enriching and widening it. Instead, they transform the words they hear into fixed clusters of thought, or whole theories, which they store up. The students and the content of the lectures remain strangers to each other, except that each student has become the owner of a collection of statements made by somebody else (who had either created them or taken them over from another source).

To Have Or To Be? Pg 24-25

For students who seek to have knowledge, learning is a matter of determined internalisation or note-taking. The point is to pin down the educational content they’ve encountered, ensuring they could reliably reproduce its core messages at a later date in response to external challenge. There’s an obvious parallel here to what Paulo Freire described as the banking concept of education. It would be interesting to know if there was any engagement between them, as Freire published Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968 in Portuguese, 1970 in English) a few years before Fromm published his book (1976). This is how Freire describes this model on pg 72 of Pedagogy of the Oppressed:

Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiques and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the “banking” concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits. They do, it is true, have the opportunity to become collectors or cataloguers of the things they store. But in the last analysis, it is the people themselves who are filed away through the lack of creativity, transformation, and knowledge in this (at best) misguided system. For apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, individuals cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Pg 72

These concepts illustrate the risks involved in online learning during a pandemic. There are many aspects to these interactions which lend themselves to learning in the having mood: teachers who have been forced to micro-modularise their learning materials at short notice, lack of adequate training/equipment for this undertaking, students engaging with these learning materials in a relatively isolated way, these relations being mediated by platforms which make it more difficult to establish continuities between micro-modules, atomisation caused by unpredictable disruptions to the learning process and anxiety for all involved as they try and sustain some pretence of normality within conditions which no one would have imagined even a year earlier. In contrast, consider Fromm’s description of learning in the being mode:

The process of learning has an entirely different quality for students in the being mode of relatedness to the world. To begin with, they do not go to the course lectures, even to the first one in a course, as tabulae rasae. They have thought beforehand about the problems the lectures will be dealing with and have in mind certain questions and problems of their own. They have been occupied with the topic and it interests them. Instead of being passive receptacles of words and ideas, they listen, they hear, and most important, they receive and they respond in an active, productive way. What they listen to stimulates their own thinking processes. New questions, new ideas, new perspectives arise in their minds. Their listening is an alive process. They listen with interest, hear what the lecturer says, and spontaneously come to life in response to what they hear. They do not simply acquire knowledge that they can take home and memorize. Each student has been affected and has changed: each is different after the lecture than he or she was before it. Of course, this mode of learning can prevail only if the lecture offers stimulating material. Empty talk cannot be responded to in the being mode, and in such circumstances, students in the being mode find it best not to listen at all, but to concentrate on their own thought processes.

To Have Or To Be? Pg 25

How do we design online learning to encourage being rather than having? How do we exercise agency over the platform infrastructure upon which online learning depends? How do we change the institutional conditions which frustrate this undertaking into ones which help facilitate it? There’s a tendency to conflate different levels of analysis here (agency, technology and organisations etc) in a way tied up with a cultural politics of technology in which naive technology-boosters experience themselves as locked in a battle against paranoid prophets of decline who see technology as endangering all which is good and true within education.

The result of this is to obscure the space in which we could ask nuanced questions about the interpenetration of these factors and how they might produce different outcomes for different learners. For example how what Tressie McMillan Cottom once described as roaming autodidacts might thrive under conditions in which others might struggle to learn, as well as how these outcomes reproduce or challenge educational inequalities.

Photo by Miguel Bruna on Unsplash

The lockdown has increased my propensity for introspection. Of the many synapses of memories through my encephalon of late, one particularly stands out, i.e. teaching students through Zoom during the lockdown. While I have lived through the SARS epidemic and was in secondary 1 when it struck in 2003, the COVID-19 pandemic has certainly been on an unprecedented scale. Hence, if I were to crystal ball gaze back then, it would still never have occurred to me that something so straightforward as teaching a face-to-face class would turn out to be such a precious affair many years later. 

During the first semester of 2020, I taught two law subjects, one 10-credit subject, LAW305 Contract & Civil Litigation (LAW305), with about 18 students in that tutor group, and another 5-credit subject, LAW301 Legal Methods & Singapore Legal System (LAW301), with about 26 students in that tutor group. LAW305 was taught over two terms while LAW301 commenced in term 2 and I had my first class on 12 March 2020. 

The second-year students I taught in the LAW305 program were not new to me. I had taught them previously when they enrolled for my 5-credit subject, LAW303 Law of Business Organisations (LAW303), in their first years. I had built up the rapport with them earlier on when they were first-year students and they were familiar with my teaching expectations. However, I had not taught the students in LAW301 before as they were first-year law students. Hence, my face-to-face interactions with the LAW301 students were extremely limited as I had only met them once for a face-to-face session on 12 March 2020. After that first and only face-to-face session, the remaining 5 other sessions were all conducted on the Zoom platform. Yet it was also one batch of students that I particularly enjoyed teaching as many remained steadfast in the face of adversity. To build rapport and maintain a line of communication during this trying period, I utilised the Whastapp for Business platform. The tutor-group student leader added my direct office line to their tutor group chats. Through these group chats, I shared many recent updates in the law with the students and discussed wide-ranging issues from course content and COVID-19, to the future of legal education.

In a previous post on the Singapore University of Social Sciences (SUSS) Facebook page, I explained how I used a range of technological tools to enhance the learning experience for LAW303, including the use of Kahoot!, Nearpod and Study.com video resources. For instance, I utilised the platform, ‘Nearpod’ for my teaching subjects to interact with students. Through an application on the platform, known as ‘Time to Climb’ (this is a highly interactive gamified activity that increases engagement with friendly classroom competition), I was able to achieve my learning objectives in an engaging manner. The platform also allowed me to deliver content directly to the students’ screens for a more interactive learning experience.

I also made use of another platform, ‘Kahoot!’, to design and deliver interactive timed-online quizzes for students on the LAW303 course. Kahoot! enabled me to add content after every quiz question to explain key concepts and relevant legal principles to students. I also made use of a range of relevant video materials from ‘Study.com’ to facilitate the teaching of LAW303. The videos with its illustrations and diagrams helped to further crystallise the students’ understanding of the course content. These were some of my teaching approaches before the onset of COVID-19. Through teaching and course evaluations, students have consistently rated these learning tools very highly and praised its effectiveness in enhancing their learning journey, since some of these law courses can be challenging. To adapt to the dynamics of online learning during the lockdown, I created YouTube videos for the remaining classes on the Zoom platform. I also anticipated that online learning would continue for the second semester of 2020 (I teach LAW303 during the second semester). Hence, I converted the didactic segments of the live online teaching sessions to pre-prepared lecture recordings (which I have hosted on the YouTube platform, on an access by link-only basis, for students’ convenience).

To facilitate this process and to make the videos more interactive, I have supplemented the creation of some of these ‘PowerPoint’ slides with the use of ‘Camtasia’, a video editing software. This freed up the time for a more interactive discussion during the Zoom sessions, which was better at captivating students’ attention as compared to a chalk-and-talk method of teaching. The challenge with using a myriad of technological interfaces on the Zoom platform was that it added slightly more complexity for the less technologically savvy student to toggle through the different screens (users of Nearpod and Kahoot! would understand) and less technologically inclined students might find it slightly discombobulating. Hence, creating YouTube lectures that are longer in duration than the usual chunk lectures do help students in their quietude to adjust to the pace of online learning.

Teaching entirely online with no face-to-face sessions has also become a modus vivendi which one would not have thought possible just a semester ago. While there is a push towards entirely online learning for many years now, COVID-19 has increased the pace of this development. I would never have imagined that it would be possible to teach from home had I actually not taught students this semester on Zoom. Yet, the Zoom platform has been facilitative. It has enabled students who would not normally speak up in class to speak up. While we are all far apart, it has actually brought the classroom closer into the students’ homes. If COVID-19 had happened when video conferencing technology was not as advanced as present, the circumstances would have been very different. It would have brought interactions necessary for business and education to a complete standstill.  That is the silver lining to be grateful for. 

The lockdown has increased the pace of uncertainty in our lives. Many students I taught have recounted their personal stories and resolute aspirations to become a lawyer. They are extremely determined and relentless in their pursuit to practice community law for the betterment of society. Yet one acknowledges the anxieties and struggles these students face as they live through a very challenging milieu. 

One student related to me how as a police officer he had to perform essential duties during the circuit breaker. This meant extended shifts. On 21 April 2020, he shared with his fellow students on his WhatsApp group that he had not seen his wife and his son in more than a month due to the need for social distancing in his line of work. In spite of this, he submitted his tutor-marked assignments on time and tried his level best to attend all my Zoom classes. He even recounted how he was functioning on little sleep in order to juggle work, university and family. The law programme is indeed a rigorous program. Yet, a majority of the students persevere and manage in spite of their challenges and struggles. COVID-19 has increased the stress on our students, especially those at the frontline performing essential services. 

To those who constantly experience a nagging feeling of whether the choices they have made would end up being the right ones many years later especially in light of COVID-19, I encourage them to read the poem, ‘Desiderata’ by Max Ehrmann. I have also shared this with all my students that I teach. The poem really stuck a chord with me, especially the words in the final stanza, ‘And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.’ This has definitely been one of the better advices amidst the gloom of COVID-19.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Ben Chester Cheong is a Lecturer, Law Programmes at the School of Law, Singapore University of Social Sciences. He also serves as an Of Counsel with RHTLaw Asia LLP.