I’m making a briefer blog post this month than usual, partly because I’m in the last two weeks of a very intensive summer class, and also because I’m aware that what I should write about – something about Vancouver and Singapore, systemic racism and racial privilege, and Singapore, brought up by the recent worldwide protests after George Floyd’s death, and the perceptible uptick in anti-Asian racism here — still remains unformed.

Back to my studies, then. Before I started my MEd at UBC, I took several online courses in order to fulfil prerequisites in Psychology — from UBC itself, Thompson Rivers University, and the University of Athabasca. As I wrote in this blog over a year ago, my overall experience of these courses, despite some bright moments, was negative. While they varied in effectiveness of pedagogic design, all of them ended up privileging a teacher and textbook-centred mode of learning, in which online discussion groups seemed ancillary, examinations that involved textbook memorization were prioritized, and in which little feedback was given to students. At that time I looked forward to getting into the Counselling Psychology Program at UBC, and leaving the online classroom behind me. Our classes, I was happy to find, were small and mostly quite interactive, and student questioning was encouraged. From March, and, given UBC’s latest announcements, likely until at least the end of Semester 1 of the next academic year, my MEd classes have moved online. In March and early April, there was a frantic – and at times heroic –scrambling by faculty to move our class discussions onto Canvas, Zoom, and other platforms. Faculty had a little longer to plan the migration of Summer classes, such as the Family Therapy course I’m taking at the moment.

            What’s the result? Despite the best efforts of faculty who have taken up the challenge, the education experience is much less fulfilling. The classes still bear traces of what they used to be. Whereas the online classes I took for the prerequisites consisted of recorded PowerPoint lectures, asynchronous discussions, and online quizzes –so much so that I never saw my instructor’s or classmates’ faces—the class I am taking now is centred on a twice weekly online Zoom meeting, in which we are asked to discuss a presentation from our classmates. There are some features of course pedagogy that could be improved – online discussions take place after class meetings, rather than in preparation for them, for example – but the videoconferencing contact does at least give me a greater sense of presence in the class, despite Zoom fatigue and that feeling of being under surveillance, with twenty people looking at you, and twenty faces to survey. It’s also difficult to expect the instructor, in a short summer course packed into six weeks, to attempt to change the pedagogy radically in response to student feedback, and we are stuck with what we have got.

            In studying structural family therapy, I developed a language to express my dissatisfaction with online pedagogy, and a realization that going online amplifies pedagogical problems that I’ve already encountered in the first year of my program, and which are rooted in both university learning and professionalization as a process. I was reading one of the “founding fathers” of systemic therapy –Salvador Minuchin (and, an aside for another day, I’m curious why we often approach therapeutic modalities through the personae and biography of founding fathers –or, much more rarely, founding mothers –rather than through practice). Minuchin and others developed systemic family therapy as a direct response to working with minoritized communities in Philadelphia, a situation in which the norms that are central to psychodynamic approaches, such as those inspired by Freud, did not apply. They also trained counsellors by working with members of the community, rather than university graduates, and they found the work of these counselors to be more effective than those of professionally trained counsellors who were not from the community, or who had not spent considerable time there. In discussing this in an interview, Minuchin talked about two different styles of learning. The first, represented by most academic program, and including the one I am in, was deductive. Trainees were taught a great deal of theory, and some practical skills. Learning came from the application of theoretical principles to practice. This contrasted with Minuchin’s second, inductive, style of learning. In this the trainee counsellor went out into the world of conversation, and learned through errors, mistakes, and feedback. If there was something that the counsellor-in-training did not understand, or needed a larger explanation for, this was the place for theory, although Minuchin and his associated were not given to over-theorizing, but rather to simply identifying patterns. 

            My MEd at UBC, like most other programs of its kind, is certainly on the deductive end of the pedagogical spectrum, but the move online has pushed it further in that direction, and we’ve also lost those informal, human, spaces that a physical classroom seems to generate: coffee and bathroom breaks, or conversations on the way to the bus stop or the bike racks. The shift for me is serious enough to make me think about how the content of what I learn is influenced by the pedagogic process, and also to plot strategies about how to change it, through learning outside the classroom, in the future. But first I do need to get through this course!