168. IT'S NOT JUST THE KIDS, IT'S US - Why It's Important for Teachers to Look in the Mirror
When out recently promoting my book, Anarchist Atheist Punk Rock Teacher, at various book fairs I was struck by several curious passersby asking me the same thing about teaching in 2023: ‘phones must be a problem, eh?’
The media has spent a lot of time over the last few years asking whether mobile phones should be allowed in schools, and different schools have been navigating the issue in their own ways. Recently, however, noises have come from government that the official line will be that phones ought to be banned in schools. It was therefore unsurprising that people who don’t themselves spend a lot of time in schools think that modern students’ obsession with their phones is causing the downfall of education. My response to the question, however, always took them by surprise:
‘It’s not just the kids though is it? It’s all of us. We’re all obsessed with our phones. It’s a society-wide problem, not just a school one.’
Because it’s true. As problematic as it may be for a student in my class to be secretly looking at their phone when they should be learning about philosophy, it’s just as problematic that the adult I am talking to in the staffroom can’t fully focus on our conversation because a notification came in that someone they know has posted something new on Instagram, or that adult friends and family you sit and watch a movie with suddenly are looking at a second screen while the film plays out to no-one. Mobile phones have undoubtedly utterly messed up our attention-spans and the way we interact with each other. Schools, famously a microcosm of society, simply reflect this society-wide loss of attention, focus, and ability to sustain real-life social interaction without mediation through a screen.
Which is not to say that schools couldn’t be a good place to attempt to undo the damage of phones. But if that is the agenda it needs to be an honest agenda. Phones are not to be banned from schools because they are a distraction from learning, they ought to be banned from schools because they are a distraction for all of us and we have charged schools with the difficult mission of trying to undo their damage. Not just helping our children, but instilling values all of us could learn from and try and fix this all-consuming addiction we all seem to suffer.
The problem with this is that for that to be the agenda, us teachers would need to be on board with it. Also the government setting those agendas. As we are seeing as the ongoing Covid-inquiry trawls through acres of incriminating WhatsApp messages from the government at the time of the coronavirus pandemic, it is unlikely. Similar to their American counterpart at the time’s clear obsession with Twitter, those in the highest offices of UK government seem just as hooked on their phones as our students are. As are most of us teachers. I know I am. I use my phone as a clock in my classroom. It’s out on the desk. But this also means incoming notifications catch my eye all the time. Or the chirping buzz on my wrist that comes when my Apple watch wants me to know I’m missing out on something. If we, the adults in the room, are sometimes teaching our students with half our mind ensnared by the possibilities of what’s happening on our phone, how can we stand there with a straight face and pretend this is a student-only problem? More often than not we are also contributing to the problem, expecting students to be checking school emails, or virtual learning provider of choice, regularly for messages and updates; suggesting interesting websites, podcasts, and other resources for them to explore. We know how we use our phones and expect our students to do the same, uncritically. If we do it, it must be mature and adult. We have a WhatsApp group to discuss a project at work with colleagues - why don’t they start one to complete an assignment?
The issue made me think of something else I’m seeing a lot in education these days that bothers me as it seems to similarly reproduce bad habits in our students: YouTube videos.
It is true - students love watching videos in class. They always have. I remember in my own 1980s childhood how excited we got when the old-fashioned bulky television and VHS recorder were wheeled into the classroom. It immediately meant that we wouldn’t be doing much boring written work and we would hopefully see something really cool! I was introduced to great movies like The Matrix, The Stepford Wives, Bladerunner, and Walkabout in the context of my childhood classroom.
However…
…there is a difference between a video being a meaningful contribution to a learning experience (for example, expressing an idea artistically, or giving first-person testimony or imagery unachievable through any other medium) and simply showing a video because it is a video. It always struck me as odd when training to be a teacher that professional teachers would advise against talking too much in lessons and, to achieve this, would instead stick on videos of other people talking to get across the same information. In recent years this has become even more pervasive given the ease of showing a YouTube video to a class. And it is this which I worry is the bad habit we are replicating. Many of the videos available on YouTube are great clips from well-made documentaries, movies, TV shows, events, lectures, etc… but many also aren’t. The internet is lousy with ‘content-makers’ these days and for any topic you want a video for there are thousands of homemade primers just waiting to be viewed. Some of these sorts of videos I have seen popping up in classrooms around the country.
‘Oh this is a good one’, one teacher says. (It isn’t)
‘I saw this the other day and thought it would be great for class’, says another. (Not sure why - some of the information in it is inaccurate).
‘Has anyone got a good clip about this topic?’ asks another on an online teaching forum, the idea of just doing a lesson without one obviously not occurring.
And it makes me realise that in a world where there is a very real epistemological threat coming from falling down online rabbit-holes into algorithm-guided conspiracies, we teachers are spending a lot of our own free-time guided by those very same dangerous algorithms as we hunt and click for hours looking for the perfect clips for our students. We then normalise this behaviour to our students - ‘here’s a good clip I found’ - and not only create the expectation that there is a YouTube video out there on anything they care to search for, but the expectation that what you ought to be doing in your spare-time is watching a bunch of YouTube videos.
Philosophers often problematise and scrutinise norms. So here’s one: it has become normal teaching practice to show a short clip to students in most lessons. Should it?
Again - this is an us problem, not a student problem. It is my adult friends who are sharing me links of inane videos they’ve found each day and filling their social media feeds with similarly shared mini movies. If we do it, it must be mature and adult. We explain new ideas to each other in INSET meetings with a brief video to make a point we could have made ourselves because we spend our evenings falling down YouTube rabbit-holes where, alongside conspiracy videos and far-right propaganda, we find them - so it can’t be bad for them to do the same…
Coming back to the phenomena of students who wouldn’t sit and listen to their teacher talk to them for 20 minutes but who will happily sit and watch a different teacher speak to them on a screen for the same amount of time, it says worrying things about how much more authoritative something appears simply because it is on a screen. We know this already from the super-rich ‘influencers’ who have made a fortune parlaying their on-screen authority into profits, and from the billion-dollar advertising industry that supports them. And speaking of advertising, it’s worth remembering that many of those YouTube videos shown in classrooms around the world are also bringing commercials into the classroom, as well as often suggesting next videos before the selected video is finished which sometimes include that worrying conspiracy/far-right stuff. Again - if the message we send to students is that these things should be watched, that they are authoritative, and that free-time should be spent searching for more of them because you might stumble on a gem here or there, is that actually a good message to send? Have we actually thought about the norm we reflexively reenforce?
None of this is to say that phones and videos in the classroom are inherently bad things. There are many ways that they could benefit student learning. Indeed, they may even prove to be more beneficial to student learning than the limited and flawed classroom model itself. But, unless the larger meta-issue is discussed openly with students - how do we interact with technology in a way that is productive and not simply passively passing on bad habits to our students - and unless we address those issues ourselves and acknowledge that, perhaps, a lot of what we do with technology ourselves is not great for us, then we will continue to see in our students only a reflection of our own problematic relationship to those devices in our pockets taking up so much of our, limited, brain-space.
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
My new book, ANARCHIST ATHEIST PUNK ROCK TEACHER, is out everywhere now on paperback and eBook. You can order it direct from the publisher or from places like Amazon. Thanks to everyone who said hello at the Manchester and Salford Anarchist Bookfair last Saturday, and at the London Anarchist Bookfair and Peterborough Radical Bookfair last month!
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