Appendix: Global pedagogy in a digital age

2013 was declared the year of the MOOC – massive open online course – when new techniques of online education rapidly expanded and caught the imagination of educators across the world. They were propagated by a series of US consortia – coursera, edX and Udacity – that collaborated with major universities to produce courses that students can take for credit, either fully online or with classroom sessions. In effect, these MOOCs constitute a new video form of the textbook, making brilliant lectures by leading scholars at elite universities available to much wider student populations and even the general public. Who could object to open access to the greatest minds our universities can offer? Who could refuse the potential of MOOCs for expanding access to quality education? Furthermore, wouldn’t anyone committed to public sociology want to make their sociology accessible the world over? While the potential of this new form of online education seems undeniable, let us examine its implications.

There are precursors to MOOCs, and the one that most readily springs to mind is the British Open University that has its own staff of professors and lecturers who prepare their own courses with lectures delivered on BBC television. Those who could ill afford the money and time to pursue university education, often those firmly ensconced in jobs, could take courses and eventually obtain a degree. They would meet with academic staff for several weeks each year but most of the learning was done independently at home. With the internet widely accessible and no monopoly over transmission, US universities now compete with one another to offer their best courses online. While this dramatically expands access to quality instruction from elite institutions, there clearly remains an educational gap between the privileged students engaged directly with faculty at their home universities (often in the form of small seminars) and the thousands of students at less elite institutions who follow the course online.

Unlike elite universities with their handsome endowments, poorer public universities now strapped for cash with declining public funds and, ultimately, facing a limit to the increase in the fees they can charge, are tempted to use online courses to deskill and, thereby, cheapen their lecturing staff. There have been cases of permanent faculty being required to use online courses developed at elite universities, courses that will then be handed over to armies of part-time, adjunct faculty to administer. Their numbers will grow at the expense of permanent tenured faculty whose autonomy will also be reduced. The struggles that are now taking place below the top flight research universities are precisely over the adoption of online pre-packaged courses, leading to fierce battles over faculty autonomy. What room for maneuver will they have to use the online course as a supplement to their own courses as opposed to having the latter defined by the former? Moreover, to the extent that these online courses are adopted, deskilling will be accompanied by the domination of the visions of faculty from elite universities. While this may be less problematic in fields like physics, it poses significant implications for a discipline like sociology. Given that the background of students is a crucial ingredient in designing sociology courses, this threatens to limit the possibilities for pedagogical approaches that may work with different communities of students. Teaching sociology to Princeton students is very different from teaching sociology to students at a public university like Berkeley, and pedagogical approaches cannot simply be transferred from one context to the other.

The pedagogical implications of MOOCs have broader ramifications when they are adopted globally. To be sure, the educational impoverishment of many countries in the Global South, reflected in overcrowded courses, unprepared and underpaid teachers as well as the poor state of and limited access to textbooks, could mean that online education would improve and indeed set new standards for teaching. But the presence of such online courses, available to all, could provide the excuse to further disinvest in national higher education. It could spell the end of universities – already in retreat – in many countries of the Global South. Inevitably, lectures from elite Western institutions, so-called ‘world class’ universities, would command a symbolic power, intensifying the domination of Western ideas – unless, that is, alternative centers could grasp the technology to develop their own courses. This is what we tried to do with two undergraduate courses organized from Berkeley.

The goal was to develop an alternative approach to online education that aimed: to disperse participation to include a global community of sociologists (rather than limited to faculty at elite Western universities); to increase autonomy and active participation (of both educators and educated); and to nurture alternative approaches to sociology (beyond the confines of dominant Western approaches). Our first attempt was a course called Global Sociology, Live! The idea was to develop a notion of global sociology through a global dialogue among sociologists located throughout the world. Working with the ideas of Antonio Gramsci and Karl Polanyi, we developed a conception of sociology as being rooted in civil society and emerging as a response to expanding capitalist markets. Following Polanyi we sought to develop the notion of ‘marketization’ as a description of the contemporary world capitalist economy, paying attention to its destructive powers, whether in the realm of labor, finance or the environment. We followed this with an examination of the way political entities, both nation-states and multilateral agencies, have channeled, contained or deepened the expansion of capitalist markets. Insofar as contemporary capitalism is increasingly global in nature, we posed the question: does a global civil society emerge in response, bringing with it the possibility of a new global sociology? We explored examples of civil society being organized on a transnational basis, whether in the form of struggles around the commodification of labor and the environment, the crafting of international legal orders that seek to protect the interests of indigenous peoples, or through the pursuit of ‘real utopias’ that transcend national boundaries.

The course aimed to scale up from prevailing local and national approaches and seek out the contours of a global sociology. We pursued this by organizing an international discussion that drew upon the expertise of social scientists located in different places throughout the world (Lebanon, India, China, Colombia, Philippines, South Africa as well as the US). ¹ Every week (after students had first read and discussed some of their work), we connected to different scholars via Skype or video-conferencing for a short lecture. This was followed by giving students the opportunity to directly pose questions to the lecturer, enabling more open-ended conversations that often took surprising turns. The picture of global sociology emerged week by week from these discussions and in ways we could never anticipate – it was indeed an unfolding and unnerving process!

The course hinged on the active participation of students who directly engaged and often challenged the distant lecturers. They played a central role in shaping the vision of global sociology that emerged through these discussions. Students in the course had been carefully selected for their international backgrounds and interests, resulting in an extraordinary group that brought with them a wide diversity of experiences and perspectives. In other words, in addition to aiming for a global array of weekly lecturers, we also aimed to globalize the classroom as much as possible. Finally, we sought to make these lectures and discussions available to a global audience by video, recording them and posting them on the website of the International Sociological Association. Anyone could watch the series if they had access to the internet and indeed the course received thousands of hits from all over the world.

Although we found the course very stimulating, we knew that there were many problems that needed to be thought through. So we asked students to evaluate the course as part of their final papers. This not only served to reaffirm their central role in shaping the course, but it also provided us with invaluable feedback and criticism. Many students expressed frustration with the overly simplistic theoretical framework we had adopted and felt that it failed to do justice to the diversity of experiences and perspectives being shared by different scholars every week. In designing the course we had felt that a broad theoretical approach would provide an overall coherence and a shared global framework for discussion. The result, however, was that this inclined some of the conversations towards abstraction rather than being grounded in concrete realities and localities. So while we began with the assumption that a broad all-encompassing theoretical framework was the best means of facilitating a global dialogue among sociologists, we came to see that without being grounded global sociology was in danger of becoming another spuriously universal sociology. Our approach tended to turn the ‘global’ into a universalizing gesture – one that both obscures a world of diverse perspectives and the specificity of its own standpoint – a tradition of Western domination that we sought to challenge.

We concluded that a true global sociology had to be built from the ground up, drawing upon the work of sociologists directly engaged with local publics. For the second iteration of the course, therefore, we took a more inductive approach in which a vision of global sociology emerged through engagement with concretely anchored public sociologies. We called it Public Sociology, Live! Much of the format for the course remained the same – weekly conversations over Skype with scholars in different locations, in which a short opening lecture was followed by questions and discussion with Berkeley students, all of which was recorded and made publicly available online. We made some significant adjustments, however, to address the weaknesses that surfaced in our first course. We carefully chose scholars on the basis of their deep engagement with publics in their own societies, and we asked them to be as concrete as possible in their lectures, encouraging them to share specific examples of how they approached their work as public sociologists. The resulting discussions avoided the lofty theorization that was more characteristic of the first course, being much more firmly rooted in the distinct specificities of each case.

A second criticism that students emphasized in their evaluations of the first course was its separation from potential audiences. Even though the scholars came from all corners of the earth, they engaged exclusively with Berkeley students in recorded sessions that were then posted for global audiences who were positioned as passive recipients with little opportunity to participate in the discussion (beyond posting occasional comments online). In their criticisms of the course, our students pushed us to think about ways we might actually facilitate a more open and participatory global discussion. Therefore we added a new component to the second course that involved actively incorporating six seminars in different locations – Barcelona, Kiev, Sao Paulo, Tehran, Oslo and Johannesburg. These parallel seminars viewed and discussed the weekly lectures once they were posted online and each group appointed one member to summarize their discussions. These summaries were then posted on a Facebook page created for this purpose. This provided a virtual space for students dispersed throughout the world to share their ideas and engage directly with each other. Individual Berkeley students were assigned to liaise with other groups and help facilitate these online exchanges. The ultimate goal was to generate discussion of the issues being raised within these different locations throughout the world, as well as between them – in effect, establishing multiple ‘centers’ in the production of this global dialogue. ²

Inevitably some groups were more engaged than others. The group of students in Tehran were especially enthusiastic, going to great lengths to overcome censorship that made viewing videos or accessing Facebook a complicated and politically risky endeavor. The South Africans were also well organized and generated a lively discussion, not least around the contribution of their own Karl von Holdt. The team in Barcelona sent in regular summaries of their discussions, which reflected the communicative methodology they advocated, and after Ramón Flecha and Marta Soler gave their presentation, Marta was especially conscientious in responding to the critical comments of the groups around the world. The other seminars contributed comments more erratically as it proved to be more work than anticipated, especially as communication was in English. But, as we discuss below, there were other reasons why their participation might have lacked enthusiasm.

Once again we solicited the feedback of Berkeley students by incorporating an evaluation of the course into their final papers. And once again they highlighted for us many of the weaknesses and ways in which the course fell short of our objectives. In contrast to the first course, students now expressed the opposite frustration – overwhelmed by exposure to vastly different topics, approaches and national contexts every week with little more than a loose conceptual framework to connect them. Students struggled to make sense of and connect the different forms of public sociology in such disparate places as Colombia, India, Philippines, Spain, France, India, Lebanon and South Africa. The seminar with Pun Ngai from Hong Kong was the exception that proved the rule. She spoke about the conditions and meaning of work in the Foxconn enterprises that employed some 200,000 workers in one physical location in South China. She described the appalling working conditions that go into the production of the i-Pads, i-Phones and Mac computers that Berkeley students were using, all clearly visible on the video screen to Pun Ngai and anyone watching the discussion. Inevitably, this brought home the connection between themselves and the Foxconn workers who were committing suicide, leading to an especially lively conversation. Here students were brought into direct connection to the engaged research of sociologists on the other side of the world. But, for the most part it was difficult for students to grapple with issues that were so foreign to them.

While students in our first class were critical (and rightly so) of our imposition of an overly simplified theoretical framework, students in the second course found the lack of theoretical grounding to be equally frustrating. This dilemma gets to the heart of one of the main challenges of building a truly global sociology – the need for a conceptual framework that can serve to facilitate and orient dialogue among sociologists from vastly different locations and perspectives, without reverting to forms of universalism that simply reproduce patterns of thought dominant in the West.

Students in the second course also remained skeptical of how far we had actually come in terms of decentering our pedagogy. While parallel seminars in other locations had been incorporated into the structure of the course, their role remained responsive rather than constitutive – the course had been designed by us without their input, their role was limited to discussing or responding to issues that we introduced, and unlike their privileged Berkeley counterparts, they had no opportunity to directly participate in discussions with lecturers. In short, though the course was intended to create a vision of public sociology on the basis of inputs from all over the world, it undoubtedly relied upon and reproduced the privileges of the central Berkeley node. As a pedagogic exercise, the next step was to encourage the autonomous creation of similar experiments in different places in the world, but so far this has only taken place in Bogotá, Colombia where María José Álvarez Rivadulla organized a public seminar along similar lines at Rosario University.

Far from solving the problems of a global pedagogy in which all contribute to a vision of global sociology, these experimental courses taught us that digital technology only brings the problems into relief. But bringing the problems into relief is important in itself not only because it is necessary for tackling them, but also because we too easily forget the ramifications of global inequalities for the growth of knowledge. Above all else, what remains in our minds are the courageous and inspiring exploits of sociologists around the world, exploits that enable us to appreciate the possibilities as well as the limits of public sociology.