On Student 2.0, cont.

For many teachers, the increasing disembodiment of our students leads to a pedagogy that is even more fundamentally disembodied. In the classroom 1.0, the teacher lectures to a roomful of mute brains and eyeballs, the students’ physicality relegated to a waggling hand, a mere medium between the drone of the expert and the scrawl in their notebooks. Now, shall we forget these bodies altogether, turning instead to their virtual doubles? No. I would argue that, in the classroom 2.0, we must turn simultaneously in two directions. As teachers, we must engage our students at the level of 1s and 0s but also at the level of flesh. Even as the classroom moves more and more online, we must make efforts to make learning ecstatic again.

While the Kindle and the iPhone certainly offer compelling alternatives, the material object of a book or a film will never be fully extinct. Books have an odor, a certain weight in our hands, a tactile pleasure at the turn of a page. The film strip has an audible clack as it moves through the projector, and the emulsion dissolves sweetly before our eyes. And, even if these mediums are rendered mostly intangible, books and films will always have a physical impact on us, causing us to recoil, sigh, bristle, and scream.

And student work has the potential for all these same qualities. It has heft and gravity, meaning and substance. Its production requires their bodies, or at least requires them to have bodies. The best academic and creative work is rooted in experience--the experience of a world, a book, a film, an idea, a self. The best learners let this world take root inside them, and they engage it, intellectually, emotionally, viscerally. So, we must bring our subjects to life for both our students and their digital counterparts. Learning must fire every neuron--must touch students at the highest levels of consciousness and at the cellular level. We must look in a way that only bodies can do, the sort of looking that breaks its subject and object to bits and melds them permanently together. No matter where it happens, this is what learning must do. It must evolve--and revolt.