Thanks for falling for my clickbaity title!
Something that always bothered me when I was in high school (and let’s be honest, university too) was the prevalence of homework. I performed well in high school. For whatever reason I found it easy enough to coast through classes and get good grades based on tests and assignments. I think I got pretty lucky. I never did homework, and it always piled up for me at the last minute and I’d find myself scrambling to finish things just before they were due. I think a big part of this was because very early on I (perhaps stubbornly, perhaps due to rumbling class consciousness) I decided that homework was bad and should not exist because it takes so much time for people to do, causes undo stress and anxiety, and often doesn’t help anyone learn. And besides, isn’t our home time supposed to be just that, home time? Not time that the school we go to for so long during the day gets to bleed into. How is that fair?
These ideas were floating through my head as we discussed the ideas of flipped learning and hyflex learning during our last class. I appreciate the ways in which both these models seek to create an atmosphere and method of accessibility for students, especially in times of duress such as our current pandemic. Disability, illness, learning needs, and all sorts of other specific accessibility needs of students can be met by combining online and face to face, and synchronous and asynchronous forms of teaching. These tools can be a form of universal design that helps both those in need of it and those who may not explicitly require extra support, which is a liberatory goal we should all be working towards.
However, in order for these methods to truly reach such a potential we need to address two concepts.
- The bleed over from school time into personal time.
- The way in which school is a kind of labour.
Hyflex and flipped learning make space for students to access school material online at home. This could be used as a means of making lessons or lecture style work something to be done on ones own, with support given in the class room, and then homework added as necessary. This risks making lectures and information transmission or exploration something that students do outside of the classroom. The time that students take during the day at school is substantial. We need to be asking ourselves carefully whether or not we should be facilitating more work for students outside the class. We know the effects of sleep deprivation on youth, something that schools are contributing to. Contextually, these methods can be very helpful for students, but we need to carefully monitor their implementation in our classroom and what our student’s workloads look like in their other classes to do so effectively.
The second thing to consider is how school is a form of labour, and students are, in effect, workers. Going to school and learning the skills we need to get along in our world post graduation (be that working or post-secondary and then working. Or, and we won’t get into this, criminalization) means that we are able to produce value or reproduce social necessities under the capitalist system in which we live. From this framework we can see how homework and the moving of formal learning into non-class time manifests as a kind of ‘unpaid overtime’ that begins to normalize hierarchical work conditions and the gig-ification of jobs. Flexibility is no longer a perk of the job, but something we need to make a part of our lives by foregoing hobbies, relations, and the general exploration of life in order to make ourselves available to work so we can survive.
Obviously none of this means that these models aren’t useful in their own ways and in particular classroom contexts, but we cannot dismiss the political economic connections and implications that every model of education has in our excitement to do good on behalf of our students. We need to use the models we have, and of course make more, with justice, liberation, and our shared struggle as teachers and students (workers both) in mind.
And all this still says nothing about the way these models facilitate the gig-ification of teachers in the education system! Who needs teachers with secure contracts and a position in their community when we can have loads of atomized ‘learning experts’ or knowledge guides’ or whatever corporate buzzword gets assigned to people in ever more precarious positions? But that’s for another rant.