This week I chose the article Faculty and online education as a mechanism of power, Peach, H. G., and Bieber, J. P. (2015) for the structured blog task.
The article argues that it is an under-represented area of research how online education, and its implementation, can be seen through the lense of Foucault’s conceptualisation of power.
The article uses interviews carried out with tenured faculty in a mix of US Universities to explore this investigation. The authors also reference another piece of research (Garza Mitchell, R. L. (2009)) to support one of their points.
In the literature review, the authors state that the majority of research in this area has been “technical or managerial in approach.” It goes on to cite several papers, nearly all dating from 1992 – 2004. Bearing in mind this paper was published in 2015, I was surprised that there was only one paper referenced which had been published in the preceding 10 years (Garza Mitchell 2009).
In addition, this more recent reference (Garza Mitchell 2009) relates to interviews with staff at community colleges, not Universities, and is therefore not a direct comparison. The point they raise is an interesting one: online education can lead to a cultural change within the institution as well as “changes in faculty status and roles”. However, I wasn’t convinced by the resulting assertion that “Such shifts in professional identity can result in a newly scripted self, one more in line with others’ desires, or a self that is easier to control” (my emphasis). How is it easier to control a faculty member who now identifies more as a teacher, than a researcher? This isn’t made clear but does suggest, on the part of the authors, that there is a hierarchy of status in the role of faculty, with researcher being placed higher than teacher.
The authors suggest one of the ways institutions outflank faculty trying to wrestle back control of their working lives is by “not giving credit for extra time spent developing or teaching online courses …. an action taken to discourage teaching online”. This part of the argument I found less convincing as it fails to acknowledge the fact that institutions want more faculty to deliver ODL courses / programmes, so why disincentivise?
As the authors state in the introduction “administrators, professors, and students are all institutional stakeholders who exercise power in their relations with one another.” It states that these interviews were triangulated with interviews conducted with 13 administrators. I would like to know more about this. I would also like to see if it could be possible to triangulate with interviews with students. For example, participant “Don”:
“When I teach face-to-face, I might be working on something and then I have class coming up. I have to cut what I’m working [on], at that point, and go to the class. When I come back I may have lost track of what I’m trying to do. The more classes I have online, the more I can simply work with them throughout, and finish what I’m doing. If I want to respond to an entire class’s _____ [assignment] within one sitting, I can do that.”
While this clearly allows Don to gain more control of his time, is this optimal for his students? For example, is Don’s feedback going to be compromised if he is responding to all his students late into the evening because he wanted to clear his day for research?
Similarly,
“For Robert, most, if not all, interaction with students enrolled in online classes is other than face-to-face. He typically communicates with them through email or instant messaging at a time and place of his choosing.”
I thought it worth noting that these online communications take place at a time of Robert’s choosing (ie not the students).
Viewing online education through this lense is an interesting and useful starting point. Especially as more and more institutions are looking to expand their Online Distance Learning offerings, it makes sense to consider how institutions are going to manage the competing demands of administrators, faculty and students. However, it is limited in scope. By its own admission, those interviewed represent a narrow demographic within teaching staff (all were tenured at the point of interview) and I agree with the authors that “future studies of power and online education should investigate the experiences of contingent faculty. The experiences of faculty in other institution types may also be different and thus worthy of further study.”
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