The Mechanics of Care

This week’s readings show how much harm institutions can cause when they ignore the voices of teachers and students. First, there’s Jason Kelley’s “Students Are Pushing Back Against Proctoring Surveillance Apps,” which describes how students in various universities are fighting against restrictive and inequitable test-proctoring software such as Proctorio. 

Before I get into too much detail about the pitfalls of this software, I want to mention that I think asking students to take exams at all during this pandemic is kind of silly (we’re all stressed enough without adding invasive exam proctoring software into the mix). Honestly, I wish the education system would shift away from test-taking as a measure of student performance, even post-pandemic. Assessments should focus more on critical thinking and research skills than on memorization; there are very few (if any) professions that expect you to memorize every single aspect of your role and never allow you to look up information or ask someone else for help. The average workplace wants someone who can think for themselves and come up with creative solutions, not someone who memorized a textbook and is really good at answering multiple choice questions. 

Since I don’t think the education system is going to follow the advice in this blog about administering fewer exams, we still need to talk about the proctoring apps in Kelley’s article.  Kelley describes how the software tracks students’ movements to ensure they aren’t cheating on their tests. It all sounds pretty invasive; I can’t believe that students can get flagged as cheaters for an action as innocuous as looking around their room. It reminds me of Shoshana Zuboff’s article on surveillance capitalism—specifically, how employers (and in this case, universities) treat their contracts with employees (or students) like machine processes. Maybe a robot could sit in one spot and stare directly at a screen for hours without losing focus, but for a human student, that set up sounds like a recipe for failure. 

The universities implementing this proctoring software are making a lot of assumptions about their students: for example, they assume that everyone has a quiet test-taking spot free of roommates or relatives and can afford advanced video and audio technology. They also assume their students have light skin, because, as we’ve discussed numerous times in this course already, the facial recognition software that so many of these programs use is biased against those with darker complexions. 

Obviously, the use of this software demonstrates a clear lack of care for and understanding of students. Brenna Clark Gray discusses the concept of care in her article “Digital Detox #6: Build Back Better.” I appreciate how Gray talks about care at the institutional level. It so often feels like care is left up to the responsibility of the individual, whether that be self-care for overworked employees or teachers being asked to care for their students. But individuals can’t possibly demonstrate enough care to solve all of the structural problems that plague the education system, and asking them to try just leads to what Gray calls “moral stress”—the fatigue caused by a profession that forces you to take actions that would otherwise be against your moral code, which ultimately leads to burnout. 

As a teacher myself, I definitely agree with Gray’s assessment here; educators go into the teaching profession because they care about their students, but when they’re stuck in a system rife with injustice that couldn’t care less about the people in it, instructors can’t always show their students the care they deserve. Teachers can’t care for their students if the institution doesn’t care for its teachers. 

As we look toward a post pandemic university, we need to ask universities and other educational institutions to cultivate cultures of care in their school communities. And to do that, these institutions need to add educators and students to the conversation rather than restricting discussions to be between administrators only. We as educators are on the ground working with our students, so we know which techniques, technologies, and structural changes will be effective. Ignoring teachers’ and students’ voices—as institutions so often do—creates an environment where members of the school feel more like replaceable cogs in a machine than like valued members of the community.

Speaking of machines, check out my Daily Create for this week: I used Google’s AI to write a poem inspired by some of my favorite poets.