We never want to make our students feel 'othered' but this is something that adult educators need to admit can happen in our classes.
This week I am going to write about the article 'Othering in Online Learning' by Phirangee and Malec. This is a qualitative study of six online students and their experiences of feeling like the 'other' in online courses that they were enrolled in. The aim is to consider the underlying reasons why students might experience a sense of isolation in online learning, even when the teacher attempts to build a social presence in the online classroom. The authors highlight that many online students feel isolated, and there are high drop-out rates. Perhaps if we can understand these tendencies, we can begin to think about how we can improve the motivation of students to participate in online learning by facilitating a deeper connection with the content and their peers. The authors categorise three different types of 'other' that were uncovered through their research:
'our participants were othered through work obligations, academic expectations, and ethnic identities that were in misalignment with their peers, their instructors, and the course con- tent.' (Phirangee and Malec, 2017, p.169). Although these students did not actually drop out of their courses, it was a possibility that their feelings may have led them to do so. I thought that this article was an interesting study of online learners and uncovered some reasons for 'othering' that I personally found surprising. As a language teacher, I am already conscious of the possibility for ethnic and linguistic othering in the classroom. For example, if you are teaching a class of multi-lingual students, it is very likely that students will want to group themselves with peers who speak the same language as them. This can lead to othering of those who do not share languages with their classmates, as was the case in the article. I was particularly surprised by the academic othering that was experienced by two of the participants. These students felt that they were othered because they had different academic expectations to their peers. One felt that their classmates were only concerned about getting their own points of view across, while the other felt that the discussions were not challenging enough. They both blamed peers for not creating discussions that they felt were in line with their own academic expectations. I thought this was interesting, as it is quite subjective. I wonder how the other classmates felt about these two participants. Could other people in the class have felt othered too, by those who have higher academic expectations, who might think classmates are 'naval gazing' (Phirangee and Malec, 2017, p.167)? Perhaps one way that this example could be countered would be to give clear guidelines of expectations for interactions in forums. Then it could reduce the instances of students posting content that they think will get them a good mark, but rather responding to one another in a constructive way to build an effective social presence. However, it could go the other way, with more rigid guidelines limiting the creative freedom of online students, and thus still perpetuating possible feelings of isolation. In my personal experience of online learning, I was quite happy with the way that we were given examples of 'good' forum interactions from our tutor. We also got clarifications and feedback from him when we were unsure. Perhaps my class is a unique case, as a 'meta' online learners who are learning about online learning! Students studying other subjects online may not have so much awareness of the academic expectations, which could lead to some learners becoming marginalised in discussions. The authors admit that one limit of this study is that they only interviewed six participants. Morrow (2005, p. 255) has suggested that it is more important in a qualitative study to focus on procedure and depth in the interview than sample size. but perhaps this study is limited in that each category of 'other' only had two interviewees. Perhaps a future study could look at interviewing one particular category, for example people from minority ethnic groups in online contexts. References
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LaurenI am an IMAESC student, English teacher and adult education researcher from the UK. Categories
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