Blog post for HELTASA on student agency in online teaching and learning

1. Individual and collective online learning agency in a time of inequality and crisis
in HE
Alan Cliff
Interim Dean
Centre for Higher Education Development
University of Cape Town
As with all the other colleagues writing at this time, I note the extraordinary
circumstances in which we find ourselves as individuals, as Higher Education
institutions and as a sector. We are all coming to terms with what it means to live at a
social distance from most – if not all – colleagues and to work remotely. I believe that,
now perhaps more than ever, we are called on as individuals, institutions and as a
sector to enact leadership on the broad canvas that is teaching and learning. Many
others in this space have recently made a similar point.
What I guess we are all grappling with is what exactly it means to enact leadership
remotely and how we go about that – especially with the unique opportunities and
challenges presented to us in online spaces and in a context of enormous diversity and
social and economic inequality. One thing is especially clear is that – whilst the online
teaching and learning space presents us with opportunities to continue core business –
we are simultaneously challenged to do this in a way that tries to avoid replicating the
structural, social and economic inequalities and inequities that characterise the Higher
Education sector nationally. At one caricatured end, we could take the hopefully
unlikely position that going online in this time of crisis is simply a matter of transferring
what we do pedagogically in face-to-face contexts to online ones. At another end, we
could decide that moving teaching and learning into online spaces is ideologically
dubious, pedagogically implausible or practically unachievable. I believe the current
situation requires us to respond to the teaching and learning challenges in ways that
understand their complexities, that appreciate the contradictions, paradoxes and social
injustices within which we are embedded and seek to find ways of knowing, doing and
being in these complexities.
One aspect of this complexity which I would like to focus on in this piece is the question
of agency in teaching and learning, at both individual and collective levels. I believe that
moving teaching and learning into online spaces calls us to think deeply about questions
of agency – individual and collective – in the structural and cultural (with due
acknowledgement to Margaret Archer’s substantial scholarship) that characterise and
distinguish these online learning spaces from face-to-face ones. I want to be clear that I
am not thinking of agency solely through a neo-liberal, humanist lens here – though I
think this lens offers some insights. This is primarily why I have couched agency in
individualist and collectivist terms.
Traditionally, we have constructed agency in student learning as predominantly
residing within the individual student, with the goal of the Higher Education teaching
and learning context being about enabling that individual student to find and adopt that
agency. In and of itself, I am not objecting to that – the point is that adopting an
individualist view of agency that is located within the student does not do justice (a
word I choose advisedly here) to the goal and purpose of teaching and learning. And

2. this is especially true for teaching and learning in the South African Higher Education
context of diversity and inequality – and for the online teaching and learning project
which has become our current centralised focus. I also think it is unhelpful to think of
student agency solely in individualist terms – again, especially in an online learning
space. We are challenged to enable students to locate their individual but also their
collective agency in face-to-face and online spaces. Indeed, I would argue that finding
collective agency can be especially powerful in online/remote teaching and learning
spaces, where learning in isolation and a focus on external attributions of agency
endanger the possibilities presented by students engaging in collectivist, social learning.
I am not saying social learning is not possible in online/remote spaces; rather that
collectivist agency is especially difficult to cultivate and nurture. We are challenged to
create enabling conditions in online spaces for students to enact individualist and
collectivist agency – meaning that they take responsibility for their own and other
students’ learning.
One final point here: as Higher Education lecturers, we are challenged to understand
deeply the structural and cultural affordances and constraints of online learning, again
especially in the current crisis and in the context of inequality. My point is that, if face-
to-face teaching and learning contexts render visible major indicators of inequality –
such as language and schooling backgrounds, class, race, socio-economic disadvantage –
online contexts potentially or actually exacerbate these inequalities. We will face
massive teaching and learning challenges in the weeks and probably months to come if
we do not as a sector, and institutionally, address the possibility that participation in
online learning replicates – and possibly amplifies – the inequalities that we have
worked so hard to address in face-to-face learning spaces. As lecturers, I believe we
have to start by acknowledging the social and material realities of educational
inequality. When then need to ask ourselves, when we design for online learning, what
we need to do to ensure that we mitigate these inequalities and whether the online
space presents us with special challenges that replicate or exacerbate these inequalities.
Associate Professor Alan Cliff (PhD)