Responsibility and response-ability: social justice in online education?

About this time last year, January 2021, also in the full swing of the COVID pandemic, I successfully defended my doctoral dissertation. The shortened title, for library formatting reasons is: Truth, Reconciliation, and Unsettling Settler Spaces and Places: An Autoethnography. The document is freely available at the Athabasca University library website. The full title was originally:

Truth, Reconciliation, and Unsettling Settler Spaces and Places: An Autoethnography of Privilege and Tensioned Interfaces Within Online Distance Education.

As I moved through the doctor of education program at Athabasca University - a doctoral program and institution that specializes in online distance education - I was reading various claims about the close links between social justice and online distance education. Specifically a leading book in the field that laid out a research agenda for online distance education - Online Distance Education: Towards a Research Agenda, published by Athabasca U Press. The editors of the volume suggested:

“Social justice, especially as it is manifest in the provision of access to education to those groups to whom such opportunity has traditionally been denied, has always been a major driving force for individual educators and distance educational institutions.” (p. 10)

After completing over 80% of my post-secondary education through online distance education, at several institutions - I called bullshit on this statement.

“Always” is a word that carries specific meaning. The research agenda editors also suggested:

“... there is a need to understand thoroughly the components of social justice and to have a clear rationale for thoughtful inclusion of social justice concerns in the policy and the practice of all online programming.” (p. 11)

This statement I tend to agree with.

The book outlining a research agenda was published in 2014. I started the doctor of education program in mid-2015. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Canada released it’s first summary report in mid-2015.

The interface between the TRC Reports and 94 Calls to Action and claims that social justice is driving individual educators and institutions - seemed a fitting area to investigate. Similarly, determining what components of social justice were being sought after, that were in turn providing further clarity for policy development and engagement in “all online programming”.

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The abstract to my dissertation states:

…this study has been conducted through critical self-reflection upon my own privileges (white, male, Settler, etc.) framed by my experiences completing an online distance education doctoral program, in turn, interfacing these with my reading of the TRC reports and Calls to Action.

This study was framed and conducted in this way, in order to examine whether social justice aspirations, such as for example the TRC Calls to Action, are at the forefront of educators and institutions engaged in online distance education, and not just glossy aspirational statements, otherwise referred to as bullshit (à la Frankfurt, 2005). The process and outcome of this study was guided by the narrative method of autoethnography, which is recognized as both process and product. This dissertation highlights some of that process, and the results represent the product.

This autoethnographic research is based on one practitioner’s experiences – mine, a non-Indigenous, white, Settler, able-bodied, male in the geographic area currently called Canada. This is intermeshed with my experiences within online distance education, and more specifically the doctoral program that I have participated in since 2015, which specializes in the field of online education.

This dissertation explores and reflects upon various tensioned interfaces through interrogating my white Settler privileges, along with broader Setter responsibilities and response-abilities articulated within the TRC Calls to Action and related processes. These include interfaces with the Indigenous-informed concepts of cultural safety, ethical space of engagement, and cultural interface.

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I started the dissertation with a letter, and some images.

I have used this image in presentations asking the question: what is going on here?

• It’s an image of our kids playing in the ‘soft sand’ - a unique spot at one of our favourite beaches, that forms as the tide comes in and out.

I follow up with this image below - based upon the first.

From my dissertation:

What is potentially lost in this mapping? What is gained? What remains the same?

Answers to these questions vary widely. One conclusion, we can suggest, is that the image in Figure 1 is not the moment itself – it is a representation of it. A flicker of an instant. An inanimate rendering of a very animate event. So is Figure 3 above; some might suggest, an even bleaker rendering. Both images/artifacts were determined by someone’s choices. In this particular case, it is the same person that took the photo and drew the map (e.g. me); however, this is not always the case. And, yet, like art or other imagery, the interpretation is largely up to the viewer – beauty in the eye of the beholder, so to say.

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The underlying foundation to my message is that often things are not as they seem. Things that seem so certain at times can become a wispy puff of a cloud – one moment hovering over a mountain on a sunny day – gone the next. Even as I pondered and slithered and pounded and prodded my way through this research and this program – I have come to appreciate even more the slipperiness of many of the things that many of us are taught in school that are purported to be solid, concrete, known, established, entrenched. Things like an understanding of what terms and words such as learning, education, knowing, knowledge, teaching, and others. Often this fits more into the realm of linear thinking; in other words, thinking in lines and sequences.

From the dissertation:

Through community-based work for decades and a position within a provincial health authority for the past five years in a position focused on supporting Indigenous peoples and communities and the interfaces with Western health systems, I have been immersed in projects that seek to address and intervene in these damaging consequences related to the settler colonial project – as well as alleviate and eliminate some of the ignorance of non-Indigenous peoples in Canada of the colonial experience, history and impacts – including my own.

Problem Statement

This research is not intended to further outline or define the devastating intergenerational impacts of what former Supreme Court Chief Justice Beverly McLachlin called the “worst stain on Canada’s human-rights record” (Globe and Mail, 2018), when referring to Indian Residential Schools. This research set out to investigate some of the responsibilities, and “response-abilities” (Kuokannen, 2011), of non-Indigenous peoples; of Settler peoples in this country in relation to the findings of the TRC, including myself. Ingold (2018) stated that “there can… be no responsibility without ‘response ability’. To be answerable, one must be able to answer” (p. 27).

The term responsibility, and related response-ability, is used purposefully in this dissertation. Datta (2020) explained this notion clearly, building upon Arendt’s (2003) notion of belonging, which “sees all obligations as collective” (p. 25). In this case responsibility suggests “a consideration of accountability (what are we responsible for?) and obligation (to whom are we responsible?), as well as living (are we viewed as responsible by those who we are obligated to?).” (p. 25). In this case, responsibilities and response-abilities, are both individual and collective.

The doctoral program I have been engaged in since 2015 is one that focusses on online distance education. I have participated in online distance education for approximately two decades in a variety of roles. These roles include as a student and learner – approximately ninety percent of my post-secondary education has been completed online (like the doctoral program I have been engaged in) – as an instructor and facilitator for over a decade, and as a periodic online course and curriculum designer. I have often wondered and analyzed, how responsible is this field, can it answer the call? And, how responsible, and how much ability to respond, do I have and carry in this work and in this field?

I am working on a post that returns to the earlier post: “Tip of the Icebergs": ClichÉd Metaphors in Education. This next post intends to dig a bit deeper into what is meant by “learning”. There are many programs, standards, calls to action, and otherwise that suggest education, training, and-or learning is to occur on certain subjects.