The introduction to the problem.

“Our learners have changed.”

I recently joined the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University (otherwise known as NSCAD) as their Director of Teaching and Learning. In my first three weeks, I spent time in one-on-one meetings with faculty, technicians, and in student-led focus groups. My aim was to listen to the needs and wants of each stakeholder in this setting (these often had nothing to do with teaching and learning). Something that I kept hearing throughout this data collection process was that teaching and learning had somehow shifted after two years of pandemic shutdowns and that the fault rested with the students ‘who had changed’. But changed how? And how is the way the learners have changed different from how I have changed, or how our faculty and technicians and staff have changed? Haven’t we all changed? The following examines some of the common threads in the discussions I’ve collected in three weeks, specifically in a set of four open forums called ‘learning circles’ attended by members of each stakeholder community. The following three topics were the most frequently discussed topics in the forums. These were generated by the community and were not administratively imposed or guided.

Community

Recurring themes in the learning circles were a lack of feeling as though we were all part of the same community. The shift to online learning was not sufficiently supported with opportunities for community building that would ordinarily have taken place within less formal avenues, such as in the hallways before or after class, or ad hoc gatherings at lunch. It seemed that students, staff, and faculty are all feeling a lack of mutual engagement in the teaching and learning experience because of this sense of detachment. Another layer to this is that artmaking on campus is often a communal practice. Weaving, ceramics, and painting studios are all open spaces, with ready access to peers. This was obviously not replicated online and has been impacted with the return to campus as well.

Engagement

The community issue leads to an overall engagement issue. Our collective sense of detachment might be accompanied by overwhelm, withdrawal from public engagement, and other behaviors that detract from how we used to do teaching and learning. I don’t mean to try and be causal, but a common thread was the general sense of fatigue and stress that accompanied the return to campus. Obviously, if we are checked out of our curricular engagement, then extra-curricular engagement is a step too far. Engagement in general, or engagement in extra-curricular activities also affects engagement in professional development opportunities to address this supposed student culture shift to troubleshoot the issues and propose possible solutions.

Space

Finally, it has come up that community and engagement in teaching and learning might be more difficult now because of how we view the spaces in which these processes occur. It has already been mentioned that there has been a loss of informal gathering space with the continuation of classes in online or hybrid spaces, and a loss in the kind of lingering around after class that helped cultivate community and sustain engagement. Space intersects with time as students and faculty felt that the period where they experienced the most disengagement was between their scheduled classes where they felt completely disengaged from the learning environment, other learners, peers, and faculty, depending on the stakeholder group. How we view communal spaces has also shifted as those spaces have been unsafe and for many, continue to be unsafe, as well as semi-public, when we’ve spent so much time over the last few years in private.

A diffractive problem

In short, there are three intersecting problems present here that might benefit from a diffractive reading across each of them displacing the self, and exploring difference and interference (Hill, 2017).