Halio, Marcia Peoples. “Teaching
in Our Pajamas: Negotiating with Adult Learners in Online Distance Writing
Courses.” College Teaching 52.2
(2004): 58-62. Print.
Halio focuses her article
on the challenges of responding to online students’ emotion-charged e-mails.
This is a subject I have been interested in for some time, having experienced a
number of emotional e-mail exchanges from both my online and face-to-face
students. Halio’s article does not provide absolute answers; instead, it is
structured to pose observations (mostly centered on one class that is
representative of her experience) and suggest eight key questions for online
writing teachers to address.
Halio uses research to
contextualize her observations, but the bulk of the article is drawn from her
analysis of e-mail archives from one specific online FYC course “for returning
adult students” (59). Halio does not discuss how such students are filtered
into (or choose to take) the course, but the eight students she describes are,
indeed, returning students of non-traditional ages, mostly working and some
with families. She notes a difference between both the volume and the content
of the female and male students’ e-mails: “[w]omen’s messages often demonstrate
their preoccupation with caretaking issues” and request emotional reassurance
that they will succeed in the course (59); they also, as a group, write far
more messages than the male students. The males “write angry messages
challenging the structure of the course or questioning the usefulness of
assignments […or] angry messages in response to feedback on assignments[….E]mail
messages from male students are often subversive” (59).
The gender differences
Halio observes are a key component of her article. Five out of eight of her
questions—whether men and women approach online courses differently, how to
help women find supportive networks, whether we should change assignments to
focus on care-giving, how to help women “take charge of their own paths through
our courses” (61), how to help male students take criticism better—focus on
different approaches for each gender. These questions, as well as the more
gender-neutral ones such as how to help students cope with stress and how to “avoid
becoming therapists for our students” (61), are interesting and worth
examination.
Perhaps because I am male,
it seemed to me that Halio’s conclusions about female students were better
supported than those about the males. She grounds her discussion about female
students with several specific citations from three separate sources, but she
does not cite any sources to support her analysis of male students. As I said
above, the article is primarily based on her observations, and it is fair to
note that the studies of female students she cites were probably discussing how
female and male students differed,
and so could be used to speak to male students. However, this is an area of the
article I wished had more than anecdotal evidence. As a male adult distance
student (admittedly in a different socioeconomic and cultural situation than
her students), I have never written an angry e-mail to a professor; nor did I
in my MA or undergraduate experiences. And while I have not systematically
analyzed my e-mails from my own distance students, I would not agree that I
have seen the same things noted by Halio.
However, this does not
mean the article is not useful. Her questions at the end of the piece are good
ones to address when building a course, and get back to the teacher’s
responsibility to design a course that works well for students while also
managing the workload and emotional stress of teaching.
Thanks for posting this interesting article, Mark. Based on what you have described here, and in my own experiences teaching online, I would also question her generalizations about male students. I teach many adult community college students in an asynchronous fully online environment, and while I can relate to some of her statements about female students, I have not had the experiences with male students that she mentions. In fact, I have had more male students who sought emotional support and encouragement than those who have written an angry email. And I can't say that I have gotten any angry emails in fact. Maybe it says more about how she runs her course :)
ReplyDeleteHi Mark! I have to admit that I was thinking something similar to Jennifer's last statement; in other words, is there room for some self-reflection here. :) Having said that, I have had several interesting email correspondences with students, and I wonder to what extent email correspondences are impacted by a student's onsite or offsite status. My experience (and something I'm interested in researching more) is that email correspondence seems to embolden some students in ways that they may not be emboldened in f2f situations. I think this has positive and, let's say, "challenging" ramifications. Perhaps, much in line with this week's reading, email positions students to challenge a figure of authority whom they might not otherwise feel able to challenge in a f2f setting. On the other hand, some students might use the distance of email correspondence as a way of bullying or harassing the professor. For example, I have had students challenge grades via email; one time, the email correspondence escalated to a point where I had to insist that the student come in for a f2f conference with my director present. Once I insisted on this and declined to further engage what was quickly becoming an out-of-hand email correspondence, I never heard from the student again.
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