The Manifesto for Teaching Online by Sian Bayne, Peter Evans, Rory Ewins, Jeremy Knox, James Lamb, Hamish Macleod, Clara O’Shea, Jen Ross, Philippa Sheail, & Christina Sinclair (MIT Press, 2020)
The abrupt shift to virtual teaching during the pandemic provided an urgent reminder that K-12 education lacks sufficient scholarship on distance learning pedagogy. But K-12 virtual educators, take heed: Our postsecondary counterparts have a lot to teach us. The Manifesto for Teaching Online, 21 provocations about online teaching, raises critical questions about virtual education. The authors challenge the technology-as-tool rhetoric and bring into focus the wider pedagogical, political, and social ideologies that shape our conception and implementation of online teaching and learning.
The authors remind us, “The [campus] can no longer be seen as a bounded, stable entity — a static container within which education takes place” (p. 149). Kindergarten from the kitchen table, calculus from the coffee shop . . . These are no longer examples from the margins but the reconstituted boundaries of school. The Manifesto is both iconoclastic and timely, a rejoinder to misguided orthodoxies about digital education.