Maha Bali

Associate Professor of Practice, Center for Learning and Teaching, American University in Cairo, Egypt and Co-Founder/ Co-Director of Virtually Connecting and Equity Unbound

Self-recorded interview September 2020

Q Maha, can you please tell me about yourself?

MB I am an associate professor of practice at the Center for Learning and Teaching at the American University in Cairo in Egypt. The majority of my work is faculty development. I help other professors improve the way they teach and integrate technology in the way they teach. I give consultations and workshops, I help them assess students, but I also help students give feedback through course and instructor evaluations. Part of my work involves helping people use digital education, and part of it is just education in general. In addition to this main part of my job, I also teach a course on digital literacy and intercultural learning for undergraduates. In the past I’ve taught teachers as well, and I’ve taught part of a creativity course, with a section on educational game design.

I’m also the co-founder of two grassroots open initiatives. One of them is Virtually Connecting. Virtually Connecting is a grassroots movement that challenges academic gatekeeping at conferences by creating hybrid conversations between people who are on-site at conferences, and virtual folks who cannot make it to conferences. That often excludes a large chunk of people who are in the global south, who are women, who care for young children, adjuncts, people with disabilities, and graduate students. So, Virtually Connecting allows them to be part of a conference even though they’re not there, and to speak to people in these “hallway conversations.” It’s not about the presentation so much as having access to the hallway, the informal conversations, and the networking. Virtually Connecting has grown a lot over the last five years and it has become a way for marginal academics—especially in the field of education and educational technology—to have a voice at the conferences that they can never attend in person. Virtually Connecting was founded by me, alongside Rebecca Hogue, and now we have five co-directors, including Autumn Caines, Christian Friedrich, and Helen DeWaard.

The other grassroots organization that I co-founded is Equity Unbound. I’m the co-facilitator along with Mia Zamora and Catherine Cronin. Mia Zamora is in the US, and Catherine Cronin is in Ireland, and now we have an Iranian from Japan, Parisa Mehran, and we have folks from Canada like Bonnie Stewart, and a whole host of other people jumping in and out of it as we go along. So Equity Unbond is an equity-focused, open, connected, and intercultural learning curriculum. It started out as a way to supplement my existing course on digital literacy and intercultural learning. It was born from the need to address intercultural learning and digital literacy by starting from an equity and social justice perspective, and also as a way to integrate connected learning into that kind of curriculum. It has grown into other branches, and it now has within it a continuity of care and goals that came up during the COVID era, and an inclusive academia project, which is influenced by the Black Lives Matter movement in an attempt to make a difference to how academia addresses race and injustice in the academy itself.

I write and speak frequently about social justice, critical pedagogy, and open and online education. I recently co-edited the volume Open at the Margins: Critical Perspectives on Open Education. I co-edited this with Catherine Cronin from Ireland, Laura Czerniewicz from South Africa, Robin DeRosa from the US, and Rajiv Jhangiani from Canada, and what we’ve done is collected perspectives about open education that come from people at the margins. They provided perspectives that had not been spoken about by the dominant white majority of people who were writing about open education beforehand. We collected them because they were offering a very different way of looking at open education, and we put them all in one volume. These were things that were maybe published in blog posts or in speeches, but not in academic journals, where people could find them more easily. We thought that putting them together would make it a lot more intense; you’d be able to see all of the marginal views in one space, rather than them being lost in a sea of dominant whiteness.

Q What will your teaching look like in 2020 and 2021?

MB I would say that the most important thing about my teaching right now is that it’s focused on the care and well-being of my students, more than anything else. Because of the situation we’re in with the COVID pandemic, a lot of people—my students, my child, myself, my colleagues—are going through different kinds of trauma. Whether it’s a health crisis, a mental health crisis, or an economic crisis, to me this involves a shift of priorities and in what we need to be doing and how we spend our time when we’re together. I have a lot more empathy and I’m doing a lot more listening than I would normally. My teaching has to be dynamic. I have to respond to the situations happening in the world, and to the way that people are reacting.

Q From your experiences and perspectives, what are the opportunities that are created by digital education?

MB There are a lot of opportunities that are created by digital education, but it’s really tricky because these opportunities are not evenly distributed. For someone who has access to digital education and access to the infrastructure and who has the digital literacy to be able to use digital education, then the biggest opportunity is in terms of how it can flex time in different ways. I think that doing things like asynchronous and semi-synchronous learning helps give people a lot of agency over how they’re going to spend their time in the digital space, where they can do things at different times, and come back to it again. There is space, there’s a flexing of space and there is time together. When we’re all together in the same room, there’s a limit to someone speaking, and someone else cannot be speaking at the same time. Digitally, we can all be speaking at the same time in text, and we are all still able to contribute. There is a space for every single person to participate in that way, and not be interrupted by anyone else. Semi-synchronous spaces are beautiful. Through spaces like Twitter, Slack, and WhatsApp, you have people all talking at the same time and, because the texts are small, it feels like we’re all together chatting and if someone misses the moment, they can come back later and still find it. It allows you to have that immediate conversation if you need it, but it also doesn’t exclude people who weren’t there in that moment, and I think there’s a lot of beauty in that.

It’s also really important to think about the social justice angles, because a lot of the time we have an automatic tendency to think about digital education as accessible to everyone. There is more than just the economic angle of having access to devices and infrastructure. There’s also the aspect of digital literacy, and how well you know how to use what you have. There are the cultural and political angles, bringing up questions such, as whose perspectives are you exposed to, when you use/ look in places like Google or Wikipedia. A lot of the time, this is a white Western male perspective. Even having access to a tool like Zoom doesn’t mean that you’re someone who’s comfortable being in a synchronous conversation with your camera on. And so, just having access to the Internet does not mean that this is social justice. It is also about who sets the norms of a digital environment, and what does that say. As we design our digital environments, it is really important to keep in mind the people who create these educational technologies, and which interests they represent.

The other opportunity is glocality, working together and openness. There is a lot that we can learn from each other. For instance, when I do professional development for professors at my institution, I can do it locally, but I can also have a global angle on it, where other institutions who are doing similar things can join us and we can all learn from each other. Most of the time, there’s no reason to just keep it local. You need to have the local part, but there’s so much value in the global part. This summer, I’m participating in something called DigPINS. I facilitated the American University in Cairo version of it, but there were versions in four other US institutions. This has been going on in the US for quite some time at different institutions. It started out at one university, and then it spread to several universities in the US. For people who are interested in learning more about digital identity, digital pedagogy, digital networks, and digital scholarship, these are things that you can discuss across the world. It might have different nuances in different local spaces, but there’s so much value in talking about it with other professors. Sometimes a professor of mathematics in the US, Germany, Egypt and Japan has more in common than they do with a colleague in the same institution who is teaching in different disciplines because they’re teaching the same thing. There’s a lot of value in that.

Then, there’s also a lot of value in openness. Even if you’re going to create something local, there’s a value in posting it online. For example, when we created our guide for going online during COVID, a lot of universities kept it open, and we left ours on our website as well. Anybody could benefit from that. You can adapt it. There’s no harm, and there’s also a lot of benefit in doing that, right? First of all, you are making it easier even for your own local folks to benefit from it, but you’re also helping other people. We are influenced by other people too and having that information easily accessible without having to go through a password or a paywall is a really useful thing, and I think a lot of things in education can be done that way. We can save people time so that they can focus on their connections and relationships with each other, and we can make content available so that people can focus on communication, and connection, and community building. That’s what I think.

Q What are some of the challenges that you’ve experienced with remote teaching?

MB I did my master’s in e-learning at the University of Sheffield and finished it in 2006 and, because of that experience, I don’t think I had any particular challenges that I faced in my own teaching. Before the closures, when COVID happened, I had tried out Zoom with my students; I had Slack, we had blogs, we had all kinds of things going. I think the main challenge has been the trauma from the pandemic itself. When I learned from Mays Imad, and from Karen Costa about this concept of trauma in the form of teaching, it gave me terminology for expressing this anxiety, and the difficulty of this whole situation helped me describe what was happening to my child, what was happening to my students, what was happening to me, what was happening to faculty that I was supporting. It was difficult.

The cognitive load and how that affected people’s ability to manage their time became something that was a really big deal to keep in mind. So, what I did last semester, which to me was not a challenge, was that I shifted my focus in my life sessions to listening to the students and helping them express what was bothering them about what was going on, and trying to take what I’d learned from them back to my institution, and my faculty development worked to pass it on in the way that I advise faculty on how to deal with the pandemic. I’m trying to make sure that everything is equitable for students who are coming from different perspectives, and who have different abilities, different circumstances and so on. That is a really important aspect of my pedagogy, and my practice as a whole.

I think that what I did struggle with in my role in faculty and professional development is that I was used to doing online professional development, but mostly in smaller groups. Usually I’d have between five and fifteen people, but now when we have more than twenty, it gets really unmanageable. We usually try to split them up into smaller groups, and I wasn’t really sure how to handle this with the workshops that I was doing online, until I attended a workshop on liberating structures. This was a full day workshop with professionals who know how to do liberating structures properly. This transformed my thinking and my practice because I was in a six- or seven-hour workshop and I felt engaged the whole time, and I felt it was really useful.

Every single activity that we tried had an impact, and I think every single one that we’ve tried, I’ve tried again since then. Since then, I’ve both transformed the way I teach, and transformed the way I do these professional development workshops. I went back to my colleagues at the Center for Learning and Teaching and demonstrated some of the grading structures to them. The grading structures are ways of structuring conversation and dialogue to make them more equitable so that everyone’s voice is heard and to make them more effective, so that you can reach good outputs and outcomes in a very short amount of time. They’re very energizing, and I really enjoyed doing them. There were so many of them. It was a good reminder. I already knew about the grading structures, but I wasn’t confident, and I wasn’t aware of the entire spectrum. I knew it existed, but I had not tried them myself with someone, so that I could feel the confidence to actually try them myself as a facilitator.

I think what was missing in this pandemic was the socio-emotional aspect. People didn’t have outlets for socio-emotional learning. You needed to establish a sense of intimacy in people when they were together, instead of putting them in groups of thirty where they are a sea of faces. Putting them in breakout rooms where there could be in groups of four or five, where they could see each other, and look at each other’s faces and sort of feel like they’re alone in a room, this makes a huge difference with online learning. I think the grading structures help structure that conversation, so that when you leave them alone in a room of five, they’re not lost for words.

Here is a moment I’d like to forget about, a very specific moment, but it has helped me better structure Q&A sessions and workshops. This one is about a participant who came to one of our workshops. It was a workshop of around seventy people, so a pretty large attendance. She kept interrupting me to ask questions and to make points that were very specific to a particular context. It turned out that she had just had surgery and was taking medication that were making her a bit uninhibited. I felt really sorry for her because there were a lot of other participants, and they were really frustrated with her. I couldn’t find a way to politely ask her to stop talking. After that we decided to do something different. For all our questions and Q&As, we decided to use something like a Slido, or a poll that does upvoting for questions, so it doesn’t become like the first person who unmutes their mic is the person who gets to ask the question. Instead, everyone types their questions, people upvote, and then the most pertinent questions that the majority of people have are the ones that we answer first. I decided that this was maybe the most equitable way of doing Q&A in the first place, so it came out well.

Q What is your most-used tool or software?

MB I’d say Slack and Twitter. Both of them are semi-synchronous spaces and they are places where you can have informal conversations. They’re neither a formal workspace like e-mail nor a learning management system, and they’re not like your home spaces. So they’re somewhere in between; I think for both colleagues and for students they’re a place where you can share jokes and GIFs and just talk about random things sometimes. This is really helpful for building community, and really important right now when people can’t as easily meet in cafes and things like that. I use Slack in my classes and with my teammates to connect virtually. With Virtually Connecting, people tend to think of it as a synchronous thing because they see the videos of us having conversations in a conference. But actually, there’s a lot of asynchronous planning happening in Slack, and in Google Docs and things like that.

The other main tool that I use is Twitter, which I use mainly for interaction, and obviously my blog, which is the space for public scholarship. The blog is broadcasting in a sense, whereas Twitter is for soliciting responses to a greater degree. A Twitter private message is more valuable to me than a Twitter public space. We have a Twitter DM with maybe twenty people, and this is the continuity with care dimension of Equity Unbound. It’s a group of people who got together to have a conversation about care during the closure, and then we just kept this Twitter direct message conversation going. We talk to each other about our frustrations and what’s happening at our institutions; we learn from each other and we share our celebrations. It’s been really important for my well-being. Without that group, I would not have been able to survive this pandemic. They helped me prepare for my keynote at the Online Learning Consortium conference this year, because I was struggling with a few things and I wanted to test out some ideas, and a few of them actually helped by taking a look at my slides. I don’t always do that but for that particular conference I felt like it was a really important presentation and I wanted to get it right. So it really helped, because there were a diverse group of them from different countries and different spaces in academia. It was really helpful to have caring friends to give me that critical feedback in that session.

My favourite resources for teaching online, or remotely, are ones that I recently helped create. These are the community building online resources that I created in a collaboration between Equity Unbound and Virtually Connecting, with OneHE. OneHE is a network of global educators that hope to improve teaching. I’m on their advisory board, and I’m a co-facilitator of Equity Unbound. OneHE is a series of community building activities, and we tried as much as possible to keep intentionally equitable hospitality in mind. Intentionally equitable hospitality is a notion that we developed in Virtually Connecting, which is about how you ensure that the spaces that you create are hospitable to different kinds of people, because it’s not necessarily equitable. In order to be hospitable, you must consider that what you do may not work for different people. You need to be very intentional about this, and very careful about how to make sure that everyone participates on their own terms in the way that makes them comfortable, and that makes them feel at home in the spaces you create. I think the most important thing we need to know right now is how to create community online. Some people think there’s a stereotype of online learning in that it does not create community. It’s the idea that we can’t do it, so it’s okay, we’ll just do lectures. But that’s not at all what online learning is. Online learning is supposed to have a social dimension, we all know that. I wanted to help people think about straightforward ways of making it happen and recognize that this is a social justice issue, and that sometimes you need to make room for marginalized people, which may mean silencing dominant voices. We try to do activities here to make adaptations.

There are all different kinds of activities. There are introductory activities, such as what would you do in the first day of class synchronously and asynchronously. You can do it visually, like the surrealist free drawings that Autumn Caines suggested, or there’s the human scavenger hunt that Susan Blum’s suggested. There are all kinds of things. Some of these come with a video of us demonstrating the activity, and some of them are just text based, telling you how to do it. There are also sets of liberating structures. One that I really like is Conversation Cafe, because it structures a conversation in rounds to make sure that everyone has a time to speak, and nobody dominates the conversation. There’s a lot more that you can take a look at. There is a list of people who have been helping us develop even more to come. These are just some of them. There are things to do as ongoing engagement—one example is the Daily Creates. These are from the Digital Storytelling DS-106 course. They’re just daily creative things that people can do—five, ten, thirty minutes—and share. It’s fun, and it also gives people an opportunity to express themselves and develop their digital literacy at the same time.

Q What do you expect higher education to look like in ten years’ time?

MB I really don’t like answering that kind of question. I don’t like speculating about the future. I always try to make my future. Just before COVID hit I was part of a project at my institution that I was collating, where I was asking people to futurize their course; imagine their course in ten or twenty years. We started doing workshops and I was also futurizing my own course. I got a couple of my students to help me out with this and in one of the sessions, they came up with what they thought were the essential elements of my course, which turned out to be care for students’ well-being and building community, rather than any content. They said the content would change. We can find our own content. We can be together in the same room or not. They didn’t know COVID was going to happen, but they basically developed a high flex model for class, emphasizing the teacher’s role in building community and caring for students’ well-being, rather than giving content, because they thought the content they could find on their own and they could figure out what they were interested in. And so, I think those students were wiser than a lot of other people.

What they said is what higher education should be like. I know that not all higher education can be like that, but I do think it should be more human focused. Higher education should support the development of the human being to help students become critical citizens, and to work within a community of learners so as to be independent and autonomous learners. I think it will be like this over time. Content will be even easier to reach. I think it’s important to note that a lot of the content that is openly available right now is very highly dominated by the Western, and Northwestern world, and that needs to open up more so that knowledge is broader and minority and marginal knowledge is heard as well. I think that the role of teachers will be more about promoting critical and creative thinking, offering wisdom, social and emotional encouragement, and helping people develop the judgment regarding how to find content and then how to think about how they choose what they use in their life. They can be role models for how to behave in the world as well. Learning is not just an act of cognition, you know. There’s a lot more going on there. Of course, it’s not that teachers will stop having the expertise to give content. Open content should be created by teachers as well, especially university professors who are experts in particular things.

Everyone can create the content that they’re expert in, and then use the content from other people who are expert in the other stuff and then focus their class on interactions with students and helping them individually and as a group together, and giving students agency. When there are a lot of open resources, students can have a choice of what to focus on more deeply if they’re interested in it. So the teacher becomes the curator and the facilitator; still the teacher creates some of the content, just not every single thing that they use in their course.

When we use a textbook, we don’t write the textbook. Someone else has written it. But if it’s open, then you don’t have to choose one textbook. You can take bits and pieces of stuff that different people have written. I don’t use a textbook in my teaching anyway, so that’s no different than what I already do, but there’s also a lot of stuff that I would like to use with my students that isn’t open. And so, the more that we have that, the easier it will be to do that kind of thing. So, for me, I hope students will have more agency and teachers will be able to focus on the socio-emotional development and critical thinking of students, rather than having to worry about passing on content.

Reflection

In my video filmed in Fall 2020, I talked about the importance of care and well-being. I also talked about the importance of building community. These were already central to my teaching pre-pandemic, but during the pandemic they became more important.

Here are some tiny tales of some of the ways I infused this into my class, referring to particular resources in the OneHE/Equity Unbound community building resources:

1. My students felt validated when they learned about trauma-informed pedagogy, when they learned how the stress and anxiety of the pandemic was affecting their ability to think, learn and manage their time. The video with Mays Imad became a central element of my teaching, letting students know that I understand what they are going through, and making them feel heard.1
2. I learned about gratitude journaling from colleagues in my department and we created this resource together that showcases different ways of using it.2 I used gratitude journaling with my then nine-year-old daughter, and it has helped her well-being so much: she managed to find a few things to be grateful about even in the period when I had COVID and her grandmother was hospitalized with COVID.
3. I learned, even more than usual, how important it is to listen to students. To invite them to annotate the syllabus (https://onehe.org/eu-activity/annotate-the-syllabus/), not so we know they have read it, but to create a conversation around what interests them, what confuses them, what they might like to change. I surveyed students pre-semester to help me plan the course, and co-authored blog posts with them on things like how they feel about cameras on Zoom.3

Caring for teachers is also important. Because I speak a lot about how teachers should care for students, some teachers, understandably burned out, and asked “what about us?”. So I blogged about it, and I think there are three main areas where teachers can receive care.4

1. From each other, in the community. This has been a lifeline for me and others, both from communities within one’s own institution and outside of it where you can vent more freely sometimes.
2. From students, occasionally. The relationship with students will always be imbalanced: as teachers, we have power and responsibility, but this does not mean that students cannot reciprocate in small ways sometimes and it makes all the difference. My students were gentle and kind to me when I had COVID. One day I lost my voice and the students stepped in to say aloud what I had written in the chat.
3. The third way for teachers to receive care is from their institutions, and I don’t mean well-being workshops! I mean modifying working conditions that exploit some teachers over others, and make some people do affective labour that is unrewarded while others do none of that and get rewards for other things like research. These structures need to change.

So these are my top tips … or the ones on my mind today as I head to campus to teach in-person with masks for the first time!

About 

Maha Bali is associate professor of practice at the Center for Learning and Teaching at the American University in Cairo, Egypt. She has a PhD in education from the University of Sheffield, in the United Kingdom. She is co-founder of virtuallyconnecting.org (a grassroots movement that challenges academic gatekeeping at conferences) and co-facilitator of Equity Unbound (an equity-focused, open, connected intercultural learning curriculum, which has also branched into the academic community activities, Continuity with Care and Inclusive Academia). She writes and speaks frequently about social justice, critical pedagogy, and open and online education.