David Gauntlett

Canada Research Chair in Creativity, Faculty of Communication and Design, Ryerson University, Canada

Interviewed December 2020 by Sandra Abegglen

SA David, thanks for joining us. Can you tell us who you are and what you do?

DG I am Canada research chair in creativity at Ryerson University in the Faculty of Communication and Design. I moved to Canada about two and half years ago from the UK, where I previously worked in a number of roles and had been a professor for many years.

SA How does your teaching look in 2020 compared to before the switch to emergency remote learning?

DG When the lockdown began, it was right around my birthday, which is March 15. At that point, I was in the middle of teaching an MA class called Creativity, Identity and Making Things Happen. The course began in January, and it was held in person. There were about twenty students in the class and I got to know them because we’d been having very nice in-class sessions where we were doing collaborative workshop-style activities together. I would bring in different kinds of creative materials so we could build metaphors about our thoughts and reflections on different topics. I would stand at the front of the class with big sheets of paper and coloured pens and I’d physically map out the exercises with the students. Then COVID happened and, all of a sudden, we had to switch to doing the last few of these online. Because we knew each other already it was fine, and we were able to work it out so that we could do similar exercises, just with the class all apart from one another, working remotely.

Wrapping up that class online went okay, but then with all the time between the end of Winter and start of the Fall semester, I had to consider how I’d translate my next class to be taught online. That one is an undergraduate course called Your Creative Self, which I had taught once before. It’s built to be very hands-on, workshop style, with everybody in the classroom together. I don’t lecture much in that course; rather I turn up to class with different materials each time to lead the students in different reflective exercises. The students and I find a lot of joy in this method and the environment it creates to share our creative experiences with one another. When COVID happened and everything switched to remote teaching, I thought that the transition with this course was going to be really terrible. I thought, how would I be able to recreate this experience online?

To add to the complexity, the course was meant to be capped at sixty students but because of an error in registration, there ended up being ninety students enrolled. Ninety students was already too many for one class in person and I remember thinking that ninety students on Zoom was going to be a serious challenge. But what can you do? That was just the situation we were in. I had a lightbulb moment maybe three or four weeks before the start of the course when for some reason I just thought, “Let’s embrace this.” I came to the realization that the only thing you can do is just try to make the best of it. I thought, I’ll just try to maximize this time and pretend that the course was always meant to be taught this way. I developed the mindset of, let’s make it great. But of course, that is easier said than done. It’s not a very clever thought, really, but making the best of the situation was just how I went about it. I simply put effort into being happy and embracing this thing and ignoring the fact that I actually thought it was kind of awful. There was not much point focusing on how awful it was, because we already knew it was awful.

Of course, I wanted to be sympathetic to the students because I anticipated that they were going to come into class having difficulties. They might have recently been bereaved, they might be feeling very anxious in these times, all of that. So, I wouldn’t force them to be cheerful about COVID, but I would just teach them as if the class was meant to be delivered online. It worked out as a good plan, and I am actually quite enjoying it. The students seem to like it too.

One thing, however, is that I’m always very aware of the fact that as the instructor, by definition, I’m at the centre of the experience of ninety students on Zoom. Due to the nature of the large class size and the online delivery, the class may be paying attention, or they may be doing something else on their computer at the same time. They might have actually switched off and I don’t really know, because half of them have their cameras on and the other half are just black boxes on my screen. I know you can’t really force them to put their cameras on, but obviously I much prefer it when I can see everyone. As the instructor in a classroom we expect to be able to see the students as we’re teaching them. The fact that you can’t see the students’ faces half of the time is definitely weird, because who knows what their experience is.

I just keep the energy level high and if I have people interacting with me and we have some good, interesting conversations, then I get a good feeling that it’s going well. The number of students who actually talk to me in any of the three-hour sessions is maybe twenty out of the ninety students, which isn’t bad, but I don’t like to think about the fact that this number is not the majority. I figure at the very least, I know they’re there. And you have to consider that online there are different ways to communicate as well—like how the students participate in the chat more than they like to actually speak up. With the high level of interaction in the chat I know that the students are present and paying attention.

SA How do you bring in the creative aspects of that course online?

DG I still get the class to do creative exercises and activities, but the big difference online is that I can’t use a variety of physical materials as I did in class. It would be exclusionary because some people would have access to these materials and some people wouldn’t. I didn’t want to have to send the students to their local Dollarama store, so the exercises tend to be things that the students can do on paper.

The activities typically involve drawing and writing on their paper while I give step-by-step instructions. It’s like creating a kind of individual worksheet with their paper and pen while I guide them through the process. It’s less varied than it would otherwise be, but it operates similarly. I don’t know what I would do if I were having to teach sewing or technical skills like design, but in my case, I can lead the class in a way which is not that different to being in a classroom.

SA What would you say are the opportunities emerging in this switch to online education?

DG Before 2020, if someone had told me that I was now going to be doing all of my teaching online, I wouldn’t have been able to picture it, and I wouldn’t expect it to work. But as it turns out, you can do it. I still think it’s better to have people in a classroom, but we’ve now seen that it’s not necessarily essential. There is always the cost and difficulty of getting people all into one place and now we are aware of the potential health risks, but the fact that you can do this kind of online teaching is an eye-opener for me. Before I had thought of online education as quite asynchronous and lacking a connection between the learners and the people working with them. Now, I have seen and experienced the new opportunities and different avenues that allow you to have a certain amount of interaction and some level of closeness in this video environment. It’s not the same, but the opportunity is there and that is striking to me.

One opportunity that we created is a thing called Creativity Conversations, where my colleague Rain and I invite students to come online and chat with us about their creative projects. Similar to coaching, it’s a chance for them to share what they’re working on and also to share some of the questions or anxieties and see if we’ve got anything that we can suggest. I say to people that we don’t necessarily have the answer to all their problems, but they can talk about them, and we might have some interesting suggestions. We could have created this space before, in person, and it would have been a place where people would turn up to appointments, but it had never occurred to me before the switch to online teaching happened. I think that for conversations like these, the fact that people can just log onto Zoom and speak to you is a really great opportunity to come from this.

I’ve done some other things like free public creativity workshops in collaboration with Artscape Launchpad, which is a resource based in Toronto to support creative communities. With COVID, it’s like the idea of your children asking you, “What did you do in the war, Dad?” Except this is the war against COVID, and obviously, I haven’t got the ability to develop any super vaccines or anything like that. Like many others, I just do lots of free things that are available online for people. It’s not solving the COVID crisis, but it is a useful thing that I can do to make things a little easier.

SA That is fantastic, David. The fact that you’ve taken these extra steps to exercise what’s within your wheelhouse and make this situation brighter is inspiring to us all. So, what tools, software, or applications have you found to be useful for online teaching?

DG I like Google Jamboard, which is a free whiteboard-type platform where lots of people can go on at once and draw and write together. I can easily post the URL for students and there is no login or anything like that, so it’s easy to use and straightforward. That’s one good tool. After I started using Jamboard I began to search for other tools where people could work together collaboratively in real time. I asked one of my research assistants to spend a while looking and I started asking people about the different kinds of tools they use. I had thought that I was going to come up with a whole list of different ones, but I never found any others that seemed as good as Jamboard. I think it’s important to use tools that are straightforward. If you’ve got a class of ninety, if most people get it, but there’s ten people who need some help, it’s going to ruin everything straight away because you need everyone to be able to use it immediately. So, it needs to be really easy.

I had considered maybe using Twitch where we could watch videos together and make comments alongside, but all of those ideas fell by the wayside because it just seemed too complicated. I landed on using Zoom and Jamboard together, because at the very least, you’re always connected by audio in Zoom, but with Jamboard going at the same time people can speak and interact without having to switch the platform they’re using, and they can have that element of visual interaction. That seemed to work well. Trying out lots of different tools ended up seeming like more trouble than it was worth, and I figured it probably was going to confuse at least some of the people, which would snowball into decreased class efficiency, and so on.

Having said that, I feel relatively unadventurous in my tools now, but using those two things together is quite good. I’ve found Jamboard to work well with the guest speakers that often come to class. I give the students some preliminary information about the guest and their topic, and then on Jamboard. We have a moment’s silence where students can each generate at least one or two questions that we’ll be able to ask our guests. This fills up the board with loads of interesting questions very quickly. Students are then invited to have conversations with the speaker. I’ve found this to be really good. I haven’t ended up using any other technologies so far. I just don’t want to make it too complicated because any extra platform you add just makes it harder. I don’t want to make it difficult for people.

SA Where do you see things moving with higher education into the future? Do you see us going back to traditional in-person teaching methods, or do you think we will trend toward a more blended approach? Or is something completely different going to emerge out of this?

DG I really don’t know. I don’t really feel like we know what’s going to happen in the next few months, let alone in the next few years, especially right now, where we’re at in this moment. I think that because we’ve had our eyes opened to the fact that you can do quite a lot of stuff fairly effectively online, it will change people’s willingness to deliver some parts of higher education in the digital realm. But also, the pandemic has reinforced many people’s keenness on having the face-to-face interaction back. So, I don’t think that we will be switching to a totally online education when this is all over, because we like the real-world experience. Also, of course, when universities have students paying a lot of money to get that student experience, you’ve got to deliver. This really does focus the mind as to what “extra” means when going to university. What does university add to your life and your experience, beyond just getting some information delivered to you through a computer?

I do think that being a student at a university should be a wonderful, all-encompassing experience with lots of different dimensions. For many, it’s possible that only a fairly small part of that is receiving the information they’re being taught, which as we’ve seen now, can be delivered via a computer. Then there are all of these extra experiences that students get from attending university, all of which can’t really be done right now because of the switch to online learning. I think to justify their cost, universities will need to go back to that. That probably raises more questions for universities about their continuing existence, certainly for some of those that weren’t so prestigious or those that weren’t doing so well before.

Universities and higher education institutions are going to have to show what they are adding to people’s lives, because people are now more aware than ever that they could just go online and take courses. There are cheaper, quicker forms of education that don’t require you to leave your house, which could be attractive to many. It’s going to be a challenge for universities. But also, I quite like that challenge because it means that universities really need to do some critical thinking about their meaning and what they do for people. We have to consider what kind of experiences and sorts of personal development are offered to the students. Learning is more than just receiving content, which you could get from the Internet. Because we are more aware now that the purpose of a university isn’t simply to hand you a parcel of information, we’ve got an interesting question—what do you need a university for? It is important that we ask these questions. A global pandemic isn’t fun, but it is thought provoking.

Reflection

That interview took place in October 2020, and I’ve been asked to write this reflection in July 2021, nine months later. I don’t think I have too much to add, especially since my answers above were relatively fresh ones. As the pandemic drags on, but the promise of a “return to normal” remains confusingly elusive, it’s difficult not to feel jaded by anything that involves yet more Zoom calls.

This concern about becoming weary or complacent links to one experience from 2021 that is worth mentioning. In January 2021 I started teaching my MA course, Creativity, Identity and Making Things Happen, feeling more optimistic because I had managed to successfully run the undergraduate course Your Creative Self—discussed in the interview above—quite successfully, and had even been given a Dean’s Teaching Award for my efforts.

When running the earlier course, I included special guest speakers, because it made things more varied and it filled up one hour of a three-hour class in a useful way, taking the pressure off me a bit. And in the Zoom environment, of course, it’s quite easy for guests to call in from wherever they are without having to travel to a campus. I had planned to have three guests, but I added more along the way, so in the end there were six weeks that included a guest—half of the classes.

Planning my course for the following term, I thought—perhaps without thinking about it too much at all—that as I was now more experienced with Zoom teaching I didn’t need the prop of special guests so much, and I didn’t plan to include any (although later in the term I was able to get in touch with Zarina Muhammad and Gabrielle de la Puente, who operate as art activists The White Pube, and they were our very engaging guests one week).

But going mostly without guests had an unintended consequence that I hadn’t anticipated. Students in Your Creative Self were able to see the primary speakers (i.e., me and the six guests) as a mix in terms of race, gender, and sexuality. Being able to speak to outstanding Black and Asian creators, as well as LGBTQ+ and disabled creators, made the course more diverse and interesting, and offered a range of role models to students who didn’t necessarily look like me. My increased confidence with online teaching, as well as perhaps a lower level of enthusiasm for having to organize another set of Zoom classes, meant that I ended up with a course that was less successful in terms of diverse representation than the previous one. The pandemic, and the Black Lives Matter movement, have sharpened our recognition of social injustices, and these issues are of course just as pressing even when we are individuals, apart, in little boxes on Zoom. So, my “simpler” solution was not better, and we have to always remember that if running an online class gets too easy it’s probably because there’s more we should be doing.

About

David Gauntlett is Canada research chair in creativity at the Faculty of Communication and Design, Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada, where he leads the Creativity Everything lab. He is the author of several books, including Creative Explorations (2007), Making Media Studies (2015), and Making is Connecting (2011, second edition 2018). He has made a number of popular online resources, videos, and playthings, and has pioneered creative research and workshop methods. He has worked with a number of the world’s leading creative organizations, including the BBC, the British Library, and Tate. For twelve years he has worked with LEGO® and the LEGO® Foundation on innovation in creativity, play and learning.