Keeping Things Somewhat Medieval Online

It seems like a lot of things you see about online teaching right now are about the sudden shift we all went through this spring from in person to online only courses, especially in places like Inside Higher Ed etc. Then there’s all the responses, often on social media which tend to take one of two positions: just surviving is what’s going on OR people are doing great things. The other thing I’ve noticed online a lot are comparisons between the virus situation in the world now and medieval plagues, and in the pieces by actual medieval scholars the main idea tends to be, the similarities are mostly superficial and if you look at the details (and most people won’t, let’s face it) things were actually a lot more complicated in the medieval world than is often credited.

These two near-simultaneous threads got me thinking about some of the parallels between the shift to suddenly entirely online education, and medieval pedagogy at the university level. You might think there’s nothing in common between the two times and methods, but at least in some ways, there are some interesting points of connection. Just for the record, what follows is not at all researched specifically in this context, nor is anything citable beyond my own memory. With libraries closed and being at a non-R1 institution (meaning without a fully stocked online library), this is the best I can do for now.

The basic medieval university program was based on the seven liberal arts for curriculum, and lecture and disputation in the classroom. The seven liberal arts were subdivided into the initial 3 (trivium) subjects of rhetoric, grammar, and logic, and the more advanced later 4 (quadrivium) of math, music, astronomy, and geometry. The specific content in each subject area was basically the classical texts by ancient and earlier medieval authors, and their main commentaries. In class, students would sit and take notes as the instructor read the textbook out loud; “lecture” comes from the Latin for “to read”, and this was in the days before the printing press (meaning personal books were probably beyond a student’s means). In order to progress to the next stage or complete their education, a student would have to participate and do well in a public debate called a disputation, which would involve interpretive argumentation based on the curricular texts. This is pretty over-simplified, but it’s the basic gist of how a medieval college student would be expected to learn.

So, some practices in the modern college or university classroom remain the same. Many instructors still “lecture” and expect students to take notes, students still need to prove their knowledge and skill to progress, and there is often some common educational content required of all students. One of the biggest changes at least philosophically is now one of the main objectives is to show students how to use critical thinking and come up with their own thoughts and reasoning. Not that this was entirely absent in the Middle Ages, it wasn’t, but the focus on individual interpretive creativity is most definitely a more modern focus.

One of things that I noticed was that the degree of interactivity between class members (including the instructor) dropped drastically when my students came back after an extended spring break to a purely online educational experience. This goes beyond students not discussing with each other as much as they might have in an in-person setting, but also when it comes to things like lectures. The most efficient thing could think of was to take the PowerPoints or lecture notes I already would have used, and added voice-over to them for the students to play and listen to in their own time. This makes the lecture experience considerably less interactive than it would have been otherwise, and at least a bit more like the medieval classroom experience.

A reason why the interactivity in particular stood out to me relates to the results of an informal survey I did of the students. As an extra credit option, they could fill out and return (online) an evaluation that specifically targeted the online section of the course (basically, the last month of class). One of the questions asked directly about the degree of interaction: did they like the lower degree or working with their class mates or would they have preferred more, and why? What surprised me was that of those who chose to do the extra assignment, there were actually more in favor of the less classmate interaction than more. While there are all kinds of reasons why this might have happened, a lot of the reasoning given was similar: students liked being able to think at their own pace. I had asked students about a week after we’d gone online to take a survey embedded in our course management software concerning if they wanted me to implement video interactivity or other more person to person technology to raise the options for discussion beyond the discussion board.

Of the three classes this was put to, a total of zero students filled out the survey. While this may have been partly due to student unfamiliarity with the tool involved, again I was a little surprised that no one was in favor of more personal interaction, because most modern pedagogical reasoning would be that many students prefer being able to discuss and interact with each other before committing to ideas or possibilities. The modern concept of there being benefit to being exposed to a variety of possibilities and reasonings before fully working out one’s own is on the one hand seemingly in opposition of the medieval focus on knowing the “correct” interpretations and reasons, and yet I was faced with students saying they preferred something almost similar to the medieval experience by working more with the texts and my lectures by themselves, as they might have in preparation for a medieval disputation.

While there certainly were students who stated their preference for more interactive personal discussion and education experience, as I was expecting, they were not in the majority. This takes me back to an article I read somewhere that suggested that many modern students actually like getting the facts and starting point interpretive ideas that often form the basis for most lectures. I also have to consider how, in a course that had been online the entire semester, students rarely engaged with the interactive options, including the discussion board, video chat, as well as voice only, any more than they were required to for a grade. Out of a class of over 20, there were about 4 or 5 students who regularly used those options. While technological experience is likely a factor, this phenomenon still seems to me to suggest that for all the focus and value put on modern students personally connecting with their instructor and each other, there might also be something to the medieval models.

I don’t know enough about the historical details of the various plagues that came through Europe in the centuries of the Middle Ages and Renaissance to speak in any detail on how those situations compare to our own world in 2020, but the one thing I will say about comparisons to those situations and now was that when addressing Boccaccio’s Decameron and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales the basic premises of concepts such as the quarantine and social distancing made those texts a lot more interesting to teach. I had already designed an assignment involving re-writing a frame and tale, and as you might expect students really used that to consider their own life situations or those of people around them in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The thing that really got my attention beyond how much thought students were seeming to put into this assignment compared to others was that no one took the comparison too far, that is I didn’t have to correct anyone on trying to get too ahistorical with the plague that formed a part of Boccaccio’s frame.

In any event, if nothing else, I have learned from this last month’s teaching experience that students will 1) surprise you no matter what the situation, and that 2) the Middle Ages are still relevant in a lot of interesting ways.

A Few Ideas Comparing the Past and Present

I was reading a book a while back about the importance of a handful of beverages in social history. Coffee was one and the coffee house was really the main focus of the chapter. Basically, in the Enlightenment (18^th century Europe) the coffee house was the one of the social and intellectual centers of life for most people. While I had some problems with how the book in question presented and interpreted its information, it got me thinking about my own habits in coffee shops. Since I was in graduate school, the local Milwaukee coffee shops were where I got a lot of my academic stuff done. They also were good meeting up places for social get-togethers. When I moved half a country away, one of the first things I did was find the local places, and there’s been one or two added since then (about 5 years ago).

Two now come to mind: one, the current pandemic and social distancing practices, and two, what would the medieval equivalent have been?

I can’t think of a general equivalent of such a location for the Middle Ages that matches well; it would have to be somewhere that had both practical/business and social functions, as well as cater to a wide range of different kinds of people. Taverns could be an option, but those weren’t quite as socially diverse as a modern coffee shop, at least not to my knowledge. Certainly there were such places for the nobles and places for the upper class peasants and places for the lower classes, but was there much or any intermixing? It’s either too bad most libraries are closed right now, or this could be a chance for trying to research like most students would want to start (as in, To the Google!). Church or local festivals of public functions might be another option, but those are less about location and business, at least in some ways. It’s an interesting question in terms of history, but also in terms of modern society. How socially open are modern coffeehouses? Starbucks for example is supposedly open to any and all, but when you go into one, there isn’t necessarily a wide mix in terms of social standing.

Medieval Europe also has experience with pandemic and plague outbreaks, although Black Death was bacterial not viral. The bubonic plague of the 14^th century does have some significant parallels including the social panic and distancing (think the frame of Boccaccio’s Decameron), as well as the origins of the term “quarantine”. Again, the details are quite different than the now, but the general parallels do make for interesting ideas.

Besides adapting to a lot more life and work online, I’ve also noticed another phenomenon with connections to the medieval past including the roles of books and reading, and personal written works. I kept a diary when I was younger (as in 20 years ago) but I have over recent years started to keep a journal when travelling. That’s unlikely to be much of thing for me this year since most of my summer travel has been canceled or postponed, but I have started to keep track of what goes on in daily life since social distancing went into full effect in my area, not quite two weeks as of this moment of writing. Looking at what I’ve got so far, it’s mostly just listing off things done, but also includes some general observations about for example how exciting it was to see a display of toilet paper and paper towels that wasn’t totally empty in a grocery store a few days ago, or how I took my fairly new car through a drive through for the first time ever (as in first time for the car, not first time ever for me). The travel journal was a major genre in the middle ages, to the point where now it’s hard to tell some of the fact from the fiction. For example, the Book of John Mandeville and the Book of Margery Kempe both contain aspects of actual travel as well as interpretive observations and thoughts and feelings about what’s been going on for the author. Then you’ve got the more household familial texts, like the Paston letters. The interesting thing here is that the forms are not quite what we might now call a journal, since Mandeville and Kempe’s are travel texts (at least as one of their main genres) and the Paston books are epistolary collections. The personal diary as we know it becomes a thing a bit later in history.

Then there’s the reading. Books as objects especially in the earlier part of the what we might call the medieval era would not have a been a common item in most households, since the printing press wasn’t around yet, and even towards the end of the fifteenth century when it was still a newer thing. Storytelling might have been one general option, and the popularity of the story telling collections from this time (Boccaccio, Chaucer, Christine de Pizan – not necessarily in any kind of order here) suggest this might have actually been a possibility. Today, there’s a lot on social media about how some people plan to catch up on their reading, but there’s also responses about how realistic of an expectation this might be. Fiction definitely seems to have some kind of social effect, not just for the entertainment value (although it’s certainly that) but also for the ‘escapist’ factor. I would be willing to bet that there’s a good bit of promise in the idea, since I know that there’s plenty of scholarship on the book as an object. I also have to wonder how far a research project into the use of fiction as a coping mechanism could go without a research library since I for one find great value in shelf browsing. Not that the databases etc. aren’t good places to go, they are, but sometimes finding exactly the right search is a struggle, and you find the best sources by checking out what’s near whatever it was you had found in the catalog.

There have already been some more public comparisons to history of pandemics and outbreaks of disease, and this one here is by no means detailed or comprehensive. I’m mostly considering a series of general ideas and how they might apply both to the past and to the present, and maybe a little intot he future.