discussion

Regarding the question of presence in online education: A performative pedagogical perspective

Ozum Ucok-Sayraka and Nichole Brazeltonb

aDepartment of Communication & Rhetorical Studies, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA; bEnglish Department, New England College, Henniker, NH, USA

ABSTRACT In response to the interruption of all levels of education following COVID-19, we start by underlining the difference between emergency remote teaching and online learning. Next, we inquire into the question of presence in physical and virtual classrooms, and offer a discussion of presence as “being-here-now,” a “movement toward becoming,” and as gelassenheit or “releasement toward things.” We highlight the material- ity of communication, and the performative production and transform- ation of the classroom space. Finally, we illustrate how performative writing enhances the sense of being-here-now, and facilitates the co- inhabiting of online learning spaces that lack co-presence of bodies in the same physical environment.

ARTICLE HISTORY Received 2 December 2019 Revised 22 October 2020 Accepted 4 January 2021

KEYWORDS Presence; online education; performative pedagogy; embodiment; inhabiting

Before COVID-19, we started this paper stating its focus as the problem of presence in the physical and virtual spaces of the communication classroom at a moment when the trend towards online education is on the rise. At this point, following an interrupted Spring 2020 semester in all levels of education with COVID-19 having pushed both K-12 and higher education to move the classrooms online, we are called to start first by underlining the difference between emergency remote teaching and online learning. As Manfuso (2020), and Hodges et al. (2020) caution, it is crucial to differentiate “online learning” and “remote learning,” rather than use the two terms interchangeably. Though it might seem like a trivial distinction to some, high-quality online teaching requires significant planning and design, as Means et al. (2014) have identified in Learning Online: What Research Tells Us about Whether, When and How.

Manfuso (2020) compares remote learning to telework where “workloads that might normally be tended to in person and in real time are instead conducted online” using collaboration tools like Zoom or Microsoft Teams, along with other multi-user platforms like Dropbox, or Google Drive. Effective online learning, on the other hand, requires careful planning that is not limited to just identifying content to be covered and information transfer, but also tends to the overall “ecosystem of learner supports, which take time to identify and build” (Hodges et al., 2020). In contrast to well-designed online learning experi- ences, emergency remote learning involves a temporary shift of instructional delivery in response to a crisis, such as the use of fully remote teaching solutions that would otherwise be delivered face-to-face or as a hybrid course, as in the case of COVID-19 pandemic. Once the crisis is over, instructional delivery returns back to the original format. It is important to understand that

CONTACT Ozum Ucok-Sayrak [email protected] Department of Communication & Rhetorical Studies, Duquesne University, 600 Forbes Ave, Pittsburgh, PA 15282-0001, USA. This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article. � 2021 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia

EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY 2022, VOL. 54, NO. 2, 131–144 https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2021.1880389

the primary objective in these circumstances is not to re-create a robust educational ecosystem but rather to provide temporary access to instruction and instructional supports in a manner that is quick to set up and is reliably available during an emergency or crisis. (Hodges et al., 2020)

The term “educational ecosystem” is key in making sense of the different instructional aspects of learning environments, whether face-to-face or online, towards supporting learners with resources that help create a community of learning beyond information transmission. Our discus- sion of presence in this paper, and the performative dimension of the classroom, directly connect to the construction of the “ecosystem of learner supports” that Hodges et al. (2020) underline.

Resisting the popular tendency to privilege digital educational spaces due to the various con- veniences they offer (flexibility of time, location, and economic appeal among others) that makes online education attractive to many (including university administrators), we highlight the need to give some thought to the experience of learning and teaching that the traditional and online educational designs offer. Cautioning against the common unquestioned assumption or expect- ation regarding the sameness or similarity of educational experience in physical, embodied class- rooms and the virtual, abstract experience, we explore their differences focusing specifically on presence and performance.

We highlight two themes connected to the discussion of presence based on the discussion of Coonfield and Rose (2012), and Heidegger (1966):

1. “Being-here-now” as openness/attentiveness to the spontaneous, unexpected aspects of experience and a “movement toward becoming” (Coonfield and Rose 195).

2. Gelassenheit or “releasement toward things” (Heidegger 54).

These themes highlight an attitude of letting or allowing, and attentiveness to emergence, rather than exercising control or planning/calculating. The question we inquire into on presence centers around the loss of this emergent experience in human interaction in the absence of bodies in online education where most or all communication takes place behind the screens. Interaction behind screens involves a very different experience than the spontaneous, unex- pected moments of the presence of “be-here-now” (Coonfield and Rose 195) due to a “hyperconscious staging of self in relation to others that attempts to freeze a reality” (p. 195) and the time spent on “‘performing’ a better version of herself” (Turkle, 2015, p. 24). We first dis- cuss our own experience of presence (or its lack) in traditional and online classrooms that led to our co-authorship. Following the discussion on the performative production and transformation of the classroom space, and an exploration of the two themes we introduced above in relation to presence, we illustrate how performative writing enhances the sense of being-here-now for a student of online education and cultivates a sense of presence between participants in a mediat- ized environment that lacks the co-presence of bodies in a singular physical location.

“Something happens…”

As I (Author 1) type now reflecting on my motivation to engage in this work, moments from my traditional classes are evoked. This past week for instance, one of my students gave a speech on living with a pacemaker. At the end of her speech, she showed the mark on her body of her sur- gery to have it installed. A subtle, small, pale pink mark. This unexpected and tender moment invited us into her speech as we joined her through our senses, fully, empathically, waking up to life and what we take for granted. Another student in that same class, who has a hearing disabil- ity, and whose speech is impaired due to the connection to her hearing, told me that she wants to give her speech, speak it rather than use sign language. She did not want to choose the option to write up her speech and submit it as a written assignment. We met outside of class in my office, and made a plan that would work, and she presented her speech verbally along with

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power point slides as support. As she stood in front of us, and gave her speech I could sense the shared sense of tenderness, vulnerability, attentiveness, and support in the classroom.

In Intercultural Communication last semester, a quiet female student from Saudi Arabia who wears a headscarf spoke about a recent experience in the U.S. that stood out for her. When it got dark and she was still on campus, she contacted the campus police and got a ride her to her dorm. She reflected on the challenge of riding in a car by herself with a male officer, con- necting this experience to her cultural background, and how this was not a familiar or a comfort- able event for her. I could see and feel how the rest of the students in the classroom were tuned in, listening and feeling with her. A moment to remember, of learning not just through the story that is shared but also through a sense of shared presence, of being touched by the other’s voice, face, movements, and vulnerability.

These three moments shared above exemplify the ways in which the classroom is inhabited through body, heart, and minds. It is moments like these that I am afraid might be lost in the absence of bodies in the online classroom. Something unique and powerful does happen when we are in each other’s bodily presence. As I kept repeating this and continuing with this work, I met my co-author (A2) who was working as my research assistant at that time. After listening to me and my concerns about online education, she said that her experiences had been different. Over the years, she had participated in several online college classes, and felt safe in those envi- ronments. Furthermore, A2 expressed to me that, during her online classes, she had experienced a true sense of presence with fellow students and her instructors. What follows, is a brief descrip- tion of her experiences.

“Presence in the Online classroom”

I joined my co-author (A1) in writing this piece because I wanted to help increase awareness and acceptance of the benefit of online classrooms for non-traditional students and students with disabilities. I was only able to complete my undergraduate degree as a non-traditional stu- dent because of the option to take online classes. As a single, working mother there was no way for me to attend face-to-face classes, even in the evenings after work. I was dependent upon public transportation, working 40 hours per week, cleaning houses on weekends, living with an invisible disability, and mothering two children who required supervision. At that time, there was no room for me in “traditional educational environments.”

I could not then, and cannot now, disagree that there is something very personal, immediate, and tangible that occurs between two people face to face or in a group of students in a face-to- face class. However, I was then as I am now, unconvinced that an online classrooms are incap- able of producing a sense of presence and connection. For a certain few, such as myself, the online learning environment is a safer, more open, and respectful place to engage in vulnerabil- ity and form relationships.

Face to face interaction does not magically guarantee presence. In truth, I felt a deeper sense of connection to and presence with people with whom I have shared online spaces than all but a very small number of people with whom I shared physical presence in graduate school. Despite corporeal proximity, presence must be intentionally fostered and cultivated. In my online classes, my body might not have been physically present, but I felt more wholly present than in most traditional settings. Perhaps, this is because my online educators have been more aware of the need to intentionally cultivate presence, whereas instructors in face-to-face settings tend to assume that bodies simply placed in a room together is equal to “being present.” Perhaps, this is because in the online classroom each student must be intentional about attending to class from their different positions in life versus simply attending a class with their bodies as their minds are elsewhere. Regardless, I have often felt a deeper level of connection and presence in online spaces than I have in traditional classroom settings based on shared human connection,

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expressed concern for the thoughts and ideas of another, and respect for the autonomy and expressions of an individual as a contributing member of a community.

In the next section, we discuss the performative production of the classroom space and the materiality of communication in relation to presence. At this point, neither do we assume that presence is automatically part of traditional classrooms due to the presence of our bodies in shared space, nor do we disregard that we can cultivate presence in online educational spaces. We both agree with Coonfield and Rose (2012) that presence involves attentiveness and open- ness to experience, and releasement (Heidegger, 1966). When we turn our attention towards the matter at hand, such as a classroom discussion, lecture, or a class activity, we actively make our- selves a part of it. This participation allows for listening, learning, and contributing to the build- ing of knowledge. Thus, an implicit assumption we have is that presence enhances learning, and our examples from the traditional and online classrooms help illustrate this point.

Bodies, space, presence: the performative production and transformation of the classroom space

Madison and Hamera (2006) write about the performative production of place and the performative transformation of space into place through the placement of bodies into a space, the regulation of movements and positions through the organization of space such as seating arrangements, rules of engagement/interaction, and other “technical protocols” (p. 52). The interaction of the body and space, though regulated and prescribed to various degrees, also has a vernacular dimension where the individuals construct place and form “affective environments, geographies of the heart” (Madison and Hamera, 52). The following example from A1’s Intercultural Communication classroom illustrates the spontaneous emergence of presence through the performative production of place as students move around the room and work together on a question.

One way we inhabit a physical classroom space is through the movement of our bodies, visiting different parts of the room to meet others and engage in dialogue over a text. As part of the first author’s Intercultural Communication class, students are invited to move around the classroom to meet other classmates that they do not know, and to work with them sharing what stands out for them from the assigned reading. At the end of their discussions, each group shares the emerging discussion points with the rest of the class. On one of these group workdays, the instructor noticed that two students from the back rows in the class moved to the front and teamed up with two other students there. One of them stood and leaned on the desk as they had an animated conver- sation going on. Within minutes, the standing student in the front group raised her hand to share a point that came up in their discussion with the rest of the class. She was positioned diagonally across from the instructor towards her right, and enthusiastically shared her ideas connecting them to a personal experience about the issue. She sounded excited, her facial expression and tone of voice were animated, and her care about the matter drew the rest of the class in, inviting their care and attention. This was an impactful moment in the classroom. In that moment, the first author as instructor, also noticed that it was through bodily co-orientation towards each other and to the audience as all engaged in a dialogue about this student’s experience in connection to the reading that something powerful was happening… a mutual creating or bringing forth of learning, through our bodily presence and orientation in the classroom.

In Digital Proxemics: How Technology Shapes the Ways We Move, McArthur (2016) refers to Hall’s (1966) work The Hidden Dimension: Man’s Use of Space in Public and Private and expands the discussion on proxemics, the organization of spaces and human distance, to digital spaces. McArthur (2016) writes about the social arrangements of space that Hall pointed to, the socio- spatial design that focuses on the effects of space arrangement and use on human interaction that ranges from sociopetal to sociofugal. “In a sociopetal arrangement, people are oriented toward each other for social interaction. Conversely, a sociofugal arrangement of space orients

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people away from social interaction” (McArthur 22). The discussion of sociopetal and sociofugal arrangement can be easily illustrated through the basic example of organizing chairs in a circular format in a classroom that invites people to turn towards each other and engage in interaction (sociopetal) versus turning the chairs to face the walls that would orient people away from each other (sociofugal). In the classroom experience discussed above, through our flexible use of the classroom space, we created a sociopetal design for interacting and learning that opened the way for spontaneity, creativity, and engagement.

An emerging question at this point is how the online classroom space can be connected to the discussion of sociopetal and sociofugal space arrangements. Later in this essay, we discuss the role of performative writing in cultivating presence in the classroom, and how one might think about the experience of performative writing as a sociopetal element in the online space that invites participants to turn towards each other and engage in interaction through sharing their writing, reading, and discussing. First, it will be helpful to examine the corporeal relation of space to presence through bodily connection and extension of self in the world.

The materiality of communication and presence

Gumbrecht’s (2004) discussion of presence focuses on our spatial relationship to the world and its objects. Gumbrecht underlines the immediate impact of present things/objects/people on human bodies, which he refers as “effects of tangibility” (p. 17). In his discussion of presence, Gumbrecht emphasizes the “touch” of the material elements of communication on the body. Later in the text he offers some specific examples that illustrate this discussion such as the effects of the physical presence of a text, of a voice, of a canvas with colors, of a play performed by a troupe on our bodily being. When students stand up and move in the classroom, meet others, and discuss a text, they “touch” each other through their bodily presence, which impacts and deepens their learning. We do not only share content in a classroom but more importantly we share the ways in which we bring the content to life through our bodily being. The performative dimension of the classroom matters.

At the heart of Gumbrecht’s (2004) exploration of presence is a longing he acknowledges for reawakening or recuperating a state of being in the world and relating to the world by “simply (and ever so lightly) reconnecting with the things of the world—and being sensitive to the ways in which my body relates to a landscape while I am hiking, for example or to the presence of other bodies (while I am dancing)…” (p. 144). Gumbrecht makes the body central to the discus- sion of presence as he brings to attention the encounter of the body with its surroundings and the material elements in that space. He critiques modern Western culture due to its tendency “to abandon and even forget the possibility of a presence-based relation to the world” (xiv-xv). It is this automatic “bracketing” of a presence-based relation to the world that concerns us regarding the discussion of presence, and the online classroom specifically.

In this paper, we inquire into the ways in which teaching and learning in the classroom space affect and shape our presence-based relation to the world that is intertwined with the meaning- based relation. So, we ask: How does living our lives through the screen affect our presence and the “production of presence” (Gumbrecht, 2004) in the online classroom? We specifically engage this question later in the paper under the section on cultivating presence in online learning spaces through performative writing. Before we do so, the next section offers a deeper explor- ation of the themes we introduced at the beginning of this essay: “Being-here-now” (Coonfield and Rose 195), and “releasement toward things” (Gelassenheit) (Heidegger 54).

Exploring presence

Being-here-now. Coonfield and Rose (2012) offer two examples from their experience of teaching at a summer abroad course in Greece that are strikingly different from each other that develop

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the discussion on presence, performance, and communication technologies. As part of their sum- mer course in Greece, students were to do solo performances of short lyric poems based on Sappho’s work, and they were asked to create their own poems using fragments from Sappho’s poetry in combination with their own words, or using only Sappho’s words. Students could select a location and time to perform their poem, and integrate the natural environment with the performance. Referring to Wallace Bacon’s (1996) work, Coonfield and Rose highlight the coming together of the text, the performers, the audience, and the space in bringing their poems to life, along with their commitment to “be-here-now” that allows for spontaneous, unex- pected experiences to emerge and become part of the performances (such as the effects of the wind on the meaning of a phrase, the angle of light on the performer’s face, or flowing tears.) In the summer program during 2011, however, the teachers noticed a major contrast between the “being-here-now” practice in the students’ performances, and the way students engaged their everyday lives as a tourist in Greece.

Armed with their digital cameras and smart phones, they increasingly mark and document their experience with intensely self-consciously posed photos. They update their Facebook pages with these photos several times each and every day. They grasp, grip, and attempt to fix and control their reality by recording and posting. (Coonfield and Rose 195)

Coonfield and Rose discuss their observation above as part of their exploration of presence, discussing how the preoccupation with the capturing, recording, posting, and representation of the students’ experiences was radically disconnected from the “be-here-now” experiences of their performances. “The students are too busy experiencing the recording and exhibiting of their moments to experience the moments they fervently endeavor to capture” (p. 195). This “hyperconscious staging of self in relation to others that attempts to freeze a reality yet to be experienced” (p. 195) is very different than presence that “exhibits movement toward becoming, an unself-conscious matching of self, text, and audience that creates something irreducible to the sum of these parts” (p. 195).

Along these lines, in Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, Turkle (2015) writes about her friend, Sharon, who shared some concerns about how the social media is shap- ing her sense of self. Sharon worries that “she is spending too much time ‘performing’ a better version of herself—one that will play well to her followers” to the point of losing track of her connection with herself and taking responsibility for it (Turkle, 2015, p. 24).

I spend my time online wanting to be seen as witty, intelligent, involved, and having the right ironic distance to everything. Self-reflection should be more about, well, who I am, warts and all, how I really see myself. I worry that I’m giving up the responsibility for who I am to how other people see me. I’m not being rigorous about knowing my own mind, my own thoughts. You get lost in your performance. On Twitter, on Facebook, I’m geared toward showing my best self, showing me to be invulnerable or with as little vulnerability as possible.

Sharon states her worry that the urge towards performing for the others overcomes her sense of responsibility for being connected to herself as she is, including the discernment of her thoughts. A main concern for Sharon is to minimize vulnerability in her performance of her “edited self” (Turkle, 2015, p. 201). She works to eliminate or lessen vulnerability through managing and control- ling her online presentation, which takes away from letting the spontaneous, unplanned aspects of experience to emerge (though not completely eliminating the possibility for such moments.)

Similar to the students’ experiences in the study abroad program in Greece that we discussed earlier, Sharon’s intense preoccupation with the staging of herself online and presenting her “best self” illustrate the tendency to control, edit, and exhibit, in contrast to the “being-here- now” practices of the students that incorporated the spontaneous and unexpected aspects of performance to be part of the experience. One might argue that this presentation of self still includes a version of presencing, a movement toward becoming in the present moment. Yet, the hyperconscious mode of constructing how one appears to others is far from a receptive

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attunement to what is already present in the moment that the practice of being-here-now high- lights, even if it might include some degree of allowing and surrendering as part of the editing and controlling. Performance of self can be associated with presencing as we discuss in this essay through awareness— which includes nonjudgmental noticing of the ways in which one interacts with, incorporates, and becomes part of, her environment, rather than a calculative, manipulative strategizing of how one appears in front of others. Sharon’s physical location behind the screen in the example above allows her to perform a version of herself that makes it possible to strategically impress upon others layers of meaning that contradicts the practice and cultivation of presence as receiving and allowing the emergent aspects of experience and, as we discuss below, “releasement towards things” (Heidegger).

Sharon’s example above also brings up further questions in relation to the classroom environ- ment. We wonder about the performance of an “edited self” (Turkle, 2015, p. 201) in the online educational environments as well as the physical classroom. Although the screen allows for a heightened level of performance in the absence of being physically and fully seen by the others, the traditional classroom obviously is a space where students as well as faculty present a version of who they are. The question then becomes, whether and to what degree we can make space for “being-here-now” experiences that enrich and inform learning in both environments.

Releasement Toward Things. Gelassenheit, or “releasement toward things” (Heidegger, 1966, p. 54), refers to a meditative dwelling in the world that is not focused on calculating the achieve- ment of any specific purposes or end results. It is a receptive orientation that privileges aware- ness and surrender over control. Along these lines, Heidegger writes about “meditative thinking” (p. 46) that is attentive to relations and processes, and to the emergence of meaning, which goes hand in hand with “openness to the mystery” (p. 55). “Releasement toward things” is related to the “be-here-now” experience in performance that Coonfield and Rose discuss as the “full sensory immersion that happens in performance” (Coonfield and Rose 194), integrating hard work and commitment with the unanticipated, unplanned occurrences that emerge.

The next section builds on the prior section on presence by integrating a discussion of per- formative writing as a pedagogical practice that helps facilitate the cultivation of presence in the online classroom.

Coming to presence through performative writing in the online classroom

How does one experience “being-here-now” within the mediated context of an online environment? In what ways can we as educators initiate or encourage a “process of becoming” and a sense of “releasement toward things” (Heidegger, 1966, p. 54) in the ambiguous space of a virtual classroom? We discuss the experiences of A2 in two different online courses, a creative writing course titled “Changing the World With Words” and an Intercultural Communication class, to illustrate the role of performative writing in cultivating presence in the online classroom (For a discussion of where and when teachers cultivate presence in the traditional classroom, please see Ucok-Sayrak, 2014).

As a graduate student, A2 enrolled in a long-distance course for practitioners of Transformative Language Arts. Throughout the program, courses are designed to increase and expand the student’s knowledge and awareness of the transformative powers of language in settings that range from interpersonal to organizational to trauma response. Students focus on ways of expression that include all forms of creative as well as non-fiction. Regardless of the writing genre favored, each student is guided using lesson topics, writing prompts, and several readings to cultivate an awareness of how our linguistic expressivity can connect us across distances, bring a sense of presence to the classroom and between participants despite the lack of corporeality and temporality. In the following, A2 describes her experience of presence in the online learning environment of the Transformative Language Arts course she was enrolled in.

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Through the assignments and writing prompts, I (A2) was able to “see” other students’ writing spaces and homes, share their childhood memories, and even their struggles as creative educa- tors in the world. Each week, students explored together aspects of the role of language and poetics in community-building, culture-shifting, history-revisioning, and social change. We shared how assigned readings or videos related to us in our various places in the world and in our lives, and we shared specific, personal experiences of language and creativity intersecting with our life’s “work” as employees, volunteers, students, and more.

Crucial to the success of cultivating presence between participants were the “ground rules” of the course that allowed us freedom to truly express ourselves without fear of judgement. Some of these rules included:

Write what you know as well as what you don’t know; follow your writing, not the facilitator or what you think you should write; write what wakes you up the most; trust yourself to write what you need to write, how you need to write it; all revealed in this workshop is confidential; treat all newborn writing with great respect and tenderness so that it can grow; no self-deprecating remarks allowed; witness others; listen carefully with your full attention, it will enhance your ability to listen to your own words; please share your responses to one another’s work—what moves you, what stands out for you – but please refrain from critiquing the work; treat all you do as a delicious and invigorating experiment. (“Arts and Culture: Writing from the Earth”).

These boundaries existed so that each student knew they were safe and welcomed, that their writing was valued as a crucial part of themselves being consciously and carefully shared with others. There was consistent intentionality to cultivating presence within the Transformative Language Arts online learning community, and between various participants through their use of language and writing. Sometimes, we were given the option to post photographs of places or ourselves, but the primary means of connection was through the written word and story. Each student was given the ability to present their story, and to be brought into the presence of another student’s experience, both in relation to the material being read and studied. What also stands out from the ground rules above is the invitation to discern what matters, to listen deeply (to self and other), and to let the writing emerge from what one knows and does not know.

Writing exercises like the following stressed the importance of sensory experience and helped to bring each student into presence with each other in ways that might have been unexpected.

We come together from across the country, and from many different circumstances. Share your responses to these five easy pieces: From where you are right now, what do you see, hear, taste, smell and touch. Tell us one thing you do that usually makes you happy. Tell us somewhere you traveled that amazed you, and why.

The responses to these prompts allowed me to envision a physical place in each participant’s life, provided a window into something sweet or funny about from their past, and gifted me with an initial awareness of what was making each person who they were that day.

The writing of my fellow students for this assignment took me to a corner caf�e in the Northeast where I smelled bagels and coffee and heard the strains of a love song playing in the background; to a beach down South where sand scratched the bottoms of feet and children’s laughter was punctuated with the sound of waves; to a mountain retreat center in the upper Midwest where the air carried coolness even in summer, and the taste of fresh berries with cream melted on the tongue. Our responses came as stories, poems, and narrative descriptions. Our words were like magic – conjuring each of us to the place of the others and growing our sense of belonging.

This kind of “magical” presencing through stories, poetry, and other poetic text creates the “here and now” for one student, and extends to the other students as well. For the storyteller or poet, presencing occurs through awareness of self and the act of creating poetic text as revela- tion of self. For the reader, the movement toward becoming occurs through the relation of self

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to the language of another. In each instance, presencing requires a performance of self-in-world and a performance of self-in-relation to world. Bacon (1996) asks us to consider the possibility that the act of performance traditionally thought to be grounded in the tangible, bodily presence of the performer, might also find expression through the creation and body of a text. That is, the encounter with, and the responsiveness of, a text–the relational nature of engaging with or creating a body of text for self and other –also constructs performance (pp. 356–357).

This performance of self through text for others is central to performative writing as an “evocative” way to bring forth “worlds that are other-wise intangible, unlocatable: worlds of memory, pleasure, sensation, imagination, affect, and in-sight” (Pollock, 1998, p. 80), and to “metaphorically to render absence present.” Performative writing in which “the writer and the world’s bodies intertwine… in intimate co-performance of language and experience” (Pollock, 1998, p. 81) represent a conjoining of writer with world and other.

In performative writing, the special attention paid to the empathic crafting of language invites the reader into a phenomenological participation with others, through text, engaging all participants on emotional, intellectual, and bodily levels. In this way, there occurs a poietic “bringing forth” (Gumbrecht, 2004, xiii) of self and other, through an engaged and emotional enactment of participatory knowing. Performative writing calls each participant forward from their separate places (in this case on either end of a computer screen) and draws them out from behind the language of simple communication, into a shared space of here and now. In the next section, we extend our discussion above to the context of an online intercultural communication classroom that the second author participated as a student. She shares her experience of writing performatively as part of an autoethnography assignment for this class which allowed her to experience a sense of presence in this online classroom, along with feelings of vulnerability and trust.

Performative writing in the online intercultural communication classroom

Performative writing, and presencing in online classrooms are of special concern since traditional paths to presencing must take place in non-traditional ways, including textual construction and presentation. The existential connection students experience with their mediatized expressions in an online classroom heightens the responsibilities of instructors to develop new ways of encour- aging and sustaining presence with and between students. Classrooms, even as shared digital spaces, are meant to be locations in which learning and transformation are acquired in conjunc- tion with others. One way of encouraging meaningful engagement and presencing is through the use of performative writing.

Instructors of online classes have a different responsibility in cultivating presence than instruc- tors in face to face settings. Because the online instructor cannot merely glance and smile at a student to indicate awareness, the instructor must perform a responsive acknowledgement of the student’s presence via written words to aid in the maintenance of the student’s sense of self and presence “in the class.” The online instructor is tasked with finding a way to reach beyond the screen and keyboard, into a world deeper and more textured than that in which self and professor exist in separate places. Creating an invitational space in which both students and instructor can share, and dwell in an experience of interaction, requires both presence and per- formance - a relational learning with versus a mediatized typing at each other.

In performative writing, the use of narrative opens the door to performance of self in the world, and encourages expression of the performance of learned material alongside everyday life. This performance of self facilitates presence through writing as a participatory activity of self-awareness, sharing, and disclosure between author and audience. There is an element of sur- render as the author engages in self-reflection prior to offering a response. In this posture of “meditative thinking” (Heidegger 46) the author is attentive to the process of writing, and to the emergence of meaning from her life in both the present moment and in her new considerations

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of her past. In the online classroom environment, autoethnographic writing can be a particularly useful kind of performative writing that bridges interpersonal distance as it calls us to be phe- nomenologically present in the performance of composition, knowledge, self, and other.

As an online student in an intercultural communication course, I (A2) was given the final assignment of composing an autoethnography that drew my life into conversation with the pro- fessor based on various readings and course concepts. As students, we were instructed to write a lengthy (p. 20) autoethnography relating moments throughout our lives, or an employment experience, to the concepts we had learned throughout the class. We didn’t have writing and sharing “rules” in that class like those for the Transformative Language Arts course, and we were only sharing the autoethnography with the professor, not other students. The autoethnography was more about trusting oneself to relate to and present the course material, and trusting the professor with any personal information that one might choose to share. I got the feeling, as the assignment was posted and students asked questions, that most other students were planning to write about an employment experience. I’m not sure many would have had the same relation- ship with the assignment as I did.

For me, the assignment was intriguing, yet at the same time produced a level of anxiety. Even placed within the context of course material, I feared how my life experience up to that moment would be perceived; I was unsure of how much honesty might be perceived as “too honest,” and whether presenting parts of my history with ambiguity might constitute dishonesty. Of course, the professor would have no way of knowing whether my presentation of self was true, but I would know, and what I presented as “myself” would forever be “who I was” to this professor. I was faced with not only providing evidence of knowledge comprehension, but of constructing my identity in such a way that I maintained integrity, while guarding against poten- tial misinterpretations and judgements. I was unsure of how safe I was in being vulnerable.

The word vulnerability comes from vulnus, the Latin word for "wound.” The choice to be vul- nerable can be an overwhelming act of trust that occurs in a safe place, where you have reason to believe that, even if you are wounded by a reaction, there will be someone (maybe even the same someone who did the damage) who will come around in a more response-able way and dress the wound.

Alternatively, as in my case with the autoethnography assignment, vulnerability can come when one simply stops caring about what other people will think about them, or when one sees an opportunity to speak a personal truth that is more important to her than the possible wounds that her speaking could result in. In this autoethnography assignment, I didn’t fully trust the professor or the other students yet implicitly I felt safe; there was no way to build to that level of trust in the time span of a semester. However, the reason I was pursuing my education, the people in my life at the time, the opportunity I saw in front of me, far outweighed my fear.

I was completing my degree as a single mother in order to be able to better provide for my children, in order to gain greater independence and in order to beat the odds that had been lev- eled against me by society. I knew that any “wound” I might suffer through the completion of the assignment paled in comparison to the wound I would self-inflict by shirking the assignment. Additionally, the autoethnography was designed such that I was able to perform a kind of “re- write” of my story within the framing of the assigned texts and concepts. The autoethnography provided me with a new way of telling and understanding my story. The re-telling of my story – the merging of past with present – brought me into presence with myself, with the texts, and ultimately, with the professor who would read my words.

Any autoethnographic writing requires a delicate balance between vulnerable personal voice, and blatant over-exposure. Writing a personal narrative does not give one carte blanche to dis- close every personal aspect of their lives, but the authority of voice within autoethnography comes from the vulnerability of placing oneself in a position of asking sometimes dangerous questions about self, situation, actions, and culture. It is through vulnerability that knowledge about self, other and world emerges. As explained by Tami Spry (2001), when done well,

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autoethnography should reveal previously unspoken, unrealized parts of ourselves that go on, through presentation to others, to challenge and change conceptions of personal and social identity, ways of thinking, and considerations of social and institutional liberation.

As I worked through my autoethnographic assignment, and began to relax into the process of discovery, I was able to allow enjoyment of the creative process to help me connect new, textbook information to a remembering and re-membering of self. The autoethnography’s requirement to explore and reveal one’s past moved beyond the realm of perpetual introspec- tion or rumination into a performative act of communication because there was an other to whom the written performance of a re-membered self was directed. Because of this, I moved from a self-in-meditation to a self-in-communication with the course material as well as with the professor.

In the online classroom, a professor who assigns an autoethnography with the request for introspection as a way of deepening one’s relationship to the common ground of an assigned reading, is disengaging the subject from purely self-centered reflection and moving her into proximity, or presence, with an other to whom she has a relational and communicative responsi- bility. As a catalyst for presence in the online space, this performative writing assignment was successful because of its invitation to open oneself to another through a sense of vulnerability, and through the professor’s commitment to holding space for the students’ creative expressions of knowledge in conjunction with identity. The next section deepens the discussion of the dia- lectic of vulnerability and safety in performative writing that helps inhabit and transform online learning environments.

Opening to vulnerability, inhabiting and transforming space

Vulnerability

One way vulnerability takes place in online education is through the realization that we give up control over our words and meaning once we submit them to the online forum. Even deleting the conversation or response after posting does not guarantee that the words have not already been read by another. Alternatively, vulnerability can come in a more traditional way, through exposure of self and personal information. In the case of this auto-ethnography, there was vul- nerability in the self-disclosure, but the context of the assignment was such that the student could disclose as much or as little as desired, with the connection to text serving as an add- itional layer of protection. There may be a deeper willingness to share personal stories if one knows in advance that they serve a purpose outside of oneself. This safety allowing for vulner- ability created its own unique space for presence. By allowing for an openness/attentiveness to unexpected aspects of experience, I (A2) was able to feel the embodiment of new knowledge in a joyful fullness of both physical body as well as textual body that had entered and co-created a “liminoid field of possibility” (Pollock, 1998, p. 81).

Inhabiting and transforming space

In his 1979 essay, “The Street is for Celebration,” Thomas Merton explores the notion of inhabit- ing a space, what it means to be fully present and living in a space versus merely occupying the space due to necessity, obligation, or submission. Using the space of a city street to illustrate his thoughts, he paints the picture of a city full of streets that serve only as paths of transportation, ways of traveling from one experience to another without ever engaging with other travelers (pp. 46–47). In this scenario, Merton tells us, the street cannot be “inhabited,” because people who use it are alive but not truly “living” in the space, not present, “a street may be a dump for thousands of people who aren’t there. They have been dumped there, but their presence is so provisional they might as well be absent” (p. 47). He explains that a sense of alienation, lack of

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safety, and fear of rejection contribute to the inability to inhabit spaces (p. 47) and that in order for a street (or any space) to be transformed, “something must be done to it” (p. 49) by the peo- ple occupying the space. To “do something to” a space, an actor must be fully present “as themselves” (p. 47) - recognizable as a whole person, and recognized by others.

In the example of the autoethnography in the Intercultural Communication class, the assign- ment was not merely a path of information exchange, nor an exercise in which I (A2) “dumped” a pile of definitions, scholarly vocabulary, or reconfigured text material. In the process of com- posing the assignment, I was both living in the moment of the writing, and also re-living the moments I was writing about; I was doing something to and with the knowledge I had gathered over the course of the semester, and that knowledge became, itself, a performance. I no longer felt alienated from the material, and the assignment was less a request for work than an invita- tion to relationship. Being able to present and perform myself as a whole person, realize simul- taneously a sense of vulnerability and safety, and feel an emerging awareness of connection to another and to self through mastery of material, allowed for transformation of the online space as well as an internal transformation.

The written words of the auto-ethnography facilitated my performance of self in that they were not only conduits of a new kind of knowledge, but also acts of emergence (as I discovered new ways of viewing myself through the course material), acts of confrontation (as I revisited unfriendly parts of my past), and acts of empowerment. I not only rewrote negative sections of my past into positive representations of the course work, but the words themselves were motivators in their own right, pushing me to continue the work and develop a new story. In this way, the autoethnography was a transformative performative that worked in conjunction with knowledge learned throughout the course to constitute a performance of a new self that was written into presence with an other.

Although the written (or typed) word is not temporally bound and lacks reliance upon phys- ical bodily representation or the responsiveness of an other, the written word is a channel of communication that, when attentively undertaken, can lead to the emergence of new under- standings of self, other, and world. In the digital classroom, the written word is a powerful form of engagement in connection with the course materials, other students, and instructors. Thus, it is important that students and educators thoughtfully and creatively consider ways in which a mediated form of communication can best be performed and shared between online class par- ticipants and instructors in such a way that a student’s writing can enable an opening to pres- ence— bridging the digital gap between human participants in online classrooms.

Ending thoughts

In this paper, we focus on the problem of presence and performance in the virtual spaces of the communication classroom during an era in which the trend towards online education is on the rise. Although digital education spaces might offer conveniences of time and location, we have highlighted the need to consider the experience of learning and teaching that is becoming increasingly tenuous in the current historical moment. As communication students and educators are confronted with an increasing demand for mediatized, digital classrooms, there is, simultan- eously, a need to intentionally focus on what it means to be present with and to an other in the absence of bodies within a learning environment. We present performative writing as one way of coming to presence in an online classroom, seeking to bridge a gap in current, mediatized educational offerings that privilege information exchange and convenience over presence, experience, and embodied engagement of content.

Using lived experiences from a face-to-face communication class, and highlighting themes connected to “be-here-now” (Coonfield and Rose 195), and “releasement toward things” (Heidegger 54), we have underlined the importance of embodying an attitude of attentiveness in the online classroom. We then explored connections of presence, performance, and

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performativity by exploring writing as a performative engagement that can be used as an online pedagogical experience enabling students and educators to connect with each other and the material in a way that calls forth a kind of presence within the digital realm. As the trend towards the integration of communication technologies in our everyday lives continue to rise, it becomes essential to consider their implications on presence, performance, and human commu- nication. Presence is one of the main themes and an experience that is at risk in the technologic- ally habituated communication environments where embodied, empathic encountering of each other and what Gumbrecht (2004, p. 107) refers as “presence effects” gets undermined or lost.

During the transition to remote learning in a time of crisis, educators relied on Zoom and other video platforms to interact with their students in real-time. Whether teaching in face-to-face class- rooms or across multiple online platforms, the discussion and applications offered throughout this paper are relevant. In any classroom setting, instructors can actively cultivate presence by encourag- ing students to tune-in to their immediate surroundings, allowing for moments of silence and awareness of body and breath, and inviting students to share their observations and experiences. In a Zoom classroom, for instance, bringing attention to how the group arrives at the virtual room together, checking in with the condition of the body/mind, and recognizing the sharing and inhab- iting of a virtual space together can facilitate presence as the participants recognize their embodied co-existence even in separate boxes on a screen. This invites a sense of “be-here-now” and a releasement towards the present moment where each student gradually realizes how s/he is part of the shared experience. Students can be further encouraged to draw connections between what they notice to the course materials. When educators are intentional in guiding their students’ to awareness and reception of the moment, to recognize and celebrate the diversity of other students’ experiences, and make space for the often vulnerable expressions of those experiences, they open the way for presence in any classroom.

Communication scholars, and performance scholars specifically, might turn their attention to the further exploration of this precious human gift and capacity as part of their scholarship on perform- ance, communication pedagogy, interpersonal/intercultural communication, among others.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

€Oz€um €Uçok-Sayrak, Ph.D. is Associate Professor at the Department of Communication & Rhetorical Studies at Duquesne University. Dr. €Uçok-Sayrak has published papers on communication ethics and culture; embodiment and identity; mindfulness; and aesthetic communication. Her research interests include communication ethics, phil- osophy of communication, ethics and epistemology, contemplative education, and communicative construction of identity. Her work has been published in scholarly journals such as Review of Communication, Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, Human Studies, Atlantic Journal of Communication, Symbolic Interaction, and in several edited books. She is the author of Aesthetic Ecology of Communication Ethics: Existential Rootedness.

Nichole Brazelton has an MA in Philosophy of Communication and Rhetoric from Duquesne University, and is an MFA candidate at New England College. She is an adjunct writing instructor for New England College and Manchester Community College, and facilitates virtual, trauma-informed writing workshops for teenagers and adults. Her academic and creative work focuses on the rhetorical construction of birth and motherhood, and has appeared in national and international publications.

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