Creating Space for Critical Participation Practices with the Google Suite

Introduction

This spring semester, I (Cora, a professor of Science and Technology Studies at Virginia Tech University) embarked on a journey of teaching a new course. This was a dream in the making and would require a lot of work to implement. I have taught this course’s predecessor, Medical Dilemmas and Human Experiences, for the past 7 years. Medical Dilemmas and Human Experiences is a course that introduces students to ethical issues from sociological, historical, and cultural perspectives. The new course, Medical Experiences and Biomedical Theories, takes the knowledge and skills acquired in Medical Dilemmas and digs deeper into the theoretical aspects of those ethical issues. My students had been asking for a “part two” for a while: this was it.

In 2023, I (Cora), along with faculty members Liora O’Donnell Goldensher and John Aggrey, designed Medical Experiences and Biomedical Theories. Specifically, the new course explores how structural and systemic violence and health are related through the application of biopolitical frames to reproductive health, environmental health, global health, and armed conflicts. This senior-level discussion course included 9 students and was taught in a traditional in-person setting with a heavy online component. The arduous part included figuring out how to encourage the students to do the readings, practice writing, and then analyze primary source literature using the theoretical tools we would examine throughout the course. In short, how would we (Cora and Alice) help them to think critically using these new tools? In addition, while the lockdowns are over and we at Virginia Tech are primarily back to in-person classrooms, COVID and the pandemic still haunt our classrooms. In particular, students here still struggle to engage in discussion classrooms in person. This View from the Field explores how Google’s suite of Docs, Spreadsheets, and Presentations was used in the course to facilitate learning and critical thinking and foster what we call critical participation: practices that emphasize the processual nature of classroom community and mutual understanding.

Background and Initial Course Design

Using Google Suite, I and my colleagues designed an assignment sequence to facilitate student-to-student interaction and student-to-instructor/GA interaction. We thought that Google Docs would provide a good space for students to explore course concepts and receive instructor feedback. First, students would define course concepts in Google Docs. Next, they would draw on these definitions to write reflections on the concepts and readings. After each step, the other students, instructor, and graduate assistant would review the work and provide clarifications and/or feedback. Initially, the assignment sequence was designed to provide scaffolding for critical engagement with the readings and some mutual learning. However, as the course progressed, it was clear that the assignment sequence also facilitated critical participation: a combination of student-student and student-instructor learning along with the processes of co-building classroom community.

Our approach to this course was grounded in bell hooks’ ideas about engaged pedagogy. As hooks notes, engaged pedagogy requires us to learn what students know and what they will need to know: “Engaged pedagogy begins with the assumption that we learn best when there is an interactive relationship between student and teacher” (hooks 2010, 19). It also requires teachers to be reflexive in their praxis. To allow space for these relationships and processes to develop in our classroom, we decided to do two important things: use contract grading and the Google suite. However, we did not know what shape these relationships and processes would take.

hooks also emphasizes the importance of making space for community: “To do this it is essential that the teacher and students take time to get to know one another” (hooks 2010, 20). In our classroom, this began with introductions during the first week of class, and it was reiterated throughout the semester with beginning of class check-ins. During the check-ins, students were encouraged to share various highs and lows of the semester either with each other or with everyone in the room. This helps set the stage for critical participation, which were reinforced throughout the semester both in the classroom and online via the Google Suite. This classroom experience made it apparent that online tools, like the Google Suite, can be just as effective, if not more effective, in producing critical participation than in-person community-building techniques. In what follows, we will narrate how the Google Suite, particularly its collaborative, online tools, allowed for de/synchronized classroom community building and facilitated co-learning among students and instructors.

Learning Objectives

The official learning objectives for the course are below.

Having successfully completed this course, the student will be able to:

1. Identify fundamental concepts of the course: such as biopower & biopolitics, reproductive technologies, disability, environmental degradation, intersectionality, anti-colonialism, and violence.
2. Apply concepts from the social sciences: such as structural violence and syndemics.
3. Analyze policy, scholarly literature, and biomedical literature related to medical experiences using the humanistic lenses of the course: biopolitics & biopower, intersectionality, structural and institutional analysis, syndemics, anti-colonialism, violence, and disability.
4. Analyze human behavior, social institutions and/or patterns of culture using course theories and concepts and analyze social institutions as related to health and medicine in various cultural and social contexts.
5. Synthesize multiple sources related to course theories and concepts to create coherent arguments and narratives related to these topics.
6. Identify interconnections among and differences between social institutions, groups, and individual actors as located within the various social institutions and groups that surround and shape the often violent dynamics of health and medicine at various scales.
7. Describe the convergences of disability, colonialism, and violence within various intercultural and global contexts using the humanistic lenses of the course.
8. Explain an intercultural experience from both their own and another’s worldview by using the humanistic lenses of the course.
9. Describe global challenges and opportunities imposed by the convergence of disability, colonialism, and violence using the humanistic lenses of the course: biopolitics & biopower, intersectionality, structural and institutional analysis, syndemics, anti-colonialism, violence, and disability.

Initially, I (Cora) had one additional unofficial learning objective for the course: to cultivate critical thinking. My commitment to engaged pedagogy “as embracing and exploring the practice of knowing together” (hooks 2010, 22) requires that I reflect on these learning objectives in relation to the outcomes of the course when taught. As I reflected on the course throughout its implementation, and discussed the course with students and graduate assistants, I came to revise my earlier emphasis on critical thinking. Instead, I realized that what I was trying to cultivate in the classroom could better be thought of as critical participation.

Whereas critical thinking seems to exist as something that people might do without a community, critical participation practices entail the ongoing process of mutual learning within a community of learners. Critical participation practices emphasize the processual nature of classroom community building in a way that does not attempt to stabilize the process. Community is an ongoing process, not a place that one pulls up to. Community, in this sense, is never built. Critical participation practices pull students and teachers outside of themselves in their longing to know: to understand how life works requires dialogue, shared understanding, and a sense of mutual interdependence in this type of community.

Assignment Overview

For each unit:

1. Students used Google Docs to share their notes and their answers to instructor-prompted discussion questions from the classroom.



2. Students wrote a weekly reflection in Google Docs on a key concept from the readings, which they then shared with other students in their small group. An example of this is below:

Reflection Question: How does Terry use Biomedicine? How is this use related to biopower and biopolitics?

Student Response: Terry interprets biomedicine as an artifact through which the United States operates biopower over its political adversaries under the faux guise of “care.” Biomedicine legitimizes the militarized intention to break down societies, systems, & individual bodies and rebuild them in a Westernized idealistic frame, basing destruction and violence as necessary steps to achieve human optimization in several facets. In a literal sense, the biomedicalization of war-torn bodies promises the enhancement of life for wounded American soldiers (through the implementation and development of prostheses) as well as general strides for the future of medicine, achieved only through the accelerated generation of available test patients. The future of medicine, as seen by Terry, is shrouded by Foucault’s “biopolitical equation” in which some populations must be sacrificed for the sake of a prioritized group. In this case, those who benefit from wartime advancements in healthcare are valued over two populations burdened with violence: American soldiers on the ground & (especially) Iraqi or Afghani citizens and soldiers in their home countries. The difference between these two vulnerable factions lies in the priorities of actors possessing biopower, like the US military for example: families of Americans injured in war are compensated and honored as wounded warriors, emphasizing their value, while the populations we claim to aide [sic] are left with an unsuitable healthcare system and “placed in a condition of slow death” (51).

3. Their group members then provided them with an initial round of suggestions, clarifications, and edits on these reflections.
4. The reflections were then submitted to the instructor, who provided feedback.
5. Then the students were asked to reflect across two or more concepts from a unit. This could be done by building on the first reflection.
6. This reflection was shared with their group for suggestions, clarifications, and edits.
7. This was then submitted to the instructor for feedback.

At the end of each unit, students then:

1. Undertook a mapping exercise using Google Sheets. During these exercises, the students, graduate assistant, and instructor mapped the intersections between the authors, analytical concepts used by the authors, the oppressive relationships, the artifacts studied, the populations studied, the individuals studied or implications for individuals, the methods used by the authors, what was not made visible but might be relevant, and the structural and systemic aspects of violence made visible. The students modified the spreadsheet simultaneously and during the class. This was done in class but could be edited and reviewed outside of class. We have provided an example of this in Figure 2. These synchronized moments allowed the instructor and graduate assistant to both hear the discussions going on in the room and see how those discussions were digitally translated into the conceptual archive in Google Sheets. Further, this enabled the instructor and graduate assistant to ask the students additional questions or challenge them to think differently about the material if they seemed to need clarification on an author or if conflict emerged between student interpretations of the texts in the classroom.



2. Wrote an analytic report building on previous reflections and the mapping exercise. This was then shared with their small group for suggestions, clarifications, and edits. Then it was submitted to the instructor for feedback.

At the end of the semester:

1. Students submitted a final project which asked them to prepare a research project using Google Doc and Google Slides. The students built off of previous units' Google Suite repertoires to do this work.
2. This project was open to any of the conceptual terrain covered in the class and any related primary source materials.
3. The students shared their first draft materials with their small groups and the instructor for feedback.
4. The students presented their work via Google Slides in class, and a few elected to do so at undergraduate research events.

If these exercises were conducted through analog means (pen and paper) or through discussion boards, this live writing/re-writing process would be compromised as all students would not have equal access to the living archive (e.g. someone with the nicest handwriting would possess the original and other students would possess facsimiles of various quality). Collaborating on Google Docs also allowed students to make their own copies into their personal drive of the collaborative sheet to adjust the size, color, and font, print a copy, or add their own notes to a separate version live or desynchronized from the class—inherently making the class much more accessible by design for a range of accommodation types.

Reflections from the Authors

Collaborative learning, mapping, and realistic expectations within the Google Suite—student perspective (Morgan)

The use of Google Suite enabled a great deal of collaborative learning during each classroom period and beyond—this facilitated cooperation among my peers as well as Cora and Alice. We, the students, kept running logs of our responses to discussion questions in Docs (which were answered in groups of students during class time), and there was a culture of common note-sharing of Cora’s clarifications regarding course materials. The collaborative Docs, shared notes, and collaborative answers to prompted questions helped everyone keep up with and critically reflect on the readings before class. This was important because many of the students come from demanding majors with intense workloads, and several of the students also work jobs to support themselves. Collaborative learning practices encouraged and facilitated by Cora made understanding the assigned materials more accessible to all students, regardless of their other obligations beyond the classroom. Additionally, the connections through running notes Docs in this elective course allowed us to work with each other toward a common goal of understanding, rather than competing for best in-major GPA or upholding privacy for fear of honor code violations one might experience in a more authoritarian-style course.

We tried something new-to-me this semester: for each unit, we performed “mapping exercises” together as a class in which we categorized the course materials by author to reveal their methods, theories referenced, analytical lenses, and other classifications (which populations were focused upon, what was made visible, etc.) using the simple structure of a Google Sheets page. At the core of this new course were the analytical reports produced upon completing each unit of material. While our weekly reflections included in-depth discussions of the assigned readings from STS and Women & Gender Studies scholars such as Chikako Takeshita and Jasbir Puar, the analyses allowed us to apply course concepts gathered in Sheets to primary sources and prove our capabilities as academic “do-ers”, rather than simply “learners” as in a banking model of education. In my case, I chose a provided primary source for my first unit analysis. However, as I gained confidence with the progression of the semester, I sought unique material adjacent to course concepts and applied my knowledge from the iterative learning process to external sources, assisted greatly by references in the shared Google Drive.

The semester’s work culminated in a final analytical report for which we were given the freedom to focus on concepts from any completed unit. I was moved by the intersectional concerns of the reproductive justice (RJ) movement, so I decided to analyze a US Senate Subcommittee report detailing the gynecological healthcare treatment of detained migrants assigned female at birth from biopolitical and RJ lenses. Using Google Suite in this final assignment gave me the space to outline and write the report (Docs) and an easy platform to shift the paper into a visual media presentation (Slides). At my fingertips was the semester-accrued knowledge of not only myself but also my peers, easily accessible through multiple iterations and formats: initial notes on readings, written reflections, and mapping exercises. With the help of Google Suite, especially in the final analytical report, I was able to utilize the perspectives of Cora, Alice, my classmates, and myself as a microcosm of the academic fields we studied together—not to mention that our colloquial terminology and foundational understanding was a welcome reprieve of comprehension from the (at times, dense) academic language we worked through in this course. According to hooks, “learning can take place in varied time frames … and that knowledge can be shared in diverse modes of speech” (hooks 2003, 44). Exemplary of this quote, student understanding was enhanced as the learning process extended outside of class time boundaries, and our conversations often veered into the vernacular.

The in-between space: observing and participating through the Google Suite—Graduate Assistant perspective (Alice)

During this course, I (Alice) was a 4th year PhD candidate in my department in the midst of defending my dissertation, hunting for post-graduation jobs, and working two other part-time jobs. While I am happy to report I have successfully defended and accepted a job offer as of writing this piece, the semester I worked with Cora and Morgan in this course was a very stressful and precarious time in my academic career. When I started working in this class as a TA again, after four semesters of teaching as an instructor of record, I was relieved to be back in the ‘learning’ role, even if it was for only a couple of times a week.

Being in this class in the in-between space of observing and participating gave me a lot of time to consider and reflect upon the arduous projects on which Cora was working. hooks’ writing about the flow of time within the classroom and the disruptions faced by demands outside of the classroom invoked my own reflections on time, belonging, and helpfulness. hooks writes, “Despite my criticism of the banking system of education, I had unwittingly been seduced by the notion of the set classroom time as the most useful vehicle to teach and learn. Dislocated, with time on my hands to contemplate being outside the structured classroom, I began to think of new ways to be immersed in teaching. Dislocation is the perfect context for free-flowing thought that lets us move beyond the restricted confines of a familiar social order” (hooks 2010, 21). These words helped me reflect on the unique time, space, and tempo of Medical Experiences and Biomedical Theories. More specifically, they helped me see how blending Google Docs with in-classroom experiences altered the flow of time within and around the classroom. Indeed, they helped create a hybrid, dislocated course environment that fostered critical participation.

While most traditional profit-oriented educational models have a frantic, scrambling energy to them—attempting to complete everything and more within the designated classroom space—this class moved with melodic tempo: periods of quick, structured notes and between times of humming stillness. By relying on Google Docs to bridge the classroom and real-world divide, students were encouraged to shift their understanding of engaging with texts from a “classroom activity” to one that extends through their writing, learning, and reading beyond the classroom space. It allowed for continued collaboration and making-together practices beyond the classroom content. Importantly, the opening of this collaborative, desynchronized classroom space was complemented by contract grading. The version of contract grading Cora implemented alleviated the toxic competitiveness in the classroom space, where colleagues are often seen as a hindrance to one’s own grade, to emphasize that grades could be ‘earned’ through collaboration, reflection, and revising. This move helped to build community amongst the students and also encouraged the students to think through the content differently (i.e. desynchronized concept cartography vs. linear reading and comprehension checks).

Collaborative technologies like Google Docs allow us to productively ‘dislocate’ the classroom and extend learning beyond the physical and temporal structures imposed by the institution. Learning and knowledge building should not be seen as an exclusively classroom task but a curious spirit that can be taken into the real world. Asynchronistic tools, like Google Suite, can also be powerful ways to reduce burnout or accommodate the flow of energy and emotions throughout the semester as students experience periods of heavy workload, lack of sleep, and time crunches. These collaborative, asynchronous assignments allowed myself and others to contribute when we could engage with more energy and enthusiasm: whether that be at 3AM, 3PM, or somewhere in between. Several times, students worked on collaborative documents early in the morning or late at night on non-class days, demonstrating that they were thinking about the content and wondering about it, even if they were ‘temporally dislocated’ from the classroom space. Importantly, it allowed students to continue building together a shared repertoire of ideas, questions, and connections that could then be relocated and contextualized within the classroom. During the in-person sessions, Cora and I could provide lively feedback and connect students’ work to one another and to the main texts. Thus, the temporally and spatially dis/located, hybrid classroom allowed us to make meaning together and enrich the material with events occurring around campus and in the students’ lives and conversations beyond the classroom.

If others were to take on this arduous project with the help of a Graduate Assistant, I would strongly recommend having open dialogues about the expectations for assistance and pedagogical approaches to evaluating assignments and classroom engagement. Cora and I began having these conversations weekly over coffee when I first began working with her in Medical Dilemmas, and we continued these conversations, albeit more loosely, in Medical Experiences. These dialogues helped me to understand and learn the craft of teaching. I credit them largely for my success and effectiveness now in classroom spaces of my own. These conversations and practices, put on display and discussed openly in the classroom space as well, model the practices of solidarity and community that (we hope!) translate into cultivating these values amongst the students.

Valuing community over individual desires: learning with the Google Suite—instructor’s perspective

At the beginning of the semester, I thought that I would be teaching my students the joy of reading to get to critical thinking (hooks 2010, 7–11, 127–133). Over time, I have come to see the ways that these learning objectives are oriented toward individual student outputs and metrics, and my own desires were imbued with neoliberal idealized forms of the learning individual. The joy of reading and critical thinking existed as individualized ways of assessing knowledge. I came to value mutual learning and community in addition to students’ critical thinking abilities. I came to see these things as interconnected in this context. The Google Suite provided the infrastructure for my own reflexive praxis in situ. My commitment to praxis and reflection allowed me to see mutual learning and critical participation develop.

Critical participation took the shape of hearing each other in different ways (hooks 2010). The students kept each other “up” in class, and we collectively learned more deeply as the semester progressed. For instance, the students’ understanding of biopolitics shifted from a characteristic that a class or group possesses to a way of describing how biological sciences and politics coproduce power differentials or a power mapping heuristic. Alice got to be with the class in the process despite the other demands of her time. We created space out of time (hooks 2010, 13–24). Students and instructors learned with each other how to do, see, and participate with the course content. Then, this course content was applied to the “outside” world via primary source analysis. By the end of the course, our classroom community—nurtured and sustained by students’ work in the Google Suite—resulted in tremendous learning. Students successfully made arguments against potential reproductive injustices, harmful environmental regulations, and military policy. This success points us to ways of promoting critical participation even amidst neoliberal education institutions that prioritize individual, rather than collective, forms of learning.

In 2003, when hooks wrote Teaching Community, Google was in its infancy, there was no Google Suite, and we still rarely thought of web applications as places for asynchronous dialogue. Within the context of the Google docs and the Google sheet, the students could try out concepts, revise their understanding of concepts, and apply the concepts to real-world policies and cases. Instructor and graduate assistant could exist as a participant-observer of the class—in sync with the learning and evaluation without the time burdens of a more traditional structure. We were learning how to make space for critical participation through iterative assignments and varied assignment types. Sharing and improving were crucial parts of this process.

We disrupted the dominant structure of the classroom itself as a form of hierarchical power: the knower (instructor) who fills all of the not-knowers (students) up like empty vessels. Our praxis, in this classroom space, resists this top-down classroom governance structure by treating each individual in the classroom as knowers, already, that are expanding their knowledge to new spaces with the guidance and support of the instructors. Our approach challenged the roles of teachers as 'all-knowers' and knowledge as transactional. Instead, we saw knowledge as something that must be built and negotiated through many different lenses to 'stabilize'.

For me, the success of the class as a space for critical participation, activation, and analysis of structural and systemic violence cannot be separated from the technocratic tools that enabled it. I recognize the Google Suite as technocratically made and maintained, but I also see it as a space that enabled our local learning community to resist top-down governance models. In this sense, the Google Suite exists as a sort of Foucauldian power articulation where both oppression and resistance commingle (Foucault 1977). The students were using the Google Suite to address issues of structural and systemic violence. At the same time, we taught each other what those issues looked like, what heuristic devices existed for mapping that violence, and how to analyze the violence.

We created modes of resistance to the forms of top-down governance through the critical participation we developed: We were developing mutual learning and mutual interdependence! As represented in the shared artifacts, we were building consensus around course concepts and a shared, accessible pool of knowledge for the students to activate over the course and outside of the classroom.

This activation took several forms. Students drew from this knowledge to analyze the readings and current events. Students encouraged each other to deconstruct various pieces of policy related to the broad topics covered. For example, one student was encouraged to research the reason why the United States recognized Jerusalem as the diplomatic capital of Israel. Another looked into reproductive policies and injustices that occurred in migrant detention centers in the United States. Students also encouraged each other to attend events for reproductive justice. The instructor and graduate assistant drew from this work to encourage students to present their work in an undergraduate research symposium. Likewise, this paper can be seen as activating our mutual learning and interdependence.

Having an open, accessible consensus-based knowledge pool developed in situ is democratic learning. This type of learning enables the resistance of top-down governance and structural and systemic violence by allowing students to activate that knowledge against the various oppressions it makes visible. They performed this activation at various levels in the classroom, at the research symposium, at the reproductive justice event, and in this paper.

Lessons Learned

Morgan: As a student, the course taught me to finally concede to the beneficial nature and power of group work. I have always resisted collaborative means of education: I knowingly operate at my own—slow—pace when developing new thoughts or completing assignments, and this has historically posed problems for me in classroom group environments where haste or efficiency is often valued over quality. In this course, having discussions and engaging materials (such as mapping exercises) during class time alongside my peers, with the added flexibility of composing written assignments on my own time outside of the classroom, gave me a new perspective on the value of working together. How our class created an interactive learning setting week by week, regardless of whether we were together or at home alone (through the utilization Google Suite), was quite remarkable, and I appreciate the experience.

Alice: A spatially and temporally disjointed classroom that uses hybridity to constellate the different actors in the flow of the classroom can be more effective at cultivating community and a sense of belonging in the class than a classroom that only exists in the time and space of designated hours.

Cora: What I learned was to embrace my own sense of vulnerability related to the online portions of the classroom. This helped me process my own uncertainty about teaching students new material and my own misplaced desires in this classroom experience. And, I openly shared with the students my uncertainty about how things might go—always a tricky move in the classroom where students can misread this as instructor incompetence. Allowing students to know my uncertainty opened up the communal space in the Google Suite more. The students could try out new ideas without reprisal or grade penalty. They could be wrong and learn with me. Likewise, they could be correct and learn with each other. They could modulate their thinking as we went. This communal space allowed me to shift my perspective from one oriented to individualized desires for the joy of reading and critical thinking to one that saw the emergence of community and critical participation. I learned to practice vulnerability to get to critical participation in the Google Suite with my students.

Coda

We do not have a formal conclusion. Instead, we thank you for reading our reflection and ask: how do you create spaces for critical participation in your classrooms? Do they surprise you when they arise? Do they rely on tools that are at odds with the goals of liberatory learning? What does your praxis look like? When technocratic tools cannot be separated from desires for critical participation practices in higher education what does this mean for democracy?

Acknowledgment

The course discussed in this article was designed by three faculty members—Cora Olson, Liora O’Donnell Goldensher, and John Aggrey. The course was then piloted by Cora Olson with Alice Fox as the Graduate Assistant.