To teach in varied communities not only our paradigms must shift but also the way we think, write, speak. The engaged voice must never be fixed and absolute but always changing, always evolving in dialogue with a world beyond itself.
—hooks 1994, 11
A curious, connected mind is poised for insight. This is also the mind that is in awe of this fathomless universe, that can read patterns, make choices, play with language, and use concepts while knowing that the map is not the territory.—Namgyel 2023
Introduction: Engaged Voices, Engaged Beings
The engaged voice as we understand it is one that is continuously informed by other voices and occurrences in the world, as hooks emphasizes in the epigraph above. The engaged voice realizes its own perspectives and contributions through perception, response, and reflection, all of which draw on individual and social bases in and over time. Through centering the engaged voice in understanding thinking, writing, speaking, and subjectivity itself, bell hooks turns, and turns us, from isolation to community. Dialogue with the world beyond depends on contexts that sustain such dialogue; we can posit this in fact as a workable definition of community. This dialogue, as hooks maintains throughout her corpus of work, has to make room for difference, not as a problem to be solved but as the ground of the possible. As an example, listen to hooks here, in an interview with George Brosi (2012):
As Rilke says, love itself is about work. It’s about the effort that you bring to it and the will, and so is community. Community is about what we bring to it, and community is based in knowing. I cannot really be with you in genuine community if I am not willing to know you. And to know you, I may have to know things that scare me or turn me off.
At base, the condition hooks urges us to transgress is the one of presumed sameness, one normal, a universal that, in academia and schooling, arose as and to justify—and conceal—whiteness, patriarchy and heteronormativity, class privilege and westernized hegemony. She urges us to refuse to be compelled by the presumption that these are the only foundations of knowledge (Myers 2023).
We write as two, white, middle-aged, able-bodied, cis-gendered women educators who have worked for nearly three decades in a predominantly white liberal arts college in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States. From this positionality and seeking always to hold it accountably, we have stewarded an Education Studies Department devoted to liberatory values and ideals. When we began working with bell hooks’s writing, “teaching with technology” could still mean writing on transparencies, and distance learning the exchange of written documents through the mail. With the emergence of the Internet, educators and other creatives saw the potential to open new channels for dialogue and collaboration (Grobstein and Lesnick 2011). With corporatization and monopolies, Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the Web as an open, democratic space gave way, as he said, to “walled gardens.” We witness cycles of access followed by curtailment, threat, and damage, the “zoom bombing” of classes in the early COVID-19 pandemic being one example, together with much greater crises such as election denial and mass shootings connecting to online extremism and the rise of generative AI.
As we confront these challenges and their changing cycles while working to sustain but also shift the field of education, we continue to engage with technology guided by a commitment to social justice and by the sense that change is both possible and natural. “The engaged voice,” hooks reminds us, must … always be changing, always evolving” (11). Following Kelley’s (2002) work on freedom dreaming as a through-line of the Black radical tradition, and in the words of one of the projects we will discuss in this paper, “we believe strongly that rather than conform our expectations to what the current system says is realistic, we need to affirm radical ideas of how life can be and let them set the aspirations of our work. Integrating imagination with practical boundaries, allowing each to inform the other, keeps our relationships vital” (Caesar et al. 2022).
In this paper, we discuss how our work using shared, co-created Google Docs in teaching and in writing is a means of honoring bell hooks by centering the idea of the engaged voice. We highlight selected examples from our practice that proceed from and instantiate this voice as part of an organic, emergent wholeness. The in-process, or live, writing that emerges with our use of Google Docs, we will suggest, models a kind of radical inclusiveness, rendering people’s presence within the process significant in itself, not only on the way to something else. In this sense, the approach, like hooks’s work, is trauma-informed and life-affirming. The binary-busting process of synchronous and asynchronous, social and individual, public and personal writing made so accessible using a Google Doc allows people to be whole without costing others’ wholeness. In other words, the radically inclusive and capacious form of this manner of communication allows both differences—and resonances—a place without requiring resolution or exclusion of the differences.
And yet. While this swerve away from the zero-sum logic of white supremacy and other oppressive architectures of thought inspires us to continue to use the technology, we recognize and share significant concerns about its dangers. This tension is an archway through which in this paper we will identify several more. We seek to name the tensions for ourselves and others as a first step to bringing them more directly into our practice with technology. We see this move as a pathway towards more accountable and more creative practice—a way of practicing freedom.
bell hooks (1994) famously argued for education as the practice of freedom: she urged all of us “to open our minds and hearts so that we can know beyond the boundaries of what is acceptable, so that we can think and rethink, so that we can create new visions,” and she celebrated teaching that “enables transgressions—a movement against and beyond boundaries [because it] is that movement which makes education the practice of freedom” (12). We use shared, co-created Google Docs with the goal of practicing freedom—from working within the boundaries of what is acceptable, from being isolated learners in impersonal systems, and from what Tema Okun (2022) has called characteristics of white supremacy culture. In tension with this goal is the potential of anything written on Google Docs to be accessed, taken out of context, and used to exploit or otherwise harm both individuals and the community effort. In tension, as well, is the very support we lend Google, as a company, by using it and legitimating its use. We recognize that we do not know very much about big tech! Of course, its ubiquity and apparent ease of access and use in our context make up a large part of its power.
We are experimenting, and in the sections below we sketch and examine examples of these experiments. In offering not a single way or a guaranteed arrival, we are seeking to practice freedom as a way of bringing possibility into being, of creating hospitable conditions, of reorienting without guaranteed arrival (Welch 1990).
Relevant Literature
Most research on using Google Docs focuses on reinforcing traditional practices, such as good writing (Nguyen and Nguyen 2022; Saeed and Al Qunayeer 2022) and the practical application of this technology within, not to change, conventional academic structures and systems. Some research explores how uses of technologies such as Google Docs can be humanizing and equity focused through embracing theoretical frameworks influenced by Culturally Responsive Teaching, social presence, validation theory, and Universal Design for Learning (Pacansky-Brock, Smedshammer and Vincent-Layton 2020). Finally, some literature considers students’ experience of technologies such as Google Docs (Henderson, Selwyn, and Aston 2017).
Our uses of Google Docs and this analysis of them were not situated in this body of literature because it focuses more on traditional concerns regarding student achievement, while we are interested in the broader work of building a critical context for questions of achievement. For this pursuit, we drew in our practices and in our analyses of those on Adichie’s (2009) “The Danger of a Single Story,” which is a form of anti-colonial, feminist, and socially just work that resonates with hooks’s call for the complexification rather than the simplification of truths that reduce people to stereotypes and prevent people from perceiving their complexity and full humanity. We likewise drew on Dancy and Edwards’s (2020) argument that higher education contexts, especially many Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs), are built on the degradation and exploitation of and violence against Black people and that those working for justice need to turn away from these and move another way (not only orient by way of reform)—the project of both our classroom- and authoring-based practices. In the analyses that follow, we are propelled by this scholarship to center our reflections in a critical reading of embodied practices, understanding that education, and not just technology, can play a key role in legislating single stories and violence or refusing these and offering alternatives.
Tensions, Transgressions, and Risks
In reflecting on our uses of shared, co-created Google Docs to facilitate community building in classrooms and in co-authoring, we have identified two central tensions. Our goal is to name and elaborate on these tensions, not, as we note above, to reconcile or to resolve them. Rather, we focus on what new questions come through from these tensions concerning how we might better relate the technology we use and what we are using it for.
The first tension is between personal, physical presence and distance from the body. Using shared, co-created Google Docs both synchronously and asynchronously, sometimes with everyone together in one actual place and sometimes with people located in different places, affords a powerful mode in which hooks’s (1994) “engaged voice” can be “always evolving in dialogue with a world beyond itself” (11). Each person adding to the shared Google Doc is speaking in their own voice, composing their thoughts (and selves—see Cook-Sather 2006) as they type. When contributors are sitting in the same space adding to a shared Google Doc, there is a strong sense of physical presence—everyone in an actual or a Zoom room contributing to and watching co-created meaning emerge in real time. There is, at the same time, a kind of distance from the body, since people are not engaging directly with one another with their bodies—not speaking, watching, listening, or moving in relation to one another’s physical presence—a distance that is increased when people are adding to a co-created, shared Google Doc asynchronously. Even as voices are engaged and evolving, present through finding words to express the self and in dialogue with those beyond the self (in contributing text, in making comments, in suggesting revisions and edits), they are also distant, posted onto an electronic page.
A second tension is between the private and the commercial, perhaps best captured as the difference between gift exchange and commodity exchange (Hyde 2018; Dalke and Lesnick 2011). The uses of shared, co-created Google Docs we discuss here invite students and us as facilitators of student learning (as well as learners ourselves) to share lived experiences, insights, arguments, questions that, if they are engaged and evolving in dialogue, are very personal—tentative, complex (and sometimes contradictory), and they can make those involved vulnerable. Writing and sharing in-process thoughts and questions, in real time, exposes us. We reveal and revise ourselves in these shared, co-created Google Docs, not only making ourselves vulnerable but also potentially destabilizing or harming as well as supporting and affirming those with whom we are in dialogue. This deeply humanizing work unfolds on a corporate platform designed for businesses and as a business. The anti-colonial, anti-classist, anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchal notion of what is “productive” that we embrace in our use of the Google Docs—which embraces Black liberatory, Black feminist, and socially just forms of teaching and learning—sits in tension with business-oriented understandings of productivity and profit.
Two Examples of Engaged Voices and Engaged Beings
We offer an example from each of our practices of using shared, co-created Google Docs to practice freedom by facilitating communal thinking and writing in classrooms and in co-authoring. Alison’s example is of an undergraduate education course she co-facilitates with an undergraduate student partner. While we focus with this example on community building within the classroom, we also note that a co-authored article emerged from this work, illustrating the wavy line between classroom-based and authoring-based teaching and learning. Alice’s example is from a web-based guide she and several undergraduate students co-authored about mentoring, which was both informed by and intended to inform mentoring practice. Her example illustrates from the other direction the wavy line between shared authoring and shared teaching and learning.
Using co-created, shared Google Docs to build classroom community
The course Alison co-facilitates was co-created with an undergraduate student in 2015 (Cook-Sather 2022). Originally called “Advocating for Diversity in Higher Education” (named by students), the course was designed to bring students’ lived experiences into dialogue with educational theory and to explore the institutional structures that sometimes support and sometimes impede the thriving of a diverse body of students (Cook-Sather, Des-Ogugua and Bahti 2018). Always co-facilitated by a BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) student, to ensure that authority in the class is not narrowly keyed to whiteness and instead embraces the richness of experience and perspective that people with different identities bring, the course enacts an anti-racist pedagogy (Kishimoto 2016) through not only co-teaching with BIPOC students but also inviting all enrolled students to co-create the course while they are taking it (Wilson and Cook-Sather 2022). Renamed “Exploring and Enacting Transformation of Higher Education” by enrolled and former students in 2021, the course enacts proactive as well as responsive, justice-oriented, collaborative work that fosters student agentic engagement and supports the pursuit of equity in higher education, as Alison and one of her student co-facilitators explain (Cook-Sather and Loh 2023).
In response to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Alison and her student co-facilitators, Jiayi Loh in 2021 and Van Nguyen in 2022, began to use co-created, shared Google Docs. Attuned to students’ need for trauma-informed approaches, Alison, Jiayi, and Van created structures for student engagement through (a) making outlines of all class sessions for students, (b) mapping responses to subject-matter-focused resources, and (c) brainstorming strategies, approaches, reactions, and recommendations (Cook-Sather and Nguyen 2023). To ensure that affective (i.e., emotional) experiences were integral to course content and processes, Alison, Jiayi, and Van created separate, shared, co-created Google Docs for (a) pooling hopes and aspirations for the course, (b) recording student responses to “checking-in” prompts, and (c) capturing insights and inspirations from class discussions (Cook-Sather and Nguyen 2023). This work was a continuation of Alison’s and Jiayi’s efforts to support student agentic engagement and enact equitable practices (Cook-Sather and Loh 2023).
From the moment of its advent through the present, the course has endeavored to create structures and spaces for student—and facilitator—voices to engage within one another in dialogue, as hooks (1994) called for:
As a classroom community, our capacity to generate excitement is deeply affected by our interest in one another, in hearing one another’s voices, in recognizing one another’s presence …. Any radical pedagogy must insist that everyone’s presence is acknowledged. That insistence cannot be simply stated. It has to be demonstrated through pedagogical practices. To begin, the professor must genuinely value everyone’s presence. There must be an ongoing recognition that everyone influences the classroom dynamic, that everyone contributes. These contributions are resources. Used constructively they enhance the capacity of any class to create an open learning community. (8)
While this commitment to inviting and supporting engaged voices is central to the course, the tensions introduced above are always at play as the course unfolds.
The tension between presence and distance takes a particular form in this course because most of the co-creation in which enrolled students engage unfolds during class meeting times. The co-created Google Docs provide spaces within which everyone can speak at once, synchronously, but without interrupting one another, and to which everyone can return asynchronously, to revisit, rethink, reaffirm, or revise their understandings and commitments. The Google Doc as a particular participant structure is both radically individualized and radically collectivized. A shared Google Doc captures every voice as it expresses or responds to something, sometimes affirming and sometimes productively challenging one another. Because the time sense around engagement is different, with silence and with a structure that allows for individuals to move in and out differently/simultaneously, these engaged voices are, sometimes at once and sometimes alternately, present with great immediacy and distant with unusual space around them within a setting at once highly social and individualized.
The second tension—between the intimacy of sharing personal human thoughts and feelings and the commercial dimension of doing so on an impersonal, corporate platform—is thrown into relief both in real time (as people’s words appear on the Doc) and over time, as people revisit these shared Docs. The sensitivity of sharing lived experiences, insights, arguments, questions that are often tentative, complex/contradictory, and can make people feel vulnerable can slip out of focus when people are doing so on flat, black-and-white, electronic pages. hooks (1994) reflects on this experience in relation to in-person exchanges in an engaged classroom, which differs so much from many of the less-personal learning experiences students have:
Students taught me … that it is necessary to practice compassion in these new learning settings. I have not forgotten the day a student came to class and told me: ‘We take your class. We learn to look at the world from a critical standpoint, one that considers race, sex, and class. And we can’t enjoy life anymore.’ Looking out over the class, across race, sexual preference, and ethnicity, I saw students nodding their heads. And I saw for the first time that there can be, and usually is, some degree of pain involved in giving up old ways of thinking and knowing and learning new approaches. I respect that pain…We practice interrogating habits of being as well as ideas. Through this process we build community. (42–43)
The vulnerability that is enabled and potentially intensified through intimate sharing of lived experiences and perspectives must be doubly considered with regard to the medium and its features. Alison and her co-facilitators are intentional about building a trusting and caring environment within which to situate their use of Google Docs; they create both individual connections with students (such as through individual Course Commitment Forms and weekly journal entries to which Alison responds). As Alison and Van explain: “All assignments endeavored to support life-affirming learning opportunities designed to ensure that social and emotional content were integrated with subject-specific content of the course—goals Van often pursued through out-of-class dialogue with and support of students” (Cook-Sather and Nguyen 2023).
Our goal here is to strive to ensure that the generative work of anti-colonial, anti-classist, anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchal engagement we strive to further in our use of Google Docs is not undermined by the platform as it serves the corporate interest of a company whose concern is not liberatory engagement, as ours is, but money. In fact, we can easily extend this concern to the “platforms” of higher education, the ivory tower, and the US educational system, which is why arguments for abolition in education are so germane (Love 2023). In doing the work we discuss here, from within systems about which we share deep critiques, we seek, with our students and colleagues, ways to change them, as hooks (1994) wrote and as we quoted earlier in this paper, “so that we can know beyond the boundaries of what is acceptable, so that we can think and rethink, so that we can create new visions” (12).
Wrestling with these tensions, Alison, Jiayi, and Van have involved themselves in the process they ask students to take up, making space to record emotional and personal dimensions in their own shared, co-created, planning Google Doc, which gives these dimensions their weight, and also releases them to the shared “page.” They intentionally link trauma-informed care and healing-centered engagement—both for them as co-facilitators and for enrolled students as co-creators—and the “pages” as spaces of holding (in the moment) and recording (to return to in the future). Questions that emerge for Alison (and Alice) through analysis of these tensions include how explicit to make them to students, how much work we need to do to understand their impact and threat, whether a consideration of alternatives to the Google platform should be more focal for us (challenging, as this form/format feels highly intuitive), and how students are understanding and possibly even taking up these ways of using Google Docs in their work as facilitators.
Using co-created, shared Google Docs to co-author
Alice’s example of the use of Google Docs to foster collaborative authoring, also very much an experience of learning, is a mentoring guide, recently published to the Web, called Believing Each Other: A Guide to Mentoring, Building Trust, and Igniting Change. Alice, together with five former mentees, now alums of Bryn Mawr College, wrote this resource following the graduation of the students. As the guide details, Alice and the students were connected by the collaboration between the College and the Posse Program, a national foundation that identifies groups of exceptional applicants coming from the same city whose attainments and promise could be overlooked by traditional admissions metrics. The group Alice worked with came to Bryn Mawr as Posse Scholars from different areas and high schools of Houston, Texas. Originally 10, per Posse’s approach, they met Alice as their mentor the summer before starting college, in 2016, having become a cohort that January when their “pre-collegiate training” began.
Once on campus, the scholars met as a group with Alice each week for 2 hours, and as individuals every other week for an hour for first and second year. For the second two years, the scholars met with Alice per their initiative, some often and some minimally. While Alice had long been an engaged mentor and advisor of students, the experience of such a concerted and well-supported mentoring process—Alice as a mentor also shared in weekly calls with a trainer who supported her work—was new to her, and deeply informative—not only in terms of students’ individual lives, paths and college experiences, but in terms of the institutional context for these experiences. After seven of the group graduated (three taking other paths along the way), Alice realized she wanted to distill and share what she had learned from this singular experience. She wrote a letter to the cohort, imagining it might grow into a personal reflection to share with others taking up this work. It begins this way:
Be honest
Be yourself
Listen with the intent to learn
Respect, trust, and believe the student
Be ready to question institutional norms
Remember that you can’t know what is realistic for someone else
Keep your promises
Be accessible
Expect to move in ways not familiar to you
Lift your students up
Let yourself be lifted up by your students
The Scholars wrote back. This led to the idea that rather than write a single-authored piece, they would collaborate to write what they called a collaborative letter to share with each other and also with a wider audience.
Writing from the Philadelphia area and Houston, where some of the Scholars had gone to be closer to home, they used a Google Doc to write asynchronously, and sometimes synchronously while meeting on Zoom, working first from what Alice had written, then to one another’s writing in an evolving, multi-layered and multi-voiced text. Dialoguing, commenting, posing questions, and telling stories—sometimes for the first time—and making arguments, they realized they were creating a reflective piece that could guide others.
As the text’s introduction emphasizes, the Google Doc format enabled the collaboration to amplify voices (“engaged voices” that hooks reminds us are dynamic and non-unitary):
In this text, sometimes we write to each other, and sometimes to you, our readers. Some of the writing is in a single narrator’s voice, and some (which appears in italics) is written in our individual voices. With this approach, we invite you to listen to the power, and the threading together, of individual and collective voices. We hope this format reflects how we created our relationships, their power, and their importance.
At a certain point, Jada, one of the co-authors and the creator of the website, had the idea of incorporating a workbook-style format into the piece to encourage readers to engage actively. The text explains:
Since the basis of this entire project is relationship, we have framed each section with prompts for reflection, inviting you, our readers, to write along with us. The process of understanding doesn’t end with our words; it continues through these prompts and the relationships you are part of. We offer this guide as a living document, not as the last word.
Calling the original Google Doc text “a living document” made room for it to be highly personal and to change. But Alice and her co-authors also wanted to create a version of it that would be more accessible, less emotionally demanding, and more generalizable to other mentoring situations. They decided to create a website that would draw out selections from the living document in a workbook format, leaving the living document, in the form of a Google Doc, “behind” the website and accessible from it. In this way, the website offers an on-ramp to the project and readers can decide whether to take it into their own work, or more deeply into the collaborative letter of this group through an invitation.
In this sense, engaged voice and an expanding community are co-constitutive. Of course, this is not always straightforward or tension free. In terms of the tension between shared physical presence and virtual engagement, Alice’s and her co-authors’ process contrasts with Alison’s example above. During the 4 years of the students’ college experience, every one of the encounters they shared with Alice was in-person, hour by hour, week by week. The only writing involved was in notes Alice took, lightly during meetings to finish after, to help her keep track of salient issues. By contrast, the Believing Each Other team co-created the living document while living in different places. None of it was written in shared physical space. All of it was written during the COVID-19 pandemic, and most during the early days, when contributors wouldn’t have gathered at least inside even if they could have. Jada and Alice subsequently co-created the website using Wix, another corporate “partner” to this highly personal and deeply political work.
Alice and her co-authors can never know now what difference their beginnings in unmediated presence would have made to the writing they did later outside of physical presence. But it is interesting to read the text for language that foreshadows embodiment. Two examples written by Alexis Giron:
I think in the beginning, there were times where we would just stare at each other until I was confident enough to say something. It comes from experiences like being overshadowed, that you noticed and somehow forced me out of old habits where I allowed myself to believe I was just being a burden on you.
I cannot count on my hands the amount of times a more privileged, white individual attempted to relate to what I was opening up about by steering the conversation away from me and more towards them. That automatically shuts me down and shows me that in this space, yet again, I’m not actually being listened to.
In terms of the tension of an online platform that encourages intimacy and that allows for corporate exploitation and harm, Believing Each Other certainly dwells in the risky middle.
A fundamental change concerning the audience for a piece of writing done in or even about school takes place when a group can jointly author a text together in real and asynchronous time. What happened for Alice and her co-authors in Believing Each Other is that as they wrote, they were writing to one another, and also invoking/inviting a community of readers sharing some of their key commitments. The Living Document opens this way:
This guide is written for people working to render ourselves and the educational institutions where we work and study capable of honoring the dignity and realizing the support needed for all students to thrive.
This is not to say, of course, that the authors can control who reads the doc or the website, or that they want to. Publication means to make something public, to open it to general observation. To publish writing helps constitute a broader community of readers and co-writers-and-thinkers-with. But it also lays the writing open to judgment, mis-appropriation, and, in the case of supplying tech companies, with more depersonalized data, extended commercialized exploitation.
Implications and Further Explorations
In using a collaborative Google Doc as the ground of composition (of thoughts, of learning community, of co-authored, published texts), the address of the writer transgresses, in hooks’s terms, conventional forms of address. The writer is already part of a living group, speaking in and to that group as well as to readers beyond, rather than alone and speaking to someone from afar in a register of argument or persuasion. The engaged voice is already, and visibly, part of a collective.
In our experience, this attribute of the engaged voice confers courage, necessary to the practice of freedom, which entails risk without guaranteed, or predictable, “success” (Welch 1990). In hooks’s words again, “Urging all of us to open our minds and hearts so that we can know beyond the boundaries of what is acceptable, so that we can think and rethink, so that we can create new visions, I celebrate teaching that enables transgressions—a movement against and beyond boundaries. It is that movement which makes education the practice of freedom” (1994, 12). Moving beyond the boundaries of what is acceptable, we find hopeful solidarities, purposeful communities, and finally abundance. Rather than being confined and over and against traditional rigor as a kind of austerity, we find enough and more than enough (Blakeney and Lesnick in process).
Working with shared Google Docs in classrooms and in co-authoring has led us to revisit the ways in which less apparently tech-mediated modes of learning and authoring have long shared in the tensions we first identified as special to the online experience. Just as considerations of current and emerging technologies are enriched by a long view of the human-technology interface (Clark 2003), so are both the historical and current manifestations illuminated by the touchstone question of who benefits, and, more deeply, how a given system has been built to promote this benefit and conceal any accompanying inequity. Inspired by bell hooks’s visionary and generous mapping, we refuse and re-groove the “normal” structures of inequitable benefit and strive to teach out of and into a world beyond it.
