With the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in March 2020, universities found themselves rapidly adapting to an entirely digital space; every pedagogical interaction became mediated through a series of platforms and apparatuses. As part of their adapting to this condition, many universities swiftly implemented the use of proctoring software, which does the invigilation work normally performed by professors and TAs on campus. For teachers, this shift raised many pedagogical questions and concerns around classroom facilitation and student assessment as well as how to care for the well-being of students, connecting to a broader critical evaluation of the relational logics of the classroom. While the carceral logics of the classroom have always been present, the implementation of proctoring softwares further inscribes these logics into our educational spaces and simultaneously extend into the private personal spaces of the home, which also unequally impact students of color, students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, transgender students, undocumented students, and disabled students. Simultaneously, this engenders an environment of distrust, neither of which are beneficial for student learning (Lang 2013).
Thus one of the core aims of this project is to invite teachers (high school teachers, professors, lecturers, TAs, tutors, etc.) to reflect on their own classroom practices and to begin providing an abolitionist pedagogical approach to the digital university classroom. As such, we provide a guide to refusing carceral/surveillance logics in the classroom. This guide is not intended to be extensive, or even comprehensive. Abolition requires collective buy-in and world-building. Rather we ask, how might we support students’ personal and intellectual growth in ways that refuse the carceral, capitalist, abelist logics while sustaining and nourishing students? And as universities begin to address what we’ve learnt, gained, and lost over the past year: how can we imagine the (digital) classroom differently?