Chatalist: Zoom Chat as Form

A latecomer to pandemic pedagogy, I’m lately drawn to the phenomenon of Zoom Chat–something else that happens while I’m teaching. I first found it distracting and disconcerting, especially when I tried to follow Chat while talking and listening to students talking. I soon gave up on that impossible task and just let Chat happen. I would download and read the Chat after class, viewing it as a supplement to what happened while I pointed things out and led class discussion. Or were the talking Zoom squares and Chat more akin to a movie with subtitles? Are Chat comments a hyper form of captioning or annotation?

I learned that students are doing all kinds of things in these Chats: commenting on texts we were discussing, fancrushing and hating on literary characters, sharing family stories that relate to class readings/viewings, making connections to texts they studied in other classes, recommending films and TV series, validating one another’s comments. I ask for volunteers to serve as Chat Curator so they can pull relevant comments into our audio discussions, momentarily aligning the channels. Here Zoom Chat becomes a form of digital polyphony.

I begin to think of Chat as an augmentation or extension of each class session, something beyond a cyber call-and-response. At one level, it can be a multimodal form of class participation (some students talk in the squares and text in the Chat, others prefer one or the other). At another level, Chat constitutes a multilmodal form of collaboration. At still another, Zoom Chat functions as a pop-up reading group.

Student discourse shifts registers in Chat. It becomes more confessional. It becomes slangier, zestier, punchier. Is Chat a collaborative form of subversion? If Chat operates as a subterranean stream, does that make it a punk practice within Zoom teaching? As I save each Chat and file it on my laptop, what kind of archive am I making? And how will records of this emergent form remake our future teaching?  – MB

Image Sources:

Music Theory Academy
Multimodality for Diverse Audiences
Karst Hydrology