Transformative Education Lab

Michael Serazio
Professor, Chair of Department of Communication

By spring 2021, as vaccines were rolling out and a long, exhausting year of masked teaching was drawing to a close, I arrived at a motto that distilled, philosophically, the upshot of what we’d just endured: “If the pandemic didn’t change you, you did it wrong.”

That truth, for me, reverberated in countless ways, but one had lasting consequence for how I approach the classroom as a formative space. Pre pandemic, I took a very laissez-faire approach to policing screens (i.e., laptops, tablets, phones, etc.): If I wasn’t interesting enough to pay attention to, that was on me. If they flubbed the final exam because of distraction, that was on them. These were adults – paying to be here, I consoled myself – and their supervisors in the career world beyond wouldn’t police their technology habits as long as they were getting their work done.

That transactional ethos misunderstood the purpose of the classroom space, in formative terms, and what our young people desperately need nowadays vis-à-vis lives lived constantly on and through screens.

It took a history-altering health crisis to get me to realize that.

Starting in March 2020, we could only be with others through those two-dimensional screens – a scar of “social distancing” that education needed to heal, alongside the tremendous formal learning loss. The pandemic – and our policy response to it – will forever define Generation Z, much in the way that
my Depression-era grandfather shopped for groceries as an octogenarian with those scars of deprivation fresh in mind.

Thus, a screen-free “tech sabbath” policy was born. I framed it not as punishment but as gift: giving students license to be offline and in-the-moment for 75 minutes twice a week. This was an endeavor to repair lost wholeness both within them and collectively as an intellectual community.

We carry in our pockets these weapons of mass distraction. Attention – as Chris Hayes’ superlative recent book, The Sirens Call, argues – is the most valuable and most exploited commodity of our era.

The call of formative education is, at least partly, a call to allocate focus in thoughtful, deliberate ways. By design, technology – be it the hardware of smartphones or the algorithms of social media content – scatters that attentiveness. And, again, that’s an attentiveness that’s necessarily oriented both inward to your soul and outward to your companions.

Pre-“tech sabbath” policy, I would notice students pretty diligently attending to what I had to say in lecture – “it’s gonna be on the test, right?” – and then checking out when their classmates would venture a thought for discussion and debate. Screens allowed for that abdication of responsibility to others in the room. (And let’s not pin this exclusively on young people: How many meetings have you been in with colleagues where a “tech sabbath” policy would benefit collective focus relative to e-mail catch up time?)

How did this go over with students? I added (and have kept) a question on evaluations asking about the policy. Roughly, 90% of respondents love it – with many admitting they were skeptical or annoyed at first but now wish it was standard policy across all their classes.

They don’t need Jonathan Haidt to articulate what the online world has done to their mental health – they know it from lived experience. Every semester, I’ll informally poll the class if they could’ve chosen to be born before or after social media came into existence, what would they prefer? It’s not even close: the former routs the latter.

We’re beginning to see states and cities rollout school-wide policy banning phones, which gives me great hope. You know those photos from the 20th century where you see people still smoking cigarettes indoors and you think, “How in world did people think that was good for their health?”

Maybe one day we’ll look back on the early decades of the 21st century – and all the ways that we allowed technology to transform and dictate our values rather than the reverse, from phones in schools to AI overtaking society – and we’ll ask the same question.

Our educational environments determine the parameters of their potential. I was mindless about that, pre-pandemic, but closing all those screens down has opened up an infinitely more satisfying sense of wholeness, purpose, and community – for them and for me.

Michael Serazio is a professor and chair of the Department of Communication at Boston College and the author, most recently, of The Authenticity Industries | Stanford University Press.