Trans folx have experienced violence and hatred as long as they are referenced in history. Transphobia has, if anything, become worse with the isolation, uncertainty, and fear brought on through the recent pandemic. At the best of times, trans individuals are watched and monitored as deviants and even dangerous people. We experience the Panopticon any place we may be – whether it is in bathrooms, retail stores, bars, restaurants, or public spaces. Society goes to great lengths, it would seem, to ensure that we all adhere to expected gender norms and roles. Authors such as Butler, Foucault, and Haraway have discussed at lengths the way LGBTQ2IA+ folx, and any marginalized community for that matter, are constantly monitored and potentially punished for transgressions if they fail to adhere to societal rules of the dominant culture. The key here is that there remains a distinction between public and private spaces. I once thought that I myself had firm boundaries between my public and private activities. The onslaught of COVID-19 has changed all of that.
This last summer, instead of taking the summer semester ‘off’, I had the opportunity to participate in a research project for the Guelph Museum, in collaboration with a history professor here at UoG. I took a special topics class in order to be a part of the opportunity, which meant that I had to also take two other courses in order to stay on OSAP as a full-time student. There were no other courses applicable to my theatre or creative writing program, so I opted to take a history course in Scottish witchcraft and 18th-century witch hunts. The third course was taken strictly as a filler course for me so as to obtain the necessary full-time credits. This was an absolute mistake, as I soon found out.
While most courses have adapted well to the new Zoom format that is so necessary in this time of social distancing, including opening options for how best to critique student learning, not all are doing so well. There are many professors at the university who are attempting to recreate the same learning paradigms as we had going in. Most of the classes I have been involved with have chosen final ‘take-home’ exams, final essays, or final projects as the best means to evaluate students in the new asynchronous learning system we have been forced to adapt. There are, however, some who still believe that a traditional final exam is both appropriate and necessary to continue using. You know the one – huge numbers of anxious students filing into the proctored classroom at the final hour in complete silence – bearing only their pens, pencils, erasures, and student IDs to their properly spaced desks. There they remain for upwards to three hours, pencils scratching away a sweated rhythm under the watchful eye of both disinterested professors and exhausted TAs.
There are important questions to be asked here – especially in this time of COVID when we have so many opportunities open to us to reframe and restructure our lives for the better. How valuable is this traditional education format to our needs as a community and society today? Is this testing structure, developed through oppressive systems of colonialism, racism, and classism truly benefiting students in today’s world? Do we still need to forcibly submit students to spew out knowledge garnered through all-nighters and hours of pouring over notes in order to spit back answers which can be easily researched and processed in a tiny portion of the time? Do these exams in fact harm large percentages of the population who do not learn best under these circumstances? What is it that we are actually trying to evaluate – and more to the point, who are we trying to eliminate or marginalize through a colonized system of hegemony and hierarchy?
These, however, are not the questions I am attempting to address in this single article. Rather, I want to focus on the current use of Respondus Lockdown Browser for administering final examinations in the student’s own home and personal space. This technology was designed to ensure that no student could ever cheat on a closed-book exam – operating, of course, under the assumption that all students will cheat if given the opportunity. Upon opening the provided link to the online exam, the student must first download this surveillance software onto their computer’s hard drive. All browsers and programs other than CourseLink must be closed before Respondus will allow the process to continue. This can involve multiple attempts to close out systems like Microsoft Teams or Discord which continue to run in the background.
The second phase of this invasive process, once the Respondus screen has taken over your system, is to provide all the necessary tests and checks of your required webcam and microphone. By the end of this session, which lasts for 10 to 15 minutes, you are allowed to begin the exam after being once again reminded to keep your eyes focused on the computer screen at all times. Failure to do so can result in having your exam flagged for review. There are many things that can cause your attempt to be flagged. Extraneous noise, poor lighting, people walking through the room, a pet barking, or otherwise engaging in distracting behavior are a few. Eating or drinking during the exam is not allowed and is yet another activity that could cause your exam to be flagged. By the end of the exam, the student has submitted to demoralizing and panopticonic surveillance that can have a severe impact on mental and emotional well-being, as well as causing undue anxiety which can hamper adequate test performance.
This undesirable and unjust system can be much worse for marginalized individuals who have suffered deep-seated emotional traumas through experiencing social surveillance in other aspects of their daily lives. In short, this is a process which delivers harm, increases anxiety, disrupts home situations, assumes privilege (which many BIPOC and queer students may not actually have), and brings systemic emotional violence into their homes; a place which, by all definitions, should be a safe haven from a public realm all too ready to control, marginalize, and punish them for their social transgressions. We simply need to do better than this for our children, ourselves, and our future. Rather than allowing the systemic violence of the past to define our education and livelihoods, it is imperative that we use the often chaotic disruptions of this pandemic to take a close look at what doesn’t work for us any longer, and make the necessary changes to benefit all of us. In the academic institution, the Respondus Lock-down browser is a part of a historical narrative that must be wiped away. It is time to redefine what true learning and education is, and begin to tell each other a different story.