The interface of the other: ethicality of online education from the teacher’s perspective

Abstract

In this article, we investigate the ethical conditions of online education by extending Levinas’ concept of the ‘face’. Considering the ‘face’ of the other raises the question of what it is we see when communicating online—is it the face of the other, or something else? How does this perception constitute the other for ‘me’? Can we access the ethical dimension of experience in online communication? To describe the ‘face’ we encounter in online educational settings, we introduce the concept of ‘interface’: the presentation of the other in something other than their body. We argue that in online settings, the interface becomes the entry point for ethical pedagogy. Importantly, we do not argue that online teaching is preferable to other forms of teaching. Instead, we aim at sharpening the view of the limits and possibilities of online teaching.

Introduction

For many years now, there has been a global shift towards distance learning and online learning, accelerated by the global Covid-19 pandemic (e.g. Kauppi et al. 2020; Bączek et al. 2021; Iniesto et al. 2021; Leo et al. 2021). This shift has sparked growing discussion about the limits and possibilities of online learning. Empirical studies have demonstrated diversity in the ways in which different persons and educational contexts respond to online settings. For instance, Bączek’s et al. study found no statistical difference between opinions on face-to-face and online learning respectively in terms of the learning method’s ability to increase knowledge; but e-learning was considered to be less effective than face-to-face learning for improving skills and social competences (Bączek et al. 2021). According to Kauppi et al. (2020), the main challenge for online learning is achieving the collaborative aim of creating knowledge together, virtually. While distance learning has benefits, it does not effectively develop interpersonal skills (Leo et al. 2021).

There are similarly diverse philosophical views on the merits of online education. On one hand, some contend that online communication does not make learning necessarily less or worse, just different (e.g. Ward 2018; Kekki 2020, 2022). Benade (2015), for example, argues that the idealization of digital pedagogy empowers individual learners to engage in processes of lifelong learning. On the other hand, some argue that online education is less meaningful than education taking place in person (e.g. Bakhurst 2020b; Berenpas 2021). Several scholars have argued that online education blurs the identities of subjects participating in educational interactions (e.g. Zembylas and Vrasidas 2005; Dreyfus 2008).

The ethicality of online education and the possibilities of authentically encountering other persons online have been widely discussed, especially in the phenomenological literature. Levinasian discourse within philosophy of education (see Zembylas and Vrasidas 2005; Berenpas 2021) and phenomenology (Cohen 2000; Staehler and Kozin 2021) on this matter has paid special attention to the Levinasian concept of the ‘face’ and, correspondingly, to the possibility of ethical relations via media. Notably, not all Levinasian discussion is critical of the meaningfulness of online communication or education. Hill (2013) suggests that online encounters between avatars can gesture towards moral responsibilities offline. While Levinasian ethics forms a part of Hill’s argument, he acknowledges that the ethical demand for a face-to-face encounter is a problematic requirement online.

However, while it is surely possible to design effective and interactive online learning experiences, the question of whether online education is fruitful for learners does not provide us with the full picture. As Joris Vlieghe (2022) argues, education also relates to the issue of how we come to inhabit a shared world and the perspective from which we do this, which is not a matter of learning. An important aspect of this context is the perspective of the teacher, which has not received much attention in discussions of online education. If we assume that the teacher is not a mere provider of information and opportunities for learning, then the teacher forms their part of the educational situation as a whole person, standing in mutual relation to the students. Thus, it is relevant that we turn our attention to the teacher’s perspective concerning online educational encounters, which often lack face-to-face level interaction. The ethical status of digital pedagogy requires further theoretical analysis of the opportunities and limitations that come with online teaching. What needs to be analysed here is the difference in experience which is brought about when the face-to-face classroom is substituted with screen teaching.

In this article, we argue that the ‘interface’ becomes the entry point for ethical pedagogy in online settings. We investigate the ethical conditions of online education through an extension of Levinas’ concept of the ‘face’. The idea of the ‘face’ of the other points towards the question of what we are seeing when communicating online—is it the face of the other, or something else? How does this perception constitute the other for ‘me’? Can we access the ethical dimension of experience in online communication? To describe the ‘face’ we encounter in online educational settings, we develop the concept of the ‘interface’: the presentation of the other in something other than their body. Importantly, we do not argue that online teaching is preferable to other forms of teaching. Instead, we aim to sharpen the view of the limits and possibilities of online teaching.

The philosophical method and theoretical framework of the argument is, as its grounding in Levinas suggests, phenomenological. This means that we describe the situation of online pedagogy as a phenomenon, or as it is experienced—not, for instance, as presented by scientific models or as assumed based on preconceptions or prejudices. The concept of the ‘interface’ in this context thus refers to what appears to the subject engaged in distance education. By doing this, we continue and revise a similar task taken up by Vrasidas and Zembylas twenty years ago, in 2005. During this twenty-year period, we have learnt much about the possibilities of online education, and the development of digital tools has brought us novel insight into what can be done online. While Vrasidas and Zembylas focused chiefly on the role of the computer in online learning, and the ability of the internet to deliver communication over long distances, we are now interested in the appearance of the other in online teaching and learning settings. We assess the possibility of the ethical relation in digital pedagogy through a study of the appearance of the other’s face, as an interface.

In the following, we first present the starting point of the argument: working with an account of teaching as dialogical, we note the conditions framing online interactions which could be defined as online ‘teaching’. Next, we pursue an investigation of online teaching by way of the Levinasian picture of ethics, wherein the ‘face’ of the other is the ethical object, extending this to develop our metaphorical concept of the ‘interface’. Finally, we describe the ethical character of online education in terms of the interface.

Teaching as dialogical: making the question relevant

Online learning environments are not just about the learner and their abilities to acquire skills and knowledge in online settings. Rather, the perspective of the learner and what the learner does in online environments is merely one of many perspectives the situation includes, such as those of the organizer(s) of the learning environment, possible other learners and the learning community, and, last but certainly not least, the teacher. The roles and forms of these other perspectives in online education naturally vary according to the type of educational setting, that is, whether it is formal, non-formal, or informal. In this article, we focus mostly on formal and non-formal situations, in which the teacher (or, in some cases, the instructor) is crucial for the very existence of the situation, and thus their role as a subject perceiving the students warrants explication.

Teaching, including online teaching, can take many forms, from lectures to adults to interactive learning with children or group work with small groups of teenagers, and even pre-recorded video. As Hamilton and Feenberg (2012) have argued, based on an analysis of historical developments in online education and an early experiment in educational computer conferencing, effective online teaching, like effective face-to-face instruction, is fundamentally relational and not merely a matter of information delivery. What all forms of teaching have in common is, following Gert Biesta’s formulation, the provision of knowledge, skills, ideas, motivation, and so on. Students gain what they could not have come up with themselves or, as he puts it, find ‘what [they] were not looking for’ and receive ‘what [they] did not ask for’ (Biesta 2020: 10). Online education is no exception (Alirezabeigi et al. 2020). Notably, in the following, we take up a critical perspective on Biesta’s work on subjectification, and construct a novel Levinasian framework.

We have chosen to focus on the teacher’s perspective because it is a crucial part of what makes the situation educational. The teacher is not merely a provider of information but is there, with the students and in communication with them. For over a decade, Biesta (2013) has argued for the need to bring teaching back to education, in order to save education from what he calls ‘learnification’. This term refers to the reduction of educational language to learning and the learner. Despite the strong emphasis in education discourse on learning and learners, some educational scholars have argued, like Biesta, that education cannot be reduced to mere learning (e.g. Vlieghe 2022). Education is a whole situation which includes not just learning but also instruction, teaching, development of intuitive understanding, motivation, and the development of one’s world-view and the sense of a shared world.

This article approaches the possibilities of online teaching with a commitment to looking beyond learnification, or the reduction of educational encounters to products of learning. As Benade (2015) has argued, this educational outlook uncritically supports the market-driven economy with its excessive focus on measuring individual learning outcomes. Papastephanou, in turn, describes how the Levinasian face-to-face relation in education has the potential to challenge the economic order of liberal education, where education is valued for its ability to produce subjects of the liberal state (Papastephanou 2008: 139–41).

Teaching involves forming a shared world, not simply promoting individual self-development or growth (Bakhurst 2020a; Blumsztajn et al. 2022). Teaching is not just about facilitating the learning process for singular individuals, but forming an experience of ‘us’ through instruction and guidance.¹ Biesta has approached education with attention to socialization, qualification, and subjectification in the teacher–student relationship. In this relationship, the teacher has the power to call students’ views, actions, and attitudes into question, to challenge them to grow, and to give them the ‘gift of teaching’, as he puts it. Biesta argues that teaching is a situation:

where we are not just being given what we didn’t ask for, and not just being given the conditions under which we can recognize something as true or meaningful, but where we are being given ourselves, our subject-ness, which […] is basically an act of emancipation. (Biesta 2020: 12)

However, our analysis challenges Biesta’s one-dimensional view of teaching, where only the teacher is presented as gift-giver. As Zhao (2012) has pointed out, the mission of education goes beyond enabling students’ subjectivity. Through Levinas, the distinct nature of teaching, rather, flows from the dialogical relation between the subjects coming together in the educational situation which includes teachers and students, where both teacher and student are challenged by one another’s presence and expectations. On a Levinasian, dialogical model, the student-as-other would, reciprocally, be able to challenge the teacher and call them into question. This model constitutes a new framework for analysing the ethicality of online teaching.

It is widely accepted that teaching takes place in the interplay of the personal, communal, and societal levels. Teacher and student are in various, reciprocal relations (however briefly or anonymously due to, for example, the large size of the group—see Biesta 2004). Especially in non-formal settings, the teacher/student division, though it persists, is not clear-cut and can vary from moment to moment; the educational situation is in constant relation to the surrounding educational community, as well as to other close communities; and the teaching does not occur in a void, but always in relation to the rest of the society. There is no such thing as ‘neutral’ or non-relational education; and this applies equally to education taking place online.

In other words, the value of teaching is not just in the qualification and socialization—providing skills and knowledge you did not ask for—and the subjectification of individual students, nor simply in providing them the skills and knowledge of the discipline (see Biesta 2017). Rather, it is the second-personal relation between the teacher and the student(s) as ‘you’ (see Bakhurst 2020b), different from ‘me’, which disrupts my way of looking at the world. In other words, by their very presence, student(s) disrupt the ‘sameness’ of the teacher’s way of looking at the world by bringing another perspective into the teacher’s experience. Thus, although Biesta’s (2017) formulation of teaching is likewise articulated in terms of a Levinasian dialogical process between the subject and the other, this article challenges Biesta’s view of teaching as enabling only the subjectification of the student. We draw attention, instead, to the subjectification of the teacher.

Notably, the teacher–student relationship is, still, by definition asymmetrical. It is the teacher who has epistemic superiority in the situation, providing the student(s) with the knowledge, skills, and space for an experience of a shared world. This holds even for teaching conceived as dialogical because, in a dialogical situation, unequal power relations may be necessary for or constitutive of the (i.e. educational) situation; without such relations, it would become something else.

This model also is what makes the question of online education interesting. If it were merely about the giving and taking from teacher to student, the distinction between online and physically present teaching would be simply practical: how do I, as a teacher, provide students their educational content in this setting? However, the ongoing discussion of online education suggests that the distinction between online and physically present teaching is, rather, related to the possibilities of our communication (see Bakhurst 2020b), togetherness (Ward 2018), and factors like vulnerability (see Berenpas 2021). Moreover, Levinas has argued that teaching is ethical when there is opportunity for challenging the teacher and the teaching (Levinas 2007, 2009; see also Castillo, Kukkola, and Siljander 2022).² Online settings constitute a different form of interaction for teachers and students, since it lacks the shared physical space and, in some cases, even the temporally shared experience of in-person learning. For example, in the case of pre-recorded video material, there is no possibility for participants to engage in reciprocal communication; or, in the case of written messages between a student or group of students and the teacher, the situation lacks the possibility for the reciprocal challenging of one another’s perspectives.

Here, to challenge means to disrupt the subject’s perspective on the world, a disruption occasioned by the mere appearance of another consciousness as another perspective on the world, potentially questioning ‘my’ ways of viewing and living in the world. Such challenging involves the requirement that we constantly adjust our own thoughts and actions when communicating with others (Biesta 2004). Online education often lacks the sense of a shared experience. Yet, in a dialogical situation, shared meaning-making is just as important as individual processes of gaining new knowledge and understanding.

The interface: what appears in online teaching

If we think of teaching as an essentially dialogical situation, wherein the teacher is simultaneously responsible for providing the student(s) skills, knowledge, and means to grow as persons, online education surely forces us to think about the limits and possibilities of teaching. These limits are much deeper than the mere practical affordances of online as opposed to offline education, such as the ability to communicate with students over a distance or the inability to touch them online, the focus of Zembylas and Vrasidas (2005). A profound way to interrogate these limits is to investigate what kind of a ‘face’, in the Levinasian sense, if any, we encounter in the online environment. In the following, we conceptualize the ‘face’ in online contexts as an interface. The term ‘interface’ is mainly used in information technology to denote what appears to the user; that is, not the underlying algorithm, programming, or the metals of which the screen is built (see Zembylas and Vrasidas 2005). By using this term metaphorically to describe the appearance of the other in the online environment, we make explicit the difference between the face of the other and that which appears of the other in online, media-based communication. Our metaphorical use of the term bears the same sense of veiling the underlying system—in our case, the actual other consciousness behind the online tools. Poetically put, what I see of the other online is the interface of the other, not the other as they experience themselves in their actual situation.

Levinasian philosophers of education sometimes characterize online education as less authentic, intimate, or simply worse than in-person education (e.g. Berenpas 2021); but Levinas’ concept of the face and the ethical relation to the other offers many different angles on and applications to this question. Although we do not claim that online education is worse than physically present education, neither do we value online education over that which takes place in person. Based on earlier research, we assume that such normative claims are not contingent on the online or offline status of the education in question, but are rather related to specific educational contexts and situations (Kekki 2022).

In the distinction between online and physically present education, the difference lies largely in how we perceive the other. Levinas has characterized the other person as manifest through the phenomenon of the ‘face’, looking at the world and at me. To clarify, a ‘phenomenon’ in phenomenology—the science of phenomena—is anything which appears to consciousness; anything that can become an object of perception or thought (Husserl 1984: 235). The idea is that, instead of investigating the truthfulness of facts or metaphysical orders of the world, we can turn our attention to things as they appear. Questions of reality, truth, and morality are bracketed, set aside because they are not relevant to the immediate appearance of the object. The appearance of the object is as it is regardless of those realities not present to the perceiving subject which might otherwise bear on the situation. For instance, my experience of communicating with my mother online does not tell me what percentage of communication is verbal or non-verbal. My experience is what it is regardless of whether we believe that 90 per cent, 50 per cent, or 10 per cent of our communication is verbal.

For Levinas, in the phenomenon of the face, the other appears as a ‘face that speaks’; that is, as a face that looks at me, speaks to me, and thereby disrupts my way of perceiving the world. The face of the other is not a plastic and static object, such as a statue, a book, a picture, or a coffee cup. Rather, for Levinas, the face comes as if between me and the other. We can analyse what appears to us—the face of the other, but not the other itself:

The Other (Autrui) who manifests himself in a face as it were breaks through its own plastic essence, like a being who opens the window on which its own visage was already taking form. His presence consists in divesting himself of the form which does already manifest him. His manifestation is a surplus over the inevitable paralysis of manifestation. This is what the formula ‘the face that speaks’ expresses. The manifestation of a face is the first disclosure. Speaking is before anything else this way of coming from behind one’s appearance, behind one’s form, an openness in the openness. (Levinas 1996a: 53)

The face refers to the phenomenon through which the other makes an entry into the subject’s consciousness, comes into view and appears to the subject. Levinas describes the face as ‘abstract or naked. The nudity of a face is a bareness without any cultural ornament, an absolution, a detachment from its form in the midst of the production of its form’ (p. 53). From this perspective, a face could be perceived not just as a concrete face, but as an abstract bareness that could possibly carry the voice of the other and thus call the subject to answer. In Totality and Infinity Levinas states:

The face is a living presence; it is expression. The life of expression consists in undoing the form in which the existent, exposed as a theme, is thereby dissimilated. The face speaks. The manifestation of the face is already disclosure. (Levinas 2007 [1969]: 66)

Levinas connects the face to the ability of the other to speak and to have meaning. The face breaks through any possible static form, and its living presence changes as the face speaks. Therefore, when we speak of the ‘face’ in the Levinasian sense, we speak of the other’s appearance to ‘me’ as the perceiving subject—the other is always other for me. That is, what appears is not the other as a whole because, for Levinas, the other is absolutely transcendent, in the sense that ‘I’ can never fully grasp every aspect of the other. The face of the other is not a plastic essence, but a manifestation. In this manifestation the other mind, so to speak, is not there for me to perceive as the other themselves perceives it. Still, the other as other and not me, appears to me in and as a face. This is not to emphasize the subject, but to explicate that the other is other not to themselves, but to an ‘I’ perceiving that other, who appears in their face looking at the world and me, facing me. Importantly, to perceive another person, the subject does not have to see their actual face physically. The ‘face’ of the other is something one can perceive in multiple different ways—hearing the other speak or act, seeing the other, or feeling the other. In all these different cases, what appears is another consciousness who perceives the world and me.

The face of the other, as a face that speaks, also involves responsibility to the other in the sense of responding or being able to respond. The idea of the other as facing me indicates that the other person is not simply one phenomenon among others, but profoundly constitutive of the experience of the world as already interpersonal and ethical. Thus, the face is a representation that calls my consciousness into question and challenges me to respond. To be faced with the other means to be called into conversation with the other.³

When we communicate online, we do not encounter the other in their physical presence, but the other still ‘faces’ us—or we are faced with the other. There are, however, several crucial differences in the appearance of the other as a face or, as we put it, as an interface online. First, online communication, especially in cases where we do not see the others’ bodies on the screen or hear their live voices, requires specific cognitive skills (Roseberry et al. 2014; Anderson and Subrahmanyam 2017). To be able to regard the object (e.g. the screen) as presenting another person and the situation as an educational one, the subject—a student or teacher—needs to be able to see as if through the screen, and to see the other where the other’s actual physical body is not. For Levinas, even reading a book may be an encounter with teaching, even though the teacher is not physically present in the written text. In the text we do not find the face of the other; rather, we sketch and interpret them. Levinas calls this the ‘profile’ of the other (2009: 213, 223). Reading forms a peculiar relation with the other, in which we are faced with the other’s thoughts without the other’s face (French: visage).⁴ Thus, the written text, books, and letters are, in the Levinasian context, a prototype of distance learning and distance teaching. However, perceiving a book as a teacher requires a specific kind of attitude towards the book as written by someone, as telling me something and not being a mere physical object. The reader of a text needs to have the tools to interpret the text.

If we apply Levinas’ philosophy to teaching, we find that teaching should reach beyond challenging the students to change and grow as individuals. The challenge takes place in dialogue and conversation. With respect to online teaching, we need to examine what channels there are for conversation to take place, since conversations there do not happen face to face, but rather interface to interface. In online communication, the other appears to me, one way or another, in the very act of communication. Otherwise, there would be no experience of communication but an experience of simply myself, speaking alone. Thus, the other is manifest to us in some way, even in an online environment. However, the way in which the other appears is different because they are physically absent. In the online environment, I know that the screen upon which the other’s face appears is not the other’s physical body; the screen merely shows the picture of the other to me. Still, we are in contact, and the actions performed by the other really are their actions and not, for instance, the product of my imagination (cf. Fuchs 2013).

In an online environment, it is not exactly the face that speaks, but an interface that the program presents us; the other’s profile, their messages, a mark of their being online, their faces and voice in a video call, and so on. In contrast to what, for instance, Berenpas (2021) argues, the interface as a phenomenon still bears essential similarities to the face: both phenomena are attached to the possibility of the other and carry traces of the other. Behind those users, profiles, and cameras—even those which are turned off—there are other persons who potentially have the power to speak, to face me. The interface can even be perceived as a living presence, that the other’s voice pierces through.

Other phenomenological discussion (mainly Husserlian and Merleau-Pontian), both within phenomenology and in the philosophy of education, has centred rather on the absence of the lived body of the other in online communication (see Dreyfus 2008; Waldenfels 2009; Fuchs 2013; Friesen 2014; Ward 2018; Kekki 2020, 2022, 2024; Osler 2020, 2024; Svenaeus 2021). This discussion is more variegated on the question of the perception of other consciousnesses via media, involving both optimistic and pessimistic arguments in this regard.

As Hyde and Rouse (2022), Kekki (2020, 2022, 2024), and Osler (2020, 2024) have argued, if we perceive something as an instance of online communication—which we by definition do, if the situation appears to us as education—the object already involves, for the perceiver, the perception of other persons. To put it in the first-person perspective, in online communication, someone speaks, and that someone may speak to me, perceiving me from their perspective, even if I do not physically see them seeing me. As Waldenfels (2009) has characterized the media-based experience of others, those others are perceived as ‘absent’ as ‘somewhere there’ from where their communication or an indication of their existence and connection with me is brought to me. He calls this ‘teleabsence’ instead of ‘telepresence’. In an online context, others are not here with me, but they are physically somewhere else, and still, we are connected. What I do in this situation gets a response from others, and I am responsible in front of them.

The interface thus appears to consciousness with a similar logic as does the face of the other. The difference lies in where the face or interface appears: in the other’s physical body (or what appears to me as such), or in another object—in this case, the screen. The other’s body thus appears to be somewhere other than in the object I perceive. In this sense, while for Levinas, the face appears as if between me and the other, the interface is concretely between me and the other, and involves much variation; the interface can be a picture on the screen, a voice in a phone call, even text in what appears as a message from another person. When examining the ethical possibilities of the online educational setting, the question remains: can the other call the subject into question through the interface?

The ethicality of online teaching: facing the interface

Above, we have discussed teaching as dialogical and the appearance of the other in an online environment as an interface. As a synthesis of these two theses, we present the ethicality of online teaching as potentially challenging, but nevertheless possible. Here, the interface becomes the entry point for ethical pedagogy.

For Levinas, the face of the other (or any perception in which the other’s ‘looking at me or the world’ becomes apparent), as a central factor in our shared social world, is what makes our lived experiences of the world ethical to begin with. Ethics is, as described by Levinas, a radical calling into question of the same (Levinas 1996a, 1996b, 2007 [1969]; see also Castillo, Kukkola, and Siljander 2022). That is, it is the presence of another perspective which disrupts the ‘sameness’ of one’s perspective on the world. What calls into question this sameness is the other expressing their different perspective on the world simply by appearing to me, facing me.

In this context, morality or rightful action are different from ethics. The ethical relation opens up the very space for rightful action. In an ethical relation, our actions can be considered normatively right or wrong in respect to the other; but without the ethical relation, there is no space for considering the morality of one’s actions towards the other (see Todd 2008; Benade 2015). The distinction is somewhat analogous to the difference between the philosophical field of ethics as philosophy of morals, and morals as the normative distinction between right and wrong. For Levinas, the ethical level of interaction between the subject and the other requires a search for justifiable actions, to discover one’s moral responsibilities and requirements. The concept of responsibility in this Levinasian sense originates from the concepts pertinent to a trial; in being responsible, we are looking for the rightful action, for moral accountability and duty (but not in the Kantian sense).

The face of the other presents the other to me as alive—it is alive to me—and challenges the subject to constantly renegotiate with the face (Levinas 1996a, 2007 [1969]). Levinas states that ‘the face resists possession, resists my powers. In its epiphany, in expression, the sensible, still graspable turns into total resistance to the grasp’ (Levinas 2007 [1969]: 197). The face of the other resists the subject’s effort to control the other. In an online setting, the teacher’s position is limited by different factors from those at work in a classical setting: for example, the teacher might see the full name of the student and hear their voice while, visually, the interface remains a dark empty screen. Yet, the other’s interface resists the teacher subject’s power. In this way, the interface of the other is not just an image, but alive.

Dialogical teaching can thus occur in educational spaces where teacher and student can call one another into question, standing in an ethical relationship in the Levinasian sense. However, the educational space that allows for the disruption of normality, and poses a challenge to the same, is different online from what it is face to face. Thus, the ethicality of a teacher’s actions in any space should be evaluated by attention to the opportunities students have for interrupting the peaceful flow of things. Lee (2019) points out that an ethical space is opened precisely in a disturbance to the teacher. To ensure the ethicality of online teaching, various channels of interference and disruption should be considered in the formation of the educational interaction. In online education, the appearance of the other as an interface means that although, for the teacher, the interface is not the same as the physically present face of the other, the interface nevertheless encounters the teacher and makes the teacher responsible to the student(s).⁵ The fact that students are able to pose questions to the teacher in online settings demonstrates that even in online teaching, there are traces of dialogue present.

The pedagogical relation is, notably, different from the ethical relation, and these two may not always appear simultaneously. For instance, a teacher may have a pedagogical relation to the student(s) via a book or pre-recorded material; but since the students and the teacher do not perceive one another, no ethical relation opens up between them—at least not before a student reaches out to the teacher. In the context of online education, the possibilities for perceiving what the other perceives are different from those available in the physical presence of the other; they are plausibly narrower. The teacher cannot share the same physical space with the students and thus understand their possibilities regarding their environment. The teacher often does not perceive the students’ situations in a fulsome manner, but sees only their faces, hears their voices, or sees merely their names on the screen.

Still, the others—the students, in this case—appear to the teacher. Just in being there, appearing to the teacher, they disrupt the teacher’s perspective on the world. On the screen, there are not mere symbols, objects like others one could encounter online, but behind those initials, names, or voices, there are other persons looking at the same shared situation, from their own perspectives and physical locations. The interface, so to say, looks at ‘me’ as the teacher, and demands something from me.

For this reason, online teaching may still be, at least in some cases, dialogical, a virtual being-with-others despite a lack of physical presence. This poses a new challenge to the teacher who, placed on a virtual platform, is pushed to remain under questioning while students are given opportunities for anonymity and physical absence. As the interface is a different phenomenon from the face in the other’s physical presence, so, too, are the details of how the interface (of the other; the student in this case) challenges the teacher. The dialogical relation is the same, however, the screen appears as the other.

One example of how others—students—challenge the teacher differently in online education than in physically present education is the silence of the participants—especially when cameras are off and microphones muted. In other words, the silence or the passivity of the interface forces the teacher to reflect on their own actions as a teacher: ‘How can I get the students to be active?’ The other is there somewhere, doing something behind the screen, but not communicating their action. This means that, in the online environment, the teacher has fewer means by which to elicit student participation or even to confirm their presence. According to our own experience, teachers tend to complain that you cannot know if there is someone behind the screen or not. While for some this may be a practical question concerning the meaningfulness of having the class, for others blank screens may be frustrating precisely as the lack of control over students’ action—what is the point of even having the class if you cannot be sure whether anyone is listening? Do I have to entertain the students to get them to stay? How can I make them act according to my plans, to make them do what I want them to do?

A place where online teaching differs essentially from teaching in person is the possibility that the teacher does not even know whether particular students are there. In a mass lecture online, the teacher may be able to perceive only a minority of the names or faces on the screen. Others remain invisible, and thus the teacher cannot have a mutual relation to the majority of the attentive students. For the same reason, the possibility of an ethical relation between the teacher and the students is non-existent in the case of pre-recorded lectures or other material. Even if we could think of the book as a teacher in Levinasian terms, and thus consider the pre-recorded video material as educational material that may teach the students something, there cannot be any ethical relation between the producer of the recording or the author of the book and their viewers or readers since no mutual relation obtains between them. Although in the physical classroom the teacher may not pay attention to every student in the room simultaneously, their faces are there, disruptive of the teacher’s world by their mere appearance to the teacher.

In conclusion, in order to remain ethical, online education must be dialogical. Only in that way will the students have the possibility to challenge and question the teacher’s need to control their presence and activities. For this, the teacher needs to perceive an interface—the student or students facing the teacher, requiring a response from, and a reciprocal relation to, them.

Conclusion

In this article, we have investigated the ethical conditions of online education by extending Levinas’ concept of the ‘face’. To describe the ‘face’ that we encounter in online educational settings, we introduced the concept of the interface as the presentation of the other in something other than their body. We argued that the interface becomes the entry point for ethical online pedagogy. This makes online teaching both the same and different from in-person teaching: while in both online and physically present teaching there is the potential for an ethical relation between the teacher and the students, the way in which the ‘other’ appears is distinct in each case.

Although the presence of the ethical relation does not necessarily make the teaching better or worse, online education, at the very least, cannot be discarded on the basis of its alleged foreclosure of the ethical relation. However, there may be other practical or moral reasons to prefer one form over the other; for instance, young children need an adult who is physically present, and many, especially younger students, require physical closeness with others.

In light of our argument, we conclude that, even if the lack of control over students in online settings remains a practical problem in particular educational situations, it forces the educational situation in general to be more voluntary when the teacher cannot control the students’ bodies and actions in the same way as in a physical classroom. Just as a physical face resists ‘my’ powers to control the other, the interface resists the teacher’s attempt to control the students’ presence in an online setting.

Practically, in online education, the teacher can merely recommend, suggest, and ask the students to act according to their will. Conversely, in some contexts, there are possibilities for controlling the situation that the physical classroom does not offer, such as the ability to mute a participant. However, in online education, the teacher cannot control what the students do behind the screens, in their homes (or wherever they participate in the class.) The students may very well have the video call open while not actually paying any attention to the call. While not paying attention to the teacher is possible also in physical presence—this is why the teacher needs ‘discipline’ in the class—in online education, the teacher cannot know whether the participants are paying attention or not. There may be some clues, but not a full picture.

The practical differences between online and in-person education naturally relate to the context and aims of the educational situation. For example, in both online and in-person education, the teacher can simply lecture without making contact with the students. For this reason, we sketched just an outline of the differences in responsibility of teachers in online as opposed to physically present education. These differences are in the appearance of the other, and thus the presence of the other and me in the educational situation.

Pointing out the differences between online and physically present teaching is not merely about what one perceives in either situation, but also possibilities for action. Regarding the teacher’s relation to the student(s), a major distinctive characteristic concerning the possibilities for action in online education is the lack of control over students’ bodies. The teacher cannot close the door to the classroom, forcing students to stay inside; the teacher cannot control what the students are doing with their bodies; and the teacher cannot force a student to leave the classroom. Although we cannot, under any circumstances, force someone to learn something, in a physical classroom teachers can force students to remain, to be quiet, and to pay attention, at least to a greater extent than online, where students are not within the teacher’s reach. As Berenpas (2021) argues, the online environment lacks the vulnerability of non-mediated responsiveness. However, in contrast to Berenpas’ assumption, this lack is not always or necessarily a negative factor. Instead, it may be positive for some students or even some teachers, as it may, contingently, result in a sense of bodily safety. Whether the lack of bodily vulnerability and control of students’ bodies is regarded as positive or negative, it is these characteristics of online educational settings which challenge the teacher to relate to the situation differently than in physically present education.

Footnotes

1

Vlieghe (2022) argues that education is an intergenerational interaction during which an already existing generation meets with newcomers in a shared world, which demands from them that they take up the responsibility to pass the world on to this new generation. However, much of teaching takes place in adult education, where the teacher might be of the same age group as the students, or even younger. One might think of ‘different generations’ here as academic generations. Thus, not all teaching targets children. For Vlieghe and Biesta, education is an intergenerational interaction, introducing the newcomers to the world in Arendtian terms. In other words, education is understood as an asymmetrical relation in the sense that it involves different generations. If we think of these different generations as either age or academic generations, the idea of introducing something to the newcomers makes more sense: for example, a university student can be thought of as a newcomer to the field even if they are not younger than their teachers.

2

To note, its lacking ethicality in this context does not make the teaching indoctrination.

3

Todd (2015) separates dialogue from conversation by pointing out that dialogue is often thought to seek a shared goal, while conversation is rather a shared engagement which does not require a formal initiation into a certain model of dialogue. Levinas perceives the ethical relation with the other as dialogue, which has been translated as conversation (Levinas 2007 [1969]: 51; see also Levinas 1971: 66).

4

In English the original terms visage and face are often translated as ‘the face’. In relation to interpreting a text, Levinas distinguishes these terms in his unedited conference notes (Levinas 2009).

5

In the Levinasian context, even though any social encounter involves the potential for responsibility—as soon as I let the other face me—not everyone is equally responsible to one another or in a similar manner. For example, a child is responsible in a different manner than an adult. The child may not respond to the adult as another individual person but as something scary or something bringing safety. The adult, in turn, responds to the child as someone not yet fully grown and thus having their own ways of coping with the world.