Easing Student Anxiety about Digital Literacy/Digital Creativity in the Classroom Justin Hodgson | Associate Professor of Digital Rhetoric | IU Bloomington

One of the more interesting questions I have been asked over the years is how do instructors help ease student anxieties about working in and with digitally creative technologies. For despite the lingering "digital native" myth in higher education, students (just like faculty) have all manner of affinities for and apprehensions with digital technologies. Just because they have come of age inundated with digital media, does not mean they are all perfectly fine to just jump off the deep end into editing a documentary with Adobe Premiere Pro.

The reality is that we need to be mindful of the anxieties students bring to class, both pre- and post-pandemic, which range issues with competency to issues of access. What I have found is that the following practices can help mitigate these matters:

• Ground them in the personal
• Focus on building better feedback loops
• Celebrate failure
• Craft learning experiences
• Remain flexible

Ground them in the Personal

One of the easiest ways to get students into learning and working with digital tools and creative technologies is to offer them low-stakes entry points where they work on things of personal interest to them. While working on course elements has an obvious value, the students are already in the process of learning about the course, its content, its key practices, and sometimes throwing a new technological learning curve on top of that can be daunting for some—especially if what they are being asked is to say or make something intelligent (and for assessment purposes) about the content itself. This can, in turn, result in less positive associations with the technology and experience, and what students often need, at least early on, are strong, positive identifications / experiences with the technology. These help them not only build critical and creative confidence, but to really begin to see themselves as someone who ‘does this kind of work’ or is ‘a creative person.’

For example, early in the pandemic I would teach Adobe Photoshop by having students create their own customized Zoom Backgrounds. Or prior to the pandemic, in spring semesters I would have students make Valentine’s Day cards in Photoshop. Or, as another example, I have helped students learn audio editing and remix practices (in Garageband, Adobe Audition, and Audacity, among other programs) by asking the students to craft a 35 second remix soundtrack to be played when they walk on stage and get their diploma. The purpose of these activities is not only to help students learn a set of practices, but to foster an affinity with particular tools and approaches, which they will later turn into specific course content engagements.

Focus on Building Better Feedback Loops

A lot of student anxiety comes from students not knowing what to do, not knowing if they are on the right track, fearing that their lack of technical skill or ability will negatively impact their grade, and so on. Thus, one of the best ways to help ease student anxiety is to create more frequent and more meaningful feedback loops. These points of contact not only help reassure students about their own progress and practices, but can be helpful in guiding them at critical moments in a project.

• Now, more specifically, I encourage instructors to have designated studio days in their class (or even during office hours) where students can work on their projects and get help as needed, with the instructor floating around as an on-demand resource and/or with the ability to ask their peers for help.
• Second, I often adopt a process-oriented approach with checkpoints rather than a product-oriented approach a singular due date. This not only provides multiple touch points for intervention, engagement, and encouragement, but also helps foreground the process and the learning, which are often key to the ways in which I evaluate student work.
• Third, I encourage instructors to provide audio/video feedback on student work (if they cannot provide it in person) as that type of feedback can often leave a more meaningful and lasting impression on the student. Also, the stumbles and 'ums' and breathing captured in A/V delivery helps humanize the process. (Though, be aware of accessibility needs for some students and adjust accordingly so that the feedback you provide has the greatest potential value to the students.)

Celebrate Failure

One of the most damaging things we do to students (especially their creativity and orientations toward critical thinking) is to stigmatize failure. But most of us fail, large and small, on our way toward something amazing. Yet I routinely see students who bear the weight and anxieties of grade-based trauma, consumed by the looming fear of failure; and this fear of failure is often central to the unsettledness they feel about trying out a new technology in classroom. Think about it from their perspective: students know how to write and take tests and respond to questions (standard academic fodder) because they’ve trained for those things their whole educational lives, but they tend to feel less comfortable with making a video or designing a digital artifact, which in turn invites worry and anxiety about how this 'lack' of familiarity will translate into their work and impact on their grade. To combat this, I try to foreground the value and importance of failure, embracing a fast failure, fun failure, and formative failure approach.

• Fast Failure: Students work through any number of inventive exercises to generate ideas and possibilities they might want to pursue for a project. Then I put them in pairs or groups and have them engage in conversation. What matters is not necessarily identifying the good/great ideas, but rather helping students quickly toss out the "failures" (i.e., ideas that seem less engaging, less of a fit for the assignment/project, and/or generally less likely to bear less fruit). The sooner we get these "first failures" off the table, the better. This process helps them focus on being generative at the start, not perfect, and I actually repeat the process with subsequent inventive stages: creating regularly opportunities for new ideas to emerge, new combinations to take form, and to not need to be forever committed to "first failures" as all ideas and projects are in-progress engagements.
• Fun Failure: Students share their trials and tribulations, mishaps and missteps as a part of class—and I include my own mess ups and miscues. We engage in what play and games scholar Jane McGonigal refers to as happy embarrassment, taking the opportunity to share in these misfires and to openly champion the best failures among us. I’ve even had some classes who decided to create and share class memes based on our individual and collective failures, which range from technological nightmares to conceptual misunderstandings. We are learning together and failure is expected, and so my key rule is that all participants in our fun failure engagements be willing to share what they have learned from the failure and to attempt to turn one failure from the semester into a functional success.
• Formative Failure: The last failure element is formative failure, and I situate this as peer review. As a professional writer and scholar, everything I send off for publication gets reviewed and comes back with critiques, suggestions, requested changes, and the like. This is, at its core, what peer review does, no matter the medium: provide formative feedback to improve the work. Of course, this process is not traditionally consider a kind of failure, but I lump it in here because (a) every revision of a paper or every re-edit of a video project means something wasn't right in the previous draft (i.e., iterative failure) and (b) it highlights how "failure" (and growth from that attempt) is a critical component of the academic work of producing knowledge in the world. Therefore, I situate the peer review process as formative failure, and focus on helping students see that what they have created at this stage is formative in its own right, but the feedback can also have a formative impact to help the project reach its potential.

Craft Learning Experiences

Some students will have clear anxieties about learning a technology and think what they need is a step-by-step tutorial or training session: "If I just have the steps in front of me, all will be right with the world." But this is problematic in many ways. First, don't get me wrong, there is value in traditional training orientations and I do many of these things myself, but while this instrumentalist approach may ease in-class tension on the training days themselves, the anxiety reappears (often in full force) when students run into a problem on their own outside of class. To combat this matter, I structure my technological orientations as learning experiences rather than training sessions (i.e., half tool/practical introduction; half challenge). That is, I introduce the basic tools and terminology of a program, guiding them through a few easy steps, and I intentionally go just a little too fast for them to be comfortable. Then I present them with a challenge or task to complete and turn them loose. The entire process admittedly operates with a bit of anxiety on the surface (not to mention fluctuating moments of frustration as students move in and out of figuring things out), but the challenge orientation creates a meaningful context for what they are learning, helps to motivate student engagement, and often fosters learning communities as they turn to one another for help, guidance, idea sharing, etc. Further, they learn the tools and techniques much in the way they will use them are their own outside of class: teeming with uncertainty.

Of course, this is not meant to be as barbaric as it sounds, as I do float around the room or make myself available in Zoom to serve as coach and/or on-demand resource. Also, the students tend to learn from watching one another, "googling" things, asking questions, and forming micro learning communities. This, to me, is one of the more useful things they get from this experience: an ability to learn amid the anxiety, to leverage their resources (in class and online), and to tinker their way to their goals. Additionally, this approach has them operating right on the edge of their competencies and abilities, which (as video games have shown) can have a major impact on their engagement and investment in the experience.

Remain Flexible

Perhaps the single most valuable suggestion I can offer instructors to help with student anxiety is to remain flexible and be responsive to the material and personal constraints of each student’s situation. Students will have all manner of apprehensions and run into all manner of personal and technical limitations during the semester (some made up, some all too real), and all of these matters will only exacerbate their on anxieties. But if we remain supportive and offer a little flexibility (with our approach, requirements, expectations, and the like), students can have a meaningful course experience, create purposeful digitally-inflected engagements and artifacts, and achieve critical course goals and outcomes in creative and often dynamic ways. Thus, I tend to focus on the learning experience and work within what is available to students (in terms of conceptual and physical access) to help facilitate pedagogy and practice.

For example, the campus may have a computer lab, but in some areas students getting to that lab reliably and making use of it may simply not be an option: students may have other life responsibilities (work or childcare) or may live in rural parts of the state making getting to the lab and home again a challenge. Rather than forcing a student to drop the class, an instructor might work with the student (or students) to see if mobile practices and production may make more sense (i.e., creating and editing a video on Adobe Premiere Rush on one’s phone rather than at the campus lab). The key to remember here is that what matters is not the specific technology involved, but rather that we always put people first, remain pedagogically focused, and stay purpose driven. So when issues emerge, ask what is really at stake. If it is the tool itself, then perhaps consider offering the student an alternative approach, method, tools, etc.

justinhodgson.com | @postdigitalJH | JH@LinkedIn