Whoosh!

We’ve heard it all before.

This is going to ruin relationships, isolate people, damage your eyesight, and destroy your ability to remember.

What is the cause of this cruel crime against humanity? 

These dire warnings have all been issued by “experts” about smartphones, computers, and, originally, many centuries ago, about books and writing. And now people, including some of my Feldenkrais® colleagues, are saying the same things about online learning and videoconferencing, especially as relates to training teachers online. 

The naysayers are quick to tell us what is wrong with distance learning and to explain, at length, why online education does not and will not work. The problem is that this negativity runs against the experience of Feldenkrais teachers around the world who rose to the challenges and pivoted from teaching their classes and seeing their students for individual lessons in person to working online. 

The transition from in-person to online learning has not been easy but the fact is that some of us started to make the shift long before the pandemic hit. Whether we made the change because we could not find a venue for teaching classes or we wanted to make lessons available to those who could not come to us and whom we could not travel to, support trainees in the times between segments, coach or supervise colleagues who lived far away,  expand the reach of what we had to offer, or for a myriad of other reasons, we’ve been learning how to make this work. Along the way, we’ve faced the onslaught of criticism from those who were only too willing to say it would not work and to tell us that we should not even bother trying.  

All of us, whether we were new to distance learning or we had been using it for a while, have had to figure how to make this new medium work. That means we’ve been busy understanding the limits of communicating online, applying best practices from educators and facilitators, finding out how to modify the design of our curriculum, discovering what new possibilities e-learning affords, testing our ideas and innovations, listening to our students’ feedback, and learning how to improve the experience for all involved. 

Ignoring the history of our method — which started with Moshe Feldenkrais playing the recordings of lessons he taught and observing his students doing them in order to learn from and improve them — and the valiant efforts of teachers doing their best to meet the needs of their students in these difficult times, the naysayers have railed against the futility of teaching online, some of them going so far as to say that recorded Awareness Through Movement® lessons are a bad idea and to ridicule the idea of working with a student in the context of a guided online individual lesson or virtual FI®. 

The controversy is not simply about whether we can — or should — teach students online; it also encompasses whether it is possible to train teachers via distance learning. This is a crucial conversation, one involves many stakeholders — the international community of teachers, Feldenkrais trainers and assistant trainers, participants in training programs, and the four Feldenkrais Training Accreditation Boards — and that speaks to how we can continue to develop our profession at a time when we do not (and cannot) know how long the battle against the novel coronavirus will take and how it will impact us.

Having taught ATM® workshops, make-up segments, and postgraduate programs online for the past few years, I have been getting quite an education about the constraints and opportunities of teaching online. When the stay-at-home and social distancing guidelines were imposed, I decided to find out what it would be like to offer A TRAINING SEGMENT ONLINE (ATSO). As an experiment, I offered Feldenkrais teachers and trainees the world over the chance to do an eleven-day segment of the recently graduated Amsterdam 5 program via the internet. Not only did the course sell out but the participants were engaged and enthusiastic about learning in this way.

Granted, the ATSO participants were self-selected and there’s a difference between advanced training online and basic teacher training. That left open significant questions about starting a new training program online, about whether it is possible to teach movement observation or hands-on work — or supervise practicums — from afar, and so on. With training programs being prevented from meeting in person all over the planet, these were not abstract questions or academic arguments; they came in the context of the real-life concerns of trainees who wanted — and still want — to be able to continue or complete their professional development.