Digital teach-ins as a tool of public education and resistance
Teach-ins have been part of activist and academic life for decades. The first Earth Day in 1970 popularized them as spaces where people could pause routine work and learn together about urgent issues. What changed after 2020 was not the idea, but the scale and speed.
When campuses closed during COVID-19, digital tools became the default almost overnight. Zoom, YouTube Live, and similar platforms stopped being optional extras and turned into core infrastructure. But the persistence of digital teach-ins after lockdowns lifted tells us something else was going on. Political pressure, institutional caution, and overlapping crises meant that many scholars and community groups needed spaces that were faster, more open, and less constrained than traditional academic venues.
By 2026, digital teach-ins are still widely used across Canada. They show up in discussions about racial justice, climate change, labour rights, Indigenous sovereignty, and academic freedom. Our team looks at this format not as a trend tied to one movement or moment, but as a durable response to how knowledge, power, and public debate interact today.
This page focuses on the format itself, how it works, and why it continues to matter.
What is a digital teach-in?
A digital teach-in is a public, participatory educational forum held online. Unlike lectures or panels designed primarily for information transfer, teach-ins are built around collective learning and political clarity. The goal is not just to explain an issue, but to understand it together and situate it within larger systems.
Historically, the term “teach-in” has implied education as a form of protest. It signals refusal to carry on as normal and an insistence that learning itself can be an intervention. That logic carried over smoothly into digital spaces. Online tools expanded who could attend, speak, and listen, removing many geographic and institutional barriers.
In practice, most digital teach-ins share a few characteristics:
- Open access
- Collective analysis
- Political clarity
- Public archiving
The last point matters more than it might seem. Recordings and transcripts mean teach-ins do not disappear once the session ends. They become reference points for students, journalists, organizers, and researchers long after the live event.
Why digital teach-ins expanded after 2020
It is tempting to explain the rise of digital teach-ins solely through the pandemic. Logistics played a role, but they do not tell the full story.
Remote tools were normalized quickly, making online gatherings technically easy. At the same time, multiple crises were unfolding in parallel. Protests against police violence, renewed attention to colonial histories, climate emergencies, and labour disruptions all created demand for spaces where people could think collectively rather than react in isolation.
Universities were also becoming more contested spaces. Scholars faced growing pressure around public speech, funding priorities, and political engagement. Community groups, meanwhile, often felt that official statements and policy announcements were disconnected from lived realities. Digital teach-ins filled that gap.
The Earth Day movement offers a clear example. Earth Day Network and affiliated organizations explicitly encouraged digital teach-ins during the pandemic, emphasizing that communities are not limited by physical boundaries. As one Earth Day resource put it, “virtual teach-ins can connect communities of all kinds” and can happen anywhere, not just on campuses or once a year. That framing carried over into other movements, from racial justice to labour organizing.
How digital teach-ins differ from other online formats
From the outside, a teach-in can look like a webinar or an online panel. The differences become clear once you pay attention to structure and intent.
Webinars usually focus on information delivery. One or two experts present, and the audience listens. Online courses are designed for credentialed learning and often restrict participation to enrolled students. Conferences prioritize professional exchange, networking, and institutional recognition.
Teach-ins work differently. They are dialogic by design. Audience participation is expected, whether through chat, Q&A, or breakout discussions. Speakers are invited not only for academic credentials, but for organizing experience, community leadership, or lived expertise. Hierarchies are intentionally softened, even when they do not disappear entirely.
That resistance to hierarchy is part of why teach-ins remain politically useful. They create room for analysis that might feel out of place in more formal settings.
Core functions of digital teach-ins
The persistence of the format becomes clearer when we look at what teach-ins actually do.
- Education is the most obvious function. Teach-ins translate complex systems like colonial governance, racial capitalism, or climate policy into language that makes sense outside specialized fields.
- Mobilization is closely linked. Many teach-ins are tied to ongoing campaigns, strikes, or calls to action. Learning and action are not separated by design.
- Solidarity is another key outcome. By bringing together scholars, students, artists, and community members, teach-ins create connections across movements and identities. Those connections often outlast the event itself.
Archiving voices has become especially important since 2020. Recorded teach-ins preserve perspectives that are often marginalized or excluded from official records. As historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz has noted in other contexts, archives shape what future generations understand as possible. Digital teach-ins quietly contribute to that process.
Common themes raised in digital teach-ins today
Across Canada, certain themes appear repeatedly in digital teach-ins held between 2020 and 2026. This repetition is not a lack of creativity. It reflects unresolved structures.
Policing and surveillance remain central topics, especially in relation to racialized communities and campus security. Colonial governance and land continue to surface in discussions of Indigenous sovereignty and resource extraction. Labour precarity and migration are linked to temporary foreign worker programs, gig work, and academic contract labour.
Gendered and racialized violence appears in conversations about policing, workplace harassment, and institutional neglect. Climate justice and environmental racism connect ecological harm to social inequality. Academic freedom and repression have become more visible as scholars navigate funding pressures and political scrutiny.
These topics persist because the systems behind them persist. Teach-ins track those patterns in real time.
From campuses to communities: who uses teach-ins today
While universities played a major role in popularizing digital teach-ins after 2020, they are no longer the sole or even primary hosts.
Community groups use teach-ins to share local knowledge and coordinate action. Faith institutions host them to connect ethical frameworks with social issues. Labour organizations use teach-ins to explain bargaining contexts and worker rights. Environmental coalitions run them year-round, well beyond symbolic dates like Earth Day. Youth- and elder-led spaces use digital formats to bridge generations and geography.
The Earth Day example is instructive again here. Earth Day Network has emphasized that teach-ins can take place in community centres, living rooms, retirement communities, or online chat rooms. That flexibility helped normalize the format far beyond academia.
Steps to hosting a digital teach-in
Digital teach-ins work best when they are intentional rather than improvised. Based on patterns we have observed across Canada, several steps tend to matter.
1. Form an organizing group
A small, representative planning team helps distribute responsibility and clarify purpose. Clear goals at the outset prevent the event from drifting.
2. Define the focus & community
Identify the issue and who it affects most directly. Asking whose voices are often missing can reshape the entire programme.
3. Select speakers & moderators
Effective teach-ins combine scholars, organizers, and community voices. Moderators play a key role in keeping discussions inclusive and grounded.
4. Plan for accessibility & inclusion
Closed captions, interpretation, and clear participation guidelines make a difference. Platform choice should reflect audience needs, not convenience alone.
5. Choose the right digital platform
Audience size, recording options, and privacy settings all matter. Testing technology in advance avoids unnecessary disruption.
6. Create a clear programme flow
Most teach-ins benefit from context-setting, focused contributions, discussion or Q&A, and a closing reflection or call to action.
7. Outreach & follow-up
Promotion through social media and community networks helps broaden reach. Sharing recordings and resources afterward extends the life of the teach-in.
Digital teach-ins have become part of how people in Canada learn, organize, and push back when formal spaces feel limited or slow to respond. They turn shared concern into shared understanding, and understanding into action. Whether you’re a scholar, organizer, student, or simply someone trying to make sense of complex issues, these spaces remain open by design. The work now is not just to attend them, but to sustain them, document them, and use what they produce to shape what comes next.