Colleges preparing for a return to face-to-face learning this fall are confronting the complex logistics of creating socially distanced teaching spaces. Eckerd College, in Florida, has a secret weapon on that front: its campus.
The grounds at Eckerd’s 188-acre campus in St. Petersburg will allow any faculty member who so chooses to teach outside, with faculty members and students all spaced up to 12 feet apart — in the shade and with a Wi-Fi connection, to boot.
Outdoor instruction has been floated at many campuses as a means of adding additional classroom capacity and allowing for social distancing. Rice University, in Texas, and the University of California at Davis will hold some classes in large tents. Amherst College, in Massachusetts, also ordered tents, and noted in a statement that starting its fall semester earlier than usual allows the college to hold as many classes as possible outdoors.
Elizabeth A. Forys, one of the leaders of Eckerd’s outdoor-instruction initiative, is an experienced outdoor instructor, having taught environmental biology and ornithology classes outside for years. So when her campus closed because of Covid-19 in the spring, she began thinking ahead to reopening. Knowing outdoor-transmission rates for the virus are significantly lower than indoor ones, Forys said, she’d simply move all her classes outside. Many of her colleagues, even those whose material didn’t naturally lend itself to teaching outdoors, might want to do the same.
But, she said, an Eckerd administrator worried that, if all faculty members started teaching outside, “people would just be walking around trying to find a good spot, and that’s going to waste a lot of time.” So Forys proposed creating a map of outdoor instructional spaces, an effort that yielded 51 sites suitable for outdoor instruction. Forys visualized each site using the program ArcGIS, representing each faculty member and student with a dot and drawing 12-foot buffers around each one. Using that data, she categorized the spaces by how large a class they could accommodate. The software also allowed Forys to evaluate the amount of shade and wind each site gets throughout the day, the surface on the ground — mulch or grass, for instance — and whether the space was accessible.
Next, Forys said, “we went out and ground-truthed it,” making sure, for instance, that sound from one classroom space wouldn’t interfere with another one nearby. The map was then converted into a database that will allow faculty members to book some spaces for their classes. Other areas will be designated as “spontaneous sites,” to be used on an as-needed basis.
Results from a survey of the Eckerd faculty, conducted by Forys’s collaborator Noëlle C. Boucquey, an assistant professor of environmental studies, indicated that interest in outdoor learning was high. More than 83 percent of faculty members surveyed, in a wide range of disciplines, including business and philosophy, were interested in teaching outdoors. About a quarter, Forys said, wanted to do so for the duration of their courses, while others might teach a portion of daily class time outside or for some class sessions, depending on the class agenda for the day.
The survey also asked faculty members what they’d need to teach outdoors — a portable whiteboard, for instance, or a Wi-Fi connection. In previous outdoor classes, Forys has broadcast PowerPoint presentations to students’ phones and tablets over Wi-Fi, and Eckerd plans to use the same method this fall. An art historian said he’d teach outside and display his slides that way.
Eckerd faculty members will use microphones that plug into their cellphones, and students will bring folding camping chairs or beach chairs along with them. (Eckerd’s bookstore will sell chairs, too. ) Students can pick up and move the chairs to work in smaller groups or get more shade.
An academic-calendar adjustment at Eckerd this fall makes widespread outdoor instruction more feasible: Students will take only one class in each of two monthlong “blocks,” in September and October, followed by a “module” in which they’ll take two courses. (The “block” model has been popularized by Colorado College and Cornell College, in Iowa.)
Florida’s temperate climate and Eckerd’s spacious campus also make the college’s approach more doable, Forys acknowledges. (In Florida, the fall is dry season, so rain is expected to be minimal, and in the event of a hurricane, the campus would need to be evacuated anyway, since it’s situated on the Gulf of Mexico.) But depending on a campus’s physical footprint, she said, creative solutions can usually be found. She recommends that institutions do an inventory of their campuses and map the possibilities. Otherwise, she says, “if you just tell people, ‘Oh, you could teach outside,’ they’re all going to go to two or three spots that they all have in their mind.”
In her experience, Forys said, the pedagogical downsides of outdoor learning are minimal. “Sometimes I’ll see students staring off into space at a pelican, but they’re really thinking about the complicated thing that we’re talking about,” she said. And while studies on the subject have largely focused on younger students, they’ve shown positive effects on academic performance and attention spans, according to recent New York Times coverage. Forys does recommend some common-sense measures, though, like prohibiting students from bringing pets to outdoor classes and asking that they remain seated in their chairs.
At Eckerd, Forys said, her colleagues seem to have “embraced” the idea of teaching outside.
“There’s a lot of fear about contracting Covid and having students in the classroom together,” she said. “Faculty have said, ‘Wow, this is the way you can actually open and be pretty safe.’”
