Brandon L. Bayne was trying to plot out a plan for a disrupted semester when he took a big step back. Like many faculty members around the country, Bayne, an associate professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, recently learned that he would soon be teaching his face-to-face courses remotely, as colleges shut down in-person instruction due to the coronavirus pandemic.
For Bayne’s students, the crisis is just the latest and most dramatic disruption of their college experience. Over the last couple of years, he says, they have faced two hurricanes, two water-main breaks, and a lot of upheaval over the controversy surrounding the university’s well-known Confederate monument, Silent Sam, which was toppled by protesters in 2018.
Bayne was planning to revise the assignments for “Religion in America,” a course with 120 students, predominantly juniors and seniors. But he realized that he first wanted to write out some guiding principles.
He came up with five, including “the humane option is the best option” and “we cannot just do the same thing online.” Each principle has several subparts. Though he drafted the list for his own use, Bayne decided to share it with his students — and on social media, where it has resonated with instructors of all kinds who are working to connect with students under the same unprecedented circumstances.
Joshua Eyler, director of faculty development at the University of Mississippi, for instance, tweeted it out with a message that read, in part: “Tip o’ the day: Add this to your syllabus. Your students will always remember it, it will help establish community, and it addresses the needs of our current moment perfectly.”
The Chronicle spoke this week with Bayne about the thinking behind his “adjusted syllabus” and what it has meant to his students and beyond. The following interview has been edited and condensed.
What made you decide to write this adjusted syllabus?
I sent a poll to my students about how they were doing, where they were at, what sort of access they had to their textbook, and to the internet and technology. I got about a hundred responses within a few hours, and it became really clear that there was a whole range of emotions going on, and a whole range of family contexts, and a whole range of differential access to material.
It confirmed what I had suspected from other colleagues who had polled their students and what I had read from others who had been teaching online already. Hearing them worry about their grandparents, seniors experiencing depression that, all of a sudden, their college life was cut short. Others, who were in Singapore or Brazil or India, and knew they weren’t going to be able to make it back.
I had been meaning to sit down to write an actual syllabus to adjust assignments to the new online environment. But I felt the need to write this down first. It was just something I jotted down for myself, as things I wanted to keep in mind as I adjusted assignments. But then I formalized it and sent it out to the students.
What was their response?
Mostly they were touched by it. It lowered their anxiety. But also the surprising thing was a lot of them wrote back to me immediately about how I was doing, wanting to check on me. It established a two-way feeling of wanting to look out for each other.
You also posted it on social media.
I don’t think any of this is particularly unique to me. This is something that I had been taking in from my colleagues, many of them in religious studies, but also other colleagues that I have seen in a different pedagogy group. I’ve been marinating different folks’ insights and recommendations. And I thought this would be my little thing that I would give back.
What response have you gotten from other professors?
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One of the more amazing things I’ve seen is the wide array of people that have responded to it. I’ve gotten emails from middle-school teachers, high-school teachers, distinguished professors of mathematics and physics, people that teach music, just a whole range. I used to be an elementary-school teacher myself, also a tutor, and substitute teacher. I’ve taught everything from pre-K to Ph.D. students.
It’s been really touching to know that this is something that has given instructors space to think for themselves, and shaped how they’re approaching their students.
How do you usually communicate with students in something like a syllabus? Might this experience change that?
I should share that, literally the first week of the semester, I found out that my mother had a really aggressive form of lung cancer. And I had to go away for 11 days, I think the second week of class. And then, unfortunately, she passed away, in late January, and then I was gone again.
And so from the very beginning, I had to change, and adapt, and bring other people in, and provide resources in new ways. I had to ask students to treat me as a human, and I had to ask students to be flexible and allow me to prioritize something else. So that’s the context that shaped my thinking.
But more broadly, it’s definitely been something that’s been building over the last couple of years. I taught a capstone seminar for our majors basically on spiritual memoirs, and on people’s confessions, from Augustine to Janelle Monáe. And that caused us all to center ourselves in a way that’s not really common in religious studies — and sometimes frowned upon.
There’s a real effort to try to bracket the self. And so that’s something I think that I’m bridging in my own scholarship and in my teaching. I think a lot of this will carry forward.
