What Professors Can Offer Students in Crisis
When Ricia Anne Chansky, a professor of English, returned to her classes at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez after a monthlong closure following Hurricane Maria, she knew she couldn’t simply pick where they had left off.
After all, the ordeal was still unfolding for her students. Many lived in student apartments that had flooded. Many had lost family homes; some had lost family members. Some lived in areas that were still inaccessible because of mudslides. Even for those out of immediate danger, food and fuel were hard to come by.
Things were still chaotic on the campus, too. There was water, but not power. Almost no one had reliable internet access. The university library had been closed for storm-damage repairs, leaving students without a printing center.
So Chansky changed gears. She “asked students, on a voluntary basis, to write what their hurricane experience was, what they had survived and what they were continuing to survive.” She also had them connect that experience back to readings from the course. Her goal: to help students re-establish a sense of agency, something they would need in order to learn.
Initially, Chansky envisioned the project as a bridge, a way back into her interrupted plans for the two sections of honors English and one of Anglophone Caribbean literature she was teaching. Instead, it became the primary assignment for the semester. Chansky told students that they could complete the project with paper and pencil if they needed to, and that she would not penalize them for opting out of it. Every student completed the assignment, she said — and most of them did so by hand. “What that says to me,” Chansky says, “is that my students — and possibly every student everywhere —are desperate to be listened to.”
Few campuses are hit with the kind of disaster that the University of Puerto Rico is working through. Still, more students have experienced trauma than professors may realize.
Chansky’s assignment drew on an earlier experience she had helping students grapple with a traumatic event. On September 11, 2001, Chansky was living in Washington, D.C., and teaching at George Washington University. The next day, she was back in the classroom with shaken freshmen who had only recently arrived on the campus. Chansky realized that the students “felt fully disempowered, and that their agency had been undermined,” she said. So she spent much of the class period letting students describe, if they wanted to, where they had been and what they had experienced during the terrorist attacks. “One of the things that I’ve always thought about since then,” she said, “is that talking about physical location, situating the self in a place and saying, ‘I am here,’ created —and I don’t want to say that we fixed anything, we didn’t fix anything — but we got to a place that we were a little bit better.”
Professors are not mental-health professionals, Chansky says — and Puerto Rico is in great need of counselors. Still, she says, giving students space to share their stories if they want to, and being there to listen to them, can help them regain some sense of control.
Chansky and some colleagues in the English department formed a working group to develop what they and others call disaster pedagogy. The members share a belief that students’ stories matter. One colleague collected his students’ writing into an anthology. Another designed a service-learning project in which students took supplies inland, by bus and then backpack, and wrote about the experience.
Next year, members of the group will work with the nonprofit Voice of Witness to train 100 undergraduate and graduate students in the techniques and ethics of oral history. The students will then collect the hurricane stories of other survivors.
“The first stage was: You tell your story, you resituate yourself, you move toward feeling more in control of your life because we show you how valuable the self in your story is,” Chansky said. “The second stage is: You go out into your community and you offer that sense of agency and empowerment to someone else.”
How have you encouraged students in your courses to use stories or experiences from their lives? What have they gained from it, and what have you learned? Share your story with me at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com and it may appear in a future newsletter.
Resources on Disaster Pedagogy
Chansky and her colleagues have two forthcoming publications on disaster pedagogy:
-“Mí María: Disaster Pedagogy and the Ugly Auto/Biography,” by Ricia Anne Chansky, UPRM. Forthcoming in Pedagogy 19.1 (2018): https://www.dukeupress.edu/pedagogy.
-“I is for Agency: Education, Social Justice, and Auto/Biographical Practices,” by Ricia Anne Chansky, Edward Contreras, Fernando E.E. Correa González, Marci Denesiuk, Jocelyn Géliga Vargas, and Catherine M. Mazak, UPRM. Forthcoming in “Pesquisa e (auto) educação em na America,” a special issue of Revista Brasileira de Pesquisa (Auto)biográfica 3.8 (2018): http://www.revistas.uneb.br/index.php/rbpab/index [in English].
PS: You may also want to revisit the article our colleague Fernanda Zamudio-Suaréz reported from the University of Puerto Rico’s flagship campus in San Juan after Hurricane Maria, and read her reflections on it here.
A Reader Recommendation
Zachary Nowak, who will graduate with a Ph.D. in American studies from Harvard University today, wrote in to say that he recommends Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons From the Science of Learning, by James Lang, “endlessly to anyone and everyone.”
Nowak, who will soon begin a position as a lecturer in the university’s history department, shared his two main takeaways from the book by Lang, who writes a regular column for The Chronicle. First, a significant academic literature on learning “shows fairly clearly that most of the ways we were taught (and which we now replicate) are ineffective.” And second, “Students have to actively manipulate what they are learning and need constant (albeit often ungraded) assessments.”
See You in Bethesda?
I’ll be attending a meeting in Bethesda, Md., called Designing Effective Teaching for part of next week. It’s part of the Lilly Conferences, which seek to encourage a scholarly approach to teaching and learning. Will you be there, too? I’d love to hear your thoughts, before or after the meeting, at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com. Please say hi if you see me in person, too! For everyone else, I’ll most likely share some insights from the conference in this newsletter the week after next.
Thanks for reading Teaching. If you have suggestions or ideas, please feel free to email us at dan.berrett@chronicle.com, beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com, or beckie.supiano@chronicle.com. If you have been forwarded this newsletter and would like to sign up to receive your own copy, you can do so here.
—Beckie
