As for remote teaching, Wilson says, he was impressed with how quickly the music lecturer mastered teaching through live Zoom classes and how actively the students participated in remote discussions. (The political-science course is taught more asynchronously, with Google Hangouts for check-ins.)
He also quickly saw how life intervenes in random and unusual ways. One day a cat walked across the music lecturer’s screen and knocked over his course material. Another time, Wilson was impressed with how compassionately one of the lecturers listened to a student talk about an ill relative.
“What I’m learning from students is that their whole families are sometimes coming to class with them, and that is a challenge when you have two to three younger siblings in the house. You don’t have a secluded space,” he says. “We have to bake that into the way learning will occur remotely. I don’t know what that looks like, but you have to build that into your class.”
That personal touch, says Wilson, is harder to create virtually, but critical to keep intact if Morgan State, a historically black college that enrolls many first-generation and lower-income students, continues teaching online into the fall, as it and other colleges are preparing to do.
Wilson worries in particular about how to retain the spirit of one-on-one meetings of professors with students. “The office hours of professors, there’s something magical that takes place when you have a face-to-face genuine conversation with someone,” he says. “You see the gesticulation, you read the body language, you are meeting that person emotionally as well as intellectually. What I see here is that we do a good job of trying to meet the students intellectually. But the emotional piece that is such an important part of our culture — that is difficult to translate.”
He has also been thinking a lot about students’ uneven access to technology. “That was a wake-up call for me,” he says. “We have invested millions of dollars here in computer labs and creating an infrastructure so they have access to technology. But now that they are remote, the number of our students who did not have laptops, who did not have Wi-Fi ability back in their homes, who did not have dedicated spaces, wherever they were, that was appropriate for the kind of intellectual engagement expected of them, that just won’t work.”
Morgan State has begun planning for a possible continuation of remote teaching in the fall, and Wilson says he’s grateful for the chance to dip back into the classroom from a distance. “I’m able to have conversations with cabinet members that frankly I perhaps could not have two months ago,” he says.
One thing he’s committed to is retaining a sense of community, no matter how physically far apart everyone may be. “We want to make sure, if we are in this environment, that we don’t lose this sense of what it means to be a family.”
Teaching Creatively
We recently asked to hear from readers who have, in the midst of this upheaval, found a creative way to teach the remainder of their course remotely. That might mean coming up with new tactics to engage students, or adjusting course content to include the pandemic. We’ve gotten lots of great responses — thanks to everyone who’s shared. If you haven’t had a chance to fill us in on your teaching this spring, it’s not too late: Tell us here.
This contribution comes from Christina Crawford, an assistant professor of modern and contemporary architecture and urbanism at Emory University. This semester she is teaching a 300-level art-history course called “The Architect + the City,” which she describes as a history of 20th-century urban design told from the architect’s perspective. She writes:
This course is one of my favorites to teach, and the rapport we’ve built as a class this semester is unprecedented in my experience. I was concerned that the work we had done as a group to build a common vocabulary, expertise, and trust in each other would dissolve online. Although I was tempted to change the paired presentations and discussion-leading responsibilities to solo written assignments, I’m glad that I didn’t. The students are using Zoom meetings and shared docs to collaborate remotely on these projects, and it’s working. I also cannot understate the difficulty of carrying a triple teaching load, now that my two kids need homeschooling. This is a challenge that all faculty parents are facing.
The class discussion leaders have met — in fact, exceeded — the challenge to replicate group engagement online. Last week the three students who led discussion (from France, New Jersey, and Maryland) separated the class into Zoom breakout rooms and asked each group to develop a collective mental map of the Emory campus. When we came back together, one student in each group held the map up to the camera for all of us to see and discuss. This exercise was brilliant, not only because it required us to mobilize the planning tool at the center of the week’s readings (Kevin Lynch’s mental map), but because it allowed us to occupy the campus together again, if only in our minds.
ICYMI
- The Chronicle’s Alex Kafka reports on whether the pandemic will usher in an era of mass surveillance in higher education.
- In non-pandemic news, Alex also looks at how computer science has come to dominate the curriculum on many campuses, and why that’s both good and bad news for many disciplines.
- The Chronicle asked 11 scholars to discuss “the best scholarly book” of the past decade. Here is their list.
Support for Contingent Faculty
The pandemic presents particular challenges and vulnerabilities for adjunct professors and other non-tenure-track instructors. How can colleges and colleagues help? Join the conversation at The Chronicle’s next faculty forum, Friday, April 24, featuring Maria Maisto, president of the New Faculty Majority; Lee Skallerup Bessette, a learning design specialist at Georgetown University; and John Warner, an author and former adjunct instructor.
Thanks for reading Teaching. If you have suggestions or ideas, please feel free to email us, at dan.berrett@chronicle.com, beckie.supiano@chronicle.com, or beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com.
