The Comp/Intent Blogger Part Four: Teaching in the Time of Covid-19

The reading for class this week was about service learning, which is awesome, but the reading triggered other thoughts for me, so I’m going to save service learning for another post.

Upstairs my eleven-year-old is playing “Phantom of the Opera” loudly on the Alexa. She’s supposed to be unloading the dishwasher, but she’s playing with the two-year-old. I can hear their conversation from my desk. A few feet from me sits my oldest, age fourteen, who is practicing Spanish on an app on her phone. Behind a closed door my husband tries to work, the nine-year-old is with him playing on an old Nintendo 64 we dug out of storage for the pandemic. Somewhere there’s a six-year-old, who knows what she is doing.

In the introduction to “Composing (Media) = Composing (Embodiment)” Anne Frances Wysocki quotes the following from N. Katherine Hayles: “In contrast to the body, embodiment is contextual, enmeshed within the specifics of place, time, physiology, and culture, which together compose enactment.”

Once a student sent me a long email as I was getting ready for class. He was in a terrible car wreck, there were fire trucks and ambulances, the other driver was injured, he was waiting to give the police a statement. There was no way he’d make it to class. He named the intersection of the accident; it was right on my route to campus. I responded that I understood, of course, and told him to be safe. As I drove past the intersection five minutes later, there were no signs of an accident of any kind. I received another email from the student saying thank you, and that he was still waiting to give the police his statement. I didn’t feel angry, but it made me question every student sob story I received after that.

In our reading this week, “Tactics of Hope” by Paula Mathieu, she quotes another work, an article called “The Sites of Pedagogy.” This article argues that “pedagogical theory premised upon the classroom as a constant is no longer acceptable…We must learn how to adjust our pedagogy to account for the changing nature of the classroom.”

Later this month, I will learn what the fall will look like for my children. My oldest is starting high school, and really wants the whole high school experience. I don’t know what that will look like for her.

My fall is online. At one college I will be teaching asynchronously and will post video lectures and announcements to try to form some kind of connection. I will have phone conferences with students for ten minutes each twice during the semester during which I will quickly give a run down of how to improve their drafts. I will never see these students. For the other college, I will be teaching synchronously over Zoom, three classes back to back on Saturdays. I will smile big, maybe even put on lipstick and a nice shirt. I will wave goodbye emphatically. I will struggle to connect over video conferencing, to feel a connection. My husband will try to keep our five kids occupied and quiet.

In “Writing Bodies: Somatic Mind in Composition Studies” Kristie S. Fleckenstein says that “The need to control the degree of disruption in a physical writing scene evolves with the belief that an academic must shut out life, must separate the life of the work from the life lived, the body from the mind.” But such separations aren’t really possible now, are they? Any barriers students or teachers had erected between the “life of the work from the life lived” are gone during this pandemic.

During the spring semester, when everything moved online and I first tried teaching over Zoom, I had one student who would take his dog on a walk during class each week while using his phone to Zoom with us. I would watch his head bobbing with his strides and the sky above him as I tried to keep my train of thought delivering the lecture I usually gave in a classroom with white boards and physical space to pace in, to students sitting still paying attention.

Mathieu goes on in “Tactics of Hope” to say of “The Sites of Pedagogy” that “Pedagogy, they argue, must be attentive to individual “sites of pedagogy,” which they define as “the locations of pedagogical address,” the “spaces in which interactions between teacher and student occur”.”

There have been several articles about what the fall semester will look like, what different colleges are doing. Colleges and universities are special spaces, providing students and faculty alike with spaces to inhabit for teaching and learning. At my community college, there is a library reading room with windows overlooking the lake. At my university, most buildings have public work spaces. When I was attending community college, I lived with several loud roommates in an apartment. I used spaces like these on my college campus to study and prepare. Having that college space was invaluable for me as a student. Now as an adjunct professor, I still use such spaces for office hours, for grading, for meetings with students, for writing my nonfiction books. I love my home, it is loud and chaotic and wonderful, but it’s not the best work environment. And while I always do a certain amount of work from home, I still rely on my campus time for a bulk of my work.

Mathieu continues to quote from “The Sites of Pedagogy”: “While it may be obvious that pedagogical processes are affected by the setting in which they occur, we understand far too little about this relationship to be able to maximize its learning potential. Gaining a better understanding of the sites in which we teach and learn is critical to improving education.”

What will a return to college mean for students who will not have college spaces to occupy? Even with limited reopenings, campus spaces will not be what they are usually. The library will not be a space to linger, nap, socialize, work, it will be a space to quickly get in, get materials, and get out. The eating areas will likely stay closed, the tables will stay empty. The study nooks and work spaces will be unoccupied.

“In order to empathize with someone’s experience you must be willing to believe them as they see it and not how you imagine their experience to be.” -Brene Brown.

I normally get a certain number of emails from students in crisis each semester. My two colleges are unique: each has a large number of multilingual students, of first-generation students, of working students. I love working with these students, they remind me of my college experience: I was a first-generation working student. But these students face unique challenges. Since we moved online mid-March, I’ve had more panicky emails from students than usual. I’ve also had more students disappear than usual. I’ve reaching out, but received crickets in response. I had a student explain she can’t write at home because of domestic violence, I’ve heard of relatives dying, I’ve had several students become the sole breadwinner when family members lost jobs. I’ve had a student in health care share than she’s now working sixty hours a week, up from her usual twenty. I’ve taught online before, this is not online teaching. The space our classes occupy has fundamentally changed as all spaces have changed due to this pandemic. Even if I get a class on campus, I won’t use the space the same way, I won’t move in the same way.

Does the erosions of boundaries force us to pursue a more embodied way of teaching and learning? How do we adapt our pedagogy to this new space? I have so many questions about what we are doing, and how these readings connect to teaching and learning during this pandemic.

My goal in this blog is to bring the readers concrete advice for teaching. Here’s my advice for teaching during the pandemic:

1.      Believe your students. Even if you’ve been lied to by students before, believe them now. We all need more empathy.

2.      Forget the syllabus. Okay, no, not completely, but when it comes to all your carefully crafted policies and penalties, consider ways to be more flexible with those. Read through your policies carefully and consider reframing them. How can we help our students navigate this new space with all the demands that come with it?

3.      Just as you strive to care for your students, care for yourself. This fall will not represent your ideal work environment. The space you teach in will be far different for both you and for your students. Acknowledge that, and find ways to live with that.

Granted, some students will opt to put college on hold, but many will not feel like this is an option. College has become a critical step for beginning careers and building a future. This current situation is no one’s ideal. We owe it to our students to try to make navigating this new learning space more comfortable for them and for us.