Elizabeth Brewer Redwine (Lecturer, Department of English, Seton Hall University)
We are all Julian now.
Last spring, the students in my class were discussing the words of Julian of Norwich, 14th-century bubonic plague survivor and anchorite who lived alone in contemplation for thirty years. I remember writing about the plague in February 2020 on the chalkboard of our warm 19-person classroom, with no one masked and everyone seated near each other. That day, a student from China and another from Rome mentioned COVID-19, and I drew a line on the board from the plagues of Julian’s time to the word COVID-19, and then we moved on to read Julian’s writings, thinking that this new strain we were hearing about would never amount to a true plague, except for the students from China and Italy whose communications from home had them more concerned. Teaching that text in March 2021 will be so different, as Julian’s solitary years foreshadowed what we all went through this past year. We know her experience more intimately now.
My students were increasingly agitated and afraid as the weeks moved into the 2020 spring. Looking back, I have learned so much about how to create a classroom that offers community and comfort in times of national trauma. On March 18th, the President of our university sent out a message saying that all classes would move online, and students began to return home. Our classes transformed from twice-weekly, in-person meetings on campus into virtual gatherings with students dialing in from their homes all over the world. In the spring, the student from Rome began each class reporting on life there from his family’s small apartment during the peak of the infection rate in that city. Our own lives in New Jersey were becoming more limited and beginning to resemble his, confined to four walls.
A number of the students in my Great Books course were already attending online because they worked in medical fields and had jobs at hospitals. One student spent most of her day caring for COVID-19 patients during New Jersey’s spike in cases in the spring. I granted her extensions and met with her over Zoom, and she ended up writing an excellent paper on power and gender dynamics in Moliere’s Tartuffe, making it through the semester despite exhaustion, isolation, and heartbreaking days as a healthcare worker.
The experience of teaching last spring, and the HyFlex and online models we used in the fall, have made me a better teacher, and this reflection is an attempt to explain why, to put together practical advice for educators as we face this next decade of so many unknowns. Watching and helping my four teenagers work through online instruction since March has informed my teaching as well. Though focused on college students, I hope these pedagogical practices can help educators working with students from a variety of age groups.
The Big Question: What Does It Mean to Take This Course Right Now?
As last spring wore on, I remember watching the video of Ahmaud Arbery getting shot while jogging after a friend alerted me to that racist killing. The murders of Black people by police began to ratchet up, and soon I was hearing about Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and others. The President of the United States called the pandemic a “hoax” and refused to wear a mask. Thousands converged, masked, on our suburban town hall in a peaceful and thoughtful youth-led, early-summer Black Lives Matter rally. I kept trying to have conversations with Trump-supporting relatives.
The semester ended, and over the summer colleagues and I met on Teams, our university’s video-sharing software, to discuss how to create syllabi that would be effective no matter how students met with us in the fall. We talked about how we would bring our experiences in the Black Lives Matter movement over the summer into our syllabi and how we would plan out the fall semester given so much uncertainty over the pandemic and the November election. These curricular conversations began to converge in one question: What does it mean to take this course right now? We brainstormed answers, presented our ideas to our colleagues, and decided on variations of a simple list that included items like do the reading, participate in each class in some way, do the writing, listen to your classmates and the professor, read the professor’s announcements and emails, and more.
My second task with writing syllabi for the fall semester was to find texts that would speak to students during this period. For the first time, I decided to teach Hamlet in my Introduction to Literature class. Over the summer I read Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell’s imagined description of Shakespeare’s young son dying of the bubonic plague. Shakespeare also wrote Hamlet while Queen Elizabeth I neared death in old age with no clear successor, so a play written about the anxiety of succession during a difficult election season, I thought, would be interesting. What I had not anticipated was the effect of Ophelia’s story and the writing that students produced about mental illness. Students were more anxious and depressed than ever during the fall semester, and more capable of discussing those feelings. Their papers on Shakespeare and performance reflected their own efforts to handle anxiety and the gendered power dynamics of the past four years.
I decided to teach Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, Dr. King’s “Mountaintop” speech, and James Baldwin’s essay “Letter from a Region in My Mind” in my Core class along with texts I had included before. The Core class is a requirement for first-year students, and the fall students seemed older than previous first-years. Their senior years of high school had been cut short, and many had relatives who’d been sick with COVID. Some had participated in the summer’s protests. Others continued to support the president. But the conversations, in a HyFlex classroom with some students in person, others on a screen in the front of the classroom, me behind plexiglas, and all of us masked, were respectful and thoughtful. Watching James Baldwin respond to a repudiation from a white professor on Dick Cavett’s show in the 1960s, students focused on Baldwin’s particular chin tilt, his refusal to allow the man to redefine and dismiss him.
In my online Great Books class, the texts that spoke most to my students were Rabindranath Tagore’s play The Post Office and Voltaire’s novella Candide. Candide, a story of an innocent young man who travels across the world, contains extreme violence, assault, and satire, but Candide winds up with his love interest from the first chapter, though she is now aged and ugly, and they decide to “cultivate our garden.” My students clung to that ending—really, we all did—though in the past students have struggled to understand why Voltaire ended the book that way. This time around, with students experiencing varying levels of trauma, that final sentence dropped into their rattled heads as a comfort. Tagore’s The Post Office is about a young boy looking out a window accepting death and imagining the end of his life as a journey. Reading about the boy, Amal, staring out the window when he can no longer move, trapped inside but trying to find a way out in his mind, landed differently for students this semester as well.
My takeaway is to dig into what the students are experiencing and allow their interests and the new depth of their responses in times of crisis to guide the class. I assigned anonymous surveys throughout the semester to check in with everyone. After attending a contemplative pedagogy workshop, I started classes with three-minute meditations on Teams and then students would write for five minutes in journals that only I could see about the static in their minds, their notes for the upcoming semester, their goals for the class, and so on. I found that these approaches made the class much more focused and made students feel both heard and responsible for their own participation. Before the meditations, we would spend a few minutes responding to simple prompts like “How are you going to take care of yourself today?” or “Please put a GIF in the chat that describes how you are feeling right now.” These tools were especially helpful around the stressful weeks of the election, and created a sense of respect and community despite distance and occasional disagreements.
Who knows what this spring semester of 2021 will bring? Amidst the uncertainty, my goal for the students in my classes is both big and small; I hope that we can, as we did this fall, create a place, online or in HyFlex, of peace, community, and empathy, what Robert Frost called, referring to poetry, “a momentary stay against confusion.”