Perspectives

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, 14^th-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.

Continue reading “A Year of Questions: Teaching College Students in 2020” →

Robert Squillace (Clinical Professor and Educational Technology Liaison, Liberal Studies, New York University)

Years before the sudden mass migration of higher education online brought about by the COVID-19 virus, instructors of courses that largely met face-to-face had begun to experiment with video conferencing. In the instances I know best, instructors on two or more different continents would conduct periodic joint sessions, bringing together students in specially-equipped conference rooms for what were meant to be globally enriching discussions. Excitement soon yielded to a recognition that connecting students in distant cities per se brought no special value or interest to the class. While instructors who remembered when a mere transatlantic call was almost prohibitively expensive got a certain charge out of seeing and speaking with students on the other side of an ocean, for students the mere act of real-time video conversation across the world was routine.  Unless such courses were carefully managed to provide students with a particular reason to speak with others who were far away, the experience could prove merely awkward, discussion feeling as forced and artificial as conversation with a group of strangers with whom one has unaccountably been assigned to sit at a cousin’s wedding. In particular, the goal of enriching students’ learning by providing a global experience was defeated by the very means of connecting them. Rather than bringing students in New York to Paris or Shanghai, the video conferences connected one classroom with a similar-looking classroom on the featureless plane of the internet.

Continue reading “Mapping Atopia: The World of Remote Instruction” →

Talar Kaloustian (Assistant Professor of English as a Second Language and Assistant Chair, ESL Unit, Community College of Philadelphia)

Pre-COVID, I think I operated under the “if push comes to shove…” mantra. I never really felt that I needed to learn how to use the many online teaching tools available to us, or that my students really needed to learn how to navigate the online education world. Don’t get me wrong: I do use some tools, such as Canvas and Screencast-o-matic, just because the times have dictated this gradual shift. I have even taught asynchronous online courses before. But this pandemic has certainly brought me to the “shove” stage of learning how to use online educational tools, and to use them in a deeper and more systematic way.

Continue reading “Talar Kaloustian” →