Meeting #3     11/30/20

 For our third meeting of the fall semester, we read hooks’ chapter: “Teaching as Prophetic Vocation.” The prompts for discussion shared ahead of time were:

• hooks opens the chapter with the statement, “The more I teach, the more I learn that teaching is a prophetic vocation. It demands of us allegiance to integrity of vision and belief in the face of those who would seek to silence, censor, or discredit our words.”
• She goes on to state, “The most vital, the most liberating strategy, that beloved teachers offered me … was learning to be a critical thinker: to ask questions, to reserve judgment while putting together the who, what, when, where, why, and how.”
• For our final meeting of this very strange year, let’s consider in what ways hooks’ view of the role of the teacher jibes with our own or not, and whether and in what ways we’ve been able to enact – or not – our most cherished goals for teaching under 2020’s highly unusual conditions.

Much of our discussion ended up taking the form of reflecting on several of the challenges we’d experienced while teaching remotely this semester, along with some successes.

 Challenges included:

• Providing equitable learning opportunities for students lacking material resources
• Creating a strong, vibrant class community when students’ personal circumstances and access to material resources are so uneven
• Scaffolding engagement with critical thinking when students have so many practical life challenges and struggle to keep up with submission of assignments
• Lack of exposure to critical thinking in many of the schools students attend prior to enrolling in KCC
• Institutional policies that discourage synchronous sessions
• Cumbersomeness and clunkiness of Blackboard
• Overabundance, for faculty, of assignments to grade, as teaching remotely generally involves assigning more written work
• How to connect with those not submitting assignments and/or not attending video meetings or participating in group projects (It was mentioned how helpful it would be to have TAs to assist with this challenge.)

Successes included:

• Option of inviting family members to join in on class sessions (e.g. students’ children invited to sing along during Zoom sessions for course on teaching music to children)
• Using platforms like Padlet to share and discuss visual artifacts (e.g. sharing and discussion of photos taken for a photojournalism course)
• Students often pay more attention to course readings in remote courses
• Students often pay more attention to one another’s work in remote courses
• Remote courses lend themselves well to making students sharing and commenting on each other’s work a major component of the course

Jason Leggett shared some helpful resources for developing remote curriculum that is relevant, engaging, and emancipatory:

• His article from 2018 that describes a class in which he used, “a video game development project and required technology as a way to foster collaboration among students while they studied civil rights narratives.”
• A CUNY Commons website with abundant resources for creating meaningful online learning opportunities

Thanks, Jason!

This FIG will be on hiatus during the Spring 2021 semester, but will resume in some form in Fall 2021. Please feel free to contact me with any thoughts or suggestions you may have for the future direction of this FIG.

 

Meeting #2     11/9/20

 For our second meeting of the fall semester, we made a brief departure from discussion of bell hooks’ Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom, and instead discussed the NYT article, “What We Lose When We Go From the Classroom to Zoom” by CUNY colleague Karen Strassler. The article was a jumping off point for consideration of some of the questions we generated during our first meeting, including:

• Can a meaningful class community be created and sustained when teaching remotely?
• How does a Zoom class compare to a face to face class?
  • Do we prepare for each differently?
  • Does each have different goals and purposes?
• What standards and expectations for conduct and participation should we have for Zoom classes and to what end?
• Does losing our classrooms mean, as Strassler fears, “…losing something vital”?

During this meeting a range of viewpoints were shared in connection with the question of whether remote teaching enhances, diminishes, or changes in new ways that are neither better or worse, the nature of our students’ college and class experience.

Almost all of us agreed that there’s a value to sharing a physical space, and being able to have spontaneous interactions and conversations, that is difficult to replicate remotely. On the other hand, some felt that the need to teach remotely had sparked some innovations beneficial to student learning. For example, instead of dissection of actual animals, a bio class is now doing “virtual dissections” which allow students to see and understand anatomy better than the old method did.

One issue that came up is what standards and expectations for students should be put in place at the college, departmental, and individual classroom levels, in order to both support student success and foster meaningful, engaged learning experiences. Sometimes there’s an effort to create “equity through asynchronicity”: departments decide that minimizing synchronous activities will be more accommodating of students’ schedules and problems with accessing devices and Wi-Fi. While this may be true, sometime the result is academic work that’s not especially deep or doesn’t spark critical thinking or student engagement.

Some of us believe that live discussions and conversations, in which students are asked to put their ideas and understandings into words to be shared and responded to by others on the spot, are an essential part of building the capacity for critical discourse and analysis that must be an outcome of a contemporary college  education. While this goal can only be fulfilled through synchronous class activity, students are receiving institutional messages, at a variety of levels that minimize the importance of being present for such activities. Many don’t join video meetings at all or are joining with their cameras off, while at work or preforming other tasks. We agreed that this sends an  undesirable message about what it means to be a part of a college class.

This poses a dilemma because if too much is asked of students’ time or access to technology, they may check out of the class or the college altogether, but if too little is asked, they may not learn much and may come away with a problematic notion of what a college students’ role is. Consideration of this dilemma led us to think about resources and supports that would help create the conditions for student to be able to be successful in classes that are intellectually rigorous. Such conditions would include the college allowing students access to libraries, labs, and quiet spaces, and the provision of laptops, phones, and access to Wi-Fi.

We concluded by reflecting on the importance of faculty lending their voices to the conversations currently taking place at the college about the policies and practices that impact teaching and learning.

 

Meeting #1     10/19/20

 For our first meeting of the fall semester, we used hooks’ chapter “Sharing the Story” as a jumping off point for our conversation. Questions we considered beforehand were:

• How do you respond to hooks’ view of the place for sharing personal stories in the college classroom?
• What, if any, is the place for and purpose of sharing personal stories in your classes?
• What are the implications of teaching remotely for the sharing of personal stories and for the creation of a class community?

This meeting consisted primarily of participants sharing accounts of techniques and technologies being used in classes that aim to bolster student interaction and that are conducive to students’ stories, experiences, and outlooks being integrated into coursework.

Approaches that were shared included:

• An Introductory Discussion Board assignment, in which students and faculty post photos of themselves along with some information about who they are and what their academic and personal interests are.
• Use, in class, of social media platforms most students use already anyway, such as Facebook or Instagram, along with conventional course management platforms like Blackboard.
• Small group discussions during Zoom meetings, that ask students to consider some sort of course content together, but also allow them to get know one another. Assigning a task, such as creating a google doc or recount of what’s been discussed to share when the whole class come back together at the end of the meeting, can be very helpful in keeping students on track while they’re in the small groups.
• Organizing small group meetings in which a cluster of students is online at the same time, working simultaneously on a google doc or other shared item.
• Beginning video meetings with a “good news” segment in which participants are invited to share, in the chat, something positive that happened that week.
• Using collaborative annotation platforms like Perusal. It was noted that the easy back and forth exchange of brief comments about assigned readings that such platforms invite in some ways replicates face to face conversation better than can long format Discussion Board posts.

Most felt that all of these technologies and approaches are helping to create meaningful learning experiences and connections for many students. At the same time, most felt that it’s challenging to foster the sort of strong connection and community that arises in face-to-face classes when teaching remotely. All are committed to creating the conditions that will allow students to have the most meaningful learning experiences possible under less than ideal circumstances.