How I’ve Learned From Cathy Davidson
Before thinking about a syllabus or videos/Zoom, think about what it means to be a student.
Students are:
Learning from a place of dislocation, anxiety, and trauma
Distracted because of physical and emotional distress
Experiencing a burden comparable to a full-time job caused by trauma and anxiety
Missing the social enhancements that nourish their support systems
Studying for an unknown future
Worried about total social breakdown, total economic collapse, millions dying over the next three or four years
Are being faced with the challenge of staying focused in a field/subject, that seems utterly tangential to their traumatized lives
At home, with parent/s, no job, canceled internships, and paying tuition for online/videos learning
Carrying an emotional workload
Potentially masking trauma by partying, pretending they are invisible, and not caring about their futures
Before we begin designing and building an online course we need to:
Think from a student's point of view
Add joy as a learning outcome
Be sensitive humans first and professors second
Design as humans for humans in a global crisis
Design courses with the awareness of pain, dislocation, uncertainty, and trauma
Begin with the question, what would I need if I were a student in this historic moment?
Ask what will be most of value to my students now?
Consider what we assign and how we assign it
Give students tools that helps them be stronger in the present and build towards their own and society's better future
Think about how students interact with one another and with us
Think about activities beyond the screen that extend the lessons of the course
Think about access in all its dimensions: technological, intellectual, personal, financial, medical, educational
Offer - curiosity, imagination, knowledge, power - as antidotes to the present disruption and trauma, tools towards by:
Creating course content where students can become co-teachers as well as co-learners, actively contributing to the course
Providing art and creativity an ideal antidote to isolation and anxiety
Asking students to share what they have learned: study skills, focus tricks, ways they have discovered meaning amid uncertainty
For example, using creativity as a tool for coping with the new social distancing constraints of their lives. Teaching video editing where students film exciting things to promote “seeing anew” in their restricted and socially distanced lives - on walks alone on formerly busy city streets; or talking to grandparents they live with; or video'ing the different forms of friendship that blossom on Zoom.
For example, giving students agency. A Political scientists whose students are modeling fall voting patterns and coming up with positive (nonpartisan) ways to get out the vote, despite sheltering. Or safe ways to stand in line at polling places.
For example, using subject material to help students understand the present and feel a little more optimistic for the future. A History professor begins his early American culture class with the 1793 Yellow Fever plague in Philadelphia.
For example, an urban planner who challenges students to reimagine urban space in the short and long run, from outside seating at entertainment venues to rent control and subsidized housing to redress gross inequities that existed in NYC long before COVID-19.
Using the "meta reflection" technique - having students think, talk, communicate with one another, about what they learned in class today or last week and what it meant for them
Using the “report-back” technique, where students communicate with others, seeing their work in school as relevant and meaningful to their disrupted lives, and lends a sense of community
Reduce the homework for videos/other asynchronous learning, while adding a component: ask your students to apply what they learned in class today to some aspect of their life and write a 25 or 50-word "report back" on a course blog or other secure course site on what they did and how it worked out