[This would be
the last week of classes, if the Spring 2020 semester had gone as scheduled. To
say that it didn’t is just to scratch the surface of this chaotic, crazy,
challenging spring, though. So for my usual semester recaps, this time I’ve
focused on brief tributes to those folks who helped us make it through this
incredibly tough time, leading up to this special weekend post of my own
reflections on teaching in this new world.]
On three
takeaways of mine from the most unprecedented teaching experience of my life.
1)
Un-Grading: The first decision I made as I began
to shift my classes (and, more exactly, my thinking) to this emergency
distance instruction model (a phrase I greatly prefer to “online teaching,”
which I have done many times and this most definitely was not) was that I would
not be grading any of the remaining work. That is, if the students turned in
said work, they would get full credit for it; I would still send extensive
feedback, but not attached to (and thus not needing to justify) grades. Eventually
FSU, like
many institutions, offered that option (known as
Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory here) for most students and classes, but I think it
mattered a lot, to me as well as to the students, that I had made this emphasis
clear and central from my first communications as we shifted gears. I get the
concerns about an absence of grades, both immediate (students might not focus
on the work) and long-term (what this will mean for GPAs, transcripts, future
applications, etc.). But to be honest I believe those issues would have been in
play for this semester no matter what, and that my decision to do away with
grades greatly amplified my ability to focus entirely on items 2 and 3 in this
post.
2)
What Matters Most: The second decision I made,
and one that I’ve likewise seen echoed by many voices (including those in the resources
from my colleague Kisha Tracy that I highlighted earlier this week), was to
make many aspects of my classes optional, including some of those that are most
central to my regular pedagogy (like the weekly email responses that are an
integral element of just about every class I teach). This was a significantly
tougher call, as it meant for example that we would have far less in-depth
conversations about most of our readings (as did my concurrent decision to make
our weekly Zoom check-ins much more about questions, concerns, and community
than about focusing on any particular course content). But I would argue that
this was the ultimate test of what I’ve always called my
student-centered pedagogy: that if my fundamental emphasis is on helping
students develop their voices and perspectives and ideas, rather than on any
particular readings or content, I had to reflect that emphasis through my
choices in a setting where we quite simply could not do all of the things my
face-to-face classes seek to do.
3)
Make It Personal: One of the main such things I
did still want to do was have the students complete versions of their remaining
individual work: a multi-textual seminar paper in my Intro to Sci Fi/Fantasy
class, their senior portfolios in English Studies Capstone, and two papers in
First-Year Writing II (a comparison between two multimedia texts and a research
paper). Again, these assignments wouldn’t be graded, but I wanted students to
complete them, and I especially wanted them to feel meaningful rather than busy
work or hoops to jump through. All of those assignments were already pretty
individualized (ie, students could choose their own texts and topics), but what
I tried to stress for them as clearly as I could was that they should make
their work as personal as possible: connect it to ideas and issues and conversations
and genres that have been and/or are significant in their own lives and
identities. To put it bluntly, my most important collective academic goal for
this semester—which was somewhere outside the top 10 most important goals
overall—was that we all came away from it remembering the reasons why we’re in
college, the value and meaning of the work we do in spaces like this. I hope in
these ways that my classes offered that chance for my students, as I know it
did for me.
Next series
starts Monday,
Ben
PS. Reflections
or tributes of your own on Spring 2020?
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