Rarely are we--we, in the largest sense--affected by a single event. When they do occur, we know that these broadly shared experiences are inherently historical: World War II, the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 (vicariously experienced across the world in real time via television and radio), and the Covid-19 pandemic. As faculty in institutions of higher education, we, like others around the world and in different professions, faced an unprecedented experience. How we approached the experiences varied from instructor to instructor from institution to institution. Within these various experiences, paradoxically, there was a common thread: how to meet learning outcomes and achieve student success despite the sudden and radical shift in our and our students’ lives. As we considered, and then prepared a special issue on how the pandemic impacted teaching and learning at institutions of higher learning, it occurred to us that the Hero’s Journey spoke to our common experience. We were forced from our normal lives into the unknown. As we moved into the unknown, we found allies and mentors. We learned new skills and strategies. We confronted difficulties and managed to overcome them, sometimes exceedingly well, sometimes we just survived. And now we prepare for a return to what doesn’t feel like the old normal, but could be. What will we learn from this experience?
Teaching pedagogical seminar courses requires interactive, hands-on sessions. However, as schools across the U.S. pivot online on a very short notice amid the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, several adjustments had to be made. These include the delivery of lessons and forms of communication. In this chapter, I provide a visual narrative of my experience teaching twelve pre-service teachers at a liberal arts college in Upstate New York. In the remaining six lessons following the pivot, the seminar was conducted synchronously, once a week, for an hour per session. The students who came from different parts of the States, attended my methods of teaching reading and writing for elementary schools course through Zoom. Despite the class starting at 7:30 am, students in this course were present and actively participating. To understand my pedagogical moves, I reflected on the transition to remote learning using the Community of inquiry (COI) framework, a social constructivist model for creating deep and meaningful learning in online and blended environments. While the framework, which comprises three dimensions: teaching presence, social presence and cognitive presence, is not developed for examining learning processes in times of pandemic, it is helpful for thinking about my instructional approaches. Research has shown that there is a relationship between the three presences and students’ perceived learning, satisfaction with the course, satisfaction with the instructor, actual learning, and sense of belonging (see Akyol & Garrison, 2008; Arbaugh, 2008; Richardson, et. al., 2017). By looking at the instructional design, course facilitation techniques and learning activities, I gained insights for sustaining students’ learning in an unplanned online environment. Hence, the purpose of articulating my thoughts guided by COI is to offer a reflective critique for broadly thinking about reconstructing a pedagogy during a global crisis.
Teaching First-Year Seminar: The hidden curriculum of culture, history, and heritage at Historically Black Colleges and Universities Abstract First Year Seminar (FYS) is a commonly used retention tool developed to support the progression and encourage the completion of college for students during their initial year of post-secondary education. Yet very little is known about the pedagogical approaches of FYS instructors, particularly at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). This study specifically explores the experiences and pedagogical perceptions of HBCU FYS instructional professionals. The researchers interviewed six participants to understand ways in which these institutional agents, specifically instructors, leveraged tenets of culturally relevant pedagogy and aspects of fictive kinship to enact social justice, within teaching approaches. Based on the coding and interpretation of semi-structured qualitative interviews, the results uncovered attempts to culturally reach and teach students. Thus, the researchers argue, that HBCU FYS instructors practice a hidden curriculum of instruction informed by Black culture and the institution’s history as a form of explicating heritage as capital in teaching.
Abstract: The author, an Assistant Professor in an Aviation Maintenance Technology (AMT) program, teaches future aviation maintenance technicians at a university in Alaska. Certified by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the AMT program is a pathway to becoming a licensed Aviation Maintenance Technician and offers an AMT degree. FAA certification requires FAA-approved curriculum (subjects and learning objectives) as well as adherence to regulatory standards for teacher-student contact hours. The university AMT program consists of a combination of didactic and hands-on teaching/learning styles, including student performance of aviation maintenance tasks (e.g., aircraft inspections and engine overhaul). The COVID-19 pandemic required faculty to convert courses to a suitable online delivery format and change the curriculum of an entire semester of courses. The author’s initial response: It would be impossible to accomplish the conversion and still maintain FAA requirements. Cancelling the program until after the pandemic was discussed. This was not an option, as current students would lose FAA-mandated credits and hours, and the AMT program could be closed permanently due to state funding issues. So, the complicated conversion began and online learning commenced mid-semester. As the semester progressed, the author began to embrace the online modality and champion an effort to complete conversion of the entire program. Through this experience, the author realized the tremendous benefits of online teaching: a greatly improved learning and lifestyle experience for the students as well as economic benefits to a financially challenged institution. The online program creates a learning environment which more closely matches the students’ future technology-driven careers and increases the knowledge and skills they will gain. Pandemic gathering restrictions limit the number of students allowed in labs and field activities. Though initially a concern, students will benefit through increased student-teacher contact and learning opportunity during these activities.
The COVID-19 pandemic prompted faculty across the country to pivot their in-person courses to ones that could be offered virtually. Some faculty learned quickly that our economically-challenged students had difficulty trying to access resources that suddenly became remote. In this reflective article, we will highlight the experiences of five social scientists’ efforts to transform courses from in-person to remote delivery, attending to each of the “presences” in the Community of Inquiry (COI) framework (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2001), while also addressing the economic challenges of students on a regional mid-western campus. We end with several “lessons learned” and suggestions for remote delivery as we move forward. Keywords: Community of Inquiry, online learning, social science
The COVID-19 pandemic created countless challenges in higher education at every level. At the faculty level, one such challenge was how to convert applied internships into online academic capstone courses in the middle of the semester. For programs that require their majors to complete internships as part of a graduation requirement, full-semester conversions were necessary, both for the Summer semester and in preparation for the possibility of no internships being offered in the Fall. Such actions are in the best interest of all students, many of whom are taking the course during their senior year and run the risk of delaying their graduation absent these accommodations. While on its surface these conversions may seem daunting, both internships and capstone courses share similarities that facilitate the process, including professional development and the integration and application of knowledge students have acquired over their academic careers. This paper aims to serve as a resource for postsecondary educators in the conceptualization and implementation of these conversions. The authors examine several important considerations, including creating new assignments to replace uncompleted internship hours, ensuring that mid-semester adjustments continue to meet course outcomes, communicating with students and internship providers to facilitate a seamless transition, and working with colleagues and university administrators to quickly build and approve a new capstone course for the Summer.
Abstract: As a nursing professor at Goshen College, a small liberal arts college in Indiana, and a nurse practitioner working at an urgent care, I have realized that there are lessons from the clinic’s transformation into a COVID-19 testing center that can be applied to educating future nurses. As nurses, we must adapt to different work environments, ever-changing practices as research progresses, and a population whose needs are different now than they will be in five years. As nursing educators, these lessons are some of the most difficult to pass on to students as the majority of their nursing education occurs in a classroom or lab, and nearly all of their clinical experience occurs in a hospital. In this essay, I explore the ways in which I taught students about the resilience that nurses must have and how the transition at the urgent care has aided these efforts. For those of us with limited online teaching experience, making hours of lecture videos could have been seen as the safe choice. But doing so would have shortchanged our students: we would not have replaced students honing their skills in lab or interacting with real patients during their clinicals. I discuss some of the methods our department used to combat these tendencies; for example, my students recorded themselves physically assessing family members. In addition to demonstrating our adaptability in teaching, the nursing faculty showed our students first-hand how resilient their professors have been: several of us practice, and a handful, including me, have increased our hours on the front lines of this pandemic in part because we view nursing as our vocation: we help whenever needed (White, 2002).
This essay discusses one campus’s response to the pandemic. We explore the issues our campus faced, and how we tackled the challenge through cross-functional team building. By prioritizing teaching and learning, we were able to navigate the inherent ambiguity of the public health crisis with flexibility and transparency. Like others in higher education, we embarked into the unknown during the Spring of 2020. It was a journey for all of us, and along the way, there were lessons learned. This is our story.
