Beginning Again

Right after spring break, my students and I piled onto a Zoom call and tried to do what, before Covid-19, we would have done in a physical classroom: enter into a discussion about a really great book.

The call went so badly that when it was done, I cried.

I experienced going online this past spring as a terrible loss. All my cues were gone: laughter, the rustle of candy wrappers, the shared eye-rolls, the thoughtful expressions. There was no ambient noise on my Zoom call, because everyone was a good internet citizen and muted their mics when they weren’t speaking. Where once I could have glanced around the room to take in my students’ body language, I was now left trying to process nine small squares of information at a time, my students’ heads floating beside and on top of each other as if we were the Brady Bunch. I talked a lot, which ran against every principle of my pedagogy. I even gave in to the dreaded urge to walk everyone through the syllabus (a practice I had abandoned some time ago), which is proof positive that my soul had left my body under the pressure of a webcam and eight disembodied gazes.

The next day, looking for some way to process the experience, I went to online office hours hosted by Jesse Stommel and Sean Michael Morris. The existence of that space, in which instructors could talk and question and support one another, was a gift. I asked for help rethinking the trimester — I didn’t want to see it only through the lens of loss, but couldn’t think of another way to approach it. Jesse sympathetically observed, “Isn’t it all loss, right now?” and I came close to bursting into tears again, overwhelmed by being heard, and by the realities of Covid, the forced distancing from my friends, colleagues, and students, and my worries about what to do next.

I was, I realized, a rank beginner at teaching online.

I began my career in education in 1994, a graduate instructor with responsibility for 120 students a semester, spread across six face-to-face discussion sections a week. My pedagogy was rooted in unyielding rules, structures, and deadlines. I had no idea what I was doing, so I embraced inflexibility and took every situation a student brought to my attention — a broken printer, a sick relative — as an affront. Twenty-six years and a whole lot of learning later I’m an educator of educators — I blog about pedagogy and consult with individuals and departments across the country on how to create fun, dynamic, collaborative learning experiences for students. I have published articles on pedagogy, led workshops, participated in conference panels on teaching, and I’m writing a book called A Pedagogy of Kindness about leading with compassion whenever we teach. I emphasize hands-on, experiential learning; I’m at the other end of the spectrum from people who rely on dry lectures given without so much as a moment for students to ask questions, give feedback, or talk to a neighbor about their thoughts. And yet this spring, I still screwed up.

The problem was that I flew at the task of online education with hubris. I thought I’d find it easy to adapt to being a distance educator. I paid attention to what experts said about equity and the digital divide, and I planned that as much of my upper-level history seminar would be asynchronous as possible. I opted for one synchronous Zoom call a week, figuring that with only eight students, it would be a walk in the park. I rewrote some assignments, and scaffolded my students’ progress toward their final research paper much more intensively than I otherwise would have done. But it plain did not work.

That’s because I thought I was only being asked to mess with geography — to settle myself in cyberspace instead of a seminar room on the third floor of Old Main on my brick-built campus. I was entirely unprepared for the fact that I knew nothing about being an online educator, and that at first glance all my usual pedagogical choices were going to be rendered null and void. I cried that first day because I was overwhelmed by the state of the world, sure, but I also cried because, for the first time in twenty-six years, I hadn’t a clue what I was doing, and that rocked my world.

If I’m honest, amid the loss, I was being a jerk. I was facilitating lifeboat learning or, as one friend put it, the business of salvage-a-semester. I hadn’t fully considered how much my colleagues who specialized in online education knew that I didn’t, or that online learning required a discrete set of skills, practices, and time for planning. I hadn’t factored in that I needed training, support, and to learn from my mistakes, despite the fact that those things had profoundly shaped my teaching career. I had to get okay with starting over. I was functionally 22 years old again, and needed to dig in and learn.

So I signed up for a three-day workshop on Facilitating Live Online Sessions through the Online Learning Consortium. Expertly led by Karen Costa and Clea Mahoney, the workshop not only delivered new things to read, think about, and turn into practice, but was designed at every step to model what a good online course looked like. I learned so much. I learned what neuroscience tells us about when and why we pay attention; I learned how to transfer that knowledge into planning interactive, high-impact, five-minute introductions to my sessions. I learned how to give my students multiple ways to satisfy an assignment, and how to give fulsome feedback in writing through audio, or in video form. I learned how to use software that was new to me, and thought critically about low-tech and high-tech solutions to pedagogical problems. I learned how to structure a course, and how to build moments for students to practice retrieving knowledge. I learned that time moves differently online — that things that take a moment in a physical classroom can require a week of immersive practice on the web, and vice versa. I learned to think first and foremost about building a community, and letting the rest flow from there.

The whole experience left me wondering how much more there was to know. Three days of instruction gave me tools and techniques I could apply in meaningful ways, and gave me back a sense of excitement about instruction. I threw out Zoom; I pulled in Slack; I used gifs and emojis to convey emotions to my students, and we started all over again.

I suspect I am not alone in this journey from expert to novice to student. I expect I am not alone in moving through shock, horror, disappointment, and even a touch of resentment as I took in the scope of my new job. I hope I am not alone in pushing past that and discovering a whole new sandbox to play in on the other side.

It’s easy to get stuck in grief and loss, and to act defensively when asked to rethink our teaching; none of us want to feel that our experience counts for very little because the landscape has changed. Many faculty and graduate students count on summers being for research, not retooling courses, while others are so busy teaching summer classes they have little time to undertake a wholesale reflection on what is and isn’t working. Almost no one is being compensated for all this extra work, and the laundry still needs to be done, the dog walked, dinner cooked, the house cleaned, and our kids and elders taken care of.

And yet, for all intents and purposes, we do not have a choice. No one likes being compelled to do things, especially in the face of global health and financial challenges that fall unequally upon certain members of our communities rather than others. We deserve to be paid for our efforts. Yet chances are slim that we can force a massive change in our political climate before August, enough to enable a rethinking of how education is funded, how families make ends meet, and how individuals have access to health care (This does not mean we shouldn’t try). In the interim, I don’t want anyone to have to cry after teaching. I don’t want anyone to despair as they connect to Zoom. As we work toward meaningful structural change, we must find a way to teach so that our students will learn the content and skills we want them to have. We cannot stay mired in a stagnant pool of grief, even if grief would let us, even if grief were that predictable. We have to press forward, with all the anger and doubt and moments of joy that entails.

I’m embracing a beginner’s mind as the surest way through this thorny situation, even though we work in an industry that so values expertise (while not rewarding people equally for it) that beginners are often viewed with scorn. We don’t have to go far to think of the colleagues who complain about their students splitting infinitives and using passive voice, or voicing the idea that their students just aren’t getting it — the equation, the reading, the interactions of color and texture. Our students deserve better, deserve compassion as they learn. And frankly, so do we.

So if you cried this past spring, or cursed, or felt despondent and sure your teaching skills were eroding, I get it. I was there too; I still feel loss when I contemplate some of the choices we have to make. But while online learning may not be second nature to many of us, it is not second best — it’s simply new, and demands we begin again. Once I granted, in spring, that I didn’t know squat and that others did, I felt relief. I could learn. I could harness the curiosity that got me into this profession to start with, and absorb a whole new world of skills. And I could offer a little kindness to my students and to myself.

Catherine J. Denial is the Bright Distinguished Professor of American History, chair of the History department, and Director of the Bright Institute at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. In 2018, she was named the Eugene Asher Distinguished Teaching Award winner by the American Historical Association. She is at work on a book called A Pedagogy of Kindness, under contract with West Virginia University Press.