Resources

Staying connected to students will be very important in the coming months–for their sense of well-being, for their academic success, and for their persistence. Managing student needs and expectations while teaching remotely can be more challenging than in the traditional classroom where students might catch you before or after class. Students might be in different time zones, have responsibilities that make it hard for them to participate in synchronous activities (in real time), or they may lack the technological capability necessary to connect. You will want to consider both synchronous and asynchronous options to make sure that all students have equitable access to your support.   Asynchronous Options  Despite the asynchronous nature of communication in many online courses, students often expect an immediate reply to their questions without considering the time of day they posted, or the possible complexity of the reply. One method for effectively addressing this concern is to clearly establish virtual office hours and a policy on when and how you will respond (e.g., within 24 hours).  • Forums are a good way to respond to students if questions are relevant to more than one student and do not require confidentiality. On Canvas, you might occasionally post a discussion prompt such as “What questions do you have about the upcoming assignment?” You may just tell students that you will respond within a certain period of time. This reduces multiple email responses to the same question and also archives the questions and responses for later access. • Toward the end of a challenging unit, you might ask students to submit to you their “muddiest point”–what is it they still do not understand or are confused by. You could ask them to email you or answer anonymously through a Qualtrics survey. This allows you to respond in one post, video, or email to address the biggest challenges students are having with the material. • You can also ask students to post their questions about the material in a Google doc or discussion board in Canvas and let them respond to each other’s questions if they know the answers. This helps create connections and increases peer learning. In this strategy, you may want to wait to chime in until a pre-communicated period of time has passed so that you don’t inhibit participation.  • Email can also work quite well, though you may want to designate a specific, consistent subject line (e.g., “Question about CHEM 100”) to keep track of the topics. You may be able to respond to the common questions or concerns at one time in a Q&A format.  Synchronous Options   Zoom, WebEx, and the good old-fashioned phone can work for real-time meetings. However, you will want to poll your students to determine possible times for everyone.   • Synchronous office hours are sometimes an individual affair, but they also can be for groups when the focus is a need common to many students. This can be more fun and will save you a lot of time! In Zoom you have the option of setting up a waiting room where you invite students in one-by-one. You can have students make individual appointments with you, or in the case of a larger class, assign them to come in groups. You can also create “common concerns office hours” where all students can elect to join. • One way of determining common concerns: At the end of a virtual class, you can ask students to post their “muddiest point”using the whiteboard in Zoom or through Qualtrics to preserve anonymity. Or you can give them a few minutes to put their questions in the chat. You can then offer virtual office hours to respond to themes that emerge. You can also meet with groups about projects, conduct reviews before an exam, or host a drop-in Q&A–remember to record the session for those who can’t make it. • Providing a contact telephone number is another option, although instructors should clearly designate appropriate calling times, as well as how and when they will respond to voice mail messages. For some students, this might be their best way to join you. Students will often be working in the virtual classroom at all hours of the day or night, so maintaining clearly understood communication channels is essential for the ongoing success of the online course.  Some additional things to plan for  • The times during the semester when students will need more support, e.g., a week before an assignment is due or an exam will be held.  • Whether you want students to drop in or schedule an appointment (in Zoom there is a virtual waiting room, and you can let a student or group of students in at their scheduled time)? 

We’re in the middle of a pandemic with no clear end in sight. At the same time, many of us are taking a crash course in teaching online that we didn’t sign up for, and we’re handling it with varying degrees of success. Given all that, what should we focus on during the remaining weeks of our classes? Start by taking your students into account. How are they doing? I’m at a small, Catholic college, and I’m teaching required, first-year general education classes this semester. My students were OK for the first two weeks of online classes, but they seem worn out now. They tell me that their professors were understanding at first, but then they returned to business as normal, creating a pileup of papers and exams just as the students were getting more tired and discouraged. I didn’t like hearing that. For this semester, please, don’t worry about covering content and let’s lower our academic standards whenever it seems appropriate. Let’s focus on what our students need. So, what do our students need right now? Most important, they need our compassion and patience, and they need simple explanations of critical information. Even my stronger students are struggling to retain information because they are anxious, unfocused, and tired. Many of them worry needlessly and endlessly. One girl has asked me five times whether I’ll punish her for her intermittent Internet connectivity problems. I’ve reassured her repeatedly, but I suspect she’s still worried. And all that worrying is making her even more tired and less able to learn. I now spend the first few minutes of each class checking in, reassuring them, and reviewing basic information like course registration dates. With some trepidation, I promise that their other professors are reasonable people, and I coach them on how to talk to them. I use anonymous surveys to surface their concerns about their classes and the college. We discuss stress management and try to calm down. I’ve ordered all of them to take at least one full day off over Easter. I reassure, and explain again and again. I’ve lowered my academic expectations. When my students struggle with understanding basic instructions, it’s counterproductive to assign them long and difficult readings. So, I shorten the readings, and I use videos or pictures instead whenever possible. Comparing Michelangelo’s “Creation of Adam” to Harmonia Rosales’ reinterpretation, which presents God as a black woman, allowed us to discuss many of the same issues as the feminist reading I had on my syllabus. And dropping the reading made my students just grateful enough to engage with the images when I asked. I’m also revising the content of the last part of my course. As instructors in philosophy, theology, and religious studies, we are well positioned to have existential conversations with our students. After all, such questions are at the core of our disciplines! I’m focusing on questions at the intersection of my background and the current moment: Is happiness a choice, or do our circumstances determine whether we can be happy? What can we know and what should we do in the absence of certainty? Who do we trust? Why does God allow suffering? Does suffering make us better and stronger? How can religion be a source of strength? What about people who don’t believe in God? I’m inviting my students to draw on their experiences in their papers. They are crafting arguments about why God might allow the COVID-19 crisis and about how their experiences are making them stronger (or not). They are considering ways in which the burdens, yet again, fall disproportionally on some groups and asking how that might complicate the picture. They reflect upon how the crisis is affecting their own faith and on the possibility of staying happy and resilient in a crisis. I’m drawing on texts I’ve already read and questions I’ve thought about before. I’m too tired right now to invent anything new! Your version will be different, focusing on your questions rather than mine, using texts you’ve read, movies you’ve seen, and art that has moved you. Experiment. Invite the students into a conversation that uses your discipline to help make sense of their experiences right now. But don’t drive yourself crazy. If nothing comes to mind, stick to a gentler version of your original plan. Be kind to your students, but also to yourself.

Students are asking questions about the pandemic, the messages of the Bible, and faith during crisis. What does it mean to teach the Bible in ways that recognize contemporary crisis and opportunity?  Dr. Mitzi Smith (Columbia Theological Seminary) and Dr. Roger Nam (Portland Seminary) discuss their creative approaches to teaching biblical literature and interpretation during this pandemic.

For a denomination like Roman Catholicism that is canonically difficult to leave, many American Catholics are migrating beyond the institution’s immediate influence. The new religious patterns associated with this experience represent a somewhat cohesive movement influencing not just Catholicism, but the whole of North American religion. Careful examination of the lives of disaffiliating young adults reveals that their religious lives are complicated. For example, the assumption that leaving conventional religious communities necessarily results in a non-religious identity is simplistic and even, perhaps, misleading. Many maintain a religious worldview and practice. This book explores one “place” where the religiously-affiliated and religiously-disaffiliating regularly meet—Catholic secondary schools—and something interesting is happening. Through a series of ethnographic portraits of Catholic religious educators and their disaffiliating former students, the book explores the experience of disaffiliation and makes its complexity more comprehensible in order to advance the discourse of fields interested in this significant movement in religious history and practice. (From the Publisher)

Quarantine strips life down to the bare essentials. My work gets me out of bed each morning and through each day. Admittedly, before quarantine, the demands of work structured most of my days and a significant portion of my life. The difference is that during quarantine I am more willing to admit that I have been reduced to my work with little else left that is life-giving. Facing this reality allows me to face the truth that I have been living through a series of stressors. My life over the past five years has been marked by transitions: relocation to a new city, a new administrative role, a divorce, co-parenting arrangements for pre-teen, now teen boys, purchase of a new home and the attendant address changes, packing and unpacking. These were papered over by a full professional life packed with teaching, academic writing, professional conferencing, mentoring, administration, leadership in my various academic groups. These stressors built to a full boil with the death of my brother in mid-March and the experience of having to view his burial via YouTube. Quarantine has brought escape routes and pathways for deep connections that the hectic pace of academic life under “normal” circumstances would have eliminated with the constant demands for productivity and keeping on top of schedules. Quarantine has reduced my work from its tangible realities to greater screen time that facilitate the escape habits I have honed over the course of my career. Teaching online is not entirely new to me; what is new to me is teaching from the space where the majority of my life and critical life moments are lived out in front of screens and through pixilated images. As waves of grief have come over me in the past weeks, I recognize how work forces me to acknowledge and name my teaching as a coping strategy. The routines of the week require me to perform and to show up for class times, respond to discussion posts, read and grade student writing, attend meetings. I pushed myself through with sufficient practice of showing up and pretending competence. I now see that teaching during these times sits within a simulated world. Simulation has always fed my need to escape, as it has for many other persons. Simulating grief, pain, loss, and stress can only go so far, for as Bessel van der Kolk reminds us, “the body keeps the score.” Teaching can be a means of pretending things are ordinary. Making minimal changes to the syllabus, expanding topics to take account of the current context, or adjusting grade expectations. All these adaptations are coping mechanisms for me to tell myself, and my students, that we were carrying on with the ordinary events of academic life. In these online spaces, we facilitate a grand simulacra and escape to familiar worlds of knowledge and competence. I am fine with the escape only because it is a means of survival at this time. I recognize all too well that the theories of online education presume that the digital world serves as the adjunct to the flesh and blood realities of teachers and learners. Now we are truly in flipped classrooms where flesh and blood encounters form less and less of our daily realities and the digital becomes the default reality. In these days of disconnection, I am finding that other forms of social gatherings in online settings need to be named as pale reflections of the real thing. Part of my grief is wishing I had been next to my parents and siblings as we said goodbye to our older brother. I long for real connections, preferring the comfort of a friend’s voice over an email expressing condolences. I long to be in real conversations with a worshipping community, and not listening to someone talk at me through a screen. These real connections that formed the parts of our real-world communities are a long way off. Until then, I face the reality that I am my best human connection. In normal times I might find this thought too self-absorbed. If disconnection gets me to fall in love with me again, to love the parts of me that are energized by teaching, to love fiercely the liberative work of my academic research, then I am achieving what Derek Walcott refers to as loving “again the stranger who was your self.” Now I am thinking of ways to teach through my body and my responsiveness to my body’s pain, my vulnerability, and longings. This means inhabiting biblical characters with greater empathy and asking students to stretch their imaginations away from orthodox inspired interpretations of biblical texts to find real connections with the feelings, fears, and experiences of biblical texts that in many ways have been formed in the midst of trauma. I’m developing exercises that ask students to read texts as they look through their windows at the world they mostly experience through imagined senses and translate those experiences into looking at the ancient world in the Bible as if peering at them standing at the window of their homes. I am learning how to harness the genius of D-Nice’s Club Quarantine parties that call people together around a screen event lived out in bodily movements in individual homes. To teach online now not only means attending to the onscreen activities, the strategies of well-crafted pixilated pedagogy, but also doing the hard work to pay attention to what happens offline with us as teachers and with our students.