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[su_youtube_advanced url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1v1Z7Yj0OU&feature=youtu.be"] Teaching is an inherently creative act. We have been taught to teach as we were taught.  I was taught by classic lecturers.  If it wasn't the lecture it was the socratic method, seminar method or students present and lets see who can do the best. When I started teaching I taught like I was taught.  I have come to discard the old ways of teaching and allow myself and my students the freedom to explore and create an experience that is saturated with the creative spirit of the times in which we live. In this Vlog I ask what creative rhythms do you have in your life that inspire creativity in your teaching?  I share my creative rhythms and I invite you to celebrate yours and realize how they inform the creativity in your teaching. 

Like semesters before, Spring 2020 began with little “pomp and circumstance.” After four semesters on-site, I had finally adjusted to the rhythm of university life as a rookie faculty member. My courses, students, and committees had become old, reliable friends; everything was predictable, or so I thought. In the “blink of an eye,” my students, colleagues and my old, reliable routines were swept into a new, unpredictable world. Courses were canceled, closed, or moved hastily to online formats. Our students were forced to return home or find new places to sleep—all while dealing with the financial strains and stresses that this pandemic has brought. Yes, the old is very much gone, and the new “normal,” whatever that might be, now reigns. What exactly is this “new normal?” I wish I could look into a crystal ball and tell you, but I can’t, no one can. But I do know that in these last few days, universities, their administration, faculty, staff, and students have done something just short of incredible. At my university, for example, over $100,000 has been raised by alumni, faculty, students, and staff to help support current students who are finding it hard to pay rent or buy groceries during these uncertain times. Lending support like this to our students will free them from some anxiety about their basic necessities while trying to finish their courses, or even college careers. I hope that these types of financial support continue well beyond this pandemic. What a beautiful “new normal” this would be.  Regarding instructional design and teaching strategies, teaching during these times has allowed some fresh air to flow into the field of education. Teachers, veteran and rookie, have been provided a gift to re-think old teaching styles and try out new ones. Although it would be nice to jump back into my normal course routine and see my students in person again, I have found moving my course online to be largely enjoyable given the innovative support and great conversations that this move has stirred among my students and colleagues. The sharing of ideas and collegiality that has arisen among colleagues who are searching for new ways to keep their students engaged has broken down many of the instructional silos that have stood for far too long across the vast fields of higher education. This “new normal” is also one that I hope remains long after we return to campus. The “new normal” that I enjoy does not come without its share of difficulty. For one, although I have enjoyed testing new online teaching strategies, I have also had to re-think others and even eliminate some in response to the “new normal” my students now face. Like many of my colleagues, my students have been separated across the country, each living different experiences at the hands of Covid-19. For some of my students, other than being at home and taking courses online, life is normal; for others, life has become unbearable. I have found that most of my day is spent less on teaching, and more on “checking-in;” cheering on my students that “they can do this!” Many of our conversations and discussion board posts have been designated as points for quiet reflection and solidarity. Within these conversations, I have learned to be more pastoral and better at letting go. The exams, quizzes, and daily assignments can wait—the personal needs of my students cannot. This “new normal,” although hard to navigate, is also one that I hope to hang on to for as long as I can. As awful as this pandemic has been, I have learned a great deal about myself as a professor of theology and religious education. And I have learned an even greater deal about the lives of my students and my courses. How I teach will never be the same and that, I have found, is the beauty that lies just beyond the “new normal.” May our “new normal” continue to breathe fresh air into what we have done—may our teaching never be the same.

Students are in crisis. How can they keep up with their academic life when the pandemic has all but assured that their personal and emotional lives are experiencing some measure of turmoil or trauma? The novel coronavirus has upended every area of society. There is no sector of public or private life that it has not affected. Faculty at institutions of higher education have been reeling from figuring out how to transform their in-person classes into a virtual format in the blink of an eye. On the other side of these virtual classrooms, students are themselves reeling from all of the changes. Professors are telling stories of students flooding their inboxes with messages expressing anxiety, an inability to focus, and an inability to keep up with their assigned work. As a result, many realized that students are carrying so much emotional and psychological distress that they need professors to be sensitive and mindful of their circumstances outside of the classroom. Without a doubt, they are right; students are drowning and they need faculty to throw them a lifeline. Professors are seeing that they need to “shift gears” to exclusively online formats and shift their expectations and requirements for students. Higher education in the age of the Covid-19 has professors making changes that are sensitive to what is happening in the students’ lives outside of the virtual classroom. Many have taken their cue from those like UNC-Chapel Hill Professor Bandon L. Bayne who made headlines after he amended his own syllabus and expectations for his students when classes were forced to go entirely online. Bayne explained that he discovered that his students not only had “a whole range of differential access to material,” but also that students were all treading water trying to navigate their own anxieties about the pandemic and their varying family and life contexts. Thanks to the pandemic, many in higher education are realizing what has always been true--that they must keep in mind the whole student when teaching. They are learning that teaching during a pandemic means that being an educator entails more than pedagogy, it includes structuring classes around the premise that student circumstances outside of the classroom have a direct impact on their ability to navigate the classroom and to meet classroom expectations and requirements. Faculty are learning that this was always the case, even in the pre-pandemic world of higher education. In our current Covid-19 world, many rely on the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) for guidance and updates about this relatively unknown virus. Yet, the reality is that the CDC had already warned of a public health issue that has a direct impact on the functioning of students in higher education before they ever heard the words “Covid-19” or “coronavirus.” In November 2019, a few months before Covid-19 began spreading across the globe, the CDC declared trauma a public health issue. Additionally, before the CDC made this declaration, faculty across disciplines were seeing college students navigate what seemed like ever-increasing mental health crises. Increasingly, students have been dealing with mental health barriers coupled with rising rates of mass gun violence and campus sexual assaults. Experts have long suspected that many college students carry the effects of childhood trauma well into adulthood, in addition to having to navigate the challenges and realities of modern college life. Many of us who teach in higher education can testify to this pre-pandemic reality. We have known students whose educational experiences have been marred by mental health crises. Many bright and promising students are forced to forgo their educational pursuits in order to tend to untreated and unresolved trauma which commonly manifest themselves during the college years. Other students may not forgo their educational pursuits, but lean on maladaptive coping mechanisms or sacrifice the quality of that educational experience with an academic performance that is not indicative of their ability. These are all pre-pandemic realities. As a result, the needs of students during this pandemic is teaching educators to always be mindful of students’ circumstances outside the classroom in order to educate the whole student in the classroom. The students of this pandemic are tasked with more than meeting the expectations and requirements of the classroom (virtual, or otherwise). In this respect, while everything has changed, nothing has changed.

Unprecedented, novel, first-time - these are accurate descriptors of the pandemic. This harsh and slowly unfolding, global crisis has triggered: national and international quarantine; all of education simultaneously moving online; re-established family routines to include homeschooling and working from home – sometimes on the same dining room table; elders separated and feeling abandoned in care facilities; rebooted work lives to exclude travel and mercilessly increased digital meetings; recalibrated sense of security to include the uncertainty of not knowing when the “all clear” will be sounded.  The imaginary parent manual does not include home schooling for all the children at a moment’s notice.  There is no section in the faculty handbook for when students go-missing during crisis pedagogy. There is no research which proves the brain atrophies with each minute of Zoom conferencing. What do leaders do when there is no experience to draw upon? What do we do when we are faced with a challenge never before faced? If, as they say, “experience is the best teacher” - what does one do in this unprecedented societal upheaval? Like most young people, I had little patience when my parents referenced their experiences for my learning. My impatience increased when their recollected stories were utilized as a warning or to point out about my shortcomings.  I had little interest in conversations which started with, “when I was a child…” or “back in my day…” Now, I, at the tender age of mid-to-late 50’s, have an appreciation for my parent’s wisdom teachings because I now realize the value of learning from and mining previous experiences.  However, this pandemic, in a digital age, is most certainly without precedent.  My hunch is that drawing too deeply upon the faux simile of past experience will not equip us to grapple with the current upheaval or the too slowly coming future. By now, we all have participated in conversations comparing this historic moment to 9/11 or comparing this to NYC in the HIV epidemic or comparing this pandemic to the pandemic of 1918 or comparing this moment to the many episodes of “the plague” throughout history.  While we can draw comparisons, we already know this is not any of those events.  This is significantly different. Those comparisons seem not big enough, not violent enough, of too small a scope or not close enough to home. As we search for previous experience from which to extrapolate for this moment, we come up short.  What do you do when you have never had to do for such a time as this? The first impulse is to do …. do something, do anything that provides a flurry of activity that looks like you are in charge, knowledgeable, and making a difference. Leaders begin to organize and strategize in categories such as immediate plans, intermediate plans, and long-range plans.  I know I did. The uniqueness of this exhausting pandemic is that it is still unfolding, it is still unfurling.  We cannot see around the corner.  We cannot see over the hill into the intermediate or into the long term. The first impulse “to do” makes sense, but it is feeble and lacks deep consideration for the current reality. The danger will not pass until a vaccine is made and widely distributed or until a cocktail of medications is approved.  What do you do when you cannot, realistically, plan? Perhaps, in unprecedented situations, the better doing of leaders is to pause; not an idle pause, but the kind of pause to rethink, reconceive, reengineer based upon the ever-changing crisis. We tend to think of waiting as being idle or complacent. In this case, I am suggesting taking time to in waiting as time of watching, observing, rethinking, dreaming.  Waiting, in unprecedented times, might mean watching the changes, observing the signs, listening both inside and outside of yourself and of your community.  Waiting as imagining the next steps, fantasying possibilities, even when it is not clear what is possible. Moving into a mode of waiting is a recognition that adaptation, contingency, or revision will not work for the long haul in this unprecedented time. Waiting, pausing, listening might mean the recognition that what is needed to move forward is new design, newfangled ways, and innovative teaching models. Several deans and presidents are making a three-pronged plan for the fall semester.  First, they plan to, as soon as possible, get back to business as usual – face to face education in the fall. Then, if there is a second wave of COVID 19, they plan to move the teaching to online for a prescribed period of time with plans to return to face to face before semester’s end. Third, if the virus wave lasts a long time, they will move the teaching to online for an extended period of time or through the end of the semester. The challenge of the three-pronged plan is that most institutions do not have the where-with-all for such nimbleness.  Staffing and teaching, while attempting to pivot between a three-pronged plan, is beyond the institutional capacity of most schools. And, we have learned that moving from face-to-face syllabi to online teaching results in crisis pedagogy and not thoughtful, quality, online pedagogy.  A three-pronged contingency plan would need three syllabi. The strategies I hear good administrators planning are simply too simple to meet the complex and vexing times we suddenly are hit by. This strategy will be like a band aid for a gaping wound. It is speculated that viral waves will be active in the future.  It is suspected, just like the flu and cold season we are accustomed to, this highly fatal strain of virus will mutate and join the cycle of flu and cold seasons.  Based upon this speculation, it would behoove us not to modify education as if the virus will someday go away. We have to design new educational models as if the virus, in some form, is now part of our educational universe. The virus is now our new normal. Rather than responding by tweaking education, suppose we spend this time redesigning education? Most of us are not trained in educational design.  The best educational leaders are rarely proficient at navigating ambiguity or guiding faculties, staff, trustees and institutions when we cannot see around corners or over the crest of the hill. The institutions who have made the most radical changes have been due to financial distress.  I suspect schools who are financially sound will also need to redesign. The redesign of education might actually be over due and only exacerbated by COVID 19 pandemic. The uncertainty of this moment, if we pause and stop tweaking, can be a time to take stock of the larger uncertainty in our society which affects education. The pandemic has divulged the complexity of societal problems which must be considered if education is to be redesigned. The social complexities which affect education are many and quite dense. Technology is ever changing. The volatility of stock markets and international economic trends are difficult to predict. The groaning of climate change, the strained health care system, the rise in white supremacy, basic democratic practices are stymied by voter suppression and widespread corruption. Student loan debt is crippling. The denominational church has shattered. The industrial prison complex has destroyed countless families. Homelessness and poverty are at an all-time high. Without giving way to nihilism, there is a pervasive, looming and lingering feeling that almost nothing is certain and the tectonic plates of society are rocking and rolling. There are no quick fixes for a new design of education.  There is no one answer for this challenge and no one leader to this moment.  Redesigning education will need our best minds, our best imagineers, our best teams of collaborators. The Wabash Center, in conversation with colleagues, has begun to think about ways we can support colleagues as we grapple with redesigning theological and religious education.   What is possible? What new communal epistemologies will guide us? Who, beyond conventional educational arenas, will we invite into the collaboration? What will it mean to deepen and broaden our digital imaginations? What if the work of education is, as bell hooks has said, to teach transgression? What will the newly reconceived education look it, smell like, taste like, feel like, sound like, be like?

By this time in a semester, the ebbs and flows of a well-designed and well-facilitated class would, in normal circumstances, have allowed a community of scholars to flourish. These learning communities help promote critical dialogue with academic peers and help to foster a pluralism of varied perspectives that ultimately serves to elevate the collective outcomes. But what if this process is arrested before this can be achieved? The on-going pandemic has created a reality unlike anything we’ve seen, but, as educators, it is incumbent upon us to ensure that these features can continue to persist. Synchronous virtual instruction (Zoom, Google Meet, Webex, etc.) aims to take the place of the in-person component of our traditional means of teaching. While there is a distinct pleasure in being able to ‘meet’ as a class, the interpersonal conversations are limited and real connections are more challenging to create. In my experience, one reason for this is that virtual sessions are planned to be delivered in an online reality and not as a virtual representation of a normal reality. The best virtual session I ever planned with my students happened by accident because I did not plan it to be virtual. A sick baby necessitated an in-person session becoming virtual, so I adjusted my completed (in-person) plans to fit a virtual lesson setting instead. Findings from this fortuitous accident--shared below--have helped frame how my fellow faculty and I view online instructional delivery. In the scope of my normal lesson planning structure, I generally aim to promote engagement and discussion via a variety of activities that tend to be relatively short in length (~20-30 minutes). To accomplish this within a Zoom, I plan for small bits of synchronous time balanced against asynchronous tasks and breakout rooms to encourage engagement and to ensure that sessions are not rote or boring. By sharing the time amongst different components, lessons become more natural, and the time goes by quickly. Another hallmark of my instructional planning approach is that I strive to offer students opportunities to engage with one another around critical issues and to leverage their budding expertise to share their thinking with their peers. To translate this to a virtual environment, I rely heavily on Google Slides to build a mechanism whereby students can collaborate and engage with one another. For instance, to replicate a gallery walk or anchor chart presentation, I design a template slide for each group that gives students instructions and frames their work. From there, I share this document with each student and change the sharing privileges to “anyone with the link can edit.” This document then functions as a collaborative space for groups of students to work together on a task that they can then share with their peers. To broaden the social/connection aspects of this activity, I utilize the Breakout room feature in Zoom to assign students to random groups. A final area of focus when thinking about delivering instruction in a virtual way is to fashion opportunities for students to engage with one another on a more personal level. To help with this, I open and close with do now exercises and exit tickets that have less to do with the explicit content of the session, and more to do with promoting the well-being and engagement of students instead. While we always want to maximize the amount of time that students are exposed to instruction, in the unique environment of a Zoom, taking some time for these kinds of activities pay off. When all is said and done, our duty as educators requires us to do what we can to help lead our learners towards achieving their potential. As we continue to learn more about how best to work with our students in these uncertain times, a great first step is to think through planning and delivery using this lens: Plan as though you are delivering your lesson to a full class of students, Incorporate virtual techniques to approximate in-person experiences, and Allow yourself (and your students!) grace to spend time with each other and to value the benefit of social interaction. While learning will continue for many, for some, this transition to a virtual classroom will be crippling. Recreating a learning community in a virtual setting will help those students reestablish connection with their peers and their professors, and hopefully offer an avenue for all to reach higher levels of achievement.

Dr. Nancy Lynne Westfield hosts Dr. Marsha Foster Boyd (Luther Seminary) and Dr. Stephanie Crumpton (McCormick Theological Seminary). Pandemic, crisis, quarantine, homeschooling, working remotely, job loss, grief and sorrow - all experiences of stress, strain and struggle. This conversation will focus upon issues of care for the soul during this time of Covid19. What practices of self-care are needed in this moment?