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a·syn·chron·ous·definition: “not existing or happening at the same time” I recently surprised a professor friend with the “news” that I taught almost exclusively in an asynchronous format and have been doing so for the past dozen years. A colleague on staff at my school recently said about this format: “Don’t you just set up the class and they are left to learn on their own?” Another professor in my field when responding to my comment in a writing workshop that I do a lot of my writing in comments on Canvas posts said: “Isn’t that mostly cut-and-paste?” I have been surprised to realize that many people in my inner circle don’t think of asynchronous online teaching as real teaching work. I beg to differ.Recently, I found myself in the worst of it. I was writing discussion prompts for week six while responding to late posts from students meant for week one while two-thirds of my students were talking with each other somewhere in week three. Others had turned in an assignment not due for two more weeks. All this teaching in multiple weeks in my course in one two-hour block while sitting at my kid’s desk on my laptop. He left for college a few weeks ago. We are all in different times, different places, but somehow still connected.Asynchronous teaching is the stuff of sci-fi and fantasy. I engage in time travel on the daily. If only I was a Time Lord with a Tardis to travel in! Or Hermione Grainger with a magical Time Turner on a necklace so I could stop the other times to focus on the one in which I found myself. Instead, I just have a learning management system, where I click to the next item in Speed Grader and jump ahead or behind a couple of weeks to material that has since slipped from my leaky brain. I try to remember what the student would and wouldn’t have encountered at that point in the class as I respond to their work.This morning, I found myself lying in bed and thinking about the clunkiness of the word asynchronous. What would be the word for being in a different place than your learners? A-syn-loc-ous? Oh, yeah. We just call that “distance learning.” Easy peasy. Everyone does that. But when we are in different times, we have a word that specifically marks the absence of togetherness: asynchronous. Out of time with one another.In fact, this is not a new reality. John Dewey called it the greatest pedagogical fallacy, the assumption that students are learning what we are teaching when we are teaching it. I can remember sitting in the now-demolished stadium-seating lecture hall in seminary and watching some of the great professors of my era lecturing. Sitting near the back, I would amuse myself by watching my classmates reach the point when they gave up taking notes, hopelessly lost in the verbiage of our professors. A few at a time, their pens would go down in defeat, and they would sit back in the wooden theater chairs and stare blankly at the speaker, folding their arms defensively. Nowadays, they would pick up their phones or click over to another tab on their computers to check the news, less obvious means of abandoning the effort to follow along. Where the students were, in time, was some light years away from where the professor was teaching. They remained closer to the energetic start of the universe that the professor was now hurtling along the furthest edges of. Teaching involves many moments like these. Planning a syllabus and having to post it a month before the class starts, or having to propose it to a committee a year in advance. In either case, never having met the learners before devising a plan for their learning. Teaching students who have just been exposed to the material alongside those who have wrestled with it for a term or even for years. Teaching people ruminating on yesterday’s political assassination about something that happened a thousand years ago. Sometimes it feels like a miracle when we end up in the same time with the same focus.All of this jumping to the location of students in time and space takes an enormous amount of imagination, energy, and nimbleness, whether online or working in person. But sure, why wouldn’t you put twenty-five or thirty-five students in my asynchronous class, since all I do is post the information and they learn it on their own in their own time? Turns out, asynchronous teaching makes me into an unwilling time lord without a sonic screwdriver in sight. But it also illuminates what Dewey named so long ago: meeting students where they are is no easy challenge, no matter the teaching modality. Teaching online and asynchronously just places this experience in vivid contrast so we recognize it more quickly and are forced to bear the weight of its reality. 

In the last few weeks, the undergrads I teach have responded to moving off campus and courses shifting online with a mixture of confusion and sadness. While their generation is well equipped to utilize digital resources, the sudden dismantling of our daily community and rhythms deeply challenged all of us. I have been grateful to find that course content and online strategies have permitted us to connect with and support one another in the uncertain, liminal space of seated courses forced into online venues. By fortunate coincidence, my GenEd class on the Psalms was scheduled to discuss post-exilic psalms during our first week of online instruction. Through theological engagement with Georg Simmel’s essay “The Stranger” and Catherine Brun and Anita Fábos’ article “Making Homes in Limbo? A Conceptual Framework,” it was my goal that my students develop a greater understanding of the human experience of migratory displacement—and ultimately respond to that understanding with empathy and action.[1] In previous semesters of this course, some students found relating to migrants a foreign idea; this term, however, found us in the midst of a very productive and personal conversation around the concept of “home,” as students grappled with their own recent experiences of displacement and isolation. Not only did I witness students thinking through course materials in a more committed manner than usual, but I also emerged from this week feeling like I know my students individually and collectively much better. In this way, current circumstances and the shift online have been gifts that enrichen the connection this class had already established in person. Here are some specific strategies that I found facilitated connection for my undergraduates this past week: Building on in-person connection: I created discussion groups composed of students who had regularly gravitated to one another in the seated classroom. We utilized these discussion groups in directed discussion forums and for Zoom breakout room exercises. Students provided feedback that interaction with known peers helped motivate them to complete work, and encouraged them to support one another. While I do like to mix up discussion groups from time to time, current shifting circumstances have made it valuable to spend time in the presence of trustworthy and familiar faces. Developing new collaborative projects: In conjunction with some individual assignments, I found that my students responded positively when we used the Zoom breakout room time for them to collaboratively craft responses to discussion questions in a shared GoogleDoc. The process of creating a shared product helped them to focus this time and consider together how they might reflect their individual viewpoints in the document. When I briefly dropped into each group, I was able to answer individual questions regarding execution of the assignment and to discuss some of the content that was on their minds. In addition to this synchronous collaboration, I found it effective to have students respond to digital “presentations” asynchronously in their end-of-the-week reflections. Earlier in the week, presenters had posted their creative renderings of selected psalms to class forums, and in students’ individual reflections at the end of the week, I asked them to explain how they connected those presentations to the week’s readings and discussion. By referring to their peers’ creative projects, it gave the sense that students were interacting with each other’s thoughts while processing the course materials. Applying course learning to present experiences: The final piece of their individual weekly reflections was to relate the discussion of displacement and “home” to their current experiences in self-isolation. While they had been connecting to the material throughout the week through the readings, video lecture, presentations, and Zoom discussion, most of them went above and beyond the requirements of this reflection because they wanted to work through their present experiences. They demonstrated an ability to empathize (yes!) with the idea of “Homes in Limbo” from the Brun and Fábos article, and shared with me about their lives in ways they hadn’t before. I believe they felt supported simply because I asked them how they are thinking about “home” during this time—and I was honored by the raw and open responses they provided. As we look to not only convey information through online education, but also to continue forming students theologically, I wonder how else we might creatively connect with our students in the midst of these unique circumstances. Even if our methods are not perfect, the students certainly appreciate any efforts on our parts to see them, hear them, and respond to them. I hope I can continue to share with my students how they are transforming me, as a teacher and as a person, while we go forward into this liminal space together. [1] Simmel, “Der Fremde”; Brun and Fábos, “Making Homes in Limbo? A Conceptual Framework.”