By Jan Vašek – Pixabay, CC0, Wikimedia Commons

BY AARON BARLOW

The emails can be overwhelming. Hundreds of them from well-meaning colleagues, campus IT departments, our chairs, deans, provosts… everyone who can is chipping in to help us make hurried conversions to online instruction. In a way, it’s wonderful to see this response (though a little frustrating: many of us were advocating planning for the current crisis more than a week before colleges and universities began to close, a week now lost—but there’s no point in rehashing that right now). People are coming together to make sure all of us are able to migrate our classes to digital environments as smoothly as possible.

But that’s not enough. It may even be useless.

Though that is up to us.

Most of the emails I have seen focus on the faculty and on the technology. Little of it addresses the students or, quite frankly, their needs. A break like this is traumatic; students (like faculty) never signed up for it. They want a traditional education in a classroom situation. Many of them are feeling pushed, even herded, into frameworks they do not like and do not believe in.

When a student announced that CUNY was closing at the start of my early-afternoon class last Wednesday, a chorus of groans followed. I had long noticed that about a quarter of my students resist the online platforms I have long incorporated into my classrooms (Blackboard, for example, or our homegrown OpenLab, the one I use most often today). I never explored why, as I should have done, for I assumed it was from lack of familiarity or access. I have always helped them with the latter, believing that the former would come with use. I didn’t recognize that there are other reasons for their reluctance.

Just as I have come to believe that face-to-face instruction is vastly preferable to the online, so have many of our students. They have been fed digital instruction since starting school, and many of them are sick of it. It makes them lonely and they don’t believe in its efficacy.

This was confirmed last Wednesday when I quizzed them about their loud negative reaction to the college’s closing. Few of the students like the online tools we use every day; none of them sees the move online in a positive light. They feel their educations are being disrupted and suspect that the replacement they are being offered is a sham.

And it is.

For most courses, the learning that had been growing over the weeks of the semester will now flatten, at best. No matter how wonderful the online structures we offer in place, the heart has been ripped from the term. Motion approximating education will remain, but the result is going to be accumulation of credit, an institutional momentum the students want as much as do our administrations, but little learning. Students know this—and they are not happy about it.

Most educators have a somewhat cynical view of student attitudes. We think that, like most of the rest of society, they have bought into the factory model of education, that they are in school only to get the degrees that will further their upward movement in society. We forget that many of them are actually interested in learning—even though they may appear to be sleepwalking through at least some of their courses. They want their degrees to mean something, to be more than just magical pieces of paper.

Our students, of course, are shoved into as difficult a situation by coronavirus as we are. This is no vacation for them, and they know it. They also recognize that the colleges and universities are lying to them through the very act of replacing their classes with online approximations—though they, too, know the lying may be necessary. They feel frustrated, for they do not want to delay their progress toward their degrees; they feel they have no choice but to accept what is happening. But they do not like it and some of them feel—and are—technologically unprepared for the new situation. Though almost all of them have smartphones, not everyone has a computer at home for writing papers.

As we begin to administer our new formulations, we need to keep all of this in mind—along with awareness that the students have been thrown into our current funhouse universe along with the rest of us.

The first of my students to respond to the first online assignment, which is to apply George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” to a current essay or op-ed, wrote instead about an article on how we should respond to COVID-19. That’s fine, given the situation we are in, though I did gently ask the student to apply Orwell as well. In all of our classes, the current crisis is going to come up. We can’t brush that aside.

In fact, we need to embrace that. In the larger picture, it is more important that our students learn from what is going on around them—especially since subject-area learning really isn’t going to continue this spring—but mainly because they are experiencing—we all are experiencing—a life-changing, slowly unfolding event whose result none of us can predict but all of us can learn from. We can’t teach students about what we don’t know but we can model learning as the unknown comes into focus and we can help students adjust in other ways—maybe even emotionally. It doesn’t matter our field, what is going on effects it and we can relate our specialties and our humanity to the current crisis.

If we do this instead of sticking to a narrow curriculum and vision of the curriculum that is already compromised and will probably collapse over the coming weeks, we can make the rest of the semester useful to our students—and to us, for that matter.

Once we have means of communicating with our students effectively beyond email and text, we can even begin to ignore all of the technical advice we are getting on how to rescue our courses and begin to really facilitate student learning, using what is happening around us and providing something more important to education than anything our syllabi can contain. We can turn to our students, to addressing their concerns from the individual positions of expertise within us and from our personal experiences as caring human beings.

That’s the best we can do right now.

If we work at it, it may prove better than anything we have done before, though it will not be categorizable and will not even be the online coursework we are trying to ram down our throats and our students’ throats.