By Felipe Esquivel Reed, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

BY AARON BARLOW

Listen to our students.

That’s the best way for us teachers to craft a successful end to a disrupted semester in a nation in crisis.

After Kent State in 1970, we students at Utica College (like our contemporaries all over the country) shut our campus down. Under the leadership of faculty, however, we continued learning, forming study groups and action committees, delving into the issues that were tearing our country apart. The continuation of education, formulated around the unfolding events of the time instead of around disciplinary assumptions and goals, may salvage this semester, too.

The difficulties in moving to online classes for many professors necessitate leaving content aside for the moment, forcing concentration on method instead. The discontinuity of the learning itself is not, perforce, being adequately addressed. The assumption is that content will take care of itself once the problems of delivery are solved.

Or will not.

We are losing more than time in the conversion but momentum as well. Not to mention student interest—which cannot be ignored. The coronavirus is becoming the central topic of the nation, for students as well as for their grandparents at risk. No matter what we do to bring attention to our new digital classrooms, we are not going to be able to compete with the unfolding crisis.

To save the semester from complete disaster, we need to do what my teachers at Utica College did fifty years ago. We need to tailor our classes to the current moment, forgetting what it is we expected to teach in favor of bringing our expertise to bear, no matter what it is. Math, economics, biology, chemistry, political science, nursing, history, sociology… all of these fields and many more can be approached through the coronavirus in ways that can move education forward. And students will respond, perhaps getting more out of the remaining portion of the semester than we otherwise could hope for.

I’ve been learning this from my students. Though we are on hiatus at City Tech right now (along with all other CUNY campuses), I have already posted the first assignments for next week. The responses have all related to the coronavirus. This has made me stop and reconsider what I am asking for the rest of the semester from my students in Technical Writing and in my three sections of First Year Composition.

When I awoke this morning, I asked myself how I could use the current situation for developing technical-writing skills. A good technical writer needs to understand purpose, audience, research, and delivery. If the purpose is to inform family, friends, and neighbors about the constantly changing pandemic, I told myself, students could start by cataloguing the audience around them. Are its members young, old? A combination? What language concerns might make communication with them problematic? Are they working and studying from home during the crisis? Or do their jobs keep them away from home? Have they lost income as a result of coronavirus? Do they have health problems other than age that put them at risk?

The next step is to utilize the answers to these questions to develop strategies for effectively reaching each group, differing media depending on each specific audience segment. At the same time, effective research needs to be conducted, separating the rumors from the facts and making sure that reliable information streams are in place.

The projects the students were working on up to this point won’t be lost, but I do suspect students are losing interest in them. This new project can be based from home. Students won’t need to focus their work on a screen but can take it to their community—even if they are stuck inside, for the most part. And they are clearly as interested in what’s going on with coronavirus as the rest of us, making this a natural platform for their learning.

My students in First Year Composition aren’t quite ready for such a project and I am not yet committed to one path. What I am thinking, though, is to ask them to keep coronavirus journals that will be the basis of papers and that will be, also, springboards for research. In addition, I emphasize a multimedia project, one that is coming up in my two second semester FYC sections. All of my students (I checked) have smartphones that can be used to document what is going around them through audio and video. I may ask them to do so. I will have to decide what the assignments are soon, but many of the details will be worked out with the students, I am sure.

I’m not interested in promoting the details of my own approaches here, simply to point out that, if we listen to our students and allow their current foci to be our lead, we can rescue this semester from the disaster it might easily become. I still remember spending hours researching the Black Panthers in May of 1970, going through stories in alternative weeklies as well as newspapers and mass-market magazines, clipping articles and cataloguing them with growing horror at what the reactions had been to this still-growing and nationally important group. What I learned then helped shape my life. The classrooms were closed? It didn’t mean learning shut down, too.

My professors made sure it didn’t. It was a teacher who asked me to look into the Black Panthers, just as others were guiding others of us—in directions we desperately wanted to go. Our students right now also need guidance, but they will drop away if the goals are not ones they helped shape.

Again, we don’t need to be creative to rescue this semester. We just need to listen to our students.