Abstract
This Final Thought challenges two assumptions in commentary on teaching and learning amid the COVID-19 pandemic: (1) that the compassionate teaching strategies used to help students learn amid the pandemic inherently undercut academic standards and (2) that these teaching strategies weren’t previously needed, during the so-called “normal time” that preceded the pandemic. By contrast, this essay argues that educators have and will always teach students whose learning is disrupted by trauma, loss, and grief. The essay advocates that educators tune learner-centered teaching strategies to the effects of loss. Doing so, we might teach and learn more effectively, without compromising our or our learners’ humanity.
Personal Reflexive Statement
I began, as many of us do, as a poor mimic, teaching in the ways that I thought my own professors taught. Gradually, I committed to active learning, designing classroom activities to allow students to engage with the knowledge that I offered. Over the past two years, I’ve begun trading active learning for learner-centered teaching, replacing many of my designed exercises with student-directed teaching and learning. Underlying these changes are pedagogical and political commitments, as I wished to teach more effectively, humanely, and justly.
In March, 2020, COVID-19 ruptured my pedagogical narrative. It could not be otherwise, and I am not unique in this. My spring quarter course went online, as most college courses did around the same time. Amid a global pandemic, my students, my colleagues, and I did our best to build new classrooms. We taught, we learned, and, at the end of the quarter, we wished each other well. But we did so without optimism, our messages betrayed by our eyes, our voices, our words, and reality.
How are we to teach during the COVID-19 pandemic?
Perhaps you heard, as I heard, a particular answer to this question. There is teaching during normal times; it is rigorous and maintains high standards. “Pandemic pedagogy” is different. It is compassionate but less rigorous.
Even those who called for accommodations in response to COVID-19 implied this. Consider these sentences from The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Allison Stanger (2020) on the need for pass/fail options for the conclusion of the 2019-2020 academic year: In normal times, it makes sense to have individual faculty members determine fair assessment. But these are not normal times. Students were forced to leave campus on short notice and are now scattered around the world. Some will be tuning in from distant time zones, others from situations where a stable internet connection is an unaffordable luxury good.
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[…] The truth is that everybody would benefit from a pass/fail policy. Faculty members could focus on engaging students for learning in demanding new circumstances. Students would get a respite from direct competition with their peers to focus on both individual growth and doing their part in a common endeavor (a skill we are very much going to need in the months ahead). What is the right posture to take with your students during a pandemic? A debate soon flared up. Some professors worried most about upholding academic integrity and maintaining rigor.
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Others viewed the coronavirus as a once-in-a-lifetime emergency that called for an outpouring of compassion—and, yes, lowered academic expectations.
Supiano frames compassion as an accommodation and not what it is: a human capacity. This framing further implies that courses designed with compassion inevitably lower academic expectations.
I want to challenge the assumption that we must choose between teaching with humanity and maintaining academic standards in our classrooms. I want to challenge, too, the illusion of a normal time, pre-COVID-19, when we could teach without reckoning with the profundity of loss and grief. Today, as we did yesterday, we teach and learn with people who know no such time. Teaching from this recognition involves not lowered, but different expectations for educators and learners alike, expectations that are as pedagogically sound and ambitious as those used during the “normal times.” 3
What Loss Does
I do not deny that we—as educators, political citizens, and human beings—face unprecedented challenges because of COVID-19. It is a macro force, producing vaster disruptions and demanding vaster responses, themselves disruptive, than most other macro forces. Yet distill it. COVID-19 has exacerbated pre-existing social and economic inequalities. These, too, produce traumas and losses that disrupt students’ learning in our courses. It is not only because of the unprecedented nature of this pandemic that many of us—faculty members and administrators both—are beginners at reckoning with trauma and loss in our classrooms. Our collective denial of the enduring crises caused by inequality and oppression allowed us to dodge this reckoning for so long.
We teach, today, in a world of loss, death, and their attendant, grief. We always teach in a world of loss, death, and their attendant, grief. I realized this too late, a decade into my teaching career, when a traumatic death in my family ruptured our sense of reality. Secondarily, it ruptured my sense of how my students and I learn together. But I should have known this all along. As my family and I suffered, all may suffer, for these are in our nature (Chodron 2016). 4
Loss and grief can be transformative and clarifying. This essay is predicated on this belief. But, as Judith Butler (2003) writes, such transformation “cannot be charted or planned” (p. 11). Unbidden, grief wills itself out of the day, the night, the atmosphere, the bodies in which we grieve. “One cannot say,” Butler continues, “Oh, I’ll go through loss this way, and that will be the result, and I’ll apply myself to the task, and I’ll endeavor to achieve the resolution of grief that is before me.” I think one is hit by waves, and that one starts out the day with an aim, a project, a plan, and finds oneself foiled. One finds oneself fallen. One is exhausted but does not know why. (p. 10–11)
Though we all may suffer, for this is in our nature, vulnerability to loss is politically and socially structured. Some of the people who enroll in our courses face systemic assaults—interpersonal and structural alike—on their lives, families, friends, and communities. When faculty design courses that ignore this sociological fact, they risk reproducing the very structures that generate those traumas (Carter 2015; Hurst 2009; Martinez-Cola et al. 2018).
Learning & Teaching from Loss
Learning from loss, then teaching from the same, has sometimes nudged, more often shoved me toward an approach like the one Maryellen Weimer (2013) develops in Learner-Centered Teaching. 5 Weimer advocates that we design courses so learners can make consequential decisions about their learning and develop the ability to self-assess their work. This means that learners have choice in the types of assignments they complete and, so, how their grade is assigned. It may mean that they have choice in deadlines for those assignments. The approach requires that educators displace some coverage of content with teaching and learning of skills and meta-cognition. Learner-centered teaching also requires that we shed the role of expert and manager of a course for that of the guide, coach, or cultivator of learning. By advocating that faculty decenter both their own authority and course content, Weimer encourages us to design courses that help students become autonomous learners. We do this by asking students to make meaningful decisions about course policies, grading structures and practices, and assignments, while also helping them learn how to effectively make those decisions.
By contrast, Weimer downplays humanistic and political motives for centering learners. “The idea of education,” she writes, “as a vehicle for social change is not a dominant feature of current learner-centered practice” (p. 18). However, I believe that learner-centering strategies can indeed be adapted to teach and learn with people whose lives are abundant with loss. Adapting these strategies, we may be able to interfere with the reproduction of inequality in higher education.
Teaching from the recognition of loss, grief, and their social structure requires that we teach humans (Darby and Lang 2019; Lang 2016) not students. The latter is a typified role, in Berger and Luckman’s (1967:72-9) sense. As an institutional and social construct, it constrains, standardizes, and simplifies reality (Pfohl 2007). This is one reason that Weimer opts for the phrase “learner-centered teaching” rather than “student-centered.” Learning goes on outside classrooms and institutions. The learner is not taking a role, but orienting themselves to the world. Learning is a way of being. For many of us, it is a way of life. We speak of lifelong learners and less commonly of lifelong students. 6
The role of the student is contained within the identity of the learner, but the former does not exhaust the latter. The learner can be many things at once. They have an enduring commitment to their learning, particularly when it is genuinely chosen. But they have other identities and commitments, too, that they bring to their learning. Often, professors view the commitments of learners as a deficit. Learners may have to pause their coursework because of their commitments to themselves, their friends, their family, communities, the human world, this burning earth. (But these commitments are often the very reason we learn.) It is tempting to want to teach the unencumbered student. We teach them in a classroom that is traditionally “a space in which a renunciation of our histories of loss is an unsaid precondition to come in, even as we continually encounter loss and loneliness” (Hurst 2009:33). Indeed, it is simpler, less work, less risk, and less exhausting to teach students who we imagine to be unencumbered. The professor can push forward, calling it rigor and claiming that those who do not keep pace are indeed deficient.
But teaching and learning with learners does not mean teaching to deficient students. It means teaching to human reality. It is unavoidable, though we can and often do pretend otherwise. Teaching from this recognition does not promise healing or wholeness to those who have lost. But it promises something else: we—the educators and the learners—will work together to pursue knowledge and understanding, even as we recognize that this work must remain unfinished. Our time together is too brief, and learning, after all, is never done. And it promises that the journey we take together will not compel us to choose between a grade and our humanity.
How to Teach from Loss
How do we do this? This section includes a few small ways of designing and teaching courses to learn with other people who have or will one day face profound disruptions, loss, and grief.
Forgive Absences
Grading attendance privileges students who are heathy, in all senses, unencumbered by work or family obligations, those who do not commute to campus, and those who remain untouched by accidents, crises, losses, or assaults during the term. Avoid grading attendance, but take it, so you can know with whom you’re learning and check on those who are not present to learn with you.
External motivation, the carrot-and-stick of an attendance grade, is a weak thing anyway and may, in fact, undercut learners’ intrinsic motivation to learn (Lowman 1990; Ryan and Deci 2000). If there are learners who choose not to attend your class, make a case for the value of your course then design a course that lives that value. Or, if you and your learners are indeed motivated by grades, do as Weimer (2013) does: show students average grades on work of learners who attended courses and those who have not. 7 But still let them choose whether or not to attend. If you’ve done that, but learners still do not attend class meetings, try to meet with them. Discuss what your course means to them and what their attendance in it means to you. But also seek to reform the institutional structures that may be producing alienated students. After all, most personal troubles are actually public issues, though our grading structures are often dreamt up by what remains of our un-sociological imaginations (Mills 2000).
When they next step into our classrooms, our learners will have survived—or, more accurately, are surviving still—a global pandemic. But some will have lost loved ones along the way. Amid this, some will made a heroic effort to dismantle systemic racism. They may have confronted federal and state law enforcement officers, batons, tear gas, flash bangs, unmarked vans, and roving militias of white supremacists. Imagine how some grading penalty for an absence looks to them: a weak exercise of authority by a person who mistakes control and conformity for teaching and learning.
Abolish Late Penalties
We use deadlines, often with late penalties, for at least three reasons. One reason is that it helps us keep a well-balanced schedule of grading and feedback. Another reason is that it supports equality in the classroom, by compelling learners to complete their work on the same timeline or lose points. A third reason is that it incentivizes learners to make structured progress on their work. Even so, I no longer believe in the virtues of late penalties.
Many learners will complete work on time. Some do so out of habit, believing they must and indifferent to why; they are ritualists in Robert Merton’s (1938) sense. Some do so because they value faculty feedback. Sometimes, they value feedback because they want to know how to get a better grade from us (Blum 2017, 2020; Del Rosso and Nordstrom-Wehner 2020). Sometimes, they value feedback because it helps them learn.
Other learners will not complete work on time. There are many reasons for this, too. They may judge, perhaps accurately, other courses more important to their future academic or economic success. Understand this, but—again—make a case for the value of your course then design a course that lives that value. Others may be prioritizing their paid work, an entirely understandable decision within a higher education system that exchanges debt for promises of a future that no one, and especially not the university itself, guarantees.
Others may be immobilized by illness, loss, and grief.
Within reason, allow students to submit all work by the course’s final deadline. Still, encourage them to submit work along the way for pedagogical reasons: they can better know their standing in the course as they go, they can receive timely and valuable feedback, and they can avoid the shock of not receiving credit on a submission before it’s too late to revise and resubmit it.
This won’t work for some assignments. Some are meant to fit into a process of learning, as when we ask students to submit plans, outlines, and drafts of work. I do this regularly, but have now started allowing learners to choose whether they complete these smaller assignments. Certainly, I encourage them to. I explain the value of these assignments, as well as their underlying purpose. And I try to provide timely, encouraging feedback on submissions. But some students, I’ve come to recognize, still may not submit work on the timeline that I build months before the start of the quarter. I do not penalize them for this. Instead, I use a flexible grading structure. For instance, I often assign students a draft of an essay. Usually, it’s worth a handful of points, maybe five (of 100 in the course) and is credit / no credit. In the past, students who missed this assignment did not receive those five points. (I penalized a lot of students who I now regret having penalized. Usually, they were working full time, overloading on courses to graduate sooner, attending to a sick parent or their own health, or spending the quarter chasing the spirit of a lost friend.) Now, those five points are rolled over to the final essays. Its weight increases from, say, 20 to 25 points. 8
By rolling points, I hope to allow learners to make meaningful decisions about their coursework; I want them to be able to prioritize work, across their courses, that helps them learn. I also roll points to avoid penalizing students for a missed assignment, no matter the cause. It helps contribute to equity in grading, as it simultaneously avoids punishing learners who miss work while also allowing learners who choose to and can complete a draft to receive a few full credit points. Finally, it eases the work of accommodating learners when personal emergencies and tragedies change the trajectory of their progress over the quarter. 9
Center (Guided) Choice and Autonomy
Nearly all of us were moved online in March and April 2020. Nearly all of us were also driven into isolation. COVID-19 cares not for our teaching and learning preferences. This academic year is troubled in similar ways.
Reality is stripping choice and control from us and our learners. But many faculty possess at least a modicum of autonomy in their classrooms, designing assignments and curating content. Some of us possess even more than that, exercising nearly complete control over what our learners learn and how they demonstrate their learning. Consider using this to offer learners control and choice over the conditions of their learning. Whenever possible, offer multiple readings, from which learners can choose. If feasible, offer a few films as substitutions for select readings. Not only does this support universal design (Rose et al. 2006), but it allows learners to make consequential decisions about how they’ll learn. It also empowers us to more effectively guide their learning. When a learner expresses interest in one course topic over another, we can direct them to readings that most support their intellectual journey. I’ve found that learners are more likely to take interest in readings when they can understand the relevance of those readings to the ideas that they themselves are generating. It helps, too, that the recommendation to read a particular work is made to them, directly by the professor and for specific reasons, rather than to the generic student addressed by the syllabus.
Consider allowing learners to choose, too, how to represent their learning (Roberts and Roberts 2008; Gannon 2020): in an academic essay, fiction, a recorded presentation, visual materials with a supporting text, etc. In my experience, most students will opt to write the familiar academic essay. But opting for this is a rather different decision than being compelled, by the professor and for usually unstated reasons, to write yet another academic essay. Those students who produce sociological stories, visual materials with sociological statements, or recorded presentations will thrive in ways they may not have otherwise. And you’ll thank yourself, when you’re grading a collection of rich, unconventional, and well cared for works.
But something deeper is in play here. When assignments have choice and flexibility designed into them, they can accommodate personal and collective disruptions that occur over a term. Some students will want to understand, sociologically process, and intellectually transform these disruptions through their academic work. Others will not want to do this. The work of processing and transforming will come later, in other contexts, and among other, more trusted people. For now, the grieving student may want to simply finish their coursework without recalling their grief. (In this spirit, I no longer require students to bring their sociological imaginations to bear on their autobiography [Nowakowski and Sumerau 2015]. I make this an option for assignments, as many students learn a lot from it. But it’s one choice among several.)
I don’t grade attendance and have abolished late penalties because I believe that doing otherwise disproportionately harms learners most vulnerable to trauma and loss. This strategy, of structured choice, is different. It’s about offering learners a way of exercising control over the conditions of their learning, even as the world and the loss it engenders strip control away. It’s meant as a minor corrective, an effort at producing the psychological safety in my courses that learners need to take intellectual and academic risks.
Respond to Student Questions with These Words
It was easier to design from the lessons of loss than to teach from them. There are older habits in the day-to-day work of teaching than in the design of courses. I think this is because teaching is dynamic, interactional, and responsive to actual learners and unexpected events, while design arcs toward imagined learners and an imagined term. I’ve bungled my way to a simple strategy that, in most cases, helps me guide learners. Respond to nearly all student questions with your own question, some variant of “What would be meaningful to you?”
Students often resist learner-centered teaching. Weimer dedicates a chapter of Learner-Centered Teaching to this. Part of the difficulty, she explains, is that students are accustomed to professors making decisions for them; learner-centered teaching requires unfamiliar work from learners. But I think there’s another cause of the resistance. Learner-centered teaching can appear to students as yet another mode of learning imposed on them, just as more professor-centered forms are. It is the professor, after all, who selected it. Though the professor may consult students about the course, the decision to consult was foisted on the students, just as the inability to consult is. Students know they are playing a different game, but they may mistake it for merely that—a different game and still one played by the professor’s rules. Questions that seem to express resistance to the learner-centered approach—how many words should this essay be or how many sources do I need to use—aim to uncover the rules that students believe are lurking in the shadows of our learner-centered classroom.
Asking students what’s meaningful or important to them can reorient them toward their power and priorities as learners. It is also an automatic check on the professor’s instinct to impose order on learning and make decisions for students. By asking this question, we also gain the opportunity to better guide our learners, who often respond to it with far more information than one expects. They share stories about their selection of majors; their plans and hopes for the future; things they learned in other courses; things they learned from family members or friends, which they may or may not agree with; and the challenges they are experiencing during the term. This is all vitally important information to the educator–as–guide, which can be used to help learners discover their paths through our courses. It can also help us know when to activate university resources for students who may need them.
Conclusion
We will lose, we will grieve, we will be undone. It cannot be otherwise.
No pedagogy can overcome these facts. Certainly, no mere teaching technology or strategy can either. We cannot Zoom, or Canvas, or active learn our way out of COVID-19. We cannot Zoom, or Canvas, or active learn our way out of loss and grief. But we can try to build, with the help of the people who choose to learn with us, classrooms that do not ask us to shed our selves in exchange for facts, theories, and skills.
We will teach still, we will learn still. This can be otherwise, but we elect to make it so.
Footnotes
Author’s Note
I am grateful to Jennifer J. Esala, Virginia Pitts, Geoff Stacks, and the anonymous reviewer for providing feedback on this essay. I am indebted to the learners, over the years, who have taught me so much.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.