A New & Unusual School Year
Fall semester at George Fox begins three weeks from today. Other universities have different start dates, but for faculty at all of them Fall 2020 presents challenges like no other. We’re scrambling to plan for classes in the midst of a pandemic.
GFU plans to open for face-to-face classes, while lots of other schools (including some very large state universities) have opted for online courses only. None of us thinks all our students will be in class; some have already asked to “attend” via zoom, and others will almost certainly contract COVID-19 and be quarantined for some portion of the semester. So my plan for the semester has to include the students who can be physically present and those who cannot. It would be disingenuous to say the latter group will get as good an educational “product” as the first. Face-to-face is just better. Of course, each student also contributes to the quality of his or her education; the remote student who pours herself into the work may benefit more than the in-person student who “skates.”
Preparation starts with an attitude adjustment. On my part, that is. I’ve had to abandon nostalgia for the good old days (six months ago, in a different world) when I knew how to teach. “Normality” may never return, and it certainly will not return this fall. The pandemic world is the real world. It’s my job to teach as well as I can in it. Once I surrender my desires for the old, I get excited about the new.
Change and challenge can bring unexpected opportunities. My students are very aware, perhaps more than ever, of the price they are paying for college. Thus, I can appeal to their self-interest; the degree of cooperation between professor and students will go a long way toward determining the quality of their education. In particular, I will invite their criticisms and suggestions about classroom practices.
Distance students will have to attend via zoom. If my in-class students have their phones or computers, I can create zoom breakout groups mixing them. The electronic chat feature may encourage otherwise quiet students to contribute to discussion sessions. I plan to record many of the zoom sessions. Students may then ask for access to the recordings as a way to review. I don’t want to encourage students to skip class sessions and depend on recorded video. That opens the door to asynchronous, everybody study on your own, online learning. Taking a cue from Andrea Scott, GFU Provost, I am adopting “remote” teaching, not “online.” The focus of the class is in the classroom, though we strive to provide remote students something worth their tuition.
I will have to plead for good electronic citizenship. Bringing technology to class presents obvious temptations: private chats, web browsing, and other distractions. Somehow I have to get my students to “buy in” to the challenge ahead of us. Together we have to fight distraction and focus on the material. It helps, of course, that I am genuinely excited about my “stuff”: Intro to Philosophy; The Good Life (my version of HUMA 205, Literature and Philosophy); Logic; and Peace Theory.
I’ve not taught Peace Theory before. Back in 1992 I taught Philosophy of Peace and War (at UO, not Fox), the closest analogue to this new assignment. Tomorrow, though, Gina Miller Johnson will give me pointers from her past work in the class.
You know what? I think this is going to work.
