Teaching and Learning During the Time of Covid-19
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The CDLA’s Teaching and Learning Collection features an array of personal and institutional documentation, community resources, class projects, and digital media related to CUNY’s remote teaching and learning practices in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. The collection brings these items into conversation with one another in the interest of centering the lived experiences of CUNY students, faculty, and staff during this pivotal moment in the history of the largest urban public-university system in the United States. In an effort to help preserve the university’s institutional memory, users of this collection are invited to explore these artifacts in order to reflect on what it was like to teach and learn at CUNY during the Spring 2020 onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
With confirmed cases of COVID-19 soon to spread across the New York City area, CUNY colleges began to triage the outbreak by preparing campus-based guidance for faculty to employ in the event of a university-wide shift to distance learning formats. Collected by the Graduate Center's Teaching and Learning Center (TLC) days before the closure of onset university facilities, these documents address emergent concerns surrounding the practice of online teaching and learning during a public health crisis. These resources urge CUNY faculty to rethink their role as educators by accounting for issues ranging from course communications and instructional design, to accessibility and assistive technology, to testing and assessment policies, to the precarious health and wellbeing of their students. CUNY faculty associated with the group “Rank and File Action” likewise circulated a proposal for transitioning to distance learning, stressing the need for educators to “give up on normal,” strategically adopt tech platforms, and consider asynchronous modes of instruction, among other recommendations.
Items from this collection also foreground the submerged perspectives of CUNY students as they struggled to keep pace with distance learning. In the case of student Reddit posts, these items document the self-represented concerns of CUNY students engaged in conversation with one another around the problematics of learning during the pandemic. In particular, these posts found students at odds with the assessment protocol, communication practices, and rigorous workloads of the distance learning process. Critically, they also paid credence to the essential labor practices and emotional toll of CUNY students as they intersected with the stresses of online coursework.
CUNY educators came to highlight the urgent need for instructors to responsively design and teach their online courses in response to the social and emotional burdens of learners. In one HASTAC blog post on the pedagogical conditions of the pandemic, for instance, Graduate Center faculty member Cathy Davidson adopted a critical perspective on instructional design for instructors to consider as they prepared for the Fall 2020 semester, urging them to not only to do no harm but also to acknowledge that harm has already been done unto students in this time of untold crisis.
Crowdsourced submissions to the collection also included academic projects by CUNY students that focus on the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on minority communities in NYC. Related items in the collection included honors theses and digital capstone projects documenting individual and collective struggles during the time of the pandemic.
From CUNY senior administrators to student Redditors, the value of this collection lies in its potential to inform and integrate our historical memory as a public institution of higher education. Working from the top-down, bottom-up, and middle-out, the CDLA Teaching and Learning Collection aims to render these educational experiences more legible, making visible multiple scales of the teaching and learning experience across the CUNY system. Users of this collection are thus invited to engage with these artifacts in ways that continue to protect the memory of this difficult moment going forward. It is ultimately through such acts of institutional remembrance that the embodied strife and collective resilience of this public crisis may live on unencumbered by any one dominant voice.
This collection is part of the CUNY Distance Learning Archive (CDLA), a group project developed as part of Matthew K. Gold’s Spring 2020 “Knowledge Infrastructures” seminar in the Ph.D. Program in English at The Graduate Center, CUNY, in partnership with The Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Certificate Program. All CDLA collections on the CUNY Digital History Archive website were co-curated by Travis Bartley, Nicole Cote, Zach Muhlbauer, and Stefano Morello (Project Manager).
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"Is anyone else finding this online semester to be more difficult than usual? I find it to be 3x more harder than regular in-person classes" Posted on September 3, 2020, this Reddit thread featured discussion and critiques of the ways CUNY instructors have increased the workload for students in their classes and rendered classes far more difficult to pass during the pandemic. This item is part of the City University of New York (CUNY) Distance Learning Archive, a group project developed as part of Prof. Matthew K. Gold's Spring 2020 Knowledge Infrastructures seminar in the Ph.D. Program in English at The Graduate Center, CUNY, in partnership with the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Certificate Program. The project's goal was to resist or trouble the discourse of catastrophe around the shift to online learning caused by the COVID-19 pandemic by documenting the lived experiences of students, faculty, and staff across CUNY's 25 campuses. Further, the project wanted to document the moment of crisis response by taking a critical approach to educational technology. -
Directory of CUNY Online Social Platforms Created in the form of an open-access Google Document on July 12, 2020, this public directory compiled a list of online social platforms associated with the City University of New York (CUNY) (e.g., Discord servers, Subreddits, Facebook groups, WhatsApp groups, and Telegram) during the COVID-19 pandemic. With a lack of clear guidance from CUNY administration, students turned to each other to crowdsource resources and cope with the emotional and practical challenges of the shift to remote learning. This item is part of the City University of New York (CUNY) Distance Learning Archive, a group project developed as part of Prof. Matthew K. Gold's Spring 2020 Knowledge Infrastructures seminar in the Ph.D. Program in English at The Graduate Center, CUNY, in partnership with the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Certificate Program. The project's goal was to resist or trouble the discourse of catastrophe around the shift to online learning caused by the COVID-19 pandemic by documenting the lived experiences of students, faculty, and staff across CUNY's 25 campuses. Further, the project wanted to document the moment of crisis response by taking a critical approach to educational technology. -
A Professor's Threat: Cameras during Testing Situations Posted on May 5, 2020, this Reddit posts featured student dialogue around whether or not instructors can viably take action against CUNY students who refused to enable their cameras during testing situations. Responders then negotiated the classroom politics and privacy issues that arose during the shift to distance learning, with professors who insisted that their students show their faces during exams to prevent academic dishonesty. This item is part of the City University of New York (CUNY) Distance Learning Archive, a group project developed as part of Prof. Matthew K. Gold's Spring 2020 Knowledge Infrastructures seminar in the Ph.D. Program in English at The Graduate Center, CUNY, in partnership with the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Certificate Program. The project's goal was to resist or trouble the discourse of catastrophe around the shift to online learning caused by the COVID-19 pandemic by documenting the lived experiences of students, faculty, and staff across CUNY's 25 campuses. Further, the project wanted to document the moment of crisis response by taking a critical approach to educational technology. -
"An Open Letter to CUNY Admins" Posted on July 7, 2020, this Reddit thread recorded one unnamed student's open letter to the City University of New York (CUNY) administration in the interest of drawing critical attention to the persistent mix of unclear, conflicting, or otherwise discordant signals received by CUNY leadership and its student populations following the outbreak of the COVID-19 across the greater NYC area. Scrutinizing CUNY administrators amid a persistent lack of institutional transparency, the student portrayed university communications as "wrought with uncertainty" which contributed to the confusion regarding CUNY's plans for the future. The letter emphasized the effects of these student anxieties and struggles, calling attention in particular to instructors who have reduplicated their teaching practices and set rigid expectations for their online courses. The student also noted the tendency for faculty to compensate for the loss of in-person learning by increasing the workload in their courses, failing to acknowledge the ongoing struggles and embodied learning experiences of their students in the process. This item is part of the City University of New York (CUNY) Distance Learning Archive, a group project developed as part of Prof. Matthew K. Gold's Spring 2020 Knowledge Infrastructures seminar in the Ph.D. Program in English at The Graduate Center, CUNY, in partnership with the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Certificate Program. The project's goal was to resist or trouble the discourse of catastrophe around the shift to online learning caused by the COVID-19 pandemic by documenting the lived experiences of students, faculty, and staff across CUNY's 25 campuses. Further, the project wanted to document the moment of crisis response by taking a critical approach to educational technology. -
#CancelRent And Eviction Blockades in Brooklyn: Black Queer Women and Femmes Fight for the Right to Housing Written and submitted by Brooklyn College student Emily Batista over the summer of 2020, this autoethnography focused on the eviction defense of 1214 Dean Street in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Batista framed this research project as a "vessel to explore the growing calls for 'Cancel Rent' as a response to the COVID pandemic," with specific attention to the underrepresented role of Black queer women and femmes in the history of NYC housing struggles. This item is part of the City University of New York (CUNY) Distance Learning Archive, a group project developed as part of Prof. Matthew K. Gold's Spring 2020 Knowledge Infrastructures seminar in the Ph.D. Program in English at The Graduate Center, CUNY, in partnership with the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Certificate Program. The project's goal was to resist or trouble the discourse of catastrophe around the shift to online learning caused by the COVID-19 pandemic by documenting the lived experiences of students, faculty, and staff across CUNY's 25 campuses. Further, the project wanted to document the moment of crisis response by taking a critical approach to educational technology. -
Covid-19 and the Escalating Mental Health Crisis among Bipoc and Immigrants Created by Areeba Zanub in Fall 2020, this digital capstone project examined the COVID-19 pandemic relationship to the rising mental health crisis of BIPOC and immigrant communities. In it, Zanub investigated the role of the "essential worker" with attention to the generational trauma and socioeconomic neglect faced by these underrepresented communities during the COVID-19 pandemic. This item is part of the City University of New York (CUNY) Distance Learning Archive, a group project developed as part of Prof. Matthew K. Gold's Spring 2020 Knowledge Infrastructures seminar in the Ph.D. Program in English at The Graduate Center, CUNY, in partnership with the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Certificate Program. The project's goal was to resist or trouble the discourse of catastrophe around the shift to online learning caused by the COVID-19 pandemic by documenting the lived experiences of students, faculty, and staff across CUNY's 25 campuses. Further, the project wanted to document the moment of crisis response by taking a critical approach to educational technology.