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The Single Most Essential
Requirement in Designing a Fall
Online Course

By Cathy Davidson . .
on May 11, 2020 Page Views: 74694 709

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Cathy Davidson

HASTAC Co-founder
and Director, 2002-
2017; Co-director,
2017- . Distinguished
Professor and
Founding Director, The
Futures Initiative
The Graduate Center,
CUNY
@CathyNDavidson

Topic

Teaching & Learning
Practices

Sub Topics

Pedagogy

Digital Literacies


Let's start the week [updated 7/20/2020] by repeating that a summer of
planning for better online learning this Fall will be wasted if we do not

begin from the premise that our students are learning from a place of
dislocation, anxiety, uncertainty, awareness of social injustice, anger, and
trauma. So are we.

This is the single essential that must be built into the structure,
assignments, thinking about what and how we will teach online in the
Fall. Face to face too. Imagine the classroom of students in face masks
sitting six feet apart, one part of the brain focused on school, another
distracted with life's realities in 2020: on parents or partners sick or dying,


on anxiety about getting sick next, on racial health disparities, on protests
and militia, on soaring death rates across the nation, on no clear path for
ending this nightmare, on a crashing economy, on an uncertain future, an
uncertain future, an uncertain future...

Why start there? Not with Zoom, not with Plexiglass, but with the
disruption of our lives in this historical moment? Because
education is an excellent way of moving beyond trauma to a place
of agency, confidence, control, community, care, activism, and
contribution.

Trauma is not an add on. From everything we know about learning, if the
trauma is not accounted for (even tacitly), and built into the course
design, we fail. Our students fail. None of us needs another failure.

This means thinking about access in all its dimensions: technological,
intellectual, personal, financial, medical, educational. And affective. And
cognitive. Distraction is the single biggest deterrent to learning. Physical
and emotional distress are the single biggest causes of distraction we
have in life. Period.

It also means thinking about agency: acknowledging the problem is not
dwelling in it. It is offering students the tools they need to address and
maybe solve the problems they (and we) all face. Too often, in the
statements by university officials, students are being discussed as if they
were crash test dummies not real human beings.

In considering what we assign and how, it means we might, at least as a
metaphor, think of the complex of trauma and anxiety as a cognitive
burden comparable to a full-time job. We should be building our courses
around the reality our students are carrying an intense emotional
workload (even if they are partying, pretending they are invisible, not
caring about their future: don't believe that for a second). Again, so are
we.

We need to build our courses thinking about the opposite of an emotional
burden: empowerment, agency, community, care. We need to be
designing ways for students to interact with one another and with us. We
need to think about meaningful activities beyond the screen that extend
the lessons of the course, building in ways students can be co-teachers

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as well as co-learners, actively contributing to their own education and
empowerment, connecting students across the barriers of courses,
institutions, locations. We need to think about what we all can offer one
another--curiosity, imagination, knowledge, power--as antidotes to the
present disruption, as tools towards building a future.

As educators, we offer ways that help students not just learn content but
also how to have a pathway towards accomplishment. We can encourage
them not just to learn from us, as experts, but we need to support them in
the process of learning how to become experts. "Expertise" is excellent
tool in the face of uncertainty.

I've learned of someone at Adelphi University who teaches video editing
including to several students with cognitive differences. Now, online and
sheltered during a time of COVID, he has pivoted so his students are
filming what exciting things and ways they see anew in their restricted
and socially distanced lives--on walks alone on formerly busy city streets;
or talking to grandparents they live with; or video taping the different
forms of friendship that blossom on Zoom. They are making interesting
films and also they are becoming confident in their own art-making, a
powerful tool for coping with the new social distancing constraints of their
lives.

| know two political scientists who have challenged students to model fall
voting patterns and come up with positive (nonpartisan) ways to get out
the vote, despite sheltering. Or safe ways to stand in line at polling
places. This gives students agency. In a COVID world, we all need
agency.

| know a lit and history prof, Steven Berg at Schoolcraft Community
College, who begins his early American culture class with the 1793
Yellow Fever plague in Philadelphia. History helps us understand the
present and feel a little more optimistic that there will be a future too.

| know an urban planner who has challenged students to reimagine urban
space in the short and long run, from outside seating at entertainment
venues to rent control and subsidized housing to redress gross inequities
that existed in NYC long before COVID-19.

| know a critical learning theorist (i.e. me) who invited students, after


reading extensively in Indigenous and decolonial pedagogy, to
collaboratively write the course "learning outcomes" for remote learning
during a global health crisis.

| know a distinguished professor of African American literature, Professor
Farah Jasmine Griffin of Columbia, who maintained a sense of
community in her large lecture class by asking students to write one or
two sentences online in answer to profound questions such as: "What
one book from class would you want to take with you? 2. What, if
anything, from your old life do you want to leave behind?" [See
"Comments" below for all the questions]

And we all know artists and writers and performers putting their own
creativity out there online for free. Students as consumers and makers of
all the arts provide an ideal antidote to isolation and anxiety. A little joy is
a wondertul "learning outcome" to build into a class design.

There is almost no field untouched by this COVID-19 pandemic or
irrelevant to it. | do not mean we all have to suddenly become trauma
therapists. That's dangerous (unless we are trained to that role). And it
doesn't mean making every class "about" the pandemic (that would be
awful). It means being sensitive to the devastating historical moment in
which we are now living and offering students a way forward beyond it.

Before we even think about a syllabus or videos or Zoom, think
about what it means to be a student. Now.

First, what defines higher education, more than any other feature, is that
itis voluntary. No law forces you to be in school. Your parents may want
you to go to college but, if you are over 18, they can't force you. Humans
are terrible at voluntary activities that are good for us (our gym is based
on a business model of 80% of annual, paid members not showing up
after Feb 1).

Add to the difficulty of volunteerism the pressure of trauma, anxiety,
illness, economic uncertainty, and dislocation. Think about attending
college without the social enhancements that help support students in
schools. | predict that, with an abolition of extracurricular activities, even
wealthy, elite private residential schools will soon be seeing higher drop
out rates, some perhaps even comparable to public commuter schools


(where students face such pressures all the time--and now exponentially
So).

Before we begin to design our fall syllabus, before we make clever
instructional videos, we need to think from a student's point of view. We
need to try to understand what it means to be studying for a future you
don't know that you will have. No one knows what lies ahead in the best
of times. Now, all the predictions seem like some dystopian futuristic
novel. Total social breakdown? Total economic collapse? A health
emergency in which millions die over the next three or four years? How
do you study to prepare for this future? What better, positive alternative
visions are there? What better narratives can we make? How does an
education, learning, help us tell better stories and make better futures?

What do our students need now? That is the essential question for going
on line. Whether teaching algebraic geometry or sociology or literature or
art or religion, we need to begin with the question of: what would | need if
| were a student in this historic moment? A great place to start? Ask
them!

This does not mean more work for beleagured instructors who are
already stressed with every imaginable disruption. In fact, what we know
from active learning, is too much preparation, too packed a syllabus,
undermines real learning. "Small learning" (James Lang's phrase) is
about small tools that empower, not doing all the work all the time and
overtime.

Asking that question also tilts the educational process: What have
students already learned that they can share? Maybe it is a study skill, a
focus trick, a way they have discovered meaning amid uncertainty that
they can pass on. Perhaps it is "meta reflection" (the single best way to
ensure retention and applicability apart from applying, experientially, what
we learn): encourage your students to think, talk, communicate with one
another, about what they learned in class today or last week and what it
meant for them. Online does not mean absence of community;
encourage them to form study and discussion groups, to work together
when you are not around.

Or, even with videos and other asynchronous learning, reduce some of
the homework while adding a component: ask your students to apply


what they learned in class today to some aspect of their life and write a
25 or 50-word "report back" on a course blog or other secure course site
on what they did and how it worked out. This is far better for learning
than studying for a test. The report-back helps students communicate
with others, see their work in school as relevant and meaningful to their
disrupted lives, and lends a sense of community when that is exactly
what this pandemic has shattered. It helps them realize why they are in
school, why it is worth it to make the effort.

Whatever you are feeling and experiencing, it's likely your students are
too--and probably in a greater degree. If you, as a professor, are having a
hard time concentrating, being productive, think about a student just
beginning the way to mastery who suddenly has to stay focused on a
field, a subject, that seems utterly tangential to their traumatized lives, at
home, with parents, no job, internship canceled, paying tuition for a
bunch of idiotic videos, etc etc.

Adjust accordingly. We need to be human first, professor second.

We need to design as humans for humans in a global crisis. We need to
design our courses with the awareness of pain, dislocation, uncertainty,
and trauma now central to all our lives. And we need to design with the
antidotes to these central to the educational experience: pleasure,
community, agency, and care.

It's a lot to ask. It is the one and only essential as we design our courses
for this disrupted fall.

Beginning by addressing students where they are now, in Fall 2020, at
this historical moment, means providing a space and structure where
they can think powerfully about themselves and the world beyond Fall
2020, beyond this plague, beyond trauma. It does what the best
education is designed to do: it offers students a tool to help them be
stronger in the present and build towards their own and society's better
future.


709

8 comments

You nailed it!

& Paul Conway

Zi Cathy, this is a wonderful statement that orients all teaching faculty
toward the right way to think about what is and is not going to
happen in and beyond the classroom a few short months from now. |
shared this post with all of my faculty colleagues, right at the moment
this week where we are beginning to focus on what is being referred
to as "hybrid resilient teaching." We all get "hybrid." Your post
reminds us that "resiliency" means far more than keeping the trains

running.
Paul.

229 | 1yearago Login or register to post comments

Good luck, Paul

Hey Cathy Davidson
Thanks, Paul. This has gone viral. | think we all were so deer-

in-headlights about going on line and so quickly that we forgot
the human part for a while. "Hybrid resilient teaching" is a
fascinating term. May we all be resilient!

Thank you so much for writing, Paul.


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Hey Cathy Davidson
This beautiful essay--with its log of wonderful and inspiring

assignments--is exactly what | mean about responding meaningfully
to this pandemic and offering students an education that empowers
them to find a better future in its aftermath. Thank you Prof Griffin!
https://bostonreview.net/forum/higher-education-age-

coronavirus/farah-ja...

Professor Griffin asked her lecture class in "Introduction to African
American Literature," once it moved online post-COVID:

"As we pass through this portal, let’s think about what we might take
to the other side, and what we want to leave behind. One or two

sentences per question. No more.

1. What one book from class would you want to take with you?
2. What, if anything, from your old life do you want to leave behind?
3. What do you appreciate that you would like to take with you?

4. What change, if any, would you like to see, and commit to bring
about, on the other side?

1@ 189 | 1yearago Login or register to post comments

Another Brilliant Example of Facing Reality with Agency


Hey Cathy Davidson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=oxe5DhMktc0&fbclid=lwAR3KDxKXAFC7bSFHLON...

114 | 10months ago Log in or register to post comments

Feeling Inspired!

an karapernicano
Really appreciate this piece! | think you're absolutely right to point
out that the Fall still need be approached from the perspective that
we are all in crisis and working through the trauma of the times. If all
online or whatnot, it's still not a "normal" moment to be taking an
online course. Many are still not necessarily choosing this format.

112 | 10months ago Log in or register to post comments

Good luck!

Hey Cathy Davidson
Thanks for taking the time to write and good luck to you---and us
all!

75 | 8months ago Log in or register to post comments

Important to keep in mind

a Ylombana
As a trauma therapist reading this brings me much joy. Educators at
all levels would benefit from the use of the trauma lens to understand
the realities of their students. Not only is this useful for building a real
student-teacher connection because it creates the possibility for
students to feel seen and heard but also it can make educators
realize ways in which they can replicate the oppression that many


communities experience. The disparities that we are seeing today
have been made more visible with the pandemic but we must not

forget that they were already there.

77 | 8months ago Log in or register to post comments

Thanks for writing

Hey Cathy Davidson
Since I'm not a therapist, | tried to make sure my attention was

sensitive, not professional. I'm very glad to hear you say this
and for your insights. Thanks for taking the time to write.

73 | 8months ago Log in or register to post comments

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