Since the last school term had such a haphazard ending, I've been questioning why learning still matters during a time when nothing seems to matter. It's natural for a sense of futility to wash over us in this time of constant anxiety, panic, and isolation. After pondering the necessity of education (because what else is there to do), I came to the conclusion that while learning this term is going to be unlike anything else, learning also happens to be pertinent in retaining a sense of normalcy in this era of the uncanny. Hence, we find ourselves here: timetables teeming with online classes, Zoom meeting invites pouring in, unsure about how to approach our classes. So I turned to our beloved professors and asked them to share their experiences with online learning and tell us why (and how) they think we can make this work. I realized reading their brilliant responses that our instructors understand what the students are going through and they are trying their hardest to make this transition easy for us. I also realized that remote learning doesn't have to mean isolated learning as long as we make that extra effort to stay in touch (reciprocated effort is key, people!) and ask ourselves why we even started learning in the first place. So I hope their responses inspire you as they have inspired me and make you a bit more excited about going into your next Zoom class:
"I have to say that adjusting to the unknowns of the fall, preparing to teach (at least in part) online, has been stressful for me. I do not like screens, and I’ve noticed since March how tired being on Zoom makes me. This is not an unusual feeling! There’s been a lot of reporting on “Zoom fatigue” – the struggle is real. But observing my physical reactions to Zoom has caused me worry: I fret about how exhausting all this online work is going to be for all of us, students and teachers; I worry too about how easy it is to ignore or bury those feelings, precisely because operating through screens discourages us from thinking too much about, or checking in with, our bodies.
This is something I’m going to try to pay close attention to this fall: how my body feels in the “Zoom room,” how I can help students get in touch with their physical experience of being online so much, and of course how we can connect those feelings to our work on performance in everyday life (the thing I am teaching this fall, in Theatre 2202: Performance Beyond Theatres). A couple of years ago I wrote a book about how our bodies, in their social, cultural, and economic contexts, make space – we don’t just exist “in” space, but actively shape it. I want to help bring student awareness to this easily overlooked fact: that everything we do with our bodies creates, or responds to, power relations, and has an impact on those relations going forward. If we are all slumped in front of our computers, trying to muster the energy from SOMEWHERE to be in class together, but we are struggling – whose purposes does that serve? Who benefits? Who experiences harm? If me and my students can get through the term having thought about these questions critically, especially when we are at our most Zoom-fatigued, I’ll call it a win.
Hopefully, we can all do a bit of virtual yoga together, too."
-Prof. Kim Solga
"When Akshi asked me to contribute a paragraph on strategies for coping with online teaching and learning, I thought immediately of the therapeutic power of poetry. One of Wordsworth’s sonnets opens:
Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room;
And hermits are contented with their cells;
And students with their pensive citadels (lines 1-3)
Not to spoil the rest of the sonnet for those of you who haven’t read it before, but it’s not really about these things. In the end, it’s about the sonnet form itself and how the restricted space (14 lines) of the sonnet paradoxically allows the poet more freedom to write than a larger form, such as an epic, would. Still, my experience with online teaching during the COVID pandemic this summer reminded me of this lyric poem and the consolation that it might offer to people working in isolation. After the images of the nuns, the hermits, and the students (us!), we get more humans working, followed by animals:
Maids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom,
Sit blithe and happy; bees that soar for bloom,
High as the highest Peak of Furness-fells,
Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells (lines 4-7)
While teaching or learning online, we are like the spinners and weavers and bees—not just soaring but working in hives (the gallery view on Zoom even evokes the cells of a beehive).
Why don’t these images signify loneliness? I would say it’s because nuns, students, maids at the wheel, weavers at the loom, bees, all—except possibly hermits—though isolated in narrow rooms, in fact work as members of a community. At the turn (or volta) of the sonnet, the speaker says, “In truth the prison, into which we doom / Ourselves, no prison is” (lines 8-9). Maybe one approach to the stress of online learning might be to find “brief solace” (line 14) in a “scanty plot of ground” (line 11), as Wordsworth does in the sonnet form itself, knowing that we are in truth connected—even in our socially distanced, pensive citadels."
-Prof. Jo Devereux
"Tips for the Pandemic Term
1. Keep exercising. All those hours in front of the computer stiffen us up mentally and physically and make us stressed. Schedule in mini-breaks, do burpees, go for a run or a swim.
2. Get outside. Social distancing can make us feel pretty isolated. Go for a walk (see exercise above); remind yourself there are other people (not to mention trees and butterflies and bunnies) in the world.
3. Attend your synchronous classes. Zoom isn’t the coziest of rooms, but the classroom is an important community for all of us, especially at a time when we’re likely seeing fewer people.
4. Schedule in your asynchronous lectures. We’re not used to having to do so much online. Lectures you can watch/listen to on your own time could easily slip through the cracks.
5. Keep in touch with your profs, TAs, and counsellors. We’re here to help you negotiate your way through this very different year.
6. Reach out for support when you need it. Covid is a shared experience, and we all understand its added stress. Talk to friends and family if you’re having a hard time. Contact the Wellness Centre at Western. You’re not alone.
7. Be flexible. Pandemic conditions change; technology breaks down; we get the virus. This year challenges the natural human desire to be in control.
8. Find quiet time. Talking to friends and family is important, but contemplation and meditation can also give us the space to find our inner resilience.
9. Be creative. Bake bread, write stories, build things. Take advantage of creative assignment options. Creativity makes us happy and gives us a purpose.
10. Most of all, have fun! Life is for living. Let’s live it (safely masked and distanced, of course)!"
-Prof. Madeline Bassnett
"Well, here we are in 2020 and we are all rapidly adjusting to new realities in a COVID era. The good news is that we’ve emerged (probably temporarily) from a period of acute crisis; many of my students responded to that crisis with tenacity, patience, and good humour. I still feel very grateful to my students who were able to smile when my four-year-old climbed into my lap in the middle of office hours and who asked about my cat, who had the nerve to sleep on camera through an entire class on Faulkner. My students really pulled through under very challenging circumstances.
But now, in August, it’s becoming clear that we’re playing a long game. I’ve realized two things. First, I may be an introvert, but I really, really miss people. And second, I hate not being able to plan things. If you like people and if you’re a problem-solver by nature (as I think most of us are), the feelings of isolation and prolonged uncertainty are going to wear us down. We’re going to have to find ways to keep our energy levels up, or even find ways to generate new energy, for a winter that looks like it will be unpredictable and emotionally difficult.
How are we going to do this? First of all, I think we’ll have to find ways to create kinds of online community we’re really not used to. I’ve taught online classes for a few years and I’ll say that community formation is the most challenging aspect of online teaching. However, I suspect that teaching online during COVID will feel different than pre-pandemic online teaching, in part because most of us won’t have the kinds of opportunities for social contact that we would normally have outside the classroom. We might do better now with the opportunities we do have. We’re all going to have to find new ways to reproduce those important but spontaneous moments which were often squeezed into the 10 minutes between classes that we all took for granted. If you feel like you need connection with other people in order to succeed at school, try to be deliberate about making friends in your online classes so that you can create a learning community that will help you stay motivated. You might need to seize the moment a little more forcefully than you normally would.
As for 2020’s tendency to walk around flipping tables on us every single day: we’re just going to have to be ok with making some things up as we go. It’s worth remembering that to some extent, the classroom has always been a space that we’ve made up as we went. Part of what’s special about a university class is that it is a period of time that is very well planned (defined by syllabi and lesson plans and allotted time periods) and also unplanned (because while scripted moments may set the stage, the best kind of learning often happens spontaneously). I also think that the kinds of work we do to create community will pay off when we run into whatever problems emerge in late 2020.
When I think about the enormity of the changes we’re facing this fall it can feel overwhelming; but when I remember what it felt like when my students and I were realizing COVID was going to change our lives, and what it felt like when we had to fix problems, I remember my students’ faces. We did ok. I think we can figure this out again. Good luck everyone, and welcome back to Western."
-Prof. Alyssa MacLean