By Annette Finley-Croswhite
It's time to pat ourselves on the back. As faculty, we made it through one of the most challenging semesters of our academic lives, whether we are new to university instruction or have been around for years. We could never had anticipated how a disease would engage our teaching and transform it in such dramatic fashion. We all deserve a standing ovation.
It's time to reflect on what we have experienced and learned this semester, especially as educators. Five key points come to mind, although a longer list would be easy to devise.
- Community: We have been collaborative and creative. We have shared ideas with colleagues in ways we never did before, needing each other for advice, skill sets and/or friendship. Collaboration has enriched departments and created new linkages across campus, often connecting those involved with the mechanics of instruction delivery and the content creators, ties that deserve further nurturing.
- Faculty and Student Inequalities: We have learned a good deal more about our students than we have in the past, perhaps because the COVID-19 crisis has forced us to communicate with them more regularly and through multiple kinds of technologies. In this context we have also been confronted with the dynamics of social inequality and perhaps better realize the difficulties students face when their circumstances limit their access to high-tech tools. But we also need to be equally aware of other kinds of inequalities that COVID-19 has created for faculty, especially women, people with disabilities and other social groups who may confront unique challenges like never before.
- Humanizing Technology: Faced with our colleagues and/or students in boxes on computer screens, we have begun to ponder more seriously how we humanize technology. Delivery and efficiency — the mechanics of technology — are essential, but the human endeavor also remains key and we've had to stretch our social and emotional intelligence to understand instructional needs in these challenging times. Compassion has proven a necessary ingredient for us all.
- Humanities, Social Sciences, STEM and Professional Programs: Divisions within any university often seem locked in competition for students and resources. COVID-19 has proven how interconnected our disciplines really are as we have relied on the skill sets of all to explain, instruct and reassure. Online poetry readings and music performances, as just two examples, have been universal across campuses in expanding the reach of our human touch.
- Learning over Teaching: No experiment proved more convincingly the importance of backward design than the situation we faced in March with the closing of our campus. Placing student acquisition of knowledge over skill sets and content in thinking about the rest of our semester and what we wanted students to take away from it focused our approaches squarely on learning as opposed to teaching.
At the Center for Faculty Development we want to underscore how resourceful, collaborative and communicative our faculty have been during the pandemic. Faculty are the essence of any institution of higher education, and that fact is just one more reality that COVID-19 has made abundantly clear.