Responding to Uncertainty through Contextualizing Learning Outcomes

Sarah Seeley

There is much uncertainty as we move into the fall. Universities are planning to enact a combination of teaching and learning formats, which includes a wide array of online, face to face, and hybrid options. Plans are informed by very different degrees of student and faculty input, and with the recent surges in confirmed virus cases, they remain quite tentative. Within this context, it will be important to acknowledge that this is an uncertain time for education as a social institution. It will be important to differentiate and apply what was learned during the spring in order to meet student needs this fall.

In contrast to the rapid transition that occurred in the spring, the online teaching and learning that takes place this fall will be planned, purposeful, and explicit. Yet, many of us will be doing that for what amounts to the first time, which will require a rethinking of many taken for granted ideas. As I plan the daily schedule for a first-year writing course, I find myself obliged to seriously reconsider even my most familiar, well-worn classroom activities. I am asking myself: what will it actually be like to do each of these things online? For example, what will online peer review workshops be like? Answers to these questions are not necessarily forthcoming. I had, of course, led peer review workshops online last spring, but that was with a group of students who had already been socialized into this type of scholarly participation throughout the eight weeks we’d previously spent together in a face-to-face context.

As such, those experiences aren’t entirely comparable to what is about to occur in the fall. I am trying to embrace this uncertainty and how it frames my online course design efforts. In learning how to communicate within and about the online course delivery context, as shaped by specific institutions and disciplines, many faculty are experiencing a kind of newness or uncertainty. Reflecting on this condition may offer some important pedagogical inroads.

In evaluating what worked well (and what did not!) during the transition to distance learning last spring, I have been struck by the degree to which any positive outcomes I can identify are directly linked to communicative choices. I will now offer a discussion of learning outcomes that I’ll frame in terms of a bespoke course text I’ve referred to as the “snapshot.” [1] I initially created the snapshot in order to smooth the online transition. Students were anxious. They were being asked to do something that, for most of them, felt completely new. Many of them were navigating the online transition as they were living in, or unable to travel back to, virus epicenters. Some tested positive, and others cared for sick family members. There was much uncertainty.

In that moment, writing the snapshot seemed quite like updating the syllabus. They are both comprehensive documents that list course expectations, responsibilities, and logistics, but the syllabus is a ubiquitous academic genre. It is meant to be a “one-stop-shop” type of document that offers essential course information. In practice, however, there often seems to be a gap between that purpose and how students understand and interact with the genre. Writing the snapshot made me realize that this is because “the dots” on the syllabus are not always fully connected.

For example, I realized that my focus on learning outcomes in the snapshot was wildly different than in the original course syllabus. As I wrote the snapshot, I placed the learning outcomes within a larger social context that included a list of opportunities for satisfying each outcome and an explicit indication of how each outcome would be assessed. At that uncertain moment in time, it seemed vital to offer this clarifying context. It seemed vital to be very plain about how the remainder of the work to be done in a very challenging semester would be “worth it.”

The original course syllabus had listed the exact same outcomes, overviews of the same assignments, and the same assessment structure. In contrast, the snapshot explicitly connected the dots between these three bodies of information. Importantly, this document framed the learning outcomes in terms of opportunity, and it was very transparent about how students could go about being active agents in their own education. These are, of course, positive characteristics in any educational context.

Yet, it took all the uncertainties caused by this global health crisis to give me the occasion to pause and dislodge the obviousness I attributed to my own syllabi. That I unwittingly left my students to connect the dots and make meaning out of this very specific academic genre now seems almost laughable. Perhaps this presumption is the root of those meme-inspiring student emails to which I might have previously whispered: What if I told you the information you seek is in the syllabus?

I am left thinking of my yoga teacher when she urges us to pause and examine the set-up of a familiar, well-worn pose. As she indicates: precisely because we know it so well, it is important to re-examine how our bodies engage with it. Precisely because we know our course designs, course documents, assessment structures, learning outcomes, etc. so well, it is important to re-examine how our students engage with them. Perhaps the hasty online transition last spring did me a favor. It obliged me to embrace uncertainty, which dislodged some unproductive obviousness.

COVID-19 has impacted life in widespread and sometimes unexpected ways, and its impact on universities cannot be overstated. Uncertainty shapes pedagogies, social opportunities, administrative choices, and enrollment trends. General insecurity is widespread, and it is important to acknowledge how this global health crisis has unhinged pre-existing precarity. It is felt socioeconomically in the form of uncertain visa statuses, terminated health insurance policies, and qualitative changes in— or total losses of— meaningful, identity-affirming teaching and learning.

In the fall we will, as always, greet a class of students who are new to the university: approximately one fourth of the total student body. Their versions of newness and uncertainty emerge each year like clockwork. They will be traversing and transitioning into new discourse communities shaped by institutional histories, disciplinary contexts, and now, COVID-related circumstances. This is the moment to acknowledge and embrace the uncertainties we are all experiencing in order to close the gap between learner and teacher.

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WRIT 2110: Strategic Writing > “The Snapshot”

Notes

[1] An abridged version of this text is appended.