“What if we do this, instead?”: Realtime Collaborative Crisis Course Development

Wanalee Ocasia Romero

There I sat staring at my laptop screen. The last time I saw my students was on campus. Now they’re a matrix of faces on my laptop, somehow all of their faces are a mixture of a blank stare and panic. I paused. I didn’t feel like teaching the critical thinking lesson on intellectual integrity and the university’s academic integrity policy any more than they were ready to participate in it.

It’s day 17 of self-isolation in response to the pandemic nature of COVID-19: I’m scared, worried, exhausted, confused, unsure. The week before my class meetings were fully given over to assuaging students’ fears, pointing them to university and community resources, and finding out what access they had to the class (technologically, logistically in their physical living space, and schedule-wise). My goal for this morning is to find a way to communicate my understanding for this overwhelming and unprecedented learning situation while also helping them feel like the class is still valuable for them.

This first-year seminar, focused on critical thinking skills for first-year students, is required for all students at my regional public university in Texas. Although most of the enrollees are still in their first year of university study, our commuter-university attracts non-traditional students, be they 18 or 58 years old. Our students have several jobs; elder-, child-, or sibling- care responsibilities; and financial upheaval worrying them right now. If they are still able to continue their studies in the online environments, they are troubled about how to keep themselves and their loved ones healthy and safe while consuming online news streams, viral videos, podcasts, and press conferences. I also remain cognizant of our Hispanic serving institution status, since almost 37% of our students identify as Latina/o. In our politically conservative state, the recent news about increased ICE raids during the lockdown are a real concern for any students with undocumented family members—or who are undocumented themselves.

“This all seems inconsequential right now, doesn’t it?” I say. All the heads on my laptop screen nod. “What if we do this, instead: What if we exercise our critical thinking skills by considering the world we’re living in at this moment?” Actual smiles start to creep in. In that instant, I reimagined the lesson that I had just prepared for “remote delivery.”  The change I began in that moment preserved some of the active learning practices we had established in the face to face classes prior to spring break, but it also gave students the agency to engage the current crisis in directions that would be meaningful and cathartic.

Historically this 1-credit seminar is structured with interactive lessons in the elements of thought and intellectual standards of critical thinking (Paul and Elder, 2009) for the first 10 weeks. During the last weeks of the course students are asked to apply these elements of thought and intellectual standards by contributing to one of four presentations about different marginalized populations in the United States and their activism for tangibly improved lives in federal policy. For each lesson thereafter there is an associated shared Prezi presentation. I provide a brief history of each struggle for equality. Students then contribute their five-minute answer to one of my discussion questions. Students’ presentations are informed by my presentation, its embedded links to reliable sources, and students’ cursory “Google research.” Exemplary presentations study the embedded links and provide thoughtful answers influenced by the semester’s assigned readings and their own critical thinking. Most presentations are shallow and aphoristic, but they are still useful in the students’ actively applying course concepts to current societal challenges.

To allow for the situational challenges of the pandemic and lockdown, my initial revision to these exercises was to give my portion of the presentation then ask the students the discussion questions live and have them answer in conversation with one another. This wasn’t an ideal solution to the “new normal,” because this conversation didn’t allow for the intellectual autonomy of a personal presentation (even a five-minute one).

So in my Zoom classroom I wondered if giving students back this autonomy in some way and focusing on the topic with which we were all already preoccupied, the lesson would serve its initial learning objective while also giving us all a chance to sort through all of the conflicting and developing information on our current situation. I started asking students some key questions about the concept of intellectual integrity regarding the pandemic and the public health response. While they began to chat, I created a group-access document online, added them all as editors, and came up with a research question: In what ways does intellectual integrity impact the response to the COVID-19 pandemic? I gave them twenty minutes with the instruction to stay logged on to Zoom, use their critical thinking skills (which I outlined on the shared document), find a source that speaks to intellectual integrity and the pandemic, and contribute that information to the document.

Over the ensuing week, I converted the rest of the semester into an examination of our shared national emergency through the lens of different marginalized populations. This consisted of focusing my original presentations into more succinct historical primers and creating more streamlined forms (like this and this) in which the students posted their findings. The new lesson plans increased instructor immediacy and presence in the classroom: our synchronous meetings decreased the “psychological distance” between instructor and student in the open acknowledgement of the shared social and epidemiological situation (Baker, 2010), and I was transparent about the instructional design and course learning objectives. 

Since many of my working-class students would have to drop this class if required to meet at the same time as our face-to-face instruction because of their “essential worker” status, the recorded lecture, embedded “research time” and shared worksheet mimicked synchronous instructor presence for those students later. The student-driven critical inquiry of the experiences of marginalized communities in the COVID 19 pandemic allowed the class to speak more knowledgeably about the topic while also giving them important information about their current situation—particularly since many of our students identify with one or more of the marginalized identities we study.

The emergent nature of the pandemic called for swift and creative faculty labor to move their courses swiftly to online delivery. Since my first-year seminar classrooms have been student-led for six years, it made sense to continue that approach online as I contributed to my students’ eLearning literacy. The renegotiation of the course simultaneously with the students responded to the impact of the emergency itself.

Although I have been teaching online for several years now, this experience helped me reimagine the online classroom space. Whereas I previously tried to configure my online courses by trying to mimic the experience of the face-to-face classroom, I now realize that the remote classroom is a unique space in which to imagine learning anew. Thinking about my students’ different access to the internet and other technologies forced me to consider how to parse the information in a way that employs what my students have available to them (both mentally and logistically) directly, instead of allowing the face-to-face configuration as an intermediary. As I develop my courses for remote delivery again this fall, I’m going to continue to imagine the digital space as the classroom and pair that wide range of tools with the course material.