Pandemic Pedagogy: Teaching International Relations Amid COVID-19 (Political Pedagogies) 3030835561, 9783030835569

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POLITICAL PEDAGOGIES

Pandemic Pedagogy Teaching International Relations Amid COVID-19 Edited by Andrew A. Szarejko

Political Pedagogies

Series Editors Jamie Frueh, Bridgewater College, Bridgewater, VA, USA David J Hornsby, The Norman Paterson School of International Affairs, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada

The purpose of the series is to create a new space for conversations between scholars of political pedagogy, and between such scholars and those looking for guidance on their teaching, and become the main recognizable authority/series/conversational space in this field. The proliferation of journals, conferences, and workshops devoted to teaching attest to the accelerating interest in the pedagogy of Political Science and International Relations over the past two decades. While research scholarship remains the dominant criterion for hiring and promotion at top tier institutions, almost all academics in these disciplines spend most of their energy teaching, and more than two-thirds do so at institutions where effective teaching is the primary factor in career success (Ishiyama et al 2010). Even those at research-intensive positions benefit from more effective classroom environments, and institutions across the world are building centers devoted to improving teaching and learning. The challenges of teaching span sub-disciplines and connect disparate scholars in a common conversation. Indeed, teaching may be the only focus that academics in these disciplines truly share. Currently, most writing about teaching politics is published in journals, and is therefore dispersed and restricted in length. This series will provide a much needed platform for longer, more engaged contributions on Political Pedagogies, as well as serve to bring teaching and research in conversation with each other.

More information about this series at https://link.springer.com/bookseries/16526

Andrew A. Szarejko Editor

Pandemic Pedagogy Teaching International Relations Amid COVID-19

Editor Andrew A. Szarejko Monterey, CA, USA

ISSN 2662-7809 ISSN 2662-7817 (electronic) Political Pedagogies ISBN 978-3-030-83556-9 ISBN 978-3-030-83557-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83557-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Anna Babii/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

There are only so many ways to say “thank you” to the many people who shape a single text, but I should probably start with those who saw promise in the proposal for this volume and who helped to make it a reality. So to Jamie Frueh, David Hornsby, Anca Pusca, Shreenidhi Natarajan, two anonymous reviewers, and everyone at Palgrave Macmillan who helped to support the production of this volume, thank you. I’m also grateful to the contributors themselves for spending some of their scarce time working on their chapters during an unusually stressful period. For so many colleagues to have entrusted me with the editing of their work and with oversight of the volume as a whole is rather humbling, and I hope I have done right by them. It is similarly humbling to read the endorsements that other colleagues have provided for this volume, and I’m thankful for their engagement with the collective work this volume represents. Of course, the reflections in this volume are the product of interactions with students, and I’m grateful for the work they did in very difficult circumstances. The pandemic presented challenges to teaching and learning alike, but at least from my side of the (virtual) classroom, the experience was not nearly as difficult as it could have been because of the energy and curiosity that students at Georgetown University and the University of Cincinnati alike brought to our classes. Moreover, in two of those classes, I received the support of excellent teaching assistants,

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Jonathan Liu and Shea Minter, and all classes rely on a broader network of supportive academic staff. Thank you all. To the extent that I am interested in and any good at teaching, it has helped to have models of effective instruction in my life from grade school onward. From early English classes with Janet Wrassmann and Margaret New to high school classes with Erik Krotz, Erik Lipham, and Jon Seals, I have benefited from the labor of many who have dedicated their professional lives to teaching. At the college and post-graduate level, classes (and discussions about teaching IR) with Bradford McGuinn, Joe Parent, Andrew Bennett, David Edelstein, Lise Morjé Howard, and Daniel Nexon—as well as the Apprenticeship in Teaching at Georgetown’s Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship—left an especially large imprint on my own teaching. Finally, I am grateful to my family and friends who have helped me make it through the pandemic. More than anyone else, I have my wife, Camille Balleza, to thank for that. Beyond her everyday support, she helped me choose the cover photo for this volume—a depiction of paper marbling that is meant to underscore the fluidity of the public health situation we have been dealing with for many months now. There’s no one I would rather have in my pandemic bubble, and I dedicate this volume to her. August 2021

Andrew A. Szarejko

Praise for Pandemic Pedagogy

“COVID-19 created numerous challenges for those of us who teach. But it also offered opportunities, especially for those who teach about international politics. From heightening awareness of the interconnected nature of the world, generating the ability to experiment with new pedagogic approaches, and forcing a rethink of the “classroom environment,” instructors from around the globe sought to make the best of a difficult situation. The contributions to this volume provide a treasure trove of lessons learned from those experiences and experiments. Any and all of them will make you a better teacher of international politics, both virtually and in-person.” —Paul Poast, University of Chicago, US “This wonderful book serves several important purposes, from processing what we have all just been through, to guiding us in our future teaching. The chapters offer radically different but equally important contributions to our profession and this moment. From Ettinger’s beautifully written philosophical musing on teaching undergraduates in an “age of crisis,” to Dayal’s real-time account from her apartment in New York (looking down on a mobile morgue, sirens in the background as she records her lectures), to Lemke’s how-to guide for balancing asynchronous and inperson teaching, the book is brimming with larger insights and smaller tips. I hope all my colleagues will read this.” —Hilde Eliassen Restad, Bjørknes University College, Oslo, Norway vii

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PRAISE FOR PANDEMIC PEDAGOGY

“The global pandemic has changed our world in dramatic ways, including how we teach. This timely volume provides a wealth of valuable and innovative ideas. With a special eye for the student’s—rather than just the instructor’s—experience in critical times and on virtual environments, this excellent volume stands out for the diversity of its contributors and compassionate approach to teaching.” —Gregorio Bettiza, University of Exeter, UK “There is a venerable tradition of studying dramatic political shocks and what they mean for the international system and for international relations. But what do political shocks in general, and the COVID-19 pandemic in particular, mean for the teaching of International Relations? This thoughtful compilation of essays and personal reflections by scholars from across the world does essential service by providing IR scholars—as teachers—with tips and insights on how to be sensitive to student needs while coping with the stresses of online and hybrid teaching. Overall, these essays are the start of a valuable conversation on these issues that emphasize flexibility and compassion. They will prove to be a useful resource for established scholars as well as early career scholars as they think through their teaching responsibilities in this era of change while managing their other tasks, both professional and personal.” —Manjeet Pardesi, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

Contents

Part I

Adapting to the Circumstances

1

Teaching World Politics in an Age of Crisis Aaron Ettinger

2

Teaching in Critical Junctures: Challenges to International Relations Bachelor’s Programs in Brazil During the COVID-19 Pandemic Elia Elisa Cia Alves and Marcos Alan S. V. Ferreira

3

4

5

3

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More Than a YouTube Channel: Engaging Students in an Online Classroom Elizaveta Gaufman and Sebastian Möller

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Interactive Learning and Participation at Zoom University Brianna Nicole Hernandez

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How Much Zoom is Too Much? Making Asynchronous Learning Work Tobias Lemke

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CONTENTS

Part II Caring for Students amid Crisis 6

7

8

Out from the Wreck: International Relations and Pedagogies of Care Anjali Kaushlesh Dayal

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When Teaching is Impossible: A Pandemic Pedagogy of Care Oumar Ba

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Supporting Student Learning Through Flexibility and Transparency Michelle Giacobbe Allendoerfer

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9

Access is Love: Equity-Minded Pandemic Pedagogy Andrew B. Jenks

10

Teaching Online During a Crisis: What Matters Most for Students Rebecca A. Glazier

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Part III Preparing for Future Disruptions 11

It Takes a Village: Harnessing Institutional and Professional Resources to Preempt and Prepare for the Future Sibel Oktay

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12

Getting Our Teaching “Future Ready” Sebastian Kaempf

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13

Disruption in an Open-Access Institution Stephanie A. Hallock

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14

Pedagogy and Institutional Crisis: Higher Education as Public Good and Scholarly Advocacy After the Pandemic Stephen Pampinella

Index

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Editor and Contributors

About the Editor Andrew A. Szarejko is a Donald R. Beall Defense Fellow in the Department of Defense Analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School and a Non-residential Fellow at the U.S. Military Academy’s Modern War Institute. He recently received his Ph.D. in Government from Georgetown University and served as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Cincinnati. His research focuses on the intersection of U.S. foreign policy and Indigenous politics, and his peer-reviewed work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Journal of Global Security Studies, the Cambridge Review of International Affairs, and PS: Political Science and Politics. His public-facing work has appeared in outlets like War on the Rocks, The Diplomat, and Indian Country Today. Since August 2019, he has served as the teaching editor for H-Diplo, an online platform devoted to promoting open scholarly discourse on Diplomatic History and IR. He tweets at @szarejko.

Contributors Michelle Giacobbe Allendoerfer joined the American Political Science Association (APSA) in 2021 as the Director of Teaching and Learning. At APSA, she coordinates teaching and learning and professional development programming for APSA members. From 2010 to 2021, she was the xi

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Faculty Coordinator for the International Politics Cohort of the Women’s Leadership Program at George Washington University and an Assistant Professor of Political Science. She taught Introduction to Comparative Politics and Introduction to International Relations in the Women’s Leadership Program and also offered an upper-level course on human rights. Her research focuses on international human rights. In addition, she is interested in the scholarship on teaching and learning and was actively involved with GWU’s Teaching and Learning Center. She has published articles on active learning in international affairs and on graduate student involvement in the scholarship of teaching and learning. Elia Elisa Cia Alves is Assistant Professor in the Department of International Relations at the Federal University of Paraiba—UFPB (Brazil). She has 7 years of teaching experience in public higher education institutions in Brazil. Since 2016, she has belonged to the Mettrica Lab, which develops work on active learning and teaching methods and techniques in International Relations at https://sites.google.com/view/met trica-lab/home and has produced publications in the Journal of Political Science Education and Mural Internacional. Her social media activity includes the use of Academia.edu and ResearchGate profiles and a channel on YouTube communicating academic literature on teaching at https:// www.youtube.com/channel/UCyFKaTIm9zh4HomSKN46fzA. Oumar Ba is an Assistant Professor of International Relations in the Department of Government at Cornell University. He formerly taught at Morehouse College. His research focuses primarily on the global governance of atrocity crimes, and the construction of and challenges to the international order from Global South perspectives. He is the author of States of Justice (Cambridge University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in Human Rights Quarterly and Cambridge Review of International Affairs, among others. His research has also been featured in public media outlets such as Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Monkey Cage at the Washington Post, and the New York Review of Books. He is an editor at the online magazine Africa Is a Country, and his personal website is www.oumarba.com. He tweets at @oumarkba. Anjali Kaushlesh Dayal is an Assistant Professor of International Politics at Fordham University’s Lincoln Center campus and a former Research Fellow at the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security. She is the author of Incredible Commitments: How UN Peacekeeping Failures

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Shape Peace Processes (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Her research and writing have appeared in, among other venues, the journals International Organization, Peace Review, and Global Governance, as well as online in the Washington Post, Foreign Policy, the Ms. Magazine blog, and the On Being Project. She researches peacekeeping, peace processes, the UN Security Council, and humanitarian intervention. She holds a Ph.D. in International Relations from Georgetown University’s Department of Government, and at Fordham University, she teaches courses on the United Nations, international relations, and humanitarian intervention in the Political Science and International Studies programs, and she advises students in the Master’s in International Humanitarian Affairs program. She tweets at @anjalikdayal. Aaron Ettinger is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Carleton University, specializing in International Relations and U.S. foreign policy. His work on IR pedagogy has been published in International Studies Perspectives and Politics and in an edited volume published by University of British Columbia Press. Since 2016, he has taught a large, introductory course on world politics in an age of crisis, in which students grapple with the defining global problems of their generation. His approach to teaching IR is derived from the principles of “Global IR” and the push for greater disciplinary inclusiveness and diversity. In 2021, he was awarded the Canadian Political Science Association Prize for Teaching. Marcos Alan S. V. Ferreira is Associate Professor in the Department of International Relations at the Federal University of Paraiba—UFPB (Brazil)—and Visiting Professor at Universidad Núr (Bolivia). He has 15 years of teaching experience in private and public higher education institutions in Brazil and Bolivia. He has also been a Visiting Researcher at the University of Manchester (United Kingdom) and Uppsala University (Sweden). Since 2012, he has conducted research on the development of International Relations programs in Brazil, which has led to publications in the Journal of Political Science Education and Meridiano 47 —Journal of Global Studies. He tweets at @marcosalan, and his academic work can be found at: https://ufpb.academia.edu/MarcosAlanFerreira. Elizaveta Gaufman is Assistant Professor of Russian Discourse and Politics in the Department of European Languages and Cultures at the University of Groningen (The Netherlands). Her research is situated at

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the intersection of political theory, international relations, and media and cultural studies. She is the author of Security Threats and Public Perception: Digital Russia and the Ukraine Crisis (Palgrave, 2017). Her other publications include peer-reviewed articles on nationalism, sexuality, and social networks. Elizaveta is a permanent contributor to the “Duck of Minerva” blog and tweets at @lisas_research. Rebecca A. Glazier is a Political Science Professor in the School of Public Affairs at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. She is the Director of the Little Rock Congregations Study. In addition to her research on religion and community engagement, she studies the scholarship of teaching and learning and is passionate about improving the quality of online education. More information about her research is available on her website: http://www.rebeccaglazier.net/. Stephanie A. Hallock is a Professor of Political Science and the Coordinator for Global Education and Engagement at Harford Community College in Bel Air, Maryland. She earned her Ph.D. in International Relations from the University of Miami and has spent over two decades focused on teaching, learning, and expanding global education opportunities for community college students, who have very diverse needs, abilities, and goals. In this learning environment, most of Stephanie’s research, publications, and presentations have stemmed from classroom experiences and student interactions, including recent work on the use of simulation games and AI to promote active learning in the IR classroom, the infusion of global learning across the curriculum, the impact of citizenship and identity on political mobilization, and pedagogical tools designed to reach first-generation college students, most notably The World in the Twentieth Century: A Thematic Approach (Pearson, 2013). Brianna Nicole Hernandez is a Ph.D. Candidate in International Relations at Florida International University (FIU). She joined the program in 2018, has since received her M.A., and is pursuing her Ph.D. as well as certificates in Women and Gender Studies and National Security Studies. Prior to attending FIU, Brianna received her B.A. from the University of Miami, where she double-majored in History and Political Science and completed minors in Sociology and Philosophy. She is interested in the role of language as a product and producer of the actors and actions that comprise the international system and its relation to power dynamics. She

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has served as a Teaching Assistant for Introduction to International Relations at FIU, and her social media presence includes a Twitter account at which she tweets about her work (@brihernandezfiu). Andrew B. Jenks is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Delaware. His research focuses on disability politics, and he has recently published articles in Disability & Society and Critical Social Policy. His work on teaching and learning includes a recent collaboration with the University of Delaware’s Center for Teaching and Assessment of Learning as an Equity and Accessibility Consultant as well as a forthcoming chapter in a handbook for graduate student instructors which suggests that the use of educational technologies that are accessible to the instructor can enhance the student learning experience. Outside of academia, Jenks competes at the Paralympic level in the sport of goalball and has had the opportunity to contribute to community outreach and engagement with people with disabilities, specifically young people who are blind or visually impaired, mostly in the U.S. Find updates at his website www.andrewjenks.net and on Twitter (@thelifeofjenks). Sebastian Kaempf is a Senior Lecturer in Peace and Conflict Studies in the School of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland (UQ, Australia). Since 2009, his courses have been taught in-person and fully online. Each course differs, but they include 2-hour lectures, 1-hour seminars/tutorials, 3-hour practical MediaLabs, and 3-hour simulation role plays. He is also the producer and convener of “MediaWarX”, one of UQ’s Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), which runs several times a year (May 2017–2024), and which has already been taken by over 13,500 learners from over 154 countries. He has received an Australian National Award for Teaching Excellence and the 2020 ISA Award for Teaching Innovation. His publications in relation to teaching and education include, “Teaching International Relations through the format of a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC)” (with Carrie Finn, International Studies Perspectives, 2020) and “Reimagining Communities: Opening up History to the Memory of Others” (with Jean-Louis Durand, Millennium - Journal of International Studies, January 2014). Through his new podcast series, “HigherEd Heroes” (co-convened with Dr Al Stark), he disseminates insights into excellent teaching practices: https://www.buzzsprout.com/813707.

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Tobias Lemke is Instructor of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Delaware and the Program Coordinator for Faculty Development and Assessment at the English Language Institute’s Academic Transition Program. At Delaware, he received his Ph.D. in 2021, and he successfully completed two course certification programs in the philosophies of learning and teaching through the Center for Teaching and Assessment of Learning. He also served as the graduate fellow for the University of Delaware’s Center for the Integration of Teaching, Research and Learning from 2015–2017; part of an inter-institutional network designed to provide professional development opportunities for graduate students and early career scholars interested in a career in teaching. He is currently working on classroom research that assesses student perceptions of active learning strategies and the efficacy of hybrid and remote learning environments for second-language undergraduate learners. Sebastian Möller is a political economy research and M.A. program coordinator at Cusanus University Koblenz, Germany. His interdisciplinary work focuses on state financialization, international trade, urban political economy, and socio-ecological transformations. He has taught a variety of introductory classes in political science, international relations, and international political economy as well as research seminars on finance and trade. At Cusanus University, he also teaches graduate courses in economics with a focus on sustainable transitions within corporations and the wider economy. Sebastian is particularly committed to encouraging and facilitating transdisciplinary learning, including dialogues with practitioners, study field trips, and transdisciplinary student research. In his digital seminar on the global political economy of Bremen’s ports at the University of Bremen (summer term 2020), he set up a seminar blog (https://blogs.uni-bremen.de/hafenblog/, in German language) where students, colleagues, and practitioners contributed to the production and discussion of knowledges. This seminar received two teaching awards, including one from the German Political Science Association. Sebastian regularly tweets about higher education and political economy (@smoeller84), and he acts as reviewer for two student journals and publishes articles and working papers with his students. Sibel Oktay is Associate Professor of and chair of the Political Science Department at the University of Illinois at Springfield, and a non-resident senior fellow of public opinion and foreign policy at the Chicago Council

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on Global Affairs. Her research and teaching interests focus on international relations and foreign policy, European and Middle Eastern politics, and mixed-method research. Her research has been published in the Journal of European Public Policy, European Journal of Political Research, and British Journal of Politics and International Relations, among others. She is the author of the forthcoming book, Governing Abroad: Coalition Politics and Foreign Policy in Europe (University of Michigan Press). Her media commentary and opinion pieces have appeared in The New York Times, The Hill, Vox, BBC, Deutsche Welle, and The Conversation, among others. Oktay has been teaching courses on international relations and foreign policy analysis both face-to-face and online since 2014. She tweets at @sibeloktay. You can find more about her research, teaching, and public-facing work on www.sibeloktay.net. Stephen Pampinella is Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Relations at the State University of New York (SUNY) at New Paltz. He specializes in U.S. foreign policy, relational social theory, and race in international relations. His peer-reviewed publications have appeared in Civil Wars and Small Wars and Insurgencies, while his current research applies relational and postcolonial frameworks to analyze governance hierarchies during U.S. military occupations. Pampinella has 10 years of political organizing experience in New York State, primarily focusing on increasing state assistance to SUNY. With colleagues, he is a co-founder of the Member Action Caucus with United University Professions, the union representing SUNY faculty and staff.

List of Figures

Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3 Fig. 5.4

Fig. 5.5 Fig. 5.6

Fig. 5.7 Fig. 5.8

Fig. 5.9 Fig. 5.10

Overview of course modules on Canvas Expanded view of a single Module in Canvas (Introduction to Global Politics) Excerpt from course discussion document (Introduction to International Relations) Excerpt from course discussion document with a focus on course introduction and learning outcomes (Introduction to International Relations) Detailed look at the overview page to Module 1 on Canvas (Introduction to Global Politics) Detailed look at the “To-Do” list as part of the overview page to Module 1 on Canvas (Introduction to Global Politics) Expanded view of Online Classroom Orientation Module on Canvas (Introduction to Global Politics) Detailed view of the technology troubleshooting page that is included in the Online Classroom Orientation Module on Canvas (Introduction to Global Politics) Detailed view of the instructions for submitting a practice assignment on Canvas (Introduction to Global Politics) Stop, Start, Continue, survey prompt for collecting student feedback during the semester (Introduction to International Relations)

79 80 82

83 87

87 89

90 91

93

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 12.1

Screenshot taken of the CCTV cameras of Brisbane, crowdsourced by my students in 2020, and uploaded onto Google Maps

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List of Tables

Table 2.1 Table 2.2

Public-funded IR undergraduate programs in Brazil IR programs by region, demographic and economic factors

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Pandemic Pedagogy: Teaching International Relations During (and After) COVID-19

For International Relations (IR) scholars around the world, the COVID19 pandemic made the second half of the 2019–2020 academic year and the entirety of the 2020–2021 academic year unusual at best. Amid all the human catastrophes of the pandemic and a general disruption to daily life, we as instructors had to continue teaching our students, most of whom had not originally registered for online or hybrid classes. Indeed, to adapt to the circumstances and ensure that our students still had valuable experiences in our (virtual) classrooms, many of us in higher education have spent more time on teaching than we usually do throughout the pandemic. This book offers a series of reflections from IR scholars on what this experience has taught us about our teaching—the ways we can adjust to crisis, the needs of our students, and the possibilities for greater preparedness in the event of future disruptions. Teaching at any level is deeply personal, but teaching amid a pandemic is perhaps even more so. Throughout the pandemic, students have become acquainted with our bookshelves, our plants, our pets, our children, and the other interlopers. These are not just reminders of how blurry the line between the home and the office can become while delivering lectures from home; they are moments that underscore to our students that we instructors are people too. Indeed, these are the sorts of reflections you will find in this book—quite personal ones that derive from the particular contexts each of the contributors faced amid this pandemic. I will continue with some reflections of my own, and I will then outline

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the individual chapters and explain how they relate to broader themes of the volume. I will conclude with a note on how this volume builds on the Political Pedagogies series of which it is a part. Teaching IR During COVID-19 I have been fortunate in that neither I nor any immediate family members have yet contracted COVID-19. While some family members of mine are healthcare workers, the anxiety I experienced over their potential contact with the virus faded into background noise at some point, and my own experience of the pandemic has largely been about changes to my personal and professional routines. While I have made slight adjustments to my research due to the closure of archives, for example, the more substantial professional changes came in my teaching. Prior to 2020, I had never taught a course entirely online. Much of my early teaching experience came as a teaching assistant for undergraduate courses at Georgetown University, and I taught my first class as the instructor of record in the summer of 2019. It was a five-week summer session of Introduction to International Relations (Intro to IR), and I have not taught in a classroom since then. While I defended my dissertation in August 2020, I have been teaching online since before the pandemic affected higher education in the U.S. Luckily, my spring teaching load in 2020 consisted of only a single independent study class with one student, and because of their schedule, we decided from the beginning of the semester—when there was still little public concern in the U.S. about a potential pandemic—to conduct all our meetings online. The mid-March shift to online instruction that so many experienced thus had little effect on how I was teaching. By the summer, however, I had to more radically rethink how to teach online; I had committed to teaching two summer sessions of Intro to IR. In approaching online teaching in these circumstances, the first thing I wanted to communicate to my students was that I was still committed to making their experience a valuable one and that I would work with them to tailor the class to their needs. If, as Schwartz (2019, p. 14) argues, establishing a productive relationship with students entails “the availability of intellectual and emotional connection,” I was trying to signal that availability with a detailed welcome email and an attached survey that asked students whether they would prefer a synchronous or asynchronous class (or a mix thereof), how frequently they would want me to host office

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hours, what had worked well for them (or not) in other online classes, and so on.1 Among the changes I ultimately made, however, perhaps the most effective one was to invite guest speakers for question-and-answer sessions with my class. I would start by asking about the speaker’s academic background and about their argument in an assigned reading before going to the students for any questions they had. In those two summer classes, for example, Joshua Busby, David Kang and Xinru Ma, Jon Lindsay, Danielle Lupton, Richard Maass, Inu Manak, Joshua Shifrinson, and Swati Srivastava all spent at least 45 minutes each discussing topics from constructivism to U.S. –China relations with my classes.2 Students benefited from being able to ask questions to subject-matter experts whose work they had read, but this synchronous component to the class was also helpful to me in building relationships that I have missed fostering in classrooms and conference hotel lobbies. The 2020–2021 academic year, however, was my first year of full-time teaching. As a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Cincinnati, I taught three undergraduate classes per semester—five new preparations in total. I taught Introduction to Comparative Politics in both semesters, and I also taught four upperlevel seminars: America and the World, War and Security, U.S. National Security, and American Grand Strategy. (It was only that last class on which I had some input.) I was happy not to have to move from the D.C. area to Cincinnati for a year, and other faculty members were helpful in easing my transition into the job, but managing this teaching load amid everything else was not terribly easy. Similar to other contributors to this volume (see Section 2), I ultimately arrived at a guiding principle—the exceptional circumstances warranted exceptional compassion, even if that meant spending an exceptional amount of time on my classes. Among other things, I saw that as being proactive about communicating with students throughout the semester, being relatively generous with respect to late assignments and excused absences, and providing ample feedback on all their written work. I did need to make time for other things— research, job applications, and a personal life included—but I saw my

1 Emphasis in original. 2 These scholars are listed in alphabetical order by last name. Kang and Ma are listed

together as they joined my class together to discuss a coauthored article.

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primary professional responsibility as making time for my students and mitigating the pandemic’s effect on their learning experiences.3 As I write this introduction in early June 2021, I am preparing to start teaching one more summer Intro to IR class at Georgetown next week—in all likelihood, the last online class that I will teach for the foreseeable future as I will then begin a post-doctoral fellowship with no teaching obligations at the Naval Postgraduate School. (Of course, views expressed here are my own and not those of the U.S. Navy or any other federal entity.) Early July will thus mark the end of roughly 18 months throughout which I have been teaching continuously with only short breaks between semesters or for holidays. That is, the impetus for this book came from experience. I pitched the basic idea for this edited volume to the series editors in late March of 2020 at a point when it was clear the pandemic would have important but still uncertain effects on higher education, and the full proposal received formal approval from the press in October. All the while, the contributors and I were constantly trying to make sense of and adapt to this new teaching environment. The pandemic is ongoing. Many in the U.S., myself included, have already received vaccinations, and it appears that the coming academic year will be a return to “normal” for most instructors. But there are inequalities in access to vaccines within and across states, and there remains uncertainty as to whether new variants of the virus might prolong the pandemic even further. That is, all the contributors to this volume offer reflections on teaching amid a pandemic while still writing from one. We thus do so humbly—we all know that things will change between the time we submit this volume and the time you read it. You will therefore not find chapters on “one simple trick to get perfect course evaluations during a pandemic” or “three universal laws of online teaching” in this volume. Rather, in their own ways, each author here is asking you to join a conversation with them. They offer some reflections on their own pedagogical practices based on their experiences of the pandemic. But what do you think, dear reader? What changes have you made to your

3 Indeed, teaching was my sole contractual responsibility—I had no formal research or service obligations—but as Jackson (2020, pp. 42–43) notes, the question of how to “make time for class” will be present at any stage in an academic career given other personal and professional responsibilities or incentives. The pandemic has made such questions of time management more pressing for many. As some of the contributors to this volume explore, this has especially been the case for those with care-giving responsibilities.

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teaching throughout this pandemic, and what will you be taking into the post-pandemic future? Outline of the Volume This volume is divided into three sections, each of which is guided by a central question. The first two sections focus on the recent past and the lessons we might derive from our experiences of teaching during a pandemic. First, how should instructors adapt to different modes of instructional continuity? Contributors will explore aspects of the quick, unanticipated change in the means of delivering instruction due to COVID-19 while also offering suggestions for instructors who face similar circumstances in the future. If, for example, one seeks to make IR “visually and affectively experienceable,” even “tangible” for students (Rösch, 2020, p. 110), how does one do so in a virtual environment? Second, how should instructors care for their students under such circumstances? That is, how should we change our pedagogical practices in such a disruptive period to ensure that students still feel welcome and supported in our classrooms and to reckon with the fact that students will vary in the extent to which they are affected by the pandemic?4 Contributors here reflect on the ways they sought to meet the diverse needs of their students, but they also emphasize the extent to which we can bring a more compassionate pedagogy into our post-pandemic classrooms. The third section is more explicitly forward-looking. How should we as a discipline prepare for similar future disruptions? If COVID-19 caught us somewhat unprepared for the switch to a long period of mostly online teaching, how can we ensure that any future transitions occur more smoothly? Contributors underscore the roles that various actors can play in these preparations—individual faculty members can take action, but departments, administrators, and professional associations can all make a significant difference in crafting a more resilient discipline.

4 Sterling-Folker (2020, p. 89), for example, describes her role as an instructor as that

of a guide: “I facilitate the learning process by listening more carefully to what students hope to achieve (both in the classroom and after graduation), being clear with regards to my learning goals for them in light of their dreams, adopting a flexible attitude toward class activities and appropriate assignments, and respecting them individually for their unique talents and interests.” The question for contributors in Section 2 is essentially about how to do all that in extraordinary circumstances.

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Each contributor in those respective sections will thus be addressing the same basic theme. Nonetheless, the varying perspectives these authors bring to bear on these issues generate fruitful differentiation amid thematic similarity. The first section begins with Aaron Ettinger’s chapter, which situates the reader in the “multiple, overlapping, and mutually abetting crises” that have constituted our teaching environment—not just during the pandemic, but in the preceding two decades. What intellectual principles should guide teaching amid crisis? Ettinger argues that we should seek a middle ground between presentism and historicism, between generalism and specialism. There instructors can find a “pedagogical eclecticism” that embraces complexity in world politics while speaking pragmatically to present concerns. Elia Elisa Cia Alves and Marcos Alan S. V. Ferreira continue in a similar vein by asking how one is meant to teach during a “critical juncture,” the sort of period most IR scholars would rather study. Drawing on their experience teaching in Brazil, Alves and Ferreira explore the myriad difficulties and creative solutions required in moving classes online in a context of relatively constrained technological resources and a political environment unsupportive of higher education. Sebastian Möller and Lisa Gaufman focus on one of the key challenges that faces any instructor but that the pandemic has exacerbated. How do we keep our students engaged? While it can be difficult to foster interactivity in online classes—especially ones that were meant to be in-person—Möller and Gaufman argue that active learning is worth the effort. They explain how simulations and student-run blogs helped keep their students engaged and fostered connections between students that one might easily overlook in the pandemic-driven shift to online teaching. Similarly, Brianna Nicole Hernandez considers how to maintain an inclusive, connected teaching environment even amid the disruption of the pandemic. Hernandez does so from the perspective of a teaching assistant who designed her own discussion and review sessions with those goals in mind. She outlines a number of games and activities that she found useful in attaining those objectives, but she also highlights the importance of treating students as “constructors of knowledge…coresponsible for learning.” The first section concludes with Tobias Lemke’s fine-grained discussion of asynchronous and synchronous modes of teaching as well as the many technical choices one will face along the way. Lemke argues that

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neither mode is ideal on its own—a “60/40 split in favor of synchronous instruction” is his preference—but he outlines the various stages of designing and ultimately teaching one’s online course such that readers obligated to teach entirely synchronously or asynchronously will nonetheless find much here to think about the next time they run a class online. Regardless of the exact format an instructor chooses, Lemke concludes, success in the online format will stem in large part from more personal choices: “Empathy, understanding and compassion should be the guiding principles of effective online teaching,” especially in the context of a pandemic. For better or worse, the subject matter of IR provides instructors with plenty of material. Indeed, as Frueh argues, this is something of an advantage for us in the field: “Most obviously, global politics courses provide opportunities for emerging agents to practice wrestling with the kinds of complexities they will confront in an increasingly globalized world” (2020, p. 5). What the authors in this first section demonstrate is that the empowerment students can experience in our classes need not be impaired by different modes of instruction, even when such changes are forced upon us by a pandemic. This brings us to the second section of the book, which focuses on how to care for students amid tumultuous circumstances and which begins with Anjali Kaushlesh Dayal’s chapter on this subject. Teaching to students in hard-hit New York City, Dayal describes the various ways in which she manifested a “pedagogy of care” in her classes, and she emphasizes three key principles that guided her pedagogical practices: transparency, generosity, and flexibility. “But these pedagogical moves,” she concludes, “will perhaps remain relevant past the crisis, as ways to help transform the classroom into a caring, collaborative place for imagining collective solutions to besetting problems.” Indeed, the remaining contributors in this section continue to press this point. Oumar Ba situates his chapter with reference to Naeem Inayatullah’s (2020, p. 18) argument that, “Teaching is impossible. Learning is unlikely… [W]e enter the classroom to encounter others. With them, we can meditate on the possibility of our own learning.” In Ba’s courses at Morehouse College, a historically Black institution, teaching amid the pandemic thus entailed a focus on how the conditions were affecting “students, their families, and their communities.” In light of those ongoing changes, Ba sought to make adaptations throughout his courses that would allow the (virtual) classroom to be “a living space.”

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Michelle Giacobbe Allendoerfer, similar to Dayal, emphasizes “flexibility and transparency” in delineating her approach to pedagogical care. Importantly, she argues that this heightened attention to the shifting needs of our students need not come at the expense of rigor or one’s own workload. Echoing Ettinger and Alves and Ferreira, Allendoerfer notes that we and our students have been working through “multiple pandemics,” and she considers how to give students “the confidence they can succeed” even amid challenging circumstances. Andrew B. Jenks’s chapter focuses on issues of accessibility, including those pertaining to disability, but he argues that the pandemic has accentuated the many different kinds of barriers that students face when entering our classes. Jenks challenges the reader to go beyond the bare minimum of meeting legal requirements for accessibility and to thereby create more inclusive classroom environments, an effort that we would do well to support at our respective institutions for the foreseeable future. This second section concludes with Rebecca Glazier’s chapter on the centrality of “making meaningful human connections” with our students. While building rapport with students is important even in normal times, Glazier argues that this is all the more central to student success and retention amid a crisis, and she provides numerous suggestions for facilitating those relationships. Moreover, she concludes, we ought to bring lessons learned from the pandemic into our future classes: “When we consider the crises that at least some of our students are likely experiencing in any given semester, it should spark in us a desire to continue to extend the compassionate and understanding policies that became common during the COVID-19 pandemic.” Above all, the authors in this section overlap in arguing that IR classrooms can and should maintain this newfound focus on compassionate pedagogy. The steps they recommend—among them, being proactive in reaching out to struggling students, being less punitive toward late assignments, and designing course materials with accessibility in mind—all take time and energy, resources that may be scarce even in the best of times. But making even modest commitments to the growth of our students can have outsized rewards (Lang, 2016). The third section turns our attention from the current pandemic and asks how we might prepare for similar future disruptions that could affect our teaching. The section begins with Sibel Oktay’s examination of the ways that departments, administrators, and professional associations might support this task. “We need to develop and sustain tools that

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harness the power and resources of the collective,” she argues, and she outlines several ways in which we might indeed “diffuse the burden away from the individual faculty member.” By creating accessible, digital repositories of syllabi, course content, and supplementary lectures or seminars, for example, departments and professional associations might put faculty members in a better position to adapt to any abrupt disruptions in future. For Sebastian Kaempf, the pandemic has provided one overarching lesson for instructors—we need “to take seriously what learning designers have been telling us for some time.” Whether one is teaching in-person or online in a post-pandemic future, Kaempf argues that our teaching can be more flexible and engaging—and, ultimately, better suited to weathering short- or long-term disruptions. Kaempf outlines several practices one might bring into future classes, including a variety of active learning exercises, but he also stresses the value of bringing student voices into the redesign of courses. After all, as the second section in this volume makes clear, resiliency in academia is not just about instructors or administrators but is also about students. For Stephanie A. Hallock, the pandemic exacerbated two of the main challenges that students face at her open-access community college: unequal access to technology and competing demands associated with care responsibilities and/or employment. She outlines some of the steps her institution took in the short term to meet those needs as well as some of the ways that faculties, institutions, and professional associations can prepare for future disruptions. With respect to professional associations, for example, she argues that rather than privileging a return to in-person events, a more robust schedule of “year-round virtual opportunities for faculty to interact with one another” could promote professional development in pedagogy that would keep us well-prepared for future disruptions. This section concludes with a call from Stephen Pampinella for a more activist academia—one that focuses on the budgetary pressures that have become increasingly salient amid the pandemic. Writing from the New Paltz campus of the State University of New York, he argues that we must be advocates for our students, and that includes pushing back against state-driven layoffs and cuts to public funding for higher education. As other contributors in this section note, there are many things we can do to prepare for future disruptions so long as we have the necessary resources, but many individuals and institutions will need to wage

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political fights in the coming years to retain or increase access to those resources. As the contributors to this final section make clear, the task of preparing academia—or at least our corner of it—for future disruptions is a difficult one. It will involve more than one person’s efforts, more than one meeting, more than one email. This is especially the case because this task is not entirely about pedagogy or anything else entirely within our control as instructors. It is also about politics, a domain that demands the “strong and slow boring of hard boards” if we are to have any longterm effect (Weber, 1998 [1948], p. 128). Drudgery that may be, but the tedium makes it no less important. Conclusion This book is meant to stand on its own, but it is also the fourth entry in a series. The Political Pedagogies series of which it is a part is currently constituted by three other edited volumes—Jamie Frueh’s Pedagogical Journeys Through World Politics, Heather A. Smith and David J. Hornsby’s Teaching International Relations in a Time of Disruption, and Daniel J. Mallinson, Julia Marin Hellwege, and Eric Loepp’s forthcoming The Palgrave Handbook of Political Research Pedagogy. The present volume begins most directly where Smith and Hornsby concluded. While their volume focuses on a variety of ways that teaching can be disrupted and can serve as a disruption in itself by breaking students away from the familiar, the pandemic primarily emerges in Smith and Hornsby’s conclusion. “As a community,” they urge, “let’s come out of this pandemic with more collaboration and a pandemic pedagogy that is inclusive, innovative, and based on care” (Smith & Hornsby, 2021, p. 160). Indeed, the contributors to this volume mirror that call while providing sustained examinations of the ways future instructors might modify their teaching during similar disruptions, care for their students, and build a more resilient discipline. In so doing, this volume supports the overarching goal of the series— to create a space for conversations about pedagogy in Political Science. I look forward to the continuing discussion. Andrew A. Szarejko Naval Postgraduate School Monterey, CA, USA

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References Frueh, J. (2020). Introduction. In J. Frueh (Ed.), Pedagogical journeys through world politics (pp. 1–15). Palgrave Macmillan. Inayatullah, N. (2020). Teaching is Impossible: A Polemic. In J. Frueh (Ed.), Pedagogical journeys through world politics (pp. 17–26). Palgrave Macmillan. Jackson, P. T. (2020). In J. Frueh (Ed.), Pedagogical journeys through world politics (pp. 41–53). Palgrave Macmillan. Lang, J. M. (2016). Small teaching: Everyday lessons from the science of learning. Jossey-Bass. Rösch, F. (2020). Pedagogies of discomfort: Teaching international relations as Humanitas in Times of Brexit. In J. Frueh (Ed.), Pedagogical journeys through world politics (pp. 103–113). Palgrave Macmillan. Schwartz, H. L. (2019). Connected Teaching: Relationships, power, and mattering in higher education. Stylus Publishing. Smith, H. A., & Hornsby, D. J. (2021). Conclusion: Pandemic pedagogy. In H. A. Smith & D. J. Hornsby (Eds.), Teaching international relations in a time of disruption (pp. 159–165). Palgrave Macmillan. Sterling-Folker, J. (2020). Confessions of a teaching malcontent: Learning to like what you do. In J. Frueh (Ed.), Pedagogical journeys through world politics (pp. 77–90). Palgrave Macmillan. Weber, M. (1998 [1948]). Politics as a vocation. In H. H. Garth & C. W. Mills (Eds.), From Max Weber: Essays in sociology (pp. 77–148). Routledge.

PART I

Adapting to the Circumstances

CHAPTER 1

Teaching World Politics in an Age of Crisis Aaron Ettinger

In Elena Ferrante’s novel My Brilliant Friend, we hear tell of a psychic state of distress in which “the outlines of people and things suddenly dissolved, disappeared…” where “unknown entities…broke down the outline of the world and demonstrated its terrifying nature” (Ferrante, 2006, pp. 89–91). “Dissolving margins”—the psychological unease in which things once hard and fast become uncertain—is a befitting descriptor of life in COVID times. For many, outlines were rubbed out that once distinguished order from disorder, work from home, reality from unreality. In universities around the world, instructors experienced their own peculiar dissolutions, beginning with the mad scramble online in March 2020, and perhaps a more orderly transition in subsequent terms. “Pandemic pedagogy”—the subject of this volume—confronted the educator with a suite of practical and philosophical problems that remain unresolved. As the world shut down, reflections on the pandemic’s long-term effect on the intellectual content of political science were a luxury. It was hard enough to remember to unmute yourself.

A. Ettinger (B) Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. A. Szarejko (eds.), Pandemic Pedagogy, Political Pedagogies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83557-6_1

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This chapter is a theoretical inquiry into pandemic pedagogy and the content of IR scholarship, an underexplored intersection in the intellectual life of the field (Ettinger, 2020). The pandemic crisis is an opportunity to understand and mitigate this imbalance. Exploring the theoretical implications of integrating the COVID-19 into the IR classroom reveals the ways that knowledge about world politics is generated and disseminated under conditions of grave personal and political uncertainty. The question at hand is the following: How, and to what extent, should the COVID-19 pandemic be incorporated into the permanent curriculum of world politics? Naturally, there is a temptation to make room in the syllabus for the latest global political developments. While this impulse is correct, it must be acted upon with care. There are distinct pedagogical, professional, and intellectual challenges to teaching world politics in an age of crisis require deep reflection on the part of the instructor. Accounting for the pandemic-era political upheavals presents its own intellectual challenge for the classroom instructor. The short-term effect of the pandemic on the International Relations (IR) curriculum was clear enough. By September 2020, global health politics got a more prominent place on the syllabus; everyone found a pandemic angle on their own areas of instruction. It only made sense; academic fashions often follow events in the real world. But the pandemic’s imprint on the intellectual content of the IR discipline is less certain. COVID did not take place in a political vacuum; it unfolded within the context of global political transformations that are dissolving previously stable patterns of world order. Essentially, we are teaching world politics in an age of crisis—a dispositive moment on the threshold of world-historical change. I am interested in the pedagogical implications of multiple, overlapping, and mutually abetting crises in world politics. I argue that this critical juncture in world politics should prompt instructors to re-evaluate the conceptual and empirical foundations of undergraduate IR classes. Our audiences, undergraduate students born in the early years of the twenty-first century, have really only known a world in the throes of crisis. Making sense of world politics in an age of crisis is a pedagogical and intellectual challenge, not just for teachers but also for IR itself. To be clear, this essay is about teaching, not about classroom techniques. These matters are capably addressed by other contributors to this volume. Rather, it is a conceptual inquiry into the relationship between undergraduate teaching and the wider intellectual life of International

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Relations at a critical juncture in current history. On a personal note, I am extraordinarily fortunate to be in a position to think about abstractions. I teach in Canada which, in the grand scheme of things, enjoys the blessings of “peace, order and good government,” outlined in the country’s constitution. A safe and productive educational environment is enabled by political stability, social solidarity, and well-financed public university system. For the most part, the crises of world politics happen beyond Canada’s borders (see chapters by Alves and Ferreira, and Dayal for different perspectives). But the coronavirus pandemic dissolved those boundaries. For the first time, for many, world politics was knocking at the door. It is from this standpoint that these observations arise. This chapter draws on my experiences teaching IR at the undergraduate level in Canadian universities, and, in particular, a large first-year introductory class on global politics. Since taking on that assignment in 2015, my class has been framed by different variations transformative change in world politics. In essence, the class is a big history of “right now” and is meant to help young undergraduates understand the crisisladen period in political history in which they live. Here, I explore the implications of “teaching world politics in an age of crisis.” First, I establish a conceptual understanding of the term “crisis” and its pedagogical significance to undergraduate teaching. Second, I address two challenges of crisis-era teaching and explore what they demand of the instructor: striking a balance between presentism and historicism, and generalism and specialist teaching in the IR classroom. I argue that the resolution to these challenges is rooted in pedagogical variations on current trends in IR thinking: “global IR” and “analytic eclecticism.” The pluralism of those two programs can be applied in equal measure to the classroom and, I propose, to great effect.

Teaching the Age of Crisis In November 2009, Time Magazine published a retrospective of the preceding ten-year period calling it “the decade from hell” (Serwer, 2009). The cover featured a wailing Baby New Year sitting amid the detritus of last night’s party. Since I started teaching, the Time cover has served me well as compelling visual and a final exam question prompt. It also is cause for constant reflection on the way I frame twenty-firstcentury world politics for my students. Intuitively “crisis” seems to fit the first twenty-one years of the twenty-first century, and using “age of crisis”

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as an overarching concept is an engaging way to frame an introductory world politics class. But conceptual intuition and a great hook are no substitutes for rigor. So, we must set the terms of the debate. In common parlance, “crisis” is a catch-all word for any bad situation. This fuzzy colloquial usage is understandable but unfortunate. Writing one half century ago, the historian Randolph Starn (1971, pp. 14–15) captured this sentiment well: “every editor and politician knows in the age of mass media, ‘crisis’ is good copy…one wonders how often ‘crisis’ has flown off historians’ pens or into their titles with little more than the force of fad.” In the classroom, terms like “crisis,” “tragedy,” or “failure” may also present as faddish, but they have a powerful focusing effect. Classroom instructors, however, are not advertisers and have a responsibility to be more precise and transparent with these “inescapable, irreplaceable parts of the political and social vocabulary” (Richter & Richter, 2006, p. 345). This goes double in periods of political confrontation in which the boundaries of common language and order dissolve, and where basic concepts “evoke complex, conflicting reactions and expectations” (ibid.). Reinhart Koselleck (2006), German theorist of history and historiography provides a rich insight into the meaning of crisis and its evolution. Etymologically, the root of crisis derives from the Greek verb “to separate” which in the ancient context was a necessary feature of citizenship, relating to “choosing,” “deciding,” and “judging” in civic life. It also applied to medicine, articulating the cognitive co-mingling of diagnosis and prognosis. Over time, “crisis” has been used to describe something dispositive; a contingent moment in which something—history, illness, war, revolution, and judgment—breaks toward a certain resolution. That ancient Greek conception embodies a double meaning that is still implicit in modern language. At once, “crisis” describes an objective set of conditions and critical juncture in which a previous state of being is restored or not (Koselleck, 2006, p. 361). Between the 1500s and 1800s, “crisis” expanded into areas of secular life, like foreign affairs and economics, as a metaphor. By the nineteenth century, intellectual usage of “crisis” converged around four general meanings: (1) a chain of events leading to a decisive moment; (2) a theologically inflected final judgment day in which history changes forever; (3) a permanent or conditional category of reoccurring crisis; and (4) a historically imminent transitional phase (Koselleck, 2006, pp. 371–372). To these general meanings a fifth consideration was added: deliberate management. If a crisis could be anticipated, it could be managed through

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the instruments of positive knowledge (Koselleck, 2006, p. 377). Such thinking certainly proved its worth in the scientific and industrial revolutions. Outfitted with the newfound technical virtuosity, crisis now carried “the cachet of a scientific-seeming organicism with an invitation to a sense of historical drama; it was a way of connecting quantity and quality” (Starn, 1971, p. 10). Following their economist cousins, philosophers of history and ideology, political scientists, organizational theorists, sociologists, and others absorbed these notions of crisis into their disciplines (Koselleck, 2006, pp. 392–393). By the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, “crisis” has proliferated in application and meaning, and has lost any analytical precision it once had. Convincingly, Starn (1971, pp. 17–18) allows for a Kuhnian possibility to defining the term. As we know, paradigms in science rupture when what is regarded as “normal” breaks down under the cumulative weight of anomalies and exceptions. In this sense, “crisis” applies to any paradigm on the threshold of change. To Starn, this meaning captures the realworld dissonance and contingency associated with crisis, without resort to grand theories of history. However, in the absence of shared conceptual meaning, common criteria for evidence, and agenda-driven use, “crisis” has lost its precision. The colloquial use seems to have prevailed. Phillip Y. Lipscy (2020, p. 99) makes an important point that not all is lost. Scholarship on crisis, and the concomitant vocabulary, is well developed in different issue areas within political science. He argues that a closer treatment of “crisis” as an ontological category unto itself presents opportunities for theoretical synthesis across different research communities and can restore crisis as a central research agenda in IR. I concur and suggest that the same can be said for teaching in IR. Is “crisis” an appropriate characterization of first twenty years of the twenty-first century? Three inflection points stand out as the benchmark dates of this era of crisis: the advent of the sprawling war on terror beginning in 2001, the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, and 2020 pandemic. At the same time, anomalies and exceptions are accumulating in world politics and “order inducing institutions cease to function” (Boin & T’Hart, 2007, p. 44). The age of crisis has seen a loss of confidence in the ideational pillars of post-World War II global order—liberalism, democracy, and market capitalism. The dysfunctional pandemic response of many highly functional states in 2020 did not help and undercut public confidence in governments’ abilities to respond to grave public threats. Geopolitically, the rapid rise of China represents a serious Great

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Power challenge to the USA. Simultaneously, there is the concomitant erosion of the US-led system of international order that served as the infrastructure of post-World War II stability and cooperation. Layered on top are era-defining challenges with migration, racism, democratic retreat, authoritarianism, and, of course, anthropogenic climate change that is incrementally bringing humanity (or parts of it, at least) to the threshold of catastrophe. The first decade of the twenty-first century was certainly bad. The second may have outdone the first. The third decade beat them both in its first year alone. If these multiple, overlapping, and reinforcing issues are not crises, then what is? Well, that is exactly the point. If this is an era of crisis, the next question is “compared to what?” An evergreen exercise for teachers is the interrogation of rhetorical commonplaces in popular discourse. Did “everything change” with COVID-19? Are we living in “unprecedented times?” Of course, this is not just a pandemic-era question. How many “once in a generation” events have marked the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the full lifetimes of our undergraduate students? Or, put differently, what are the closest analogies to the present era of crisis? The world has seen pandemic, revolution, refugees, depressions, insurrection, democratic decline, and hegemonic transitions before. Except for world war (so far), the current era has seen them all unfold, all at once. They are escalating processes that are undermining the global order’s capacity to cope with disturbances and return to previous conditions of stability (Boin & T’Hart, 2007, p. 46). And they require explaining. Teaching global crises from within the dissolving margins of world order is thus a profoundly important challenge and the way instructors respond in the classroom has significant effects on the students, especially for young undergraduates. An instructor’s response helps bring conceptual order to a disorienting era for students, at the outset of their adult lives (Westheimer et al., 2017, p. 1043). Boin and T’Hart (2007, pp. 43–46) note three interrelated components of crisis that should prompt reflection among instructors about the importance of teaching: threat, urgency, and uncertainty. When the 2020 pandemic broke out, it altered the basic threat calculations of daily life for all students, though not evenly or equitably. The pandemic’s urgency and immediacy, along with the cascading crises it set off, called upon instructors to become translators of world events in real-time. Engaging with imminence puts the instructor in a position to bring to bear the historical depth of the discipline to contextualize the immediate moment for

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students in need of trustworthy intellectual guidance. Third, and most important, a crisis entails a considerable degree of uncertainty about the causes and implications of these events. Here, the instructor’s role is clear. To establish what we know and what we do not. The instructor’s role is to ask the right question, to provide tentative answers, and open avenues for what to ask next. This approach converts what is uncertain and unknown into something calculable and knowable through the simple process of thinking things through. From the perspective of early undergraduate students of world politics, these three conditions of crisis— threat, urgency, and uncertainty—are all crying out for conceptual order. Boin and T’Hart also discuss a fourth component of crisis: its subjective nature. In an information ecosystem polluted with self-serving misinformation, the problem is all the more acute (Brühwiler & Okayama, 2020, p. 335). The classroom instructor can create conditions of trust that can help students re-establish stable outlines of the world such that conceptual order might be restored.

Pedagogical Challenges Establishing conceptual order for students is a great responsibility and no small task. This second section outlines two major intellectual challenges to adapting an undergraduate world politics curriculum in an age of crisis. First, I address the epistemic and methodological tug-ofwar between presentism and historicism in the world politics classroom. Second, I discuss another tug-of-war between generalist and specialist types of teaching. In neither case do I advocate for firm boundaries between them. Rather, here is where “dissolving boundaries” between firmly maintained distinctions can expand the parameters of possibility of IR teaching, an argument I ground in pedagogical variations on “global IR” and analytic eclecticism (Acharya & Buzan, 2019; Sil & Katzenstein, 2010). Presentism and Historicism Teaching world politics in this age of crisis requires a commitment to instruction on the present. That is a justifiable choice and, given the arguments made in the previous section, makes perfect sense. But too much focus on any one time period can both obscure and clarify. The intellectual threats in this case are availability and recency bias; the cognitive

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disposition to place outsized emphasis on what is new, newly learned, or what can be immediately recalled. Pay too much heed to the headlines (or, smartphone alerts) and it is easy to elide the historical context. Focus on the deep backstory and the significance of current ruptures may be dulled. Indeed, one does not want to be overwhelmed by the drama of events, nor be obtusely unaffected by them. To some degree, these are straw men positions. The greater challenge for the instructor is establishing the correct balance of what is immediate and what is context, and how it can be purposefully presented to students craving insight. The methodological debates between presentism and historicism are well-established in historiographic and philosophical literatures (Armitage, Forthcoming; Walsham, 2017). So too have the great wordsmiths given us plenty of pith. “What’s past is prologue,” Shakespeare reminds us in The Tempest. “The past is never dead. It’s not even past” wrote Faulkner in As I Lay Dying. Eminently quotable, of course, but these are not much help in a pedagogical sense. Historically minded IR scholars are also alert to the epistemological and ontological shadows cast by history (Lawson, 2012; Lemke & Szarejko, Forthcoming). But what these, and many other disciplinary analysts forget to address, is how this historical epistemology influences the classroom. The work of scholarship is not only research; it is also teaching, and teaching entails different genres of communication, presentation, argumentation, evidence, and purpose. So how does the balance of presentism and historicism play out in the classroom where the audience is less sophisticated than the disciplinary meta-commentators and more vulnerable to historical fallacy? When I speak of presentism versus history, I speak of a methodological commitment that instructors must confront, especially instructors working in historically minded fields like IR. In the classroom, what is the correct balance between a pedagogy focused on what is current and what is context? Answering this question is a challenge when considering both the audience and the instructor. As a rule, young undergraduate students are especially are prone to presentism. Growing up with world crises unfolding all around them, students can be forgiven for internalizing crisis as the ordinary state of affairs. It is not their fault; they haven’t been around long enough to know much better and may only have working knowledge of events from last five or seven years (Ettinger, 2016, p. 200). This is not much to work with and, in the absence of greater

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context, it anchors their perceptions to a narrow band of history. Instructors must remember, as I’ve argued elsewhere, “to adjust our expectations of undergraduates to the time horizons within their lifetimes – not ours” (Ettinger, 2016, p. 201). Compounding the difficulty is the sheer speed of events. Things happen fast. They may not always fundamentally change the world, but they can disorient, distract, and draw outsized attention. This is made worse by the hyperactive news environment that militates against reflection (Litfin, 2020, p. 59). Instructors are also vulnerable to an availability bias that anchors perceptions of what is important to the landmark events of their generation (Bow & Lane, 2017). Here, the formative political events of one instructor’s lifetime are merely sections in a textbook for younger generations. This generates an expectations gap between what the instructor knows and what the instructor expects students to know. Ultimately, managing the generational evolution, the speed of events, and the uncertainties they entail is both a matter of pedagogical concern and psychological worry.1 In this age of crisis, the duty of the classroom instructor is, at very least, to provide historical and comparative context. It demands wide-ranging historical context and the ability to explain it to students. It is a daunting prospect but, it would seem, that an instructor trained in IR is up for the task. The stuff of the discipline is deeply inscribed by historical content, perhaps more than any other empirical branch of political science. For the historically minded IR instructor, the past exerts even greater influence. In this context, it is easy to overdo the history. Just as an instructor must avoid excessive focus on the present, so too must they avoid getting lost in historicism. Deep historical knowledge, however, can be combined with a productive pedagogical way to mobilize some of the virtues of presentism. How can these two things—presentism and history—be reconciled in the classroom? Unlike many historians who regard presentism as an unforgivable intellectual sin, the IR instructor should not socially distance from pedagogical presentism. Its possibilities should be embraced with due regard for intellectual habits it can impart to students. Pedagogical presentism is, in short, an opportunity to ingrain in students the habit of asking the contextualizing question: “what do we know” and “to what does this compare?” It is a question that by necessity projects backward and forward in history in order to think through the political present

1 The emotional and psychological aspects of teaching are covered later in this volume.

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in a systematic way. Historian David Armitage (Forthcoming) summarizes eight types of presentism that are useful ways of thinking through teaching. Two are particularly helpful in this context. The first is narrative presentism, which holds that the past is the cause of the present. It is a common-sense assumption that the present did not come out of nowhere that allows the possibility of a causal account of the origins of the present. Of course, there are methodological worries to this with respect to the ambiguities of causal explanation, of falling into an inevitability narrative, of over-determination. But in the classroom, simple and well-established qualitative methods like process tracing and historical sequencing provide theoretically informed and empirically sensitive tools for connecting the immediate present with the past (Mahoney et al., 2009; Pierson, 2000). A related method is “strategic presentism, which helps “understand and address the way that the past is at work in the present” (quoted in Armitage, Forthcoming). Its interpretive logic permits the analysis of cultural and ideational considerations that shape the worldviews of political subjects. The point is not to retreat from causal explanation nor to fear explanatory overdetermination. Rather the point is to ingrain the habit of historical analysis before deciding on how much weight to ascribe to the present. Ultimately, teaching students about the crises of world politics must integrate concerns with the present with context from the past. The Generalist and the Specialist Within political science, teaching IR is uniquely difficult. It demands the abilities of a specialist in order to speak to specific topics, and the breadth of a generalist who can cogently weave together empirical and theoretical content that is global and transhistorical in scope. Who but the rare polymath can claim such abilities? This is why most scholars focus on their strengths and teach their special niche in world politics. Compounding the problem is the pandemic, which forced classes online, adding technical complications to the mix. Teaching classes on world politics in an age of crisis takes the challenge one step further, seeking to alloy the intellectual demands of broad and deep content, with the speed of fast-moving events. Pulling together the capabilities of the specialist and the generalist, and the cogence of an effective instructor is hard. For faculty, especially early career faculty, it pits the very different imperatives of research and teaching against each other. This is a straightforward reality of academic work that is probably well-understood but goes largely unremarked. The

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source of the difficulty is in the diametrically opposed places of specialism and generalism in political science. For researchers, being a “specialist” or an “expert” reaps great professional rewards. Being a “generalist” is career suicide. The interplay of generalism and specialism is almost completely overlooked in the intellectual and professional life of political science scholarship. This is all very unfortunate. At once, a scholar ought to be a generalist and specialist with the ability to deploy each skill set in the right circumstances. Consider the differences between the work of academic teaching and research. The audience is entirely different, as are the objectives and the style of communication. The purpose of the researcher is discovery and dissemination of new knowledge, ultimately in published formats, to an audience of mostly academic peers. For researchers, the communication style is predominantly the long-form essay or monograph that adheres to dense scholarly writing conventions which are impenetrable to non-experts. The purpose and style of the classroom instructor are entirely different. Here, the objective is student engagement, interest, and ultimately learning—first the basics, then more sophisticated matters. The instructor lays out foundations, communicates established knowledge simply, develops technical skills, and cultivates young minds for futures in academia and (mostly) beyond. The mark of a good researcher is originality, innovation, contribution to a body of literature, and leading insight. In the classroom, substantive originality is not a necessary condition of good pedagogy. Neither is contribution to the field. No undergraduate student rejects a lecture because it does not make an original contribution or advance the literature. Intellectual commitments to theoretical traditions or methods of research do not have nearly the significance they do in the published discipline. Ultimately, the classroom is a venue with much more flexible and pluralistic possibilities than the constrained and “disciplined” strictures of the research side of the profession (Ettinger, 2020, p. 346). A scholar trying to publish on twelve or sixteen different topics in a single year would be dismissed as a dilettante by a desk editor or a hiring committee. However, speaking to disparate topics is exactly what the classroom instructor does, multiple times per term, as an essential aspect of the work. Combining the virtues of the generalist and the specialist might be the greatest intellectual challenge inside the classroom for the professor. This call for combination is well grounded in recent intellectual trends in IR and methodological literature. Recently, prominent scholars have

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theorized a “global IR” research agenda with the aim of unseating the Euro-Atlantic from its position at the center of IR scholarship. Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan (2019, pp. 300–308) theorize the parameters of a global IR that is rooted in, among other things, pluralistic universalism, world history beyond only Euro-Atlantic history, regional dynamics, and expanded notions of agency. Taking “global IR” to the classroom represents a parallel teaching agenda that is equally important to the diversification of the discipline. Recent work in IR methodology has laid the conceptual foundations for this kind of intellectually pluralistic agenda. Global IR teaching is also more inclusive teaching. By necessity, broad and diverse subject matter will appeal to diverse student audiences who may not see themselves or issues that are important to them represented in the world politics curriculum. Global IR, as conceptualized by Acharya and Buzan (2019), is intended to inform the research work of IR scholars but it has pedagogical lessons as well. Global IR, they say, gives “due recognition to the places, roles, and contributions of non-Western peoples and societies,” which entails pluralism in both theory and empirical content. From my position, teaching in Canada to a student body that includes new Canadians, those whose ancestors have been here since time immemorial, and everyone in between, the motivating and moral force behind an inclusive Global IR is sitting right there in front of me. Combining generalist and specialist teaching finds intellectual foundations in analytic eclecticism (Sil & Katzenstein, 2010). In its research configuration, analytic eclecticism is a curiosity-driven and pluralistic approach to inquiry that eschews strict paradigm-bound or methodologically bound engagement with the world. It is a flexible approach to developing knowledge through open-ended problem formulation, middle-range causal explanation, and attentiveness to both academic and practical dilemmas. A full rehearsal of analytic eclecticism’s merits is not necessary here except to point out its three principal benefits. First, it articulates problems that reflect complexity, rather than simplifies. Second, it is attentive to multiplicity, heterogeneity, and multi-causality. Third, it encourages “pragmatic engagement” with the political world with a keen eye on both scholarly and political implications. In short, it is an excellent intellectual basis for the blend of generalist and specialist teaching I have described here. Moreover, it is especially well-equipped for substantive engagement with the multiple and overlapping crises of world politics in the third decade of the twenty-first century.

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There are, of course, practical difficulties. An ambitious teaching agenda comes at a high cost of time and effort. Not all will be in a position to take such a risk. Pedagogical eclecticism means expanding beyond an instructor’s comfort zone. It is stressful, without question, and sticking to your strengths is extremely appealing when buffeted by the other demands of life and work. Indeed, many of the professional risks of analytic eclecticism that Sil and Katzenstein (2010, pp. 214– 215) concede—especially the time investment involved for pre-tenure faculty—apply equally to the pedagogical side. For younger scholars, it is a better career move to seek success as a research specialist. This is the outcome of fundamentally different professional incentives for graduate students and new faculty. From the outset of graduate training, young scholars are inculcated with the values of the “published discipline” (Hagmann & Biersteker, 2014). That is to say, graduate students are taught to prioritize research-based specialization in their work. They must develop well-specified, hopefully well-funded research programs that yield constant and “high impact” published output—a trend that continues for early career scholars. Academic careers are made on specialization and expertise in a given area. Career reward and advancement turn on the ability to make contributions to a specific body of knowledge. Speaking to a broad audience through the media or policy is desirable but not necessary. Fundamentally, the audience for most academic research is a small community of similarly interested scholars. Conversely, early undergraduate pedagogy demands the competencies of a generalist that are not rewarded in ways that benefit a young scholar. This is especially true in IR where the geographical and historical scope of content is enormous. The pedagogical difficulties of combining generalist and specialist teaching are many. COVID-era teaching, where home and work demands occupy the same physical space, makes it even harder to accomplish. Indeed, depending on non-work obligations, career stage, and other factors, pedagogical eclecticism and Global IR may be impractical. It is daunting, and dissuasive, to try and combine breadth that is well outside research expertise, with depth that cannot simply be gleaned from the textbook chapter. For new faculty, it is a steep and treacherous hill to climb, and in COVID times, the learning curve is even steeper. Indeed, some of these challenges sort themselves out over years of teaching, after an individual’s research specialization deepens and base of knowledge expands. Unfortunately, not everyone gets better with age. It is easier

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to stick with what you know and what has always worked. Doing so is safe but intellectually and pedagogically stagnant. Still, teaching one’s own academic strengths and weaknesses has enormous intellectual potential for both the instructor and student. For the instructor, as Nancy Luxon (2015, p. 45) says, the benefit here is extraordinary intellectual growth. Everyone who has ever taught knows that the best way to learn a topic is to teach it. “Like our students,” she says, “we would likely find ourselves without enough time to prepare at the level of ‘expert’.” In doing so, we become models of curiosity and intellectual risk taking by treating uncertainty and not knowing the answer as an intrinsic feature of learning. The phrase “I don’t know” becomes “an invitation to sort out confusions, evidence, criteria, and conclusion” (Luxon, 2015, p. 46). In these circumstances, the instructor conveys that a gap in knowledge is not a weakness but an opportunity. The key is transparency. Disclosing to students what is expertise and what is newly learned material facilitates the relationship of trust with students. It treats the process of learning as part of the lesson, as valuable as the substance of the lessons themselves. It is a form of disciplinary renewal from the classroom-out.

Conclusion This chapter only scratches the surface of the pedagogical challenges at hand. Teaching undergraduate world politics in an age of crisis, and especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, should prompt deep reflection on the way we, as scholars, approach the taught discipline of political science and International Relations. The sketch I have provided here outlines some of the pedagogical, intellectual, and professional implications of an ambitious teaching agenda. Pedagogically, instructors must establish how to present the world-historical moment in which we live, to young students whose grasp of the larger context cannot be assumed. Moreover, instructors must figure out how to present this content with an eye to curricular coherence within a wider undergraduate program of study. Intellectually, instructors must provide students with the conceptual tools needed to make sense of the world. This requires instructors to assess, refine, and if necessary, rebuild their own conceptual foundations. Here I have suggested “crisis” as the framework for doing so because the term remains useful as a way to approach world politics in the twenty-first century, if it is thoughtfully and rigorously applied. I recognize, of course, that the intellectual and classroom demands of pandemic pedagogy run up

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against the limits of what any one person can do. The difficulty is multiplied in these unforgiving times. For our students, the payoff is worth our extraordinary efforts. Where margins are dissolving, the instructor can facilitate a return to coherence. Where the nature of the world terrifies, the classroom can be an island of equanimity. Where unknown entities break down the outlines of the world, the instructor can make things knowable and restore order for students, if only in their minds.

References Acharya, A., & Buzan, B. (2019). The making of global international relations: Origins and evolution of IR at its centenary. Cambridge University Press. Armitage, D. (Forthcoming). In defense of presentism. In D. M. McMahon (Ed.), History and human flourishing. Oxford University Press. Boin, A., & ‘T Hart, P. (2007). The crisis approach. In H. Rodríguez, E. L. Quarantelli, & R. R. Dynes (Eds.), Handbook of disaster research (pp. 42–54). Springer-Verlag. Bow, B., & Lane, A. (2017). Generations: The sources of our ideas about Canadian foreign policy. International Journal, 72(2), 158–165. Brühwiler, C. F., & Okayama H. (2020). Introduction to teaching US Politics in the age of Trump: International perspectives. PS: Political Science & Politics, 53(2), 355–355. Ettinger, A. (2020). Scattered and unsystematic: The taught discipline in the intellectual life of international relations. International Studies Perspectives, 21(3), 338–361. Ettinger, A. (2016). Teaching the post-September 11 wars to the post-September 11 generation. Politics, 36(2), 197–209. Fendler, L. (2008). The upside of presentism. Paedagogica Historica, 44(6), 677–690. Ferrante, E. (2006). My brilliant friend. Europa Editions. Hagmann, J., & Biersteker, T. J. (2014). Beyond the published discipline: Toward a critical pedagogy of international studies. European Journal of International Relations, 20(2), 291–315. Koselleck, R. (2006). Crisis. Journal of the History of Ideas, 67 (2), 357–400. Lawson, G. (2012). The eternal divide? History and international relations. European Journal of International Relations, 18(2), 203–226. Lemke, T., & Szarejko A. A. (Forthcoming). Doing historical international relations. Cambridge Review of International Affairs. Lipscy, P. Y. (2020). COVID-19 and the politics of crisis. International Organization, 74(S1), 98–127.

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Litfin, K. T. (2020). The contemplative pause: Insights for teaching politics in turbulent times. Journal of Political Science Education, 16(1), 57–66. Luxon, N. (2015). Teaching what we don’t know. PS: Political Science & Politics, 48(1), 44–47. Mahoney, J., Kimball, E., & Koivu, K. L. (2009). The logic of historical explanation in the social sciences. Comparative Political Studies, 42(1), 114–146. Pierson, P. (2000). Increasing returns, path dependence, and the study of politics. American Political Science Review, 94(2), 251–267. Richter, M., & Richter, M. W. (2006). Introduction: Translation of Reinhart Koselleck’s ‘Krise,’ in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Journal of the History of Ideas, 67 (2), 343–356. Serwer, A. (2009, November 24). The ‘00s: Goodbye (at last) to the decade from hell. Time Magazine. http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/art icle/0,33009,1942973-7,00.html. Accessed 21 February 2021. Sil, R., & Katzenstein, P. J. (2010). Beyond paradigms: Analytic eclecticism in the study of world politics. Palgrave Macmillan. Starn, R. (1971, August). Historians and ‘crisis’. Past & Present, 52, 3–22. Walsham, A. (2017). Introduction: Past and … presentism. Past & Present, 234(1), 213–217. Westheimer, J., Rogers, J., & Kahne, J. (2017). The politics and pedagogy of economic inequality: Introduction. PS: Political Science & Politics, 50(4), 1043–1048.

CHAPTER 2

Teaching in Critical Junctures: Challenges to International Relations Bachelor’s Programs in Brazil During the COVID-19 Pandemic Elia Elisa Cia Alves and Marcos Alan S. V. Ferreira

Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic has compelled the academic community to deal with structural and conjunctural challenges of higher education. Going online was only one among several other tensions both professors and students faced in 2020 amid a consolidation process of International Relations (IR) bachelor’s programs in Brazil. The sanitary crisis hit the country in an ongoing political and economic crisis. Beyond emotional, physical, and economic difficulties for many academics in the world during this period, Brazilians also had to deal with several political and socioeconomic issues that were already negatively influencing

E. E. C. Alves · M. A. S. V. Ferreira (B) Department of International Relations, Universidade Federal da Paraíba (UFPB), João Pessoa, Brazil

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. A. Szarejko (eds.), Pandemic Pedagogy, Political Pedagogies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83557-6_2

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higher education in the country since the mid-2010s (Mancebo, 2017). On top of that, organizational issues boosted the context of uncertainties and insecurity threatening effective teaching and learning (T&L) (Bain, 2004). Therefore, this chapter aims to present how IR bachelor’s programs in Brazil have adapted to changes to online instruction in the context of pre-existent political and socioeconomic challenges in addition to the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, we focus on the adaptations experienced by public universities in the context of higher education in this country, institutions that stand out for their quality in teaching and research, including tuition-free courses and services they provide to the community. These institutions experienced significant growth in the 1990s–2000s due to public policies designed to expand access and to deal with the challenges of a growing economy, especially until 2014 (Ferreira, 2016; MEC, 2008). Nevertheless, most of them were not prepared for distance education and were severely affected by COVID-19 pandemics. This calamity added a further degree of complexity to higher education globally but particularly in Latin America because of the unresolved challenges it faced such as growth without equality, unequal access and achievement, and the progressive loss of public financing (Unesco, 2020). As a consequence, some had to abruptly stop teaching activities, thereby making the transition to remote learning among high education institutions (HEI) in Brazil a politicized issue amid myriad pre-existent constraints. Professors had to adapt their courses to online instruction facing institutional and legal uncertainties, support students with learning difficulties and personal problems, and deal with their problems simultaneously. To shed light on how the transition process in HEI elapsed in Brazil, we analyze the case of the Federal University of Paraiba (UFPB), focusing on its IR bachelor’s program. In some aspects, the UFPB adaptation process was recognized as a reference to other Brazilian HEI (Teixeira de Carvalho et al., 2021, p. 14), despite being an institution with limited resources located in the Global South. Regarding our methodology, we apply interpretative analysis grounded in participatory observation and surveys with stakeholders. Among Gouëdard et al.’s (2020) recommendations to improve learning transition during a crisis, surveys collect qualitative feedback on T&L progress, challenges, and solutions. These sources allow for the continuous shaping of responses to the crisis according to stakeholders’ feedback and contribute to fostering their

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engagement. Therefore, besides public data from official research institutes, we present results from specific surveys conducted throughout 2020: three (3) institutional surveys conducted by UFPB and four (4) surveys conducted by the coordination of IR undergraduate course from UFPB. Two surveys monitoring socioeconomic and health conditions of students were conducted in June 2020 (with 178 responses) and in October 2020 (with 205 responses) corresponding to 66.5% of students formally enrolled in the course. Two surveys on virtual learning experiences and teaching methodologies were also conducted at the end of the first supplementary period (2019.4) and after the second supplementary period (2020.1) in February 2021. To reach a comprehensive analysis on the challenges to adapt to online instruction as a whole, the results were triangulated with updated literature on the topic and colleagues perceptions from other institutions. As a result, we point to the challenges to prepare a safe environment to learn in a public health emergency and the negative effects of structural and conjunctural uncertainties for learning. We also identify some possible corrective measures regarding socioeconomic, health, as well as pedagogical issues. We found that encouraging group work and peer instruction was perceived by the students as an effective learning strategy that could tackle the negative effects in learning due to physical distance and the weakening of community feelings due to pre-existent socioeconomic and political tensions as well as the isolation of the pandemic.

The Pre-Conditions of the COVID-19 Crisis: Educational and Political Challenges for Undergraduate Programs in Brazil from 2003 to 2020 From 1994 to 2014, Brazil experienced a significant expansion in higher education, quantitatively and qualitatively, through the promotion of public policies. In the 2000s, Brazil experienced a growth based on state inversions in higher education, as also seen in Latin America as a whole. This process was made possible through programs like Expansão Fase I (Expansion Program Phase I, 2003), and the Program for Restructuration and Expansion of Federal Universities (Reuni, Act 6096-2007), launched by the Brazilian Ministry of Education (MEC, 2008).

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In a changing and globalized world, these policies had significant impacts in some emerging grounds like IR. The field experienced an unprecedented public-funded development and growing interest of public opinion in the area (Alejandro, 2019; Ferreira, 2016). Before 2003, Brazil had only three public-funded IR bachelor’s programs. Up to 2020, 25 new IR programs in public universities were created (Table 2.1) across all regions of the country (MEC, 2021). Given the historically low quality of private-funded higher education in Brazil (with exceptions like Getulio Vargas Foundation, among others), this expansion allowed an increase in graduates with full capabilities to serve the public and private sectors during the commodities boom that boosted the Brazilian economy until the mid-2010s. Moreover, in a very unequal country, where a large share of the population cannot afford to finance high-quality courses, this process represented a tool for social mobility boosted by the implementation of affirmative policies (Brasil, 2012). Despite those efforts, still in 2018, while 61.9% of young people in class A entered HEI, only 10.5% of class E youth had the same opportunity, and 75% of class C students were enrolled in private HEI (MEC, 2018). In addition to socioeconomically unequal access, another unbalance remains. If we analyze IR programs’s regional distribution, considering the geographic division of Brazil according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) and the period of 2003–2020, the Southeast and South saw the creation of eight and seven programs, respectively, followed by North and Northeast with four programs each, and the Center-West had only two new programs. Rio de Janeiro and Rio Grande do Sul states alone had four new programs, while other socially and economically important states like Pernambuco, Ceará, and Amazonia had no creation of public-funded undergraduate programs (Table 2.1). Considering the geographic distribution of IR undergraduate programs, Table 2.2 reveals unbalances regarding to socioeconomic and demographic aspects, reinforcing the idea that the expansion was not necessarily organized nor well-coordinated (Alejandro, 2019, p. 92), reproducing previous regional inequalities. The 2010s were marked by more advances in the area, specially in graduate level, with a new generation of scholars to deal with the challenges of a disorganized rapid expansion. The creation of Master’s and Ph.D. programs outside main Brazilian cities, as in João Pessoa (PB),

Federal State (subnational) State (subnational)

State (subnational)

Federal

State (subnational)

Federal

Federal

Federal Federal

UNB

USP

UNESP

UNESP

UFRGS

UEPB

UFRR

UFF

UFS

UFU

UNIVERSIDADE DE BRASÍLIA UNIVERSIDADE DE SÃO PAULO UNIVERSIDADE ESTADUAL PAULISTA JÚLIO DE MESQUITA FILHO UNIVERSIDADE ESTADUAL PAULISTA JÚLIO DE MESQUITA FILHO UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DO RIO GRANDE DO SUL UNIVERSIDADE ESTADUAL DA PARAÍBA UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DE RORAIMA UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL FLUMINENSE UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DE SERGIPE UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DE UBERLÂNDIA

Funding and political level

Acronym

SE

NE

SE

N

NE

S

SE

SE

SE

CO

Region (a )

Public-funded IR undergraduate programs in Brazil

Institution

Table 2.1

40

100

30

100

#New students/year

Uberlândia, Minas Gerais

Aracaju, Sergipe

Niterói, Rio de Janeiro

Boa Vista, Roraima

João Pessoa, Paraíba

80

60

112

38

144

Porto Alegre, Rio Grande 60 do Sul

Marília, São Paulo

Franca, São Paulo

São Paulo, São Paulo

Brasilia, Federal District

City/State

TEACHING IN CRITICAL JUNCTURES …

(continued)

2009

2009

2008

2006

2006

2004

2003

2002

2002

1974

Start year

2

23

Funding and political level Federal

Federal

Federal

Federal

Federal

Federal

Federal Federal

Federal

Acronym

UFSM

UFSC

UFRJ

UFGD

UNIPAMPA

UFRRJ

UFPB

UFPEL

UNILA

UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DE SANTA MARIA UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DE SANTA CATARINA UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DO RIO DE JANEIRO FUNDAÇÃO UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DA GRANDE DOURADOS FUNDAÇÃO UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DO PAMPA UNIPAMPA UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL RURAL DO RIO DE JANEIRO UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DA PARAÍBA UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DE PELOTAS UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DA INTEGRAÇÃO LATINO-AMERICANA

(continued)

Institution

Table 2.1

S

S

NE

SE

S

CO

SE

S

S

Region (a )

Foz do Iguaçu, Paraná

Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul

João Pessoa, Paraíba

Seropédica, Rio de Janeiro

Santana do Livramento, Rio Grande do Sul

Dourados, Mato Grosso do Sul

Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro

Florianópolis, Santa Catarina

Santa Maria, Rio Grande do Sul

City/State

50

55

80

60

50

55

120

80

50

#New students/year

2010

2010

2010

2010

2009

2009

2009

2009

2009

Start year

24 E. E. C. ALVES AND M. A. S. V. FERREIRA

Federal

Federal State (subnational)

Federal Federal

Federal

Federal

Federal

State (subnational)

UNIFESP

UNIFAP

UERJ

UFG

UFABC

FURG

UFT

UNILAB

UEPA

UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DE SÃO PAULO UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DO AMAPÁ UNIVERSIDADE DO ESTADO DO RIO DE JANEIRO UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DE GOIÁS FUNDAÇÃO UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DO ABC UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DO RIO GRANDE FUNDAÇÃO UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DO TOCANTINS UNIVERSIDADE DA INTEGRAÇÃO INTERNACIONAL DA LUSOFONIA AFRO-BRASILEIRA UNIVERSIDADE DO ESTADO DO PARÁ N

NE

N

S

SE

CO

SE

N

SE

Region (a )

Belém, Pará

44

2020

2017 São Francisco do Conde, Bahia

80

2015

2012

2012

2012

2011

2011

Start year

2015

45

76

40

40

50

80

#New students/year

Porto Nacional, Tocantins 80

Santa Vitória do Palmar, Rio Grande do Sul

Santo André, São Paulo

Goiania, Goiás

Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro

Macapá, Amapá

Osasco, São Paulo

City/State

Source Prepared by authors, based on MEC (2021)

a Regions according Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics: CO (Center-West), N (North), NE (Northeast), S (South), SE (Southeast)

Funding and political level

Acronym

Institution

2 TEACHING IN CRITICAL JUNCTURES …

25

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E. E. C. ALVES AND M. A. S. V. FERREIRA

Table 2.2 IR programs by region, demographic and economic factors Region

% Total Population

CO (Center-west) N (North) NE (Northeast) S (South) SE (Southeast)

7 8 28 14 42

% in GDP (2010) 9,4 2,8 13,8 16,4 57,6

Number of IR programs 3 4 4 7 10

% of total IR programs 10,7 14,3 14,3 25,0 35,7

Source Prepared by authors, based on IBGE (2010) and MEC (2021)

Goiania (GO), Uberlândia (MG), and Macapá (AP), allowed a diversification in terms of both innovative research and the profile of students—not necessarily coming only from Brasilia (DF), Rio de Janeiro (RJ), and São Paulo (SP). The challenges related to the diversification and unbalance of curricula among institutions (Ferreira, 2016) were also addressed after the release of a National Curricula Guidelines with the support of the Brazilian International Relations Association (ABRI), published as a law resolution in October 2017 (MEC, 2017). In 2020, just before pandemic closures, IR public-funded programs still had significant challenges pointed out previously (Ferreira, 2016), which were intensified by political and socioeconomic structural factors. First, there were precarious work conditions, given that in some cases the new programs were created without workspaces, adequate classrooms, and even with a lack of basic elements such as functional libraries and computer labs. These challenges triggered even greater consequences with the COVID-19 pandemic, demanding from professors, staff, and students a stressful adaptation in an adverse political context within a global trend of decreasing funding to higher education (see Chapter 14 by Pampinella). Second, bureaucratic and political issues were already affecting publicfunded universities. In this regard, budget centralization and strong political dependence impact the development and planning of teaching. Since a controversial impeachment process in 2016, the new presidency committed to austerity fiscal policies with a spending cap (PEC 95/2016) limiting the growth in federal government expenditure to the previous year’s rate of inflation for the following 20 financial years, with severe impacts on public health and education financing (Rossi et al., 2019).

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In 2019, an extreme right-wing administration assumed the cabinet under Mr. Jair Bolsonaro, and higher education turned out to be an arena for political disputes and the target for even greater cuts1 due to the skepticism of the government on the role of science and higher education. Since Bolsonaro’s presidential campaign, his main proposal for education was to extinguish Paulo Freire’s ideology2 from schools and universities, with a declared disdain for the humanities, as well as to oppose frontally to the so-called left indoctrination, which was, according to him, a set of ideologies imposed by the previous Workers’ Party (PT, in Portuguese) administrations (2003–2016). Also, since the confirmation of the first case of COVID-19 in Brazil, Bolsonaro’s public statements regarding the pandemic were that it was a ‘fantasy’ and just a ‘little flu,’ acting frontally against the recommendations of his own Health Minister at the time. The political crisis during his government was marked by lack of strong and trustworthy technical leadership and coordinated efforts between the federal and state governments, specially in health and education. While Gouëdard et al. (2020) suggest that clear and dynamic communication initiatives between levels of education systems facilitated stakeholders’ engagement in the implementation of remote learning, countries with preexisting issues related to the lack of financing and multilevel governance coordination, the implementation of remote education revealed to be even more challenging. Abrucio et al. (2020) identified ‘Bolsonaro’s federalism’ to be based on a dualistic view of intergovernmental relations with little participation of the federal government in reducing territorial inequalities and supporting subnational governments, jeopardizing the coordination of policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, based on which they conclude that federative and healthcare crises walk together. Barberia et al. (2021), observing basic education state-level programs, suggest the need for coordinated efforts 1 In 2019, the government announced: (i) budget cuts (ANDIFES 2021); (ii) a program aiming to provide private financing and entrepreneurship to public HEIs (Futurese) (MEC 2019); and (iii) the unification of the two most important funding research agencies despite the academic opposition (Escobar 2019). 2 According to Paulo Freire, knowledge construction should start from the reality of

the student, aiming to break domination relations in the society, an idea perceived as ideological and political biased by Brazilian extreme-right wing supporters. Despite that, Freirean critical pedagogy is recognized and has “influenced progressive educational practice and inspired educational activism around the world. many contemporary nonformal educational efforts are deeply influenced by Freire’s work” (Barlett, 2005, pp. 344–345).

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to address the preexisting unequal access to and provision of education for vulnerable groups. Meanwhile, Brazil watched several shifts in the head of the cabinet of the Health and Education Ministries, polemic statements on social media, budget cuts, and revoked and judicialized decisions on the appointment of several deans of Federal HEI. Another key topic related to political challenges for higher education amid the pandemic was polarization (Castro et al., 2019). Charron et al. (2020) show that social and political divisions influenced the remarkable regional differences in excess mortality in Europe, suggesting that in polarized societies it is hard to build a consensus toward sanitary measures to be adopted, leaving room for greater pressure from private interests concerning public health and ultimately for more populist and less scientifically grounded politics. Kamienski et al. (2021) include the role of universities in this discussion, suggesting that those institutions were targeted as a competing side to impose political narratives, a topic further discussed below. Besides politics, the socioeconomic conditions also represented threats intensified by the COVID-19 (Pinto, 2020). The estimated unemployment rate in Brazil reached 14.6% in 2020 and 17.9% only considering the Northeast Region, where the UFPB—analyzed as a case study—is located. The average income, in 2020, was estimated at US$ 450 a month.3 An increase in extreme poverty since 2015 reached, in 2019, 13.88 million Brazilians living with less than US$ 1.90 a day and 52 million with less than US$ 5.50 a day (IBGE, 2021). That juncture directly affected students. In April 2020, 24% of the students from the IR bachelor’s program in UFPB declared to have their household income limited to two Brazilian minimum wages (around US$ 400 a month), and 43% reported their families were facing unstable economic conditions. Previous research shows that students who experienced an economic shock had a 20% higher risk of dropping out of the course (World Bank, 2020). Even considering students of public HEI do not have educational debts, the crisis would ultimately mean extending their program, a condition not necessarily feasible for all students due to living costs, for example. Also, with campus closures, there have been mass students displacements as support networks and access to vital services have been diminished.

3 The nominal exchange rate as of May 2021 is 1 US dollar to 5.23 Brazilian Reals.

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Regarding house conditions to study online, while in OECD countries 90% of advantaged students have a quiet place to study at home (Gouëdard et al., 2020), 27.9% of students from UFPB declared that they lack an adequate private place to study (UFPB, 2020b). Among the IR bachelor’s program, 7% reported not having any condition to study at home, and 21% declared to be responsible for someone else (child, elder, or person with disabilities). An important initiative to deal with this challenging setting was the creation of CASU (an acronym for Committee for Action and Solidarity) at UFPB. Created by professors and students, CASU aims to ‘identify the most difficult situations (whether economic, technological, pedagogical, health or violence), giving visibility and support networks’ (Vieira, 2020). CASU identified that 73% of students that answered their first survey declared to be in socioeconomic vulnerability. Regarding foreign students, especially from Lusophone Africa countries, who were also affected, UFPB’s International Office (ACI, in Portuguese) provided psychological assistance, hygiene, and protective materials to prevent COVID-19 as well as a symbolic sum of money to purchase food items (ASCOM-UFPB, 2020). Beyond those challenges, with the sense that the pandemic would last more than few weeks, the whole HEI system had to face the great challenge of moving online, revealing organizational and operational issues. Formal and informal answers have been addressed to adapt and minimize the negative effects on learning.

Passing Through the Storm: IR in a Public HEI Adapting to Health, Organizational and Operational Challenges of COVID-19 COVID-19 affected T&L at almost all HEI in the world. Marinoni et al. (2020a) estimate that two-thirds of HEI implemented distance education. In March 2020, the beginning of the academic semester in most HEI in Brazil was surprised by the need to suspend in-person classroom teaching activities. In addition to the human cost of the pandemic, this was the source of professional disruptions for higher education in Brazil. While private entities drew up a scenario of rapid implementation of digitalization of education plans as they suffered financial pressures from default

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and mass dismissal of professors, public HEI offered roughly three kinds of response as they enjoyed administrative autonomy. The first option public HEI had was not to promote virtual transition, suspending all teaching activities at the institution, except for graduate programs. Recalling the discussion about political attacks on public universities, some noticed that this was an act of resistance to show the value of academic research and efforts to study and combat the virus. The reasoning behind this strategy was that accepting teaching in a precarious online education could feed the dismantling of public higher education and leave many students with no proper access behind, increasing systemic inequalities. The dean of the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA) discussed this perspective on a webinar for the Brazilian Academy of Sciences (ABC, 2020). Those who adhered to this model at first were the Federal Universites of Pernambuco (UFPE), Minas Gerais (UFMG), and Sergipe (UFS) among others that later during 2020 started to adapt toward remote education in face of the abiding decrees on physical distancing due to the severe juncture of the pandemic in Brazil. The second way was to transition within constraints. This led professors to adapt their courses without many resources, offering not mandatory free classes without planning and training, leaving professors, at first, free whether to teach regular courses or not. Those institutions understood that providing remote learning was a way to allow students to to stay at home (adhering to social distancing measures) and to maintain study routine, aiming to sustain their mental health and social, although virtual, contact. This resulted in learning-by-doing pedagogical approaches with professors attempting to replicate the face-to-face way of proceeding, yet using distance modes or only asynchronous materials. At first, in this case, the transition was not homogeneous, causing losses for students in terms of learning and completion of courses. Unicamp and the University of Sao Paulo (USP), institutions that rank among the best universities in Brazil, are some examples that adopted this strategy, as explained by Unicamp dean Marcelo Knobel (ABC, 2020). The third way was to ‘transition with minimal planning,’ which was the case of UFPB, further presented below. In less than a month, for example, UFPB implemented surveys and training opportunities for the academic staff, seeking alternative means of resource provision. Although it was controversial among most deans, not transitioning online could result in an even greater negative impact on learning (Souza et al., 2020). Dorn et al. (2020b), in estimating the effect of distance

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learning on a fundamental school in the United States, found that students who took online classes with a quality structure were three to four months behind those in a regular class. Those with precarious access to content were seven to eleven months behind, and students who did not had any kind of class were a year to fourteen months behind a regular student. Besides losses in learning, long-run impacts may include increased inequality due to increased financial and conjunctural constraints and loss of the provision of continuing education, researches, community services, and meeting environments (World Bank, 2020). The forced move to distance T&L offered opportunities to propose more flexible learning possibilities and to mix synchronous with asynchronous learning (see Chapter 5 by Lemke). Nevertheless, transitioning online represented much more than only choosing the mix between synchronous and asynchronous activities. The World Bank (2020) recommendations to cushion negative impacts on remote learning include: (i) training the academic staff to define their own plan for content, goals, and learning assessment within the new modality; (ii) seeking and adapting existing platforms; (iii) survey students on their capacity to engage in remote learning—equipment, family responsibilities, home environment; (iv) coaching and supporting students on how to learn remotely; (v) providing hardware to students and instructors; (vi) determine an institutional policy for assessing current term student performance (as relates to grading); (vii) determine an institutional policy for teaching assessments and course evaluations; (viii) revision of graduation requirement for the academic year (2020); (ix) assessing adequacy of provision of financial and material support for at-risk students and institutions; and (x) developing and implementing program to keep at-risk students engaged, including through dedicated tutors and customized work programs/schedules. In short, transitioning to remote learning presented several challenges to be overcome. UFPB, like most of the institutions in Brazil, has been confronted with an unprepared shift to online teaching and the need to engage and motivate students remotely. Similar to other HEI around the world (Marinoni et al., 2020b), UFPB implemented a contingency plan to minimize COVID-19’s effects on academic activities. This included the online transition to maintain academic continuity, knowledge development through webinars, ensuring emotional wellness by supporting projects, and building access for student communities to devices, internet, e-resources, and scholarship opportunities. Nevertheless, these actions were not well coordinated and were taken according to the new demands that emerged in a pandemic context.

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The institution in particular was at the end of a regular semester as the announcement of the first lockdown decree came in March 2020. Amidst the break until the following academic period, the institution applied surveys to map the most urgent demands, and it ultimately offered an academic period of 10 weeks with a minimal infrastructure to test its own T&L virtual environment. Meanwhile, all the academic community took courses on virtual platforms like Google Classroom, Moodle, and SIGAA Virtual, and 1,600 teaching assistant scholarships were offered to undergrad students. Existing technological resources conditioned the transition to distance learning. The access to devices, quality of the internet connection, and the usage of online distance learning platforms are among the critical factors that must be integrated when designing an education response to the crisis. In April 2020, 65.4% of students of UFPB declared to have a computer at home in working condition, although 92.3% declared to have a mobile phone and 75.5% declared to have a broadband connection (UFPB, 2020a). Besides, 41.7% of the respondents declared they had never taken an online course before April 2020 (UFPB, 2020a). To overcome limitations in internet access4 , USP, for example, was one of the first ones to provide Internet kits to low-income students. That practice became usual among most Brazilian public HEI, and many started to offer financial support to buy tablets and/or internet. UFPB conducted a survey evaluating the experience of students and professors in remote T&L activities offered in the first supplementary period (UFPB, 2020b). From the more than 7,000 student respondents, 60% agreed that the period was important for their education, and more than 70% declared themselves satisfied with the conduct of professors in online activities. Nonetheless, 19.4% of the students declared not to be enrolled in any activity in the period, 20.8% were having technical problems, and 24.8% of students declared to have only a mobile phone to access the activities (UFPB, 2020b). Out of 1,000 professors who answered the questionnaire, 67% regarded the period as important for their teaching skills development, and 68% declared their productivity to be within or above expectations during social isolation, a level that is rather impressive considering that 47% of the faculty had school-age children(s) who needed assistance (UFPB, 2020c). 4 Available at: https://jornal.usp.br/institucional/usp-distribui-mais-de-2-mil-kits-int ernet-para-estudantes-com-necessidades-socioeconomicas/. Accessed 29 January 2021.

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Above all, the greatest challenge was to guarantee student engagement (see Chapter 3 by Gaufman & Möller and Chapter 10 by Glazier in this volume). The pandemic aggravated the health conditions of the academic community as students and professors started experiencing the physical and mental health impacts of the disruption. Among the more than 6,000 student respondents from the whole university, in July 2020, 42.2% declared not to be feeling well during the supplementary period due to anxiety issues (UFPB, 2020b). The survey conducted only among IR bachelor’s students showed that 27.7% of respondents declared themselves to be diagnosed with physical disease related to risk groups (high blood pressure, respiratory issues, diabetes, among others), and 34.9% of respondents reported having a professional diagnosis of some kind of mental issue (depression, anxiety, among others). Besides the systemic factors, literature suggests that the intense use of digital devices has been associated with detrimental effects on health and well-being such as sleep disturbances, attention lapses, anxiety, and a higher incidence of obesity and depression (Chassiakos et al., 2016). While literature signals that students in schools with a strong sense of community are more likely to be academically motivated (Solomon et al., 2000), distancing measures have weakened schools as communities with detrimental effects on students’ learning outcomes (Gouëdard et al., 2020). With physical distance, students are led to develop their agency and manage their learning. The major channel of improvement of remote learning is to personalize and humanize education, tailoring its content to the learning needs of the students (Escueta et al., 2017; Glazier, 2021). Therefore, to seek students’ well-being, institutions should promote not only students’ physical and mental health, but also the development of socio-emotional skills, by preserving the school community, and the link between peers and professors. Within this context, the IR bachelor’s course provided several initiatives that would not only pursue educational goals but also strengthen the sense of belonging to a learning community. The first one was the creation of a YouTube channel of the International Relations Department broadcasting seminars and videos from professors and their projects. The second was the preparation of a welcome course for the new students, covering topics with specialists such as personal time management, affirmative policies on HEI, and mental health at the university. Another initiative was the offering of an IR in Transformation course covering different topics in IR related to the COVID-19 crisis (DRI, 2020).

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The IR bachelor’s program coordinators also scheduled meetings with the Academic Center to welcome and solve student demands as well as with faculty, presenting data on and orientation to teaching and assessment methodologies based on the analysis of the professors’ discipline plans. The IR bachelor’s program also applied surveys5 to monitor learning conditions and pedagogical methodologies. Among the results, students reported that the most effective teaching methodologies were traditional classes with synchronous meetings with their professors and discussions of assigned texts. The use of slides and the suggestion of audiovisual resources (as podcasts, documentaries, movies) were also pointed to as effective, in second place. Creating a study routine was identified as an important learning strategy for 26.3% of respondents. In both surveys, small group assignments were addressed as the most effective assessment instruments, according to the students’ perceptions, whether they be conceptual maps, questionnaires, research projects, or the production of audiovisual material. Regarding the most significant changes we implemented in our own courses, workgroups and small collaborative assignments appeared to be a successful strategy in order to sustain the social, albeit virtual contact that helps to develop community ties among students. We also started to consider grading participation through computing camera aperture, verbal and written interventions on chat and texts, always taking into account connection restrictions. The context was also an opportunity to test innovative methodologies of teaching and assessing learning such as adopting free online games and simulations,6 and assigning video and podcasts7 production.

5 Although there were methodological issues related to these surveys, they could evince important perceptions from the students. For example, the teaching methodology assigned by most students on the survey was employed by all professors, while other strategies, as elaborating a conceptual map, were only assigned in few courses. 6 Two successful experiences were the application of the free game, ‘Tragedy of the Commons,’ from Prof. Ronald Mitchell (University of Oregon), which enabled fruitful discussions on the Prisoner´s Dilemma and governance-related concepts, and ‘Decarbonise!,’ a decision-making simulation game on how to tackle the climate crisis. The latter is available for free at https://www.decarbonisegame.com/. 7 The podcast playlist is available here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2XTDaAg6P GzZTrfMD4iZf7?si=g9KJC2SsSwilbVOzm_xnyw&nd=1.

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Final Remarks The case of Brazilian HEI public-funded universities provides important inputs for research and analysis on the impacts and adaptation of IR education in the pandemic. Besides the impact of a health crisis, the country’s political and economic context has triggered a maximization of the effects of the pandemic on students, faculty, and staff. The rapid growth of IR in Brazil without the provision of infrastructure on which to build such programs added to the problems of social inequality and poverty that have historically plagued the country. As a result, even in the face of the herculean effort of faculty and staff, adaptation to remote education had as it main challenge the interconnection of a hostile political environment to education, socioeconomic problems, and the organizational and technological limitations of a university in the Global South. In the case of the authors, to work in this critical juncture was not an easy task. Our motivation, in joint efforts with other faculty colleagues, was based on a belief that public-funded education can be an element of social transformation in an unequal and politically polarized country. Moreover, in our case, a perspective that human nature is not only selfish but is also able to be an agent for social change was key to cross a very stressful period. Thus, the belief that human beings have multiple dimensions combined in them that enable cooperation (like material, spiritual, and cultural aspects) helped us to manage this difficult period, especially trying to balance these aspects in our personal lives. With all the social challenges presented, the UFPB case indicates how commitment to teaching and social causes can overcome even seemingly insurmountable problems. Besides, this experience serves as a starting point for analysis even for the Global North in that creative solutions with extremely limited resources can enable adaptation that meets the needs of students in IR even amid an internationalization of the faculty. Lastly, while this chapter presents a study case of a particular country, in a world characterized by social injustices in which the academy reproduces its unbalances, the findings presented serve for comparative analysis on how Global South universities are adapting to—or also could be an example of—dealing with a global pandemic.

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References ABC. (2020). Desafios da Educação superior em tempos de pandemia. O mundo a partir do coronavírus, ed. 11. Academia Brasileira de Ciências. http://www. abc.org.br/evento/webinarios-da-abc-11/. Abrucio, F. L., Grin, E. J., Franzese, C., Segatto, C., & Couto, C. G. (2020). Combating COVID-19 under Bolsonaro’s federalism: A case of intergovernmental incoordination. Revista De Administração Pública, 54(4), 663–677. Alejandro, A. (2019). Western dominance in international relations? The Internationalisation of IR in Brazil and India. Routledge ANDIFES. (2021). Painel dos Cortes. Brazil’s National Association of Directors of Federal Higher Education Institutions (Andifes). ASCOM/UFPB. (2020, April 17). UFPB lança programa para acolher intercambistas durante quarentena. Notícias UFPB, Communications and News Office. Bain, K. (2004). What the best college teachers do. Harvard University Press. Barberia, L., Cantarelli, L. G., Schmalz, & Santana, P. H. (2021). Uma avaliação dos programas de educação pública remota dos estados e capitais brasileiros durante a pandemia do COVID-19. Políticas Públicas e Sociedade. FGV, CLEAR. Bartlett, L. (2005). Dialogue, knowledge, and teacher-student relations: Freirean pedagogy in theory and practice. Comparative Education Review, 49(3), 344– 364. Brasil. (2012). LEI Nº 12.711, DE 29 DE AGOSTO DE 2012. Dispõe sobre o ingresso nas universidades federais e nas instituições federais de ensino técnico de nível médio e dá outras providências, Brasil. Castro, A. C., Ferreira, M. A. S. V., & Leite, A. C. C. (2019). Polarizações políticas e desigualdades socioeconômicas na América Latina e na Europa. Editora UFPB. Charron, N., Lapuente, V., & Rodriguez-Pose, A. (2020). Uncooperative society, uncooperative politics or both? How trust, polarization and populism explain excess mortality for COVID-19 across European regions. Working Paper, 12. The Quality of Government Institute. University of Gothenburg. Chassiakos, Y., Radesky, J., Christakis, D., Moreno, M. A., & Cross, C. (2016). Children and adolescents and digital media. Pediatrics, 138(5). Dorn, E., Hancock, B., Sarakatsannis, J., & Viruleg, E. (2020a, June 1). COVID19 and student learning in the United States: The hurt could last a lifetime. McKinsey & Company. Dorn, E., Hancock, B., Sarakatsannis, J., & Viruleg, E. (2020b, December 8). COVID-19 and learning loss—Disparities grow and students need help. McKinsey & Company. DRI. (2020). Departamento de Relações Internacionais, UFPB. https://www. youtube.com/playlist?list=PLomnu9l0XwKNK1H-XD04YbjOgSFwzs2bN.

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Escobar, H. (2019). Não há justificativa lógica para fusão de Capes e CNPq. Jornal da USP. Escueta, M., Quan, V., Nickow, A. J., & Oreopoulos, P. (2017). Education technology: An evidence-based review. National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w23744 Ferreira, M. A. S. V. (2016). The rise of international relations programs in the Brazilian federal universities: Curriculum specificities and current challenges. Journal of Political Science Education, 12(3), 241–255. https://doi.org/10. 1080/15512169.2015.1063440 Glazier, R. (2021). Making human connections in online teaching. PS: Political Science & Politics, 54(1), 175–176. https://doi.org/10.1017/S10490 96520001535 Gouëdard, P., Pont, B., & Viennet, R. (2020). Education responses to COVID-19: Implementing a way forward (OECD Education Working Papers, No. 224). Paris: OECD Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1787/8e95f977-en IBGE. (2021). Condições de vida, desigualdade e pobreza. Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística. Available at: https://www.ibge.gov.br/estatisticas/ multidominio/condicoes-de-vida-desigualdade-e-pobreza.html Kamienski, C., Mazim, L., Penteado, C., Goya, D., Di Genova, D., De Franca, F., et al. (2021, January). A polarization approach for understanding online conflicts in times of pandemic: A Brazilian case study. In Proceedings of the 54th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2,101. Mancebo, D. (2017). Crise político-econômica no Brasil: breve análise da educação superior. Educação & Sociedade, 38(141), 875–892. Marinoni, G., Van’t Land, H., & Jensen, T. (2020a, May). The impact of Covid-19 on higher education around the world (IAU Global Survey Report). Published by the International Association of Universities. Marinoni, G., Van’t Land, H., Jensen, T. (2020b, August). The impact of Covid-19 on higher education around the world (IAU Global Survey Report). Published by the International Association of Universities. MEC. (2008). Programa de Apoio a Planos de Reestruturação e Expansão das Universidades Federais – Relatório do Primeiro Ano. MEC, Brasil http:// reuni.mec.gov.br/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=25&Ite mid=28 MEC. (2017). Resolução no. 4 de 04 de outubro, Institui as Diretrizes Curriculares Nacionais para o curso de graduação em Relações Internacionais, bacharelado, e dá outras providências. http://portal.mec.gov.br/docman/out ubro-2017-pdf/73651-rces004-17-pdf/file MEC. (2018). Censo da Educação Superior. Notas Estatísticas. Instituto Nacional de Estudos e Pesquisas Educacionais Anísio Teixeira (INEP). MEC, Brasil. https://download.inep.gov.br/educacao_superior/censo_superior/docume ntos/2019/censo_da_educacao_superior_2018-notas_estatisticas.pdf MEC. (2019). Perguntas e respostas do Future-se, programa de autonomia financeira da educação superior. MEC, Brasil. http://portal.mec.gov.br/

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busca-geral/12-noticias/acoes-programas-e-projetos-637152388/78351-per guntas-e-respostas-do-future-se-programa-de-autonomia-financeira-do-ens ino-superior MEC. (2021). Cadastro Nacional de Cursos e Instituições de Educação Superior Cadastro e-MEC. Brasília. https://emec.mec.gov.br/ Pinto, F. R. M. (2020). COVID-19: A new crisis that reinforces inequality in higher education in Brazil. PRE PRINT SCIELO. Rossi, P., Oliveira, A. L. M., Arantes, F., & Dweck, E. (2019). Austeridade Fiscal e o financiamento da educação no Brasil. Educação & Sociedade, 40(e0223456), 1–20. Solomon, D., Battistich, V., Watson, M., Schaps, E., & Lewis, C. (2000). A sixdistrict study of educational change: Direct and mediated effects of the child development project. Social Psychology of Education, 4(1), 3–51. Souza, A. P., Soares, C., dos Santos, G. M., Costa, G. W., Ramos, L. M., Lima, L., & Ferreira, P. D. D. (2020). O que sabemos sobre os efeitos da interrupção das aulas sobre os resultados educacionais? Síntese de evidências. CLEAR, EESP, FGV. http://fgvclear.org/site/wp-content/uploads/sinteseevid-20201006-1.pdf Teixeira-de-Carvalho, D. L., Dias Junior, J. J. L., & Kruta-Bispo, A. C. (2021). Nosso Calendário Parou! A Mudança Organizacional na UFPB devido à COVID-19. Revista De Administração Contemporânea, 25(Spe), e200249. UFPB. (2020a). Diagnóstico do perfil discente sobre o acesso às tecnologias remotas e à internet. Pró-reitoria de Graduação (PRG), Observatório de Dados da Graduação (ODG). https://drive.google.com/file/d/12iubv2Wv ALyrOWDxRSO8oL7a7pVX6uxb/view UFPB. (2020b). Avaliação do Período Suplementar (Estudantes). PRG, ODG. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1G1Czs-71G6gtza-iWbjJ_xpDOz7 8DUMy/view UFPB. (2020c). Avaliação do Período Suplementar (Docentes). PRG, ODG. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tl76M0oJO0tW-5FPlBRr9vnrw0Lz bDHg/view UNESCO. (2020). COVID-19 and higher education: Today and tomorrow. Impact analysis, policy responses and recommendations. International Institute for Higher Education in Latin America and the Caribbean (IESALC), UNESCO. Vieira, J. (2020, July 3). Comitês de solidariedade na UFPB apoiam estudantes afetados pela pandemia, Notícias UFPB. https://www.ufpb.br/ufpb/con tents/noticias/ufpb-cria-comites-de-solidariedade-para-estudantes-afetadospela-pandemia-1. World Bank. (2020). The COVID-19 pandemic: Shocks to education and policy responses. World Bank.

CHAPTER 3

More Than a YouTube Channel: Engaging Students in an Online Classroom Elizaveta Gaufman and Sebastian Möller

Introduction: The Pandemic as Setback for Active Learning? “University is not a YouTube Channel!” insisted students in the spring of 2020.1 Under normal circumstances, nobody would doubt this claim. In a global pandemic, however, little if anything is normal. In 2020 and 2021, the Corona crisis has heavily unsettled mundane practices and perceptions within university teaching and learning in most parts of the world. Suddenly, the statement of a university not being a YouTube 1 This claim was made by Lijst Calimero, a student party at the University of Groningen in the course of a university-wide discussion on on-site and hybrid education (see Fabrizi & Siebelink, 2020).

E. Gaufman (B) University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands S. Möller Cusanus Hochschule für Gesellschaftsgestaltung, Koblenz, Germany e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. A. Szarejko (eds.), Pandemic Pedagogy, Political Pedagogies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83557-6_3

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channel makes perfectly sense to students and lecturers alike. Its very emergence is indicative of a severe ramification of COVID-19 on higher education, namely the danger of a reversion of the much needed and broadly welcomed shift from teaching to learning (Barr & Tagg, 1995; Biggs, 1996) under the special circumstances of remote seminars. In fact, the statement rather reads as “University should not be a YouTube channel!” or “University should be more than a YouTube channel!” Since we absolutely agree with this demand, in this contribution, we show how it can be met by engaging students in knowledge co-creation by means of creative digital active learning tools and techniques. The perception of university education as a YouTube channel stems from the more conventional forms of instruction: frontal lectures that can easily be converted into a pre-recorded lecture for students to watch. This is a teaching mode that has existed for hundreds of years, but it certainly is not the most effective one: studies show that active learning works (Michael, 2006; Prince, 2004). Moreover, as Omelicheva and Avdeyeva point out (Omelicheva & Avdeyeva, 2008), active learning methods foster higher-order cognitive skills, such as application and critical evaluation skills, while frontal instruction is effective on a lower cognitive level, such as memorization. Recent trends in active learning in political science and IR include research-based learning (Healy & Jenkins, 2009), simulations, the co-production of blogs, podcasts, and other media as well as experimental learning (Forostal & Finch, 2020). Under regular conditions, active learning has proven to strongly support the achievement of learning goals and the development of student’s skills and to improve learning experiences and student satisfaction. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, active learning became even more significant, as both faculty and students were not only struggling with new working conditions, but also with psychological challenges associated with isolation, anxiety, and motivation. Thus, pandemic-driven digitalization of higher education must not result in a didactical setback. Quite to the contrary, we should aim to capitalize on new digital opportunities to further develop and improve active learning. In this contribution, we therefore address several challenges in designing and teaching interactive online learning and offer our tested solutions from two political science seminars at University of Groningen (Political Communication) and University of Bremen (Port Seminar) in summer of 2020. Specifically, we discuss active learning techniques, community building, motivation, and mental health challenges in a

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pandemic-induced online learning environment. While we taught at different universities, both authors faced similar challenges and share a similar teaching philosophy. During the pandemic, we jointly reflected on our seminars in a spirit of collegial advice and support. This chapter elaborates on our individual and shared experiences and lessons learned. We concentrate on two asynchronous methods that were crucial to the success of our seminars: simulation in the political communication seminar and blogs in the port seminar. During the emergency mode of pandemic teaching (i.e., the sudden transformation of in-class seminars into remote online courses), universities and many colleagues were mainly concerned with the practicalities of enabling synchronous seminar sessions via online conference tools. In both our seminars, however, we focused on good solutions for asynchronous learning in order to better account for technical and mental problems associated with the pandemic. Simulation is one of the best learning methods as it enhances the students’ understanding of abstract concepts and theories that encourages active learning and creativity (Asal & Blake, 2006; Eagle, 1975; Shellman, 2001; Shellman & Turan, 2006). By carefully crafting the assignments that condition the application of theoretical material to the fictional situation, the instructor is able to maximize learning success in the seminar group. Moreover, in a setting where the environment is simulated, but the behavior is real (Jones, 2013), a simulation gives the students an opportunity to immediately apply their acquired theoretical knowledge in a safe, relatively low-stakes setting. Even though a simulation does require a synchronous component, it is also possible to conduct parts of it via discussion boards and vlogs where students are able to build a community and interact with each other in preparation for an active phase. Given the increasing popularity of policy blogs, blogging is slowly emerging as a new active learning tool in the social sciences. Seminar blogs have several unique advantages. Firstly, blogs allow students to develop creative writing skills and to learn how to precisely and creatively summarize complex matters in a manner susceptible to the wider public. They, therefore, contribute to the development of crucial skills crucial for Political Science graduates (Hanson, 2016). Secondly, blogging is an effective way to implement student research and classroom peer review (Crowder-Meyer, 2019). Moreover, blogs can stimulate students to critically engage with both textbook knowledge and public discourses. Finally, and this has proven to be of important advantage during the pandemic,

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blogs foster discussions among students and can boost student’s selfesteem through positive feedback from within and outside the class. In the remainder of our chapter, we briefly introduce the setup of the two seminars that serve as illustration of our argument (section “Setup: Moving Interactive Seminars Online”). This is followed by a discussion of four main challenges in designing and teaching interactive online seminars, namely community building (section “Community Building”), fostering discussions (section “Fostering discussions: Discussion Board & Seminar Blog”), active learning (section “Active Learning: Simulation & Empirical Research”), and mental health (section “Mental Challenges: Empathy & Staying in Touch”). For each challenge, we present solutions from our seminars. These solutions have been tested successfully in the online classroom. They are, however, neither perfect nor applicable for all types of Political Science seminars especially in light of workload. In fact, we ourselves have taught in a pandemic emergency mode that rendered much of what we did experimental steps rather than well designed and tested remote didactics. However, extensive positive student feedback indicate that we have managed to meet some of the challenges of interactive online teaching. This would not have been possible without our incredibly committed and creative students from whom we have learned so much in the course of our first pandemic semester.

Setup: Moving Interactive Seminars Online In summer term 2020, we taught the seminars “Political Communication” (University of Groningen) and “Bremen’s Ports in the Global Political Economy” (University of Bremen). Both seminars were originally designed as interactive and intense in-class learning experiences. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, they had to be moved online in an ad hoc manner. Regardless of the overall trend to simply translate classroom sessions into virtual meetings, we decided to put more emphasis on asynchronous learning. In this section, we briefly describe the setup of both seminars.2

2 For more reflections on balancing synchronous and asynchronous activities see Lemke in Chapter 5 of this volume.

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Political Communication Research Lab Political Communication was set up as a small research lab seminar. The seminar was intended for second year students of European Languages and Cultures program who chose political science as their minor. The seminar was supposed to combine both theory and practice of political communication on an introductory level, but also mimic the real-life challenges that students might face as individuals engaged in political communication. Because of the pandemic, the seminar had to take place entirely online and consisted of both synchronous and asynchronous activities stretched over 8 weeks, with 12 hour-long live sessions in total. The seminar was divided into 10 theoretical sessions devoted to the following topics: public opinion and mass media, media and democracy, mediatization, framing, security, persuasion, branding, social media, objectivity, and infotainment. All of these topics can be subdivided based on the main focus: public, candidates, and media, i.e., the three character groups participating in the simulation. The culmination of the seminar consisted in the simulation of the presidential elections. The students were supposed to pick a role in the simulation and post social media contributions in character until the end of the seminar on the discussion board. The weekly social media posts constituted a formative assessment that counted toward 10% of the overall grade. A press conference participation in character as well as elections counted for a further 10% of the grade with students offering a break-down of their character’s behavior and voting during the post-op after the elections. A research paper was replaced with a different summative written assessment—a memorandum, a piece, and style of writing more common in a policy-oriented environment. A more typical assignment was a group presentation that was replaced by a vlog due to the pandemic. Each vlog was supposed to offer an insight into respective sessions’ theoretical frameworks and could be watched asynchronously. Given the small scale of the seminar and above-average student access to technology, including high-speed internet, it was still possible to conduct live sessions that were shorter than usual seminar meetings. Even so, in order to minimize disruptions to the seminar, most of the presentations were recorded as vlogs instead of given live in order to reduce students’ stress related to the in-class performance: battling technology on top of theoretical frameworks could hardly stimulate the learning experience. Given that the live sessions were mostly frontal instruction-free, it

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was possible to dedicate them to the discussion-based activities, especially break-out groups. Break-out groups need a clear task and directives from the instructor, and yet they are an essential tool in active learning online (Gahl et al., 2020). Hence, the live seminar was roughly divided into the following blocks: vlog Q&A, input from the instructor, break-out sessions, and debrief remarks from the instructor. The simulation took place in a fictional environment of the Republic of Genovia based on the country from the motion pictures “Princess Diaries” 1 & 2 starring Anne Hathaway and Julie Andrews. According to the seminar’s brief, Genovia used to be a monarchy, but Queen Anne Hathaway abdicated the throne and became its first president 20 years ago. Genovia was a member of the European Union but after the Conservative party called for a referendum, its citizens voted for “Gexit” sending the country into political crisis as the conservative president failed to negotiate a deal with the EU. The elections were supposed to determine where the country goes next. Using popular culture to create the simulation’s fictional environment was a conscious choice, as its familiar nature helps students acclimate to the classroom (Jester, 2020). Against this backdrop, the students were supposed to comment on the ongoing electoral campaign from their character’s perspective. This way, they could experience the power of such media effects as agenda-setting and framing, while the students who chose to be media outlets could see how their gate-keeping role was undermined by both presidential candidates and voters alike. Presidential candidates, on the other hand, had to contend weekly with issues related to personal branding and media strategy, as well as mediatization of Genovian society that forced them to pivot their electoral campaigns. Port Seminar: Studying Globalization Locally Like Political Communication, the seminar on Bremen’s ports in the global political economy was planned as a research-based seminar for students with a special interest in political economy and policy analysis. It presented a unique opportunity to study globalization and global-local interactions in the student’s own backyard, namely the various ports of Bremen and Bremerhaven. In order to study world politics and political economy locally, the original course outline included a range of field trips and meetings with port actors, local policymakers, and former dockworkers. 45 graduate and undergraduate students from Political Science,

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Sociology, Geography, and History took the class mostly as a general studies seminar or, in the case of Political Science students, as specialization in either policy analysis (port policy) or International Relations (political economy of globalization). The port seminar was structured into 12 sessions on the history of Bremen’s ports, colonialism, global trade and merchant shipping, port governance, the container as technical infrastructure of global capitalism, port competition, (de)regulation of dock work and urban (re)development. Students were allowed and encouraged to focus on individual topics since the main goal of the seminar was to stimulate their empirical curiosity and to conduct small research projects on rather smallscale questions. In this spirit, we jointly amended the syllabus by including sustainability of merchant shipping and green ports as additional topics after our first session. After the sudden need to digitalize the course, the seminar sessions were turned into asynchronous learning units with each unit consisting of an introductory video discussing core concepts and addressing central themes of the respective readings, an opening blog post on the seminar blog3 including important sources for empirical data relevant to the study of the unit’s topic and student contributions in the form of blog posts or podcasts which had to be uploaded to the blog three week after the start of the learning unit. Some students choose to write a term paper instead of a series of blog posts, allowing them to dig deeper into one topic of their choice. Nevertheless, the seminar blog was both the main output and the virtual home of this course. For some units, extra material was produced (like recorded interviews with port actors we would have met in person otherwise, snippets from documentaries and policy/business documents). Over the course of the term, the seminar only met four times via Zoom to discuss some readings and the progress of students’ research in break-out sessions and plenary discussions. The main goal of these meetings was to stay in touch with students and create a sense of community. They did not include any presentations from the lecturer or students. Given the character as an interdisciplinary and research-based course, moving the port seminar online was difficult and relatively easy at the same time. Difficult because its design deeply relied on jointly going into the field and observing the ports’ operations and actors’ behavior

3 Hafenblog: https://blogs.uni-bremen.de/hafenblog/.

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in real time. This seemed hardly possible online at first sight. On the other hand, moving the port seminar online was relatively easy because, in contrast to most other seminars and lectures, it did not carry the burden of having to familiarize students with a fixed canon of knowledge. Rather we aimed to apply theories, concepts, and questions from fields already studied in previous classes to new but somehow familiar empirics. This took off some pressure from students and the lecturer alike. Therefore, however, the particular style of online learning chosen for the port seminar might not be applicable for most introductory courses. The port seminar was awarded with the Berninghausen Prize for excellent teaching under COVID-19 conditions in 2020 and with the teaching award by the German Political Science Association in 2021. Selected research results of the seminar were published as an edited volume in Bremen University’s Institute for Political Science working paper series in January 2021 (Möller et al., 2020).

Challenges & Tools of Interactive Online Seminars Since we both argue that pandemic (or non-pandemic) online teaching must not fall back to traditional forms of instruction that forego experiences of active learning, this section is devoted to selected challenges and related tools and strategies in engaging students in an online classroom. These challenges include but are not limited to community building, fostering discussions, active learning, and mental health. Here, we are drawing from our pandemic teaching experience in both seminars that we have been jointly reflecting during and after the summer term 2020. Community Building Most of us are familiar with marketing techniques that try to make us as customers to be active members of a community with a shared identity (Gruss et al., 2020). Community building is important not only for customer engagement, but also for student engagement as well (Adam, 2020). By creating a positive shared identity for students, we tried to enhance the learning experience and mitigate the psychological effects from the pandemic. In Political Communication, several students naturally coalesced around the mass media outlets and maintained a social network among

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themselves, where presidential candidates gave interviews to the press, voters offered op-eds and/or referenced the coverage in their weekly contributions. One of the characters was the instructor’s alter ego in the simulation that allowed them to participate directly in the simulation without breaking anyone’s character. That meant that the instructor had to provide input in character that ranged from debate moderation, op-eds, as well as “Talk Voting” cover of Jason Derulo’s “Talk Dirty.” This type of instructor engagement helped foster a sense of community and engagement, as well as built on the robust evidence for using humor in the classroom (Appleby, 2018). Not only did it contribute to selfmotivation and increase of interest in learning, it was vital in keeping the levels of anxiety and stress low, especially in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Granted, given a comparatively high number of live sessions, asynchronous community building was less vital. At the same time, live sessions also offered an opportunity to foster community building through break-out groups with students becoming ad hoc consultants for the two presidential campaigns. For example, after a discussion on the influence of branding in politics, the students were split into two groups, each containing a presidential candidate, where they were supposed to brainstorm the respective campaign. This type of break-out group activity offered yet another opportunity to apply the theoretical concepts that were discussed earlier on a concrete empirical example. Additionally, it lessened the burden on the students who were presidential candidates and equalized the amount of work they had to do on their own. The port seminar’s main working mode was an asynchronous one which raises questions about the need for community building. Successful student research, however, requires continuous guidance by the lecturer, feedback by fellow students as well as motivation and commitment through a social learning situation. Thus, building a community was also key for the success of this online seminar. This was achieved through at least four measures. From the very beginning of the seminar onwards, students were, firstly, encouraged to work in groups. During most of the summer term, it was possible for students to physically meet in small groups (not on campus but privately and outdoors) and to jointly work on their projects. In the port seminar, students were allowed to work in fixed and changing groups during the term (changing group for different blog posts or podcasts). This was also incentivised by relatively lower word counts for collaborative projects. In fact, many blog posts and

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podcasts were produced by teams. Secondly, seminar-related interaction on social media was encouraged in order to form a learning community. For this purpose, a seminar hashtag was created on Twitter (#Hafenseminar) where some of the blog posts were featured by the lecturer, the department, and the university. While this increased the public visibility of the port seminar, it did not generate a significant amount of interaction and probably hardly contributed to community building since only few seminar participants are active Twitter users. As the COVID-19 infections in Germany went down after the spring wave, the university allowed study trips at the end of the summer term under strict protective measures. This made a voluntary cycling trip through Bremen’s old overseas ports possible which served as an active recapitulation of the seminar’s topics in the field. Students and the lecturer visited some of the key places that were discussed over the course of the semester. On this occasion, some of the students met for the first time. In the seminar evaluation, this trip was mentioned by many participants as a highly valuable experience and one of their personal highlights in the so-called Corona semester. For our seminar blog, a student created a map of our field trip with links to related blog posts. A final measure of community building was the formation of an editorial board (including 6 volunteering students and the instructor) for the seminar publication (Möller et al., 2020). In addition to the blog, this publication allowed the students to not only contribute to the seminar but also to a wider public debate in Bremen and Bremerhaven. It is published open access on the website of the Institute for Political Science with a preface by Bremen’s port senator. Moreover, copies were sent to major actors in the local port community increasing the visibility of the student’s research. Like the blog, the seminar publication has a rather elaborate and appealing layout expressing a certain appreciation of student research. The experience of the port seminar clearly shows that valuing student’s contributions by providing publication opportunities strongly motivates and promotes learning and skills acquisition. Furthermore, students could familiarize themselves with the different steps of publishing research results (including peer review). Over the months of working on the publication, the editorial board members grew to a close community committed to publishing their work.

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Fostering Discussions: Discussion Board & Seminar Blog One of the challenges in crafting a successful simulation in the context of Political Communication is to match the learning objectives to the creative process. This issue was addressed by combining the preparation and interaction phases of the simulation. By applying the theoretical concepts weekly and developing their simulation character, the students were able not only to test their knowledge in a short and low-stakes assignment, but also to build a long-term strategy and decision horizon usually unavailable in a 1-day or 2-day simulation. Moreover, all simulation participants additionally strengthened their media literacy and critical thinking skills. Additionally, given privacy concerns, the students were not forced to create or use their existing social media accounts but instead mimicked social media activity on the discussion board. One of the situations that instructors (and students) dread the most in any classroom, whether virtual or not, is the pin-drop silence among the students. Discussion boards, where the students are supposed to post their input, provide an excellent opportunity to jump-start in-class discussions. For once, the written and short format offers a different medium of expression for students not entirely comfortable with public speaking and at the same time, those contributions give the instructor an insight into individual learning progress. A seminar blog is another brilliant but rather time-consuming tool to foster discussions among students in online seminars. In fact, like discussion boards, blogs can also be used in analogous seminars. In the case of the port seminar, students, the lecturer, and some guest authors4 were posting the results of their own empirical research on specific aspects of the learning units. The blog posts then could be discussed by others via the comment function. A longer discussion has emerged under some posts of general interest and high timeliness. Students, the lecturer, and other visitors of the blog would for instance post information on other relevant data sources or pick up an argument made by the author of the original post or another commentator. The great feature of blog discussions is that they can develop independently of time and space. If you do not have a comment right away, you might have one in two weeks’ time and you

4 For instance, a colleague from the economics department working on maritime culture and a graduate who wrote their thesis on the EU’s anti-piracy measures in the Gulf of Aden and the Gulf of Guinea.

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can just post it then. This also allows for connecting contributions from different learning units in retrospect. Since the blog shows new comments on the landing page, everyone could see how discussions on certain posts developed over time. In addition, students were encouraged to post and discuss news related to ports, global trade, and merchant shipping and many actually did. In total, 143 posts and 378 comments were posted on the seminar blog. The posts are categorized by the respective learning units and additional meta-categories like research data, podcasts, Corona crisis, and port news. The blog was part of a WordPress-based university-wide blog system (UniBremenLogs). This made it rather easy to edit and handle. All seminar participants were upgraded to blog authors so they could post and edit their posts without the final approval of the lecturer. This made the tool flexible and quick. At the same time, student peer reviews of posts prior to publication were encouraged. In an internal vote, the port seminar decided to make the blog publicly available so everyone (including the students’ friends and families) could follow the seminar results. Students could still opt out and just submit their posts to the lecturer in case they did not wish to publish their work. This option, however, was hardly used. In general, the blog format and its online visibility created a highly welcomed upgrading of student contributions to proper learning contributions. Students were also encouraged to include links to other blog posts. In fact, this was a grading criterion. This resulted not only in students reading fellow student’s work but also in the visibility of the interconnectedness of knowledge and the emergence of individual and collective learning maps over the course of the semester. Active Learning: Simulation & Empirical Research Following Petranek et al. (1992) and Asal and Blake (2006), Political Communication was designed along the three phases: preparation, interaction, and debriefing. However, in order to adapt to the online environment and stimulate student engagement, the preparation and interaction phases were often merged, as the students had to enact their personas weekly following the theoretical input via reading, vlogs, and seminar discussion. Ultimately, the theoretical and conceptual input was spread throughout the duration of the seminar that also allowed the students to build on their political communication knowledge and develop their simulation characters. The final assignment capitalized on all

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aspects of the seminar and the simulation in particular: Each student was supposed to compose a memorandum where they would provide specific political communication recommendations depending on their role in the simulation. For instance, students who chose a role of a mass media outlet were supposed to reflect on their media strategy and journalistic principles (e.g., objectivity and framing), while students who chose to be voters were supposed to map the political communication strategies that would work on their voter’s demographic. The port seminar was designed as a research-based course that inspires and enables students to raise and answer empirical questions about Bremen’s ports, their history, management, and interrelations with politics, the regional economy, and urban (re)development. Students were conceptualized as co-creators of the knowledge that was to be acquired during the seminar from the very beginning. The learning videos and opening blog posts for each learning session served as a kind of thematic panorama of relevant issues and questions to provide some guidance and orientation for students who then could either choose a specialization topic from a prepared list or suggest an own topic within the scope of the learning unit. In fact, students amended the syllabus by introducing sustainable shipping and green port policies as research topics for our seminar. Student research is probably the most effective and at the same time a very demanding type of active learning since student researchers need close guidance and support. To this end, the blog contains a section listing different types of accessible empirical data sources that were briefly introduced in the learning videos and jointly amended over the course of the seminar. Moreover, on the virtual learning platform (Stud.IP in this case), a continuously growing literature list was provided for the students. On demand, students were assisted in regard to methods of data collection and analysis. The main goal, however, was not to train students in the practicalities of empirical research, but rather to stimulate empirical curiosity and to develop a research attitude. Accordingly, seminar participants were asked to conduct exploratory studies on mostly small-scale issues to ensure they could complete them within the semester. Student research conducted in the context of the port seminar included the interpretation of trade statistics, comparative port analysis, content and discourse analyses of port policies as well as interviews with dock workers, seafarers, and members of parliament. Many of the student projects were conducted not only in the spirit of interdisciplinarity but

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also of transdisciplinary research. Some research results were posted in the form of podcasts, which was encouraged by the lecturer and supported by an external expert on producing podcasts. Mental Challenges: Empathy & Staying in Touch There is an overwhelming consensus that the pandemic has been the reason for a surge in mental health problems around the world (Pfefferbaum & North, 2020; Usher et al., 2020). As lecturers, our role often went beyond teaching but also encompassed counseling and mental health support. Given the increased levels of anxiety and uncertainty, it was important to provide a very clear and predictable online learning environment, communicate deadlines, and learning objectives. One way of addressing the predictability was introducing a weekly step-by-step online course template, where every week the students could have an overview of texts, tasks, and assignments on their plate. Even though these features should be a part and parcel of any successful class, be it online or offline, it was especially important to offer a sense of normality and continuity in some form as well. At the same time, it was also important to signal to the students that this type of instruction was not normal, it was an emergency solution to teaching in once in a century global catastrophe and we, as instructors, should center empathy and care, not just learning (Baran & AlZoubi, 2020; Bozkurt & Sharma, 2020). Another issue that the instructors might consider is the importance of escapism (see also Dayal in this volume). Being bombarded with COVID-19 statistics on a daily basis, watching the frightening images on TV and often being affected by the pandemic personally, does not let the students escape the nightmare that was 2020. While discussing the setting for our fictional election campaign in the political communication seminar, students were asked whether they would like to factor in the pandemic in our simulation. One of the students gave a really poignant answer: “It would be nice if there was one place, where there was no pandemic.” Everyone else in class agreed and it really gave an idea about how incredibly necessary such a respite would be. Genovia remained COVID-free and the students could emerge themselves into an environment that reflected other political challenges around the world—the rise of populism, green activism, or EU politics—but at least the students did not have to relive the daily pandemic challenges in class. In a sense, a part of our class mirrored role playing tabletop or online games, where both

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grown-ups and children can reinvent themselves and enjoy a different, sometimes less painful, reality. Introducing empathy to the syllabus5 was another way to cope with the repercussions of the pandemic for students. In Germany, the summer term (April–July 2020) started shortly after a large-scale lockdown of public life was introduced amidst horrifying news on the pandemic from Northern Italy. Therefore, many students and lecturers were still in shock when the semester started and online learning was not a priority for many of us. In order to address anxieties and uncertainties of that time, we explicitly talked about the special circumstances and potential mental ramifications in our syllabi. The port seminar syllabus started with 10 principles6 that should guide the handling with online learning and teaching: 1. Nobody signed up for this! 2. The seminar has no priority in light of fear and care for family and friends, the loss of student jobs, and volunteer community work. Also, other seminars and lectures might be more important than this one. 3. We cannot do the same online as we would have done in a normal seminar. 4. Course requirements will be lowered in light of the limited learning conditions in the pandemic. 5. We will mainly work in an asynchronous manner in order to account for technical problems and mental side effects of extensive screen time. 6. Feedback on how things work is more important and welcome than ever. 7. Work and learn in groups so you do not feel alone. 8. Please raise as many questions as you can in our Stud.IP forum or via email. 9. Make use of the lecturer’s digital office hours if you have any problems.

5 See also Ba and Glazier in Chapters 7 and 10 of this volume. 6 Dayal in Chapter 6 of this volume talks about the foundational principles of

transparency, generosity, and flexibility that are relevant for all pandemic syllabi.

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10. We need more flexibility than usual in order to react to changes in the protective measures. Let’s reevaluate our syllabus in the middle of the semester. Another, more practical, measure to cope with potential mental ramifications of the pandemic was the introduction of a photo quiz on the port seminar’s blog. This rather playful element was meant to engage students beyond screen time. Each week, a photo from somewhere within the ports or of something port related in the cities of Bremen and Bremerhaven was posted on the blog, often a very detailed picture that was not easily recognizable at first sight. Students were asked to find the place depicted in the photograph and post information on its history and meaning in the comments. In some cases, students actually went to the places and took selfies as proof of them going there. Moreover, some students posted quizzes on their own and thereby created learning opportunities for their fellow students and the lecturer. This was not only fun but also an effective tool of team building and stimulating individual field trips.

Conclusion: Lessons Learned & Recommendations In coping with the challenges of pandemic teaching in the way described above, we spurred active learning, creative knowledge acquisition, and skills development amidst a global pandemic that unsettled many routines in higher education. A simulation-based seminar does not actually involve a lot of additional preparation effort: apart from coming up with a simulation premise and setting up a digital environment for the class (e.g., a discussion board, readings, etc.), the simulation is carried by students who take the election campaign in the direction they prefer with only occasional interventions from the instructor. After collecting the assignments and grades for the political communication course, it was obvious that the students managed to apply the theoretical concepts to their simulated environment. Especially the memos provided specific theory-based suggestions for electoral campaigns, media, and public. This resulted in relatively high grades for the written assignments. Therefore, students definitely achieved the learning outcomes of the course whereby they not only presented the theoretical concepts but actually applied them successfully to their simulated environment. While during the simulation the

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students might have gotten carried away by the heat of the elections, the memos showed very robust evidence for the higher-level learning. Based on this experience, we would argue that a conventional summative assignment (memo in this case) was successfully accomplished because it was supported by the creative simulation components: digital input and elections proper. As the students were motivated by the gaming element, they approached the memos in a very serious manner. In a similar vein, the port seminar’s blog and publication have received wide recognition beyond the learning group and the university itself. The cooperation partners that have been interviewed for learning videos, blog posts, or podcasts or that have been approached otherwise by students were highly interested in our results. Students put a lot of effort and creativity into their contributions and identified research fields and questions for their further studies. The public visibility of their work created an incentive to produce high-quality contributions since this time, not only the lecturer would read their texts. Moreover, the share of students who turned in their coursework was higher than in most other online seminars and even higher than in previous regular seminars. This shows how students were motivated to meet the learning goals by means of community building, fostering discussions, active learning, and offering empathy. Based on our own experience, we would give the following general recommendations for engaging students in an online classroom: • Do not underestimate the need for structure and support for asynchronous learning. This part of the seminar requires at least as much attention as the synchronous meetings (which is probably also true for post-pandemic/analogous seminars). • Reduce the amount and density of topics and readings. Turn some of your mandatory readings into additional readings (generally speaking: less is more). • Instead of an extensive reading list, make suggestions for individual specialization (including audiovisual material, media content, and data sources). The goal should not be to make everyone read everything but rather to provide opportunities for individual inspiration for further studies. • Utilize discussion boards and/or blogs. Miro and Padlet are more recent and very handy digital options to structure and save discussions in the online classroom.

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• Put emphasis on content co-creation. Students can connect more easily with a seminar which they actually contribute to (as opposed to rather passive participation/consumption). • Show your appreciation for students’ contributions and encourage your seminar participants to publish their work. • Integrate simulations or similar creative assignments if possible. • Stimulate community-building activities and collaborative learning among the students! • Offer empathy during a pandemic and account for limited learning conditions and access to technical infrastructure. Following this advice might help you in turning your online seminar into more than a YouTube channel. It is worth noting, however, that students are not the only ones struggling during the pandemic. Instructors, especially those in precarious positions (adjuncts, non-TT faculty, temporary contracts, graduate students), also suffer from similar challenges of being overworked, burned out, and anxious, especially during a pandemic. We should also note that active learning methods and the suggestions we have made do take a lot of time, as most teaching preparation does. As most instructors might have noticed by now, online instruction takes even more time to prepare than f2f sessions. Moreover, in some cases, it is virtually impossible to convert courses, especially large lectures, into sessions centered on active learning methods without placing an incredible high burden on the instructors. Blogs and simulations worked very well in our seminars, but they are certainly not a one-size-fits-all solution for online teaching. For us, both collegial advice and counseling on the one hand and explicitly sharing the responsibility for a successful seminar with our students worked very well for stabilizing ourselves within pandemic teaching. In that spirit, we do not want the readers to regard this chapter as a criticism to their own crisis-mode teaching or as a call for a continuous self-optimization of lecturers, but rather as an inspiration for the time after the pandemic.

References Adam, E. (2020). No student is an Island—Students’ perspectives of sense of community in online higher education. In Tertiary online teaching and learning (pp. 199–205). Springer.

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Appleby, D. (2018). Using humor in the college classroom: The pros and cons. Psychology Teacher Network. Asal, V., & Blake, E. L. (2006). Creating simulations for political science education. Journal of Political Science Education, 2(1), 1–18. Baran, E., & AlZoubi, D. (2020). Human-centered design as a frame for transition to remote teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic. Journal of Technology and Teacher Education, 28(2), 365–372. Barr, R. B., & Tagg, J. (1995). From teaching to learning: A new paradigm for undergraduate education. Change, 27 (6), 13–26 Biggs, J. (1996). Enhancing teaching through constructive alignment. Higher Education, 32, 347–364. Bozkurt, A., & Sharma, R. C. (2020). Emergency remote teaching in a time of global crisis due to CoronaVirus pandemic. Asian Journal of Distance Education, 15(1), i–vi. Crowder-Meyer, M. (2019): Blogging your way to a research paper: The benefits of a semester-long blogging assignment in the political science classroom. Journal of Political Science Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/15512169. 2019.1647220 Eagle, R. E. (1975). Classroom simulations and student creativity. Teaching Political Science, 2(4), 437–448. Gruss, R., Abrahams, A., Song, Y., Berry, D., & Al-Daihani, S. M. (2020). Community building as an effective user engagement strategy: A case study in academic libraries. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 71(2), 208–220. Fabrizi, G., & Siebelink, R. (2020). https://www.ukrant.nl/on-site-educationis-here-to-stay-but-needs-improvement/?lang=en Forostal, J., & Finch, J. (2020). Teaching the town hall: Incorporating experiential learning in a large introductory lecture course. Journal of Political Science Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/15512169.2020.1725528 Gahl, M. K., Gale, A., Kaestner, A., Yoshina, A., Paglione, E., & Bergman, G. (2020). Perspectives on facilitating dynamic ecology courses online using active learning. Ecology and Evolution. Hansen, H. E. (2016). The impact of blog-style writing on student learning outcomes: A pilot study. Journal of Political Science Education, 12(1), 85–101. Healey, M., & Jenkins, A. (2009). Developing undergraduate research and inquiry. The Higher Education Academy. Jester, N. (2020). Popular culture as pedagogy in the political theory classroom: reflections from higher education. European Political Science, 1–13 Jones, K. (2013). Simulations: A handbook for teachers and trainers. Basingstoke: Routledge. Michael, J. (2006). Where’s the evidence that active learning works? Advances in Physiology Education.

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Möller, S., Gentes, T., Gohlke, M., Jathe, J., Jung, F., Kenanidou, K., & Orlando, L. (eds.) (2020): Schlüssel zur Welt - Die Bremischen Häfen in der Globalen Politischen Ökonomie (IPW Paper Nr. 1). Institut für Politikwissenschaft, Universität Bremen. Omelicheva, M. Y., & Avdeyeva, O. (2008). Teaching with lecture or debate? Testing the effectiveness of traditional versus active learning methods of instruction. PS: Political Science & Politics, 41(3), 603–607. Petranek, C. F., et al. (1992). Three levels of learning in simulations: Participating, debriefing, and journal writing. Simulation & Gaming, 23(2), 174–185. Pfefferbaum, B., & North, C. S. (2020). Mental health and the Covid-19 pandemic. New England Journal of Medicine, 383(6), 510–512. Prince, M. (2004). Does active learning work? A review of the research. Journal of Engineering Education, 93(3), 223–231. Shellman, S. M. (2001). Active learning in comparative politics: A mock German election and coalition-formation simulation. PS: Political Science and Politics , 34(4), 827–834. Shellman, S. M., & Turan, K. (2006). Do simulations enhance student learning? An empirical evaluation of an IR simulation. Journal of Political Science Education, 2(1), 19–32. Usher, K., Bhullar, N., & Jackson, D. (2020). Life in the pandemic: Social isolation and mental health.

CHAPTER 4

Interactive Learning and Participation at Zoom University Brianna Nicole Hernandez

Introduction The abrupt shift from asking students to recap their Spring Breaks to telling them we would not be meeting in the classroom the next week brought with it not only anxieties about the state of the world but also anxieties about the state of my syllabus. As Gaufman and Möller note in Chapter 3, comments comparing the university classroom to watching a streaming platform are illustrative of the potential consequences of COVID-19 on teaching and learning. Focusing learning on students’ active participation and critical application of concepts and theories takes intentionality and creativity on any given day. To do so in a time when the learning environment is abruptly transformed into a small screen you sit behind from wherever the internet connection is best asks educators for a new level of ingenuity and almost assumes a propensity for flexibility. I was lucky enough, during this time, to be working with a professor who gave me the space and trust to be fully responsible for the learning that

B. N. Hernandez (B) Florida International University, Miami, FL, USA

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happened during Friday classes with my section of the course. Each TA created their own unique syllabus for the students in their section to go with the course syllabus created by the professor of record. The professor, fortunately, adapted rather quickly to the COVID-19 shift, resulting in a stable module schedule and much less of a scramble to revise my own plans for the section. This chapter discusses strategies for cultivating inclusion, connection, and participation. Specifically, it provides a look at the experience of adapting face-to-face activities to online instruction in the context of an undergraduate introductory course by a graduate teaching assistant. I will first preview the context of the course and the learning environment. I then turn to the translation of a classroom culture built on participation, group activities, and multiple strains of accountability to remote learning in section two. Examples of my experience adapting interactive learning assignments to the virtual space are provided. I conclude with a note on cultivating co-responsibility for learning. On March 11, President Mark B. Rosenberg announced Florida International University (FIU) would be transitioning to remote learning starting March 12. On March 13, I did not take attendance. I changed the week’s writing assignment to an extra credit opportunity. I informed the students they would not have to present the assignment they had been working on for two classes at the end of class, because instead of providing the space for them to work collaboratively during the class session we talked about the syllabus. In that Zoom meeting, the students and I reflected on the learning environment we had worked together to create over the course of the semester; what worked and did not, what they would miss and wouldn’t. Collectively, we decided that we would do our best to keep the culture of our Introduction to International Relations section intact. Not only did that mean lots of reworking active learning instructions for me but also a fundamental shift in how interaction was to be defined in our new space. It is a goal of mine to design courses that recognize and incorporate multiple ways of knowing into learning activities and to position students as parities who are constructors of knowledge and co-responsible for learning (Archer-Kuhn et al., 2020). Those who lean constructivist in their pedagogy, as I do, often argue that students learn best through interaction—with each other and with the teacher (Sloam, 2008). Constructivism as a theory emphasizes meaning-making and how history, structures, and experiences color the way we understand and interact with social reality. In bringing constructivism into pedagogy, we,

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as instructors, acknowledge that through rich experiences in the classroom students are not only reaching conclusions about the world but are actively (re)creating it. It is a position that demands critical thinking. As such, the learning environment I aimed to cultivate was one with ample discussion, openness, reflection, and an abundance of active learning. As educators—especially ones teaching political science and international relations—we have a dual responsibility of imparting academic skills as well as preparing students to become better community members and capable global citizens (Ishiyama et al., 2016). I want my classes to be challenging but fair and, most importantly, valuable to the students beyond their time there. It is important that we teach students how to process and evaluate information, form, and communicate arguments backed by evidence, write well-constructed papers, and see the value of viewpoints different than their own. Encouraging students to question what they know results in fruitful and revealing classroom discussions and has allowed me to identify and address common misconceptions. It is my hope that when students in my classes critically examine an aspect of the world, they also consider, though perhaps not always consciously, their role in its creation, perpetuation, and transformation. In my own experiences as a student and in learning from professors of record as a TA, I realized the value I place in the transparency of knowledge production within the field is also something I look for as being reflected in transparency of course design when creating culturally responsive teaching environments. Research shows the creation of an environment that is conducive to students learning through facilitating connection and confidence can be accomplished with collaborative approaches and cooperative learning groups. To do this well, it is important to get a sense of who your students are. At the start of the semester, I asked the students in my section to take out a piece of paper (index card, lined paper split down the middle to share with a friend, etc.) and answer some questions about their interests, what they think international relations is, and some word association responses in addition to identifying information like year in school and major. I, like Daniel H. Nexon and Iver B. Neumann (2006), see value in using J. K. Rowling’s wizarding world in relation to international relations—that and I am an unashamed Potter-Nerd—so I placed students in Harry Potter houses based on their interests and views of international relations. Themes, countries, and theories for group assignments, projects, and in-class activities were also based on these Houses. Students

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were provided with House fact sheets that included information about things they would be responsible for during the semester. I had each group create a chat and discuss expectations. The students then signed a copy of the House sheet and returned it to me; acknowledging they understood their responsibilities to each other and the rest of the class. The encouragement of mutual respect and a shared responsibility for learning as described by Bain and Zimmerman (2009) is a hallmark of the active learning examples included in this chapter.

Adapting Our Classroom Culture to Remote Learning Our Florida International University community went completely remote on March 16—following the move to online learning a few days before. No libraries. No campus study spaces. No Starbucks. As I was adapting to participating in graduate seminars via Zoom and changing the Intro to IR syllabus, the undergraduate students in my section were adapting their understanding of ‘college life’ and figuring out how to be students from their parents’ kitchens and bedroom floors. To accommodate the transition period, I did not count attendance toward their participation grade for two Monday lectures and two Friday discussions. While good teaching responds to the needs of the student, it is important to find a balance between creating a supportive environment and enabling poor student behavior, so, in our classroom conversation on March 12 and in subsequent emails, I made it clear that the grading scheme of the section had not changed. I still expected participation; it would just look a bit different some days. I also made sure to reinforce the multiple strains of accountability established during the first part of the semester. The students remained responsible to themselves, to me, and to their teams. Several of their weekly writing assignments for the semester asked them to reflect on their experiences of team assignments and describe the roles they played. These reflections helped me to gauge who needed more support—or prompting—to engage effectively. I also reminded them weekly of their standing in the House Cup and where House Points could be gained in upcoming activities. This helped fuel their continued active engagement and fend off the free-rider problem. While distraction is something educators should always be cognizant of, it seems ever more present in conversation—and practice—during this time of COVID-19. As someone who studies the role of language and

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construction of institutions, I find it refreshing to move my own thinking away from preventing distraction to cultivating attention. Sticking with the power of rhetoric for a moment here, it is helpful to invoke Lang’s (2020) intentionality of understanding attention as achievement for both yourself and the students. To reach the point of achieving one must put in work. Educators cannot solely put the onerous on the students to pay attention, especially when there is so much else going on; the responsibility is a shared one. Since our brains are wired to notice novelty (Gazzaley & Rosen, 2017), change is extremely important. Moving from passive and active formats in the classroom will help students’ brains stay engaged with the teaching and learning that is happening in the space. During in-person instruction, I always provide students with an agenda for the day. I would have a Google Doc pulled up and projected as they came into the classroom with a one-to-three word run-down of each teaching/learning block. I have found that this not only tips students off that I will not be speaking at them for an hour but also serves to spark some curiosity as to what the agenda lines refer to. This is especially the case with the active learning blocks. I recreated this in the Zoom space through screen-sharing the same Google Doc agenda for the first few minutes of class. Redirecting student attention from boredom and distraction takes even more creativity than before Zoom fatigue was a factor. To combat this, I had the students of the Intro IR course play. Trust me; I know how that sounds. College students playing—what does that even look like? Learning through play is characterized by choice, wonder, and delight (International School of Billund, 2019), and you have probably already done some of it in your in-person courses. The employment of a wide range of teaching techniques which correspond to the broad range of learning preferences that exist (Fleming, 2001) can help to trigger design, implementation, and experiences of active learning. When students are tasked with being governments or international organizations and solving a problem, they are presented with rules and goals, but they are also asked to be creative and to make choices as with any game of makebelieve. These types of activities help to create—or reinforce—inclusive learning environments as students are signaled to leverage their learning and personal experiences. Students create understandings when what they already know and believe meet new ideas and knowledge their courses put them in contact with. Inclusive learning environments encourage students to bring their lived experiences and identities into the space to interact

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with the concepts and events being discussed. Students are most likely to learn deeply when they are trying to solve problems or answer questions that they consider relevant or interesting (Bain & Zimmerman, 2009)—a little competition can be quite fruitful as well. Much of the remainder of this chapter will consist of examples of in-person learning activities designed for an in-person semester and transformed for remote learning. Active Learning Online Here are examples of how I transitioned active learning with an objective of having students apply their knowledge and a goal of assessing student learning from the in-person to the online environment. Policy in Practice The purpose of this assignment is to hone students’ critical thinking and collaboration abilities while reviewing concepts and definitions related to international relations theory, international institutions, and policy making. Through the application of the course material to real-world problems, the students will link theoretical arguments to practical solutions. The assignment asks students to practice creative problem-solving as well as conduct research efficiently. Each House (group) was asked to use the information provided about their assigned country in a packet—handed out in our last in-person class of the semester—along with their class notes to design a policy that targets the specific issue presented for the assigned country. Students were informed they could use data sets/indexes (Freedom House, Fragile State, Global Peace, and Correlates of War were mentioned as examples) to support their policy. The students were informed of all the sections they needed to include in their final proposals verbally and in the packet. The rest of the class period the students worked in their teams on this activity as I moved from group to group to chat with them. The plan was to give students a bit of time to complete their proposals and prepare to present them at the beginning of the next class meeting. The next class meeting was our first one of remote learning. The students had already put in time and effort to work on this project, so it was important to give them the opportunity to see it through while considering the period of transition to remote learning. Instead of asking groups to present via Zoom, I tasked them with collaborating through Google Doc or Word with completing the process of creating the proposal

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if they had not done so the first day in class. Maintaining the same criteria for success for the proposal itself was simple this way. However, the successful presentation criteria included engaging thoughtfully with the questions and concerns of classmates. To keep the integrity of this part of the assignment, students had to post their proposals to a Discussion Board on Canvas. Then each student voted to adopt or reject the proposal by leaving a “yes” or “no” in the comments of the proposals from each of the other groups. As with all the in-person activities prior to this one, students were reminded the most engaged House would receive a House Point. In this case, the point was rewarded based on the asking and answering of questions in the comments of the Discussion Board. The writing assignment for the week (these are due before the next class period) prompted students to critically reflect on their policy recommendation and the process of creating it. They also had to provide a critique or challenge to their proposal whether the rest of the class had voted to accept it. Securitize This The activity for the module on security and securitization was altered the most for remote learning. The learning objectives associated with this activity included application of theory and concepts, collaborative decision-making, and connecting to real-world processes. Had we been physically in the classroom, one person from each House would have selected a topic from the Goblet of Fire (a cup) related to a human security issue. Alternatively, I chose the topics at random for each group. Yes, I did pull slips of paper from a Marauders’ Map coffee mug. There was no way to claim the topic assignments were calculated or unfair this way. Each group was tasked with researching the topic and constructing an argument as to why their issue calls for extraordinary means to be used by the government in the name of security. I sent an email to each group with the assignment instructions, their topic, and the member of their group who would serve as the government. In class, the students would have voted to elect the person who would serve as the government official. Since this person would be exempt from collaborating on the securitizing of the topic, I assigned this position to four students who had experienced the most difficult working remotely and had participated consistently during in-person instruction. The government’s first task was to evaluate the threat presented and decide, given practical concerns like limited resources, which two they

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would act against. The original design of the activity allotted three minutes for each group to make their case to the government through one representative. Instead, each group was expected to create a PowerPoint of at least three slides (this does not include title or references page). The presentation had to be narrated by three group members, and I specified that these students could not be the same ones who had presented on behalf of the group for a previous assignment. The completed PowerPoints were submitted to me through Canvas inbox or email. After reviewing the presentations, I sent them to the students making up the government. During in-person instruction, the government would have had five minutes to consult and declare two security threats. Alternatively, the government reviewed each of the presentations and submitted a document that answered the following questions: 1. Which two issues are you most convinced are national security threats? 2. What about these presentations was most convincing? 3. What was the process of creating consensus within the government to choose these two issues? After receiving this document, I posted the winning presentations to Canvas. Doing so enabled me to keep with the spirit of the activity. I had planned to inform the class of an international issue pulling attention and resources away from domestic concerts and thus the issues they presented. The government would then have to choose only one issue to declare a security threat. The final two teams would have had a chance to present their cases and a suggested course of action before the class. The government would then consult and inform me of which issue they chose. Before revealing that choice, I would have asked the constituents (students who are not part of the government) to vote. Alternatively, all the students had to engage with at least one of the posted presentations via Canvas. In our subsequent Zoom meeting, the students voted. I then revealed the threat the government had chosen. In this case, there was agreement, but we discussed situations when that might not be the case and why some issues are easier to connect to national security than others.

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Box 1.1 Examples for Troubleshooting Internet Concerns To accommodate students who experienced internet connectivity challenges, I modified a group activity that would have required students to connect outside of class time to evaluate Use of Force scenarios. Instead, we did this as a class during our scheduled Zoom meeting. Two students who traveled home to South America experienced increasing difficulty trying to complete group activities that tasked students with working jointly on a PowerPoint or Word Document. One student had to schedule a time to travel to attend classes and complete assignments after losing internet in their town for a few days. The activity for that week gave the students a choice: complete individually or with your group. Students may need to share electronic devices, compete with other members of the household for bandwidth, or travel to use Wi-Fi. Accounting for this, I made sure students had access to all the material needed to complete an activity well in advance and scattered due dates for assignment pieces across the week. In one case, I modified an activity to be completed over the span of two weeks instead of the one it was scheduled for if we had been in-person.

Human Rights Scenarios To complete this assignment students had to identify which rights as written in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights had been violated in the given scenarios. A chart listing the rights as well as the list of scenarios was posted to Canvas. The activity was designed to be completed within their groups. We were nearing the end of the semester and student attention was waning as their stress levels seemed to be waxing. I modified the activity to allow students to exercise their agency when completing the assignment. They were given the choice to work with the members of their House, individually, or, in the case of two students in Brazil, create a sub-group. I received the charts in many forms; some from individual students, some from Houses, and some from individual students whose House members submitted joint work under the House banner which they had nothing to do with. I found the students were quite honest about their contributions to joint submissions. In lieu of having Houses discuss their answers to particular scenarios and defend them, I had students choose two scenarios and discuss why it violated the right(s) it was matched with as their writing assignment for the week. This kept the content-based learning objectives the same while

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swapping writing skills for oral communication skills. This also served as a way to ensure individual students took responsibility for their own learning about human rights violations. Bringing Discussion Online It is my experience as a Teaching Assistant that students often complain about weekly discussion posts. It is my experience as a student that we often complain about weekly discussion posts. That is not to say the Discussion Board cannot be a useful and enjoyable tool. As mentioned above, the Discussion Board can be used in lieu of steps of a simulation, to encourage engagement, and make effective use of class time. I suggest assigning discussion posts sporadically and designing them with a variety of learners in mind. The following is an example of an assignment that asks students to discuss and reflect on what they learned and that can be conducted via Canvas, Blackboard, Teams, or other online platforms. Take a Pic I found that having students find or take a photo representing an international problem, historical event, theoretical tradition, or current event can be a fun way to begin a unit, chapter, or topic discussion. Each student would post a discussion of a picture, for example, representing democracy. During the lecture or discussion, I could then refer to some of these posts by saying something like, “Oh, remember Andrew’s photo of the protest, well that is a great example of freedom of assembly.” The exercise gives an idea about what misconceptions and associations students are bringing to the topic. At the end of the class or chapter, the students’ task would be to comment on their own post reflecting on whether they would choose the same picture given all the knowledge they accumulated. This activity has something for the readers, the writers, the visual learners, and even for the kinesthetic ones who create scenes or go find them and produce original photos. Reviewing Online Beyond sustaining in-class activities and discussions, my last major task was to help students review for graded exams. Here are two examples of how I transitioned review and exam preparation activities from the in-person to the online environment.

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Stick It to the…Theory During in-person instruction, students competed for the House Cup in various activities, including speed and skill trials. When students came into the classroom on a Stick it to the… Theory day, the board was divided into sections and sticky notes covered the board under the heading “Word Bank.” The objective of the game was for each group competing that day (they did this two groups at a time) to correctly place their colored sticky notes in the correct places in the least amount of time. The sticky notes had the names of scholars (Waltz, Wendt…), concepts (relative gains, absolute gains…), and entities (international organizations, states…). The sections on the board represented theoretical traditions. A representative from each competing group was selected. They could not get help from their group until all sticky notes were placed or the time ran out. The representatives were then allowed to consult with their groups before declaring “final answer.” I then chose particular sticky notes to have the students explain their rationale for placement. The students not at the board had the chance to correct their peers and this led to a few back-and-forth debates between students. This activity also worked remotely, though with modification. Using Google Doc, I was able to create tables with headings, color code text, and create a word bank. Students were still evaluated on the same criteria. The difference, and the loss, was the level of energy and competitive spirit from the classroom. Overall, the activity was still a useful way to assess students’ retention of key terms and review the theoretical traditions in preparation for an exam and for moving into higher level courses. Concept BINGO BINGO, using bingobaker.com, replaced Concept Catch. As a review exercise prior to exams or in time left over from quizzes, I would have the students split the room in two right down the middle. Given that students tended to sit in clusters with members of their House, this made the sides relatively even in number and generally pitted two Houses against the other two. I projected a key terms list on the board. The list combined words and phrases from the textbook and lecture PowerPoints. I started the game by holding a light, small Finding Nemo ball in my hand and saying a term from the list. I then tossed the ball to a student on either side of the room. That student was tasked with defining the term and saying something about its significance. If the student did this correctly, they then chose a term and tossed the ball to the other side of the room.

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If they were unable to answer the question the team lost a point or could use one of their three saves. Using a save only works if another member of your team can answer the question. If not, the other side of the room can steal the point by answering correctly. Creating BINGO cards with all the key terms from the textbook and PowerPoints for the exam period took some time as I had to test out a few different sites. Once the cards were created, I sent the students the call list. The learning objective remained the same, but instead of the students testing each other, I called out definitions. In both games the students needed a bit of luck. Students did not know when the ball would be coming your way or what the term would be. In a similar way, students did not know what terms I would call or whether their card had it listed. I had planned to play two rounds that ended with the first BINGO. By the end of the first round, we had decided to play until third place and as many rounds as we could in the allotted time. Like Concept Catch, if a student called BINGO with a mislabeled card, the other students had the opportunity to discuss the correct answer.

Conclusion International Relations as a discipline provides ample opportunity to foster classroom environments in which students are prompted to evaluate their own thinking and behavior—including in the time of COVID-19. It is paramount to success that educators are intentional about creating a favorable disposition toward learning through relevance and inclusion. Giving students the opportunity to have a voice in that creation and encouraging them to take co-responsibility for their learning models the political agency we hope to instill them outside the classroom. In the activities presented in this chapter, there is a deliberate cultivation of personal characteristics such as trust, respect, and communication which enable the deep learning in students we hope to achieve (Spronken-Smith et al., 2011). While the previous pages have provided examples from transitioning an IR course to remote learning, we know that every classroom is different, and you never really teach the exact same class twice. It is my hope that the activities discussed provide inspiration if not guidance; it is more important that this chapter says “it can be done”. Transitioning rapidly from one mode of instruction to another, while not ideal, can be accomplished, and most active learning assignments were able to be translated to

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remote learning. Cultivating an interactive class culture and being reasonably accommodating were essential in the process of teaching at “Zoom University” due to COVID-19.

References Archer-Kuhn, B., Lee, Y., Finnessey, S., & Liu, J. (2020). Inquiry-based learning as a facilitator to student engagement in undergraduate and graduate social work programs. Teaching & Learning Inquiry, 8(1), 187–207. https://doi. org/10.20343/teachlearninqu.8.1.13 Bain, K., & Zimmerman, J. (2009). Understanding great teaching. Peer Review, 11(2), 9–12. Fleming, N. D. (2001) Teaching and learning styles: VARK strategies. Honolulu Community College. Gazzaley, A., & Rosen, L. (2017). Distracted Mind: Ancient brains in a high-tech world. MIT Press. Ishiyama, J. T., Miller, W. J., & Simon, E. (2016). Handbook on teaching and learning in political science and international relations. Edward Elgar. Indicators of Playful Learning: International School of Billund. (2019). Developed by Pedagogy of Play at Project Zero, Harvard Graduate School of Education. Lang, J. (2020). Distracted: Why students can’t focus and what you can do about it. Basic Books. Nexon, D. H., & Neumann, I. B. (Eds.). (2006). Harry Potter and international relations. Rowman & Littlefield. Sloam, J. (2008). Teaching democracy: The role of political science education. The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 10(3), 509–524. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-856x.2008.00332.x Spronken-Smith, R., Walker, R., Batchelor, J., O’Steen, B., & Angelo, T. (2011). Enablers and constraints to the use of inquiry-based learning in undergraduate education. Teaching in Higher Education, 16(1), 15–28.

CHAPTER 5

How Much Zoom is Too Much? Making Asynchronous Learning Work Tobias Lemke

Introduction The global spread of the COVID-19 pandemic has forced universities the world over to shift to online and remote forms of instruction. While video-conferencing applications like Zoom and Learning Management Systems (LMS) including Canvas, Blackboard, and Moodle provide exciting opportunities to make distance learning both efficient and fun, switching from the in-person to the virtual classroom can present significant organizational and practical challenges. For one, teaching remotely, just like any form of teaching, takes planning, practice, and experience to perfect.1 As Charles Hodge and his co-authors point out, well-planned online instruction is meaningfully different from courses moved online

1 The average preparation time for a fully online university course ranges from six to nine months (Hodges et al., 2020).

T. Lemke (B) University of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA

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hastily in response to a crisis (2020).2 Yet, few instructors have the time and the resources needed to develop the pedagogical skills and practices that traditionally informs online learning. The reality of the pandemic means that most teachers are jumping into remote instruction with little to no training, hoping to develop the necessary skills along the way. All this has added yet another obstacle to an already challenging work environment.3 The point of this chapter is to provide a conceptual starting point for navigating this tricky terrain. I do this by discussing some of the central concerns, challenges, and considerations that informed the development of my own online teaching practice over the past twelve months. The central question guiding my discussion relates to the appropriate delivery mode for online instruction, specifically how to choose between synchronous and asynchronous course components. Although it may be intuitive to privilege synchronicity and continue teaching “as usual” via web conferencing platforms, I suggest there are limits to this method. Not everything we do in the physical classroom translates seamlessly into the virtual realm and too much screen time can quickly put a strain on both students and teachers. Rather, I advocate for a hybrid model that combines synchronous (i.e., face-to-face) instruction with asynchronous modules students can complete outside of class (see also Gaufman & Möller in Chapter 3). The goal is to offer students direct access to meaningful in-class interactions while also giving them the flexibility they need to adjust their learning in less-than-ideal circumstances. To round out this section, I provide examples of how to design and organize a more balanced online learning environment by drawing from my own experience teaching Introduction to Global Politics, pedagogical training I

2 Online teaching and learning have been studied for decades and research indicates that effective online education results from careful instructional design and planning. (e.g., Branch & Dousay, 2015; Means et al., 2014). 3 Consequently, the pandemic has only added to the portfolio of professional skills college instructors are expected to bring onto today’s job market. While a promising research agenda and strong record of academic publishing remain the sine qua non of professional survival, the cultivation of teaching skills that translate into both in-person and remote learning environments is not far behind. The added strain is particularly burdensome for adjunct instructors and contingent faculty, who already face work environments with limited institutional support and low levels of job security.

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received at the University of Delaware, and the broader scholarship of teaching and learning (SOTL).4 With the table set in this way, the remainder of the chapter outlines a series of suggestions for how one can navigate the transition to online teaching. It is important to note that this is not meant as a collection of best practices. Nor do I want to convince anyone that what I discuss below is how they should organize their own online teaching. Rather, I hope to offer something like a roadmap for instructors that plan to teach online, especially for those with little or no experience in this area. Accordingly, much of what follows is organized in the form of a personal narrative account, one that is informed by frequent reflection and recourse to evidence-based teaching and learning practices. At the same time, I hope experienced online teachers may find useful points of comparison and contrast in the examples I discuss below. If nothing else, the chapter should read as a plea for recognizing the importance of reflective teaching practices and to take pride in the time and resources we invest in becoming the best teachers we can be.

Choosing Your Mode of Instruction: Blending Synchronous and Asynchronous Teaching The first decision instructors face when moving their teaching online is how they wish to deliver content, activities, and assessment in a remote learning environment. For example, how much class time will be spent in live face-to-face (i.e., synchronous) interactions between students and teachers using video-conferencing services like Zoom? Conversely, how much time will students spend completing assignments and assessments out of class and on their own time via LMS (i.e., asynchronously)? Often the choice of modality will depend on the needs and characteristics of the learners. For example, adult learners usually require more flexibility and so asynchronous modules with limited or optional synchronous sessions may work best. In contrast, younger learners, including K-12 and

4 Since March 2020, I taught multiple sections of Introduction to Global Politics at the University of Delaware, a public-private land-grant research university. I taught an analogous course, Introduction to International Relations, at Haverford College, a private liberal arts college. The examples I draw from in this chapter are based on my experience teaching these courses online. Classes were capped at 25 students.

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undergraduates, may benefit from the structure of required synchronous sessions. Especially in crisis situations, synchronous delivery may seem like the best option. Not only does synchronicity enable us to retain the interpersonal dimension of learning many of us value greatly, but it means that, at least in theory, instructors can continue with their original lesson plan and course outline without making significant changes. Everything they planned to do in the physical classroom they will now do in the virtual classroom, albeit through a video camera lens. However, both delivery modes involve tradeoffs that should be considered carefully before designing your course. As mentioned above, the advantages of retaining face-to-face interaction through synchronous teaching are obvious and immediate: teachers can deliver the content of their courses much the same way they do in-person: by speaking directly with their students. Among other things, this allows us to check for student understanding almost immediately and thus offers an important feedback mechanism. It also enables students to take an active part in the course and to engage directly with the instructor and peers. High levels of engagement and interaction may not always be needed (e.g., in large survey classes where the primary mode of in-person teaching is lecture). But smaller more seminar-based classes, as well as teaching pedagogies that rely heavily on active-learning strategies to encourage student’s participation, will want to consider using at least some synchronous components. Synchronous learning features heavily in my own classes since I transitioned to remote teaching. I am a big believer in real-time interaction as a highly effective and efficient way to teach and learn.5 Accordingly, I favor a participatory and discussion-based teaching style in most of my classes and using live face-to-face video conferencing allows me to engage with my students in that way, even if connectivity issues can present an obstacle to large group-based discussions (see also Glazier in Chapter 10). More importantly, some of the classes I teach at the University of Delaware are designed specifically for international students, often with lower levels of English language proficiency. For these students, the ability to take part in synchronous class sessions is crucial for developing their language 5 Asynchronous communication incurs large overheads and is less effective in establishing information than purely linguistic media, including back and forth conversations in real time (Newport 2021).

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listening and speaking skills. Finally, video-conferencing applications, for all their flaws, are an amazing technology that allows us to see, speak to, and hear from our students virtually whenever we want and wherever we are. Just a few years ago, that would hardly have been possible. There are concrete challenges involved in synchronous teaching. It is now well-established that too much video screen time can have detrimental effects on student motivation and ability to process information (e.g., Wiederhold, 2020; Wolf, 2020). According to new research by Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, “Zoom fatigue,” as the phenomenon has come to be known, is caused by the way digital technologies tend to disrupt the everyday communication practices humans have developed and fine-tuned over centuries (Bailenson, 2021). Researchers identify four separate factors at the heart of this disruptive dynamic: video conferencing exposes people to excessive amounts of close-up eye contact, it forces participants to examine (and evaluate) their own face almost constantly, it leads to a drastic reduction of our usual mobility during conversations, and it increased the cognitive load necessary to hold a conversation even over short periods of time. In short, people are simply not equipped to videoconference regularly and over extended periods of time. Some of these problems can be overcome by making strategic adjustments in the Zoom room. Bailenson, for example, suggests that users should default to “hiding” their self-view during conferencing to minimize the distraction that comes from constantly evaluating oneself in a digital mirror. During long meetings, people should also consider turning their videos off for blocks of time to allow participants to relax and take a break from monitoring their nonverbal communication cues. A more lasting solution is to limit the amount of synchronous time students spend in class, or to cut out altogether. In fact, in the prepandemic world of online teaching, asynchronous teaching was often the norm (Branch & Dousay, 2015). The primary advantage of asynchronous teaching is the flexibility it adds for both students and teachers. Asynchronous modules allow students to complete class assignments, watch pre-recorded lectures, and participate in online discussion on their own time. This added flexibility is particularly useful given the current circumstances of the pandemic. Many of our students did not plan to take classes from home nor the confines of their dorm rooms.

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Striking the “Right” Balance? After considering both approaches carefully and experimenting with a fully synchronous course in the initial transition to emergency remote teaching, I settled for a blended approach that aims for a 60/40 split in favor of synchronous instruction. In practice, this means I expect students to attend synchronous class time regularly but allow for a sizable portion of allotted course time to be moved into asynchronous components. For example, one of my Intro to Global Politics courses at the University of Delaware is scheduled to meet twice a week for 90 minutes of class time. Prior to the pandemic, I would generally use the first 30–45 minutes for lecture and structured discussion, break for 10 minutes, and then resume class with small group-based assignments (think-pair-share) and time for questions and clarifications. When I switched to emergency remote teaching in March 2020, I initially sought to adopt the same approach for the online classroom. In theory, web conferencing would allow me to do everything I did in the physical classroom. Plus, I wanted to cause the least amount of (additional) disruption to the academic and personal lives of my students. However, it quickly became apparent that translating established course routines into the virtual classroom is challenging. For one, class time frequently “dragged on” with students less motivated and willing to engage with the material. Students would zone out halfway through class and I first encountered the dreaded “black box” phenomenon, as students frequently turned off their cameras (I generally expect students to turn their cameras on during class discussion, but not when I am lecturing or when students work on individual projects and assignments). I myself felt a lot more drained after 90 minutes of online teaching than I did following the same amount of work on campus, even though I was following the same lesson plan. I then almost immediately decided to cut synchronous class time and began to structure class along shorter, more manageable lesson modules that students could complete quickly and thus feel a sense of accomplishment by making steady incremental progress. For example, I spent the beginning of each class walking students through the assorted topics and activities we planned to complete that day and did my best to stick to that schedule. In this sense, class time unfolded along a checklist of activities that guided our discussion each day. At the same time, I understood that these ad hoc adjustments, while useful in keeping students more engaged

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and on-track, were not a long-term solution and came with their own set of challenges. For one, I was unhappy with the amount of class time I was losing and with it the course content I usually covered in class. Moreover, the structured nature of the class created a rather stiff learning environment that was very different from the more open and high-energy discussions I wanted to create. I started working on a long-term solution in preparation for next semester’s course load (Summer 2020). The principal component of my plan was to maximize the use of the university’s local LMS (Canvas). Until then, I used Canvas mostly as a convenient dumping ground for files and a place for students to check the syllabus or upload assignments. As part of my new approach, I wanted students to engage more productively with their LMS and maximize some of the features it offered for learning at a distance. I kept my original course outline, which disaggregated the content into modules. Each module covered a specific topic and could be taught as a standalone lesson, although students would be required to complete each model before being able to move on to the next (Fig. 5.1). Each module is housed on Canvas and includes several activities, including asynchronous assessments students complete before and after attending synchronous class sessions. The original structure for each module included a brief introductory page, a link to their assigned readings, a set of pre-recorded videos (i.e., mini lectures), a quiz to test student comprehension, and a set of short writing assignments involving short-answer worksheets and reflection essays (Fig. 5.2).

Fig. 5.1 Overview of course modules on Canvas

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Fig. 5.2 Expanded view of a single Module in Canvas (Introduction to Global Politics)

My primary goal is for students to begin working through their weekly course materials before attending synchronous class. Moving the prerecorded videos onto Canvas allowed me to offload the more traditional lecture components of my class and thus open up space for more active and students centered learning. I tried to keep these videos short (an average of 5–8 minutes), however, that proved difficult at times and I started working on tightening my lectures significantly. The quiz was meant to incentivize students to read the assigned material and watch the lectures. In the new format, class time is limited to 50–60 minutes, with the explicit understanding that students spend the other 30 minutes of “free” class time to work through the modules. In class, I tend to spend the first five minutes going over logistical matters before turning to the learning objectives of the module. At this point, students should be familiar with the outline of the material and primed to discuss key questions and concepts. I often move directly into small group work in breakout rooms so students can talk to each other, compare notes, ask for clarification, and set the parameters for our class discussion that follows. I make it a point to have students record their breakout room conversations on a document that everyone in the class has access to. This way, small group conversations can be tied back to the entire class and students can see what questions and discussion topics are motivating their peers. To pull these different strands of learning together, I decided to center class around a central shared document that serves simultaneously as

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lesson plan, study guide, glossary, and depository for our class notes.6 For convenience, I eventually settled on using a Google Doc (both UD and Haverford are “Google Universities”), but any text document can work for this purpose. The key is to make the document accessible, easy to find, and to stress its usefulness and importance in class. In fact, using the shared text document has gradually replaced the use of slideshows altogether. I initially used slides for the recorded lectures but have since moved to using Google Docs exclusively as the medium to record and present with. The text document has several advantages over using slide shows. For one, it is just simply easier to manipulate it than slides. It also offers vastly more space to add information, including pictures, graphs, and tables and one does not have to worry constantly about “cluttering” up the slide. More importantly, students are more likely to edit to document themselves in my experience, especially when teachers encourage students to use the commenting function to ask questions and discuss among themselves. I also often require students to report their breakout room activities in a short paragraph that is shared with the rest of the class. In many ways, the use of this document has helped me to flip the classroom more effectively than I was able to do prior to the pandemic—students now often expect to take an active part in editing our shared class document by adding notes and asking questions in the comment sections.. The result has been a truly “shared” class artifact that all stakeholders contribute to (Fig. 5.3). I stress the centrality of the document by sharing when students trickle into the Zoom room for class. Accordingly, it is the first thing they see, in addition to each other, and it can help to gradually direct their attention toward class and prime them for the upcoming lesson (Lang 2016). The top of the document begins with the topic and date for each class, a recap of the previous module, and a list of current learning objectives. The structure can help students develop a routine that makes the online learning environment more manageable and sets clear expectations for students and instructions each week. Specifically, this means students can feel more tethered to the course and their shared experiences in ways that are not dissimilar from the experiences they make in an in-person class. Here, the routine of working on the shared document together replaces 6 In my experience, these shared “discussion note” documents have become instrumental in students preparing for course exams and final projects.

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Fig. 5.3 Excerpt from course discussion document (Introduction to International Relations)

the routine of coming to class and interacting in the physical classroom, even if that practice is limited to listening and taking notes (Fig. 5.4). During the second synchronous meeting, I set time aside for students’ questions and clarifications. At this point, I have access to their quiz scores and can use these assessment metrics to identify module-specific bottlenecks to shape the focus of our discussion during the second meeting. Each module ends with students submitting an asynchronous assignment. These range from worksheets for which students answer basic questions taken from the reading and mini lectures to reflective essays or case studies that require higher forms of thinking and learning, including syntheses and application. Designing Effective and Accessible Asynchronous Learning Environments The mixed teaching approach I outlined above is the product of an extended learning process grounded in my own experience, pedagogical

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Fig. 5.4 Excerpt from course discussion document with a focus on course introduction and learning outcomes (Introduction to International Relations)

experimentation, research, and, crucially, a series of online learning workshops I completed during the summer of 2020. Particularly useful was the Design Learning Environments Online (DLEO) course, run by the University of Delaware Faculty Commons’ technology staff from June to July 2020. The workshop stressed two crucial points that became invaluable for me as I designed my own asynchronous learning environment. Firstly, it began with the caveat that asynchronous learning, by definition, can miss the interpersonal and interactive character that is just easier to recreate during synchronous face-to-face meetings. However, the point is not to give up on making online learning interactive and engaging but to think about how one can design it to offer many opportunities for meaningful intellectual exchange and active learning. This intentionality is key here. Related to this point, the workshop addressed what is perhaps the biggest obstacle in the way of effectively integrating asynchronous components into your online course: it takes a great amount of time, resources, and institutional support to design and implement a user

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friendly, accessible, and effective online learning environment. To make this process more transparent and offer some guidance, the following sections will draw out some of the key lessons I picked up from the DLEO workshop and provide examples of how I sought to implement these in my own course. Analysis The pedagogical foundation of the workshop was the ADDIE model, an acronym for the five stages of a cyclical development process including (1) Analysis, (2) Design, (3) Development, (4) Implementation, and (5) Evaluation. The model is analogous to other planning heuristics popular in education including Universal Design Learning (UDL) as well as the backwards design approach (Ralabate, 2011; Wiggins & McTighe, 1998). The first stage, analysis, urges the instructor to consider the underlying motivation for teaching the course prior to the planning stage. What are the desired learning outcomes for the course, what is the timeline for completion of the project, what type of students are likely to enroll in the course, and what are they required to learn? Reexamining these questions is crucial for an effective transition to online teaching. In contrast, holding rigid assumptions, beliefs, and expectations about teaching and learning can limit our ability to adjust teaching practices when necessary (Sunal, 2001). As I planned for my own transition to asynchronous learning, I considered factors such as course classification, prerequisites, whether the course is chosen or required, the technology experience that will be required to complete the course, and students’ likely comfort with different learning experiences (I thought the last point to be particularly important since none of my students originally signed up for an online class). I also reflected (again) on what students should accomplish by the end of the course and sought to match these learning outcomes with appropriate activities and assessments. Here I paid careful attention to what activities would be best face-to-face versus online and how I could facilitate learning and collaboration outside of class. Many of the standard assessments in the Intro to Global Politics course remained unchanged (e.g., quizzes, worksheets, reflection essays). I made the biggest adjustment to the format and implementation of the exams. Prior to the pandemic, exams were time-limited and proctored in class. Over the course of 90 minutes, students answered a combination of

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multiple-choice questions, concept definition, and short answer/essay questions taken from the readings and class discussion. Once we moved online, I decided against proctoring the exam altogether and turned it into an open book take-home exam that students complete and submit over the course of a weekend. My motivation behind the change was twofold: first I wanted to make the exam phase as stress free as possible; my students were stressed enough as it was and compassion, empathy, and understanding seemed like the appropriate course of action under these circumstances.7 More importantly, I wanted to adapt the exam format to the primary mode of learning as part of the new course design. Because students now have more time and independence to complete course components, this should be reflected in the primary assessment of the class. It also stressed the need to develop ownership and accountability throughout—two key components of asynchronous learning (Garrison & Cleveland-Innes, 2005). Design The workshop also stressed the importance of design in creating effective and accessible online learning structures. If nothing else, efficacious design should involve the learner. According to research, students feel a heightened level of engagement when they receive regular updates about current and upcoming content and any attempt to increase social presence creates a simulative environment of a real-world experience for students (Cobb, 2009). Instructors can also use inquiry-based learning (IBL), which requires students to investigate questions they have concerning the content (Pedaste et al., 2015). One strategy that online instructors can implement to establish IBL is through the implementation of Know, Want to Know, and Learned (KWL) charts (Ogle, 1986). Utilizing KWL charts can initiate exploration of the content as students identify what they know and what they want to know about the topic. I implement part of this strategy by beginning synchronous class sessions with a regular refresher segment that recaps some of the material we covered before. Using a shared document can also make it easy for students to share questions and concerns and collect them on the document. The teacher can then 7 I will return to the issue of radical empathy and its implication for teaching in the conclusion.

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attend to these questions even after class and students can go back to the document for clarification. Design should also aim to facilitate collaboration among students and teachers. For example, instructors can assign roles to assist with active participation of all students during both synchronous and asynchronous segments of the class. Roles can include facilitator (serves as team leader and key contact to instructor), interpreter (reteaches concepts), reminder (reiterates assignment criteria and deadlines), and mentor (review’s peer work and offers professional critique before submission). Prior to starting the assignment, instructors can encourage groups to determine who will handle what aspects of the assignment and indicate when each component will be completed. Although these strategies are useful in all learning environments, facilitating collaborative work is especially important during asynchronous learning. Another crucial design strategy is to develop a clear and consistent learning structure that helps students navigate the remote and asynchronous components of their learning environment. To create an intentionally inviting online environment, courses should offer intuitive navigation tools. If nothing else, each module should have the same structure. The location of reading materials, assignments, tasks, collaborative opportunities, etc., always should be in the same location and format. An effective strategy for module development is to begin with an overview page that outlines all readings, tasks, and assignments required for the module, along with corresponding due dates for each item. Depending on the LMS, instructors can hyperlink items in the overview page directly to the assignments, which provides a clean and organized feel to the course. The overview page adds to the course’s structure and can help keep students engaged in the learning process and increase academic integrityFig. 5.5. Each module started with an overview page that listed the relevant learning objectives, provided a brief introduction and some conceptual scaffolding for the material, and listed the individual tasks students had to complete throughout the module (Fig. 5.6). Finally, there are course design rubrics, such as those from Quality Matters (qualitymatters.org), which can assess course design according to research-based rubrics. I strongly believe in the pedagogical value of rubrics in all settings, but this only becomes more evident in remote and asynchronous environments where clear expectations are key.

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Fig. 5.5 Detailed look at the overview page to Module 1 on Canvas (Introduction to Global Politics)

Fig. 5.6 Detailed look at the “To-Do” list as part of the overview page to Module 1 on Canvas (Introduction to Global Politics)

Development & Implementation The workshop also stressed the importance of mindful and intentional planning to guarantee the smoothest roll-out possible. It is crucial, for example, to build in time to test your asynchronous course modules, especially if this is your first time trying your hand at it. This includes relatively mundane steps like checking video links are properly embedded, all

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hyper-links are working, and, if applicable, visual module content has the necessary image permissions. Verify that all multimedia applications work in as many different computer configurations as possible and be aware of and troubleshoot any problems early. More generally, it is useful to get early and regular feedback from others, those familiar and not familiar with the content if possible. Another useful addition to any asynchronous component is a course orientation module that presents students with course-specific information (i.e., introductory letter or video, syllabus, schedule) and general information and resources (i.e., library, university policies). A course orientation module can help instructions make clear how to get started and where to find various course components. These may be part of a learning module or perhaps some are a separate module in themselves. A “Getting Started” or “Start Here” section, for example, helps students know where to begin in this course experience and you may want to include your welcome letter or video introducing yourself and an overview of the course. You can also use that space to share course goals and learning objectives. In my case, I designed an orientation module that asked students to complete several assignments without the pressure of receiving a grade for it. This was meant to make them more comfortable with the online environment and to set clear expectations for what is to come. After completing the orientation module, I can be more confident that students understand how to get and submit their assignment, how to post and participate in discussion, and how to take their quizzes and examsFig. 5.7. Orientation modules are also great to provide students with general information regarding navigating the course, technology resources, and where to get support. Are students given all the information they need to accomplish some of the basic common tasks that will be needed in your course? Do they know how to access their LMS, set up and use an appropriate browser, install needed plug-ins, read files, and access both audio and video recordings? I wanted to be especially sensitive to various levels of online learning experience students may bring into the classroom. Although Canvas has been a part of the University of Delaware’s learning community for some time, I know from conversations with colleagues that not everyone uses the LMS for their courses. Accordingly, I had to expect that some of my students may have little to no experience navigating these asynchronous platforms and so I focused on the technical aspects of online learning in the orientation module. Among other things,

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Fig. 5.7 Expanded view of Online Classroom Orientation Module on Canvas (Introduction to Global Politics)

I linked students to University resources, including “how-to” videos that gave step-by-step instructions for how to complete basic tasks online (Fig. 5.8). You can also use the orientation module as a place to clarify expectations regarding proper online behavior. How should students communicate with each other in discussions, chats, and breakout rooms? How often should they respond to online discussions, and what is the proper etiquette for working collaboratively on shared documents and final group projects? These questions can be answered as part of the orientation module but should also be listed clearly as part of the syllabus. Such orientation activities can help students get to know each other by, for example, asking students to introduce themselves with a short video (which you should model by doing it first). In my classes, I ask students to complete a discussion prompt as part of the orientation module (Fig. 5.9). The primary purpose of the activity is for students to introduce themselves through images, videos, or a short text and then respond to their classmates’ prompts by commenting on similarities or interesting differences. At the same time, the activity provides students with a low-stress exercise that shows them how to submit responses and engage in online discussion.

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Fig. 5.8 Detailed view of the technology troubleshooting page that is included in the Online Classroom Orientation Module on Canvas (Introduction to Global Politics)

Evaluation Lastly, effective design will allow practitioners to review their courses through the lens of best practices. One way to reflect upon course designs is through student feedback. One can also keep a reflection journal to note issues that come up during the semester and address in the next course design phase. In addition to the standard course evaluations used by my department and the English Language Institute, I designed an anonymous survey to share with my students during the last week of class. The survey begins by acknowledging the challenging nature of the transition and thanking students for their patience and ongoing commitment to their personal education. I then asked students three specific questions to reflect on their learning experience with the new online environment. The first question asked students to report on an online activity or assignment they completed this semester that helped them learn the course material. The second question asked students to discuss something they experienced in the online classroom this semester that made learning more difficult for them. The third question was more general and asked

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Fig. 5.9 Detailed view of the instructions for submitting a practice assignment on Canvas (Introduction to Global Politics)

students to name something they would change about one or more classes to make learning remotely easier for them. Students mentioned several specific assignment types that appear to have worked well in the online environment. Respondents mention the use of videos (e.g., YouTube) helps to break up the monotony of the lecture. Several students also mentioned that frequent writing assignments provided more opportunities to practice composition and replacing multiple-choice quizzes with short answer/essay assignments provided a more meaningful learning experience online.8 Beyond the identification of specific assignments, responses clustered around several themes that students identified positively with the online learning environment. For one, the move to remote teaching appears to help some students access, collect, share, and use various course materials,

8 These results are based on the analysis of three semester-based surveys (Spring, Summer, Fall 2020) and include a total of 173 individual responses.

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including documents on which classmates and instructors can provide regular frequent feedback. Several responses mentioned the use of shared google docs in and outside of class time, and a number of students were particularly appreciative of the feedback they received from their instructor. Several responses mentioned the use of Google Drive as central to their learning in the remote environment by making collecting and sharing course materials easier. On a more general note, students appreciated the opportunity to watch recorded lectures multiple times, to meet with instructors during Zoom office hours, and to work on final projects (including poster presentations) collaboratively via sharing platforms. One student remarked that “having all of the materials in one place online helps to remember stuff.” A second theme centers around the increased opportunities for collaboration afforded by online teaching and the breakout room function specifically. Students mentioned that work in smaller groups helped them relax in an otherwise high-stress environment and provided more opportunities to exchange ideas. Moreover, working together in Zoom and Canvas seems to create more pressure to work collaboratively, challenging students to communicate with others clearly and work in teams (see also Hernandez in Chapter 4). In contrast to some of the positive feedback listed above, some students found it harder to communicate with the instructor and classmates. For example, several students mentioned that they no longer had the option of asking the instructor for clarification during an in-class exam or assignments. Thus, while some students seem to excel in the online environment and become more communicative, others may be more intimidated by the use of online technology to engage directly with others. Instructors should be mindful of that “digital” divide. At the same time, some students went as far as to express doubt that online learning is a functional alternative and that they are often just going through the motions without “learning anything.” One student commented that “honestly, none of the assignments I have completed online have helped me learn the material. Online learning is very challenging since I just do not have the motivation to work on my assignment and learn the material.” Along the same lines, a student responded, “I have not really learned anything since switching to online learning.” Another response noted: “I had a much harder time learning in all of my classes. I cannot think of an assignment that really helped.” In conclusion, initial feedback indicates that thoughtful planning can mitigate some of the challenges associated

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with moving to asynchronous learning although students may still prefer in-person teaching more generally. An alternative to running a complete survey at semester’s end is to check in with students throughout the semester and ask how they are adapting to the online teaching environment, regardless of how much of their class time is spent asynchronously. I have used this type of feedback activity for many years and deploy it even more regularly during online teaching—just to get a sense of how students are doing in and outside of class. First, I ask them if there is something we do as part of the course that is not helping them learn and they would prefer to stop doing. This could be an assignment or an activity we do either in or outside of class. Next, I ask them to tell me something they would like to start doing to make learning (online) easier for them. Lastly, I ask if there is an activity they are doing in class that is working well for them and they wish to continue or perhaps do more of (Fig. 5.10). Checking in with students during the semester gives instructors the opportunity to adjust as the semester goes on and thereby maximize the course’s teaching and learning efficacy. More importantly, it demonstrates

Fig. 5.10 Stop, Start, Continue, survey prompt for collecting student feedback during the semester (Introduction to International Relations)

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the willingness on behalf of the instructor to be reflexive, open to feedback, and aware that the original course design can be approved upon. It also signals that ownership of the course is shared between the instructors and the students and encourages the latter to become more involved in shaping the flow of instruction.

Conclusion Above I discussed my firsthand experience adjusting to the remote teaching environment many of us adopted in response to the COVID19 pandemic—often with little or no practical familiarity on how to design effective and accessible online courses. I suggested that a blended approach that mixes synchronous and asynchronous components was one way to design courses that balance our desire for face-to-face interaction with a broader concern for creating a more flexible and compassionate learning experience for our students. To support my contention, I provided specific examples from my own course design and insights gained from participating in several remote teaching workshops offered by the University of Delaware’s Faculty Commons in the summer of 2020. Before I conclude, however, I wanted to raise two issues that present important caveats to the chapter’s central proposition. First, I understand that not all of us will have the opportunity to design our own courses from scratch. Especially adjunct or contingent faculty might be asked to teach courses that are pre-designed. Departments may have specific guidelines for how certain courses are to be taught—synchronously, asynchronously, or a mixture of both. Relatedly, the chapter began by acknowledging that to design a remote learning environment takes time and energy that some instructors may simply not have. Nor is there a silver bullet approach to transitioning from in-person to remote teaching that is sure to bring about the best results. At the end of the day, we all do what we can, to the best of our ability, with the resources at our disposal. When in doubt, it may be best to let intuition and experience guide your teaching practice—and never hesitate to ask for help. The second issue concerns the relationship between students and instructors. Above I suggested that the circumstances of learning remotely during a global pandemic means instructors ought to be particularly sensitive to the needs of students. Empathy, understanding, and compassion should be the guiding principles of effective online teaching, especially since students may not be prepared to learn online under less-than-ideal

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circumstances (nor have most of them have chosen to do so). However, this raises the question of why we should not always have the highest level of compassion. Is there something qualitatively different about our current circumstances that warrants a radically different approach to how we relate to our students? Perhaps not. At least for myself, teaching during the pandemic has reminded me of how important it is to consider our vocation in relational rather than transactional terms. Yes, we exchange knowledge, or the skills to create knowledge, for the time and attention our students give us. But teaching is first and foremost about building meaningful and lasting relationships. I for one, want to take that lesson with me beyond my pandemic pedagogy. At the same time, I believe it is important to acknowledge how difficult it can be to retain a sense of normalcy and routine in the virtual classroom. Compassion is called for. If nothing else, we as instructors should do what we can make ourselves available and approachable to students. Part of this is to maintain a continual presence in your online course: students should sense that you are monitoring and following up their progress regularly. Course modules should be on time and up to date, and we should get feedback to students promptly. Collaborative and team-based activities can also help to create a sense of community and keep the class connected. Together, our commitment to these practices can help provide a modicum of solidity in these unsettled times.

Works Cited Bailenson, J. N. (2021). Nonverbal overload: A Theoretical Argument for the causes of zoom fatigue. Technology, Mind, and Behavior, 2(1). https://doi. org/10.1037/tmb0000030 Branch, R. M., & Dousay, T. A. (2015). Survey of instructional design models. Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT). Cobb, S. C. (2009). Social presence and online learning: A current view from a research perspective. Journal of Interactive Online Learning, 8(3), 241–254. DeNoyelles, A., Zydney, J. M., & Chen, B. (2014). Strategies for creating a community of inquiry through online asynchronous discussions. Journal of Online Learning and Teaching, 10(1), 153–165. Garrison, D. R., & Cleveland-Innes, M. (2005). Facilitating cognitive presence in online learning: Interaction is not enough. The American Journal of Distance Education, 19(3), 133–148. Hodges, C., Moore, S., Lockee, B., Trust, T., & Bond, A. (2020, March 27). The difference between emergency remote teaching and online learning.

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Educause Review. Retrieved January 7 2021, from https://er.educause.edu/ articles/2020/3/the-difference-between-emergency-remote-teaching-and-onl ine-learning Means, B., Bakia, M., & Murphy, R. (2014). Learning online: What research tells us about whether. Routledge. Ogle, D. M. (1986). KWL: A teaching model that develops active reading of expository text. The Reading Teacher, 39(6), 564–570. Pedaste, M., Mäeots, M., Siiman, L. A., de Jong, T., van Riesen, S. A. N., Kamp, E. T., Manoli, C. C., Zacharia, Z. C., & Tsourlidaki, E. (2015). Phases of inquiry-based learning: Definitions and the inquiry cycle. Educational Research Review, 14, 47–61. Ralabate, P. K. (2011, August 30). Universal design for learning: meeting the needs of all students. The ASHA Leader. Retrieved January 9 2021, from https://leader.pubs.asha.org/doi/10.1044/leader.FTR2.16102011.14 Sunal, D., Hodges, J., Sunal, C., Whitaker, K., Freeman, L. Edwards, L., et al. (2001). Teaching science in higher education: Faculty professional development and barriers to change. School Science and Mathematics, 101(5), 246–257. Wiederhold, B. K. (2020). Connecting through technology during the Coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic: Avoiding ‘zoom fatigue’. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 23(7), 437–438. Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (1998). What is backward design? In G. Wiggins & J. McTighe (Eds.), Understanding by design. ASCD. Wolf, C. R. (2020, May 14). Virtual platforms are helpful tools but can add to our stress. Psychology Today. Retrieved February 7, 2021, from https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/the-desk-the-mental-hea lth-lawyer/202005/virtual-platforms-are-helpful-tools-can-add-our-stress

PART II

Caring for Students amid Crisis

CHAPTER 6

Out from the Wreck: International Relations and Pedagogies of Care Anjali Kaushlesh Dayal

How can international relations professors care for students who are facing structural crisis, if we understand “care” as the duties of providing support, assistance, mutual respect, and tools for navigating and confronting disaster, in the context of their instructional duties? What, if anything, can an introduction to a notoriously chilly, bleak discipline offer students besieged by unpredictability, death, and upheaval? For students and faculty teaching at New York City’s universities, the sudden shift to online instruction in March 2020 layered educational upheaval on top of local disaster: as residents of an early global epicenter for a novel illness, New Yorkers were plunged into a chaos of sirens and mobile morgues stacked with their beloved dead; as scholars, students, and members of university communities, however, we were charged primarily with staying inside and continuing our work as best we could, and asked to maintain the academic rhythms of the semester in the conditions of rapid,

A. K. Dayal (B) Department of Political Science, Fordham University, New York City, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. A. Szarejko (eds.), Pandemic Pedagogy, Political Pedagogies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83557-6_6

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dangerous flux. A semester designed and begun with established patterns of instruction and evaluation suddenly became one of interruption, dislocation, and constant emergency—and yet the work continued then, as it does now: amidst mass death, isolation, financial crises, and widespread unpredictability, learning needs to abide, and universities demand we produce grades and assessments, ranking students’ mastery of material. As a discipline that examines processes of cooperation and conflict between states, and which in its most mainstream variants sidelines individual crisis, grief, and disaster to the machinations of structure and elite processes, international relations can help students place their situations in context of other disasters—but pessimistic, state-centric accounts of international relations can also leave students in despair, with little sense of how their fates and actions aggregate up to the whole. This chapter investigates the imperatives of care, flexibility, and improvisation that navigating these layered crises requires and offers an account of the international relations learning goals I privileged when my students were unexpectedly, simultaneously beset and asked to continue learning. Drawing on my own experience and conversations with students who navigated New York during the pandemic, as well as scholarship on care in the classroom, strategies of instruction in crisis zones, and critical and feminist pedagogy, I argue that generosity, carefully paring back to essential learning goals, and emphasizing what international relations can teach us about cooperation, collaboration, mutual aid, and collective restitution are key strategies for helping students learn in crisis. Writing from a year into the pandemic, there’s been little room to evaluate how effective these strategies are, of course. Instead, to draw on Adrienne Rich (1973, p. 54), this chapter is an exercise in diving into the wreck—“the wreck and not the story of the wreck,” revisited to “see the damage that was done/and the treasures that prevail.” When we move beyond the urgent phase of this pandemic, some students—as ever—will remain in crisis, and future disruptions may be likely for any of us. This chapter is an effort to delve into what I learned by teaching through an acute early phase of a crisis and then to cast up whatever might be of use to inform future efforts. Necessity pushed me toward the approach I outline here—an improvisational generosity emerged as the only possible mode of instruction and evaluation early in March 2020, while the bleakness of circumstance by May 2020 pushed me to reconsider course content, as well. Two brief personal notes: this essay focuses on my introduction to international relations course, but I teach three separate classes every Spring semester, and

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in the first week of March 2020, I had surgery. I spent the last week in February carefully planning the next few weeks of classes ahead of time to accommodate recovery, but I did little to plan for full-scale instructional disruption, despite clear indications of substantial community spread in New York, mostly because I didn’t really know how. Just five days after I had surgery, we transitioned to online learning, rendering my plans moot. My immediate choices about instruction were all therefore made assuming my own challenges coping with the upheaval would be mirrored in students being asked to leave dorms on short notice, perhaps to face uncertain home or living circumstances: every accommodation I made would have to be as generous as possible, both because I could not possibly know what students were facing and because I myself needed a gentleness for recovery that seemed very distant. I was not planning on telling them I had had surgery—indeed, it costs me something to say it here—but so, too, I realized, should I assume many of them would not rush to tell me, or any instructor, if something were to leave them feeling less than whole. Accordingly, I decided my only hope of securing this mutual generosity and gentleness was by being completely clear about what I wanted and needed students to learn, what I no longer cared about them doing, and what I expected from them. I began to record lectures for asynchronous delivery, all pared back to the most vital points, all ending with a series of discussion questions for us to take up during our regularly-scheduled course times via Zoom, and all designed to reinforce the single fundamental point or debate I wanted them to walk out into the world with, with every possible extraneous piece of information jettisoned. With no capacity to fundamentally reimagine the course mid-semester, I anchored my approach in conveying in the most straightforward way possible the most fundamental dimensions and debates within the discipline instead. Two months later, at the beginning of May 2020, I sat down to record the last lecture of the semester—a lesson about civil war, intervention, and the Rwandan genocide that I close every semester with, and which allows me to tie together various strands of their course material and my research expertise. In the intervening weeks, as I had recorded new lectures and improvised a new architecture around a previously-constructed syllabus, a staggering volume of death had unfolded around us—and with little sense still of how the virus was transmitted, and no clear treatment yet for the virus, a fearful, complete cloistering had set in: it was hard to imagine anything but seeing what, exactly, tomorrow might bring, and

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every human interaction seemed fraught with danger. At one point in April, I counted 16 sirens in the background of a 24-minute lecture on international political economy I had recorded, shrugged, and sent it out anyway—there was no guarantee a subsequent recording effort wouldn’t end up with more sirens in the background. Yet at first I ended the term the way I always did. “We often fail to act when it comes to saving strangers,” I said, closing out the semester as the last slide gave way to a black, blank screen. I had ended this class with some version of this line for five years, but it was clear the moment I said it that it wouldn’t do now. Students already knew that people could fail to make even small adjustments to their lives to save others. They knew help wasn’t coming anytime soon. Indeed, they were living some version of this line. Two students had cried during Zoom office hours just the day before, telling me who they’d lost; the view directly out my window at my mother’s apartment, where I was staying, was straight into a mobile morgue; every weekday I woke between 2 and 4 AM while they turned on floodlights to place more people in it. My experience wasn’t unique: the city was blotted with these mobile morgues, and the Bronx neighborhood where Fordham is located and its adjacent zip codes became for a time among the places hardest-hit by COVID in the world.1 I couldn’t, I knew, end the semester this way, leaving students in the dark, ruined place onto which so many roads in international relations converge. So I kept talking, keeping up the improvisational act that I’d been doing all semester. I reminded them what they’d learned about international cooperation; about the possibilities for change in the international system; about social movements and civil resistance; about the strategies short of military force for mitigating human suffering that we’d discussed; about how sometimes, under some conditions, we do choose mutual rescue and mutual aid. I told them that—in possession as they were now of these theories of politics, of change, of cooperation, of mutual rescue—the world awaited their work, needed their work. I kept talking not to give them false hope, but because the wreck around us was clear, and our lives were already ensnared in the “ribs of disaster” (Rich, 1973)—what we needed now were tools. Taken together, these two moves—explicitly adopting a feminist pedagogy of care that structured the form of the course, and a critical 1 “Total count of COVID-19 cases based on patient address by ZIP code‚” https:// www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/imm/covid-19-cases-by-zip-04292020-1.pdf

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pedagogy emphasizing international relation’s collective solutions that structured course content—constituted my effort to adapt introductory international relations instruction to unfolding crisis, and to animate some part of it as an urgent pathway out of disaster. This chapter proceeds in two parts: it outlines a pedagogical approach to international relations anchored around the principles of transparency, generosity, and flexibility, and then, it advocates for course content oriented toward the tools we do have to address crises—again, not to give false hope to students, but to help them understand what we know is possible, with the understanding that students who already feel despair need to understand the nihilism animating some visions of international relations without believing it is the only true mode of politics. The first part of this chapter outlines the pedagogy of care that structured the course requirements and design, while the second part of the chapter discusses the critical pedagogy that informed the course content.

Adopting a Pedagogy of Care I begin from the premise that no one can flourish in a learning environment when they do not feel whole or safe. In an ordinary semester, this requires building a respectful classroom culture that emphasizes the equal dignity of all people—and therefore all students—in order to make rigorous, challenging, and sometimes discomfiting intellectual inquiry possible in the condition of diversity. But this is a minimum in crisis. Indeed, in crisis, I found I had to make explicit the implicitlyheld ideas about teaching, students, and the classroom that I had been burying under course structures that hinged on evaluating students, even as I emphasized their learning and understanding over grades in my rhetoric—pushed by the imperatives of limited time, many students, and the pressures of the tenure track, I had been determining the bulk of most students’ grades with a few standard, in-class exams that were comparatively straightforward to grade and scrupulously “fair” by the terms of my rubrics, but which reinforced an “audit culture” of “hierarchy, competition and individualism” (Motta & Bennett, 2018, pp. 634–635). “Audit culture,” write Sara Motta and Anna Bennett (2018, p. 625), “reinforces historically deeply gendered and unequal power relations in academe and pushes toward elitist banking approaches in teaching and learning, and instrumental and elitist relationships with society…the very conditions, commitments and practices of mutality, relatedness, and

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dialogue that foster and inclusive and nurturing higher educational institution become relegated to irrelevance, and explicitly derided.” There are practical reasons for giving closed-note, in-class exams—but they neither suited the moment, nor did they accord with the views I actually held of students, or of learning. My approach to students had always implicitly been that “banking” or deficit models of learning are insufficient ways to understand how students and teachers interact: students are not merely empty shells, waiting to receive knowledge, and the difference between my understanding of the world and theirs is not simply that I know more than they do, despite my expertise in their field of study. Instead, they are dimensional human beings who come to the classroom knowing something different than I do—and who in this moment required me to be a dimensional human being far more than they needed an auditor. Most research and writing on care focuses on primary and secondary education, and while there are meaningful debates about best practices and classroom strategies in these contexts, a comprehensive body of scholarship argues that uncaring classrooms can alienate students, while caring instructors appropriately invested in their students’ welfare foster important avenues for intellectual and personal growth (Larsen, 2015). There is far less research on caring in the post-secondary classroom, where research has sometimes operationalized caring as instructor immediacy or availability—“the degree to which an educator is perceived as approachable and open to students” (Ibid., 15). Yet caring still clearly matters in college classrooms beyond instructor availability (Um et al., 2012)—and scholars and teachers who work with students facing crisis underline this in their scholarship and strategies. From community colleges to conflict zones (Imad, 2020), instructors argue that care for the whole student—cura personalis, in the language of my Jesuit mentors and employers—facilitates learning where it otherwise might be impossible. Indeed, drawing on an argument that Melody Fonseca of University of Puerto Rico Rio Piedras made to illuminate her teaching strategy in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, focusing on the whole student; on adapting the classroom for their needs; and on introducing flexibility into rigid institutions can be a radical form of reimagining international relations—a way of refocusing the discipline away from its traditional standard-bearers and gatekeepers by enabling the exact people often marginalized in international relations theory to better participate in its discourse and construction (Fonseca, 2018). Feminist scholars echo this understanding of pedagogy, emphasizing “a holistic sense of education as a relational dynamic” that “brings

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attention as much to the experience of joy, vulnerability, empowerment, and powerlessness, for both students and teachers in their role in pedagogical processes of both ‘reproduction of hegemony’ and its contestation” (Motta & Bennett, 2018, p. 642). For students who navigated New York in the early days of the pandemic, asynchronous lectures and virtual discussion sessions provided a common platform and structured interaction across contexts, but the actual scattering of students meant they were immediately facing radically different circumstances, and accordingly required radically different things of me. Care could entail being more interventionist, checking in with students who appeared to be struggling more frequently, or helping connect students with university resources to address food insecurity or a lack of internet or computer access. Care could also entail being far less interventionist: not just accepting that some struggling students were going to put their health and the health of those they loved ahead of attending class, but encouraging it, with the understanding that penalizing them for normal human behavior in a tumultuous time was not only unkind, but also was neither more likely to make them more likely to learn anything nor likely to leave the class richer for making them feel derelict. In this sense, as Oumar Ba has written, both in Chapter 7 and elsewhere, “a pedagogy of care entails a commitment to ensure that students will have the support they need to submit all assignments and complete the course,” even when this comes at the expense of strict enforcement or prioritizing learning over other necessities (Ba, 2021). I oriented this pedagogy of care along three organizing ideas that emerged early in March 2020, and which I then formalized for inclusion in my subsequent syllabi. Each of my courses is explicitly organized around the principles of transparency, generosity, and flexibility. Each class—like Oumar Ba and Michelle Allendoerfer’s classes—received pre-recorded lectures and then had a regularly-scheduled optional smallgroup discussion in real-time via Zoom, with each lecture ending with a set of discussion questions that they would take up in the synchronous sessions via breakout room with one another, and then in a joint set of discussions with me. This is an approach that echoes Ba and Allendoerfer’s arguments in Chapters 7 and 8 and that prioritizes student well-being in order to enable learning in crisis circumstances through multiple modes of engagement and multiple avenues for learning. Asynchronous lectures enabled students to work through material at their own pace, even when they were unable to join synchronous sessions, and enabling students

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to remain engaged even when circumstances made them very differently able to participate in course lectures (Allendoerfer, Chapter 8); students turned in six low-stakes assignments over the course of the semester which they could work on by themselves, or together in live Zoom sessions where I was also available. Meanwhile, live Zoom discussions served to build community and to—as Ba argues in Chapter 7—serve as a lively space in a time of mass death.2 My syllabi all include the following language: The mode of instruction for this course is online. Given the danger and unpredictability of the Covid-19 pandemic, a fully online course best allows us to focus on the material at hand without potential disruptions that might unfold over the semester. Our lives will be different during this time period than they have been in past semesters, and some of us may encounter enormous challenges as we are trying to engage with the course materials. To accommodate this, the class is built around the goals of transparency, flexibility, and generosity. • Transparency: One thing I hope everyone will take away from any international relations course I teach is that we as individuals are all shaped by big structural forces beyond our control. This is one of those times. It may not always be easy to focus on work during these difficult times. Everyone’s challenges will be different, and the personal, professional, financial, and physical stresses any of you may encounter in the coming months may affect your ability to engage with the course as you want to. My primary concern in this course is that you to learn something. The things we learn in this course are vital for you to know. If you walk away from this class having thought deeply about why states sometimes cooperate and sometimes are in conflict; how states use violence; what makes some international policy decisions difficult; what kinds of trade-offs policy makers consider when making policy; why international cooperation is important, what makes it difficult, what benefits, dangers, and assistance it can bring to people worldwide, and if you can reflect on some of these lessons as you move through the world, then you will be better prepared for life in the twenty-first century, no matter what career you go on to.

2 Ba, this volume.

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I hope you will take the material and course seriously because they are important—and the best way for you to learn during these times is to focus on the material, not to be concerned with your grade when, for many of you, your ability to work, concentrate, and focus may end up out of your hands. I recognize you are taking this class at an unpredictable, difficult time. The course is designed to keep you engaged with the material throughout the semester, with smaller assignments rooted in discussion to help us understand the major concepts of the course. • Flexibility: The course is designed with flexibility in mind, and the arrangement of the course should hopefully enable you to be engaged and involved. The lectures will be available in multiple formats— video recording, PDF, audio recording—with the hope that this will make accessing materials straightforward regardless of your internet connectivity. If you are in a time zone other than EST and attending your discussion section is a challenge; if you are unable to access course materials; if your internet access or study space is unreliable, please communicate this with me. We will try to find another solution that will enable you to learn. • Generosity: Bad times demand mutual understanding and mutual grace. Please be respectful of one another and of me; please be generous to one another in discussion and in communication.3 The course’s grading system is designed with generosity in mind, too— as you will see below, most assignments are built around a check/check plus/check minus system. This is the only way to fairly grade people who may be facing radically different circumstances at this time. There is no reasonable or fair way to rank you on a spectrum of A to F using usual evaluation metrics (Burke, 2020). Accordingly, the evaluations are designed to assess whether you understand the material well (a check plus), whether your understanding needs further clarification (a check), or whether you are struggling with the material (a check minus); each of these categories, as noted below, translates to a certain number of points toward your grade; the total number of points adds up to 100, so you can check your grade at any time yourself. If I do my job well and you are engaged in the material, you can do well in the course. This does not mean the course itself is easy—the material at times can be very challenging—it means that I am trying to assess your understanding, not to rank you.

3 This approach draws on arguments outlined in Burke (2020).

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Flexibility and transparency are, as Allendoerfer discusses in Chapter 8, well-established ways to engage diverse student populations in the classroom and enable them to learn. Generosity, on the other hand, is often confused with a lack of rigor. In a world where discipline is a cardinal virtue, a system of mutual grace might easily be misunderstood as sloppiness, or fostering laziness, or failing to teach students accountability. But each of these determinations rests on comparing actual students to some fictional ideal student with perfect control over their life circumstances whose intent is to defraud the instructor, or whose choice is to do shoddy work. But even this student, even if they exist in a pandemic, neither benefits from nor learns anything more from an unkind, Draconian classroom than they would from a more generous one where rigor resides in approaching the material with a sharp eye while approaching one another with mutual respect. Critical feminist scholarship is again relevant here, highlighting how a classroom that approaches students as whole people worthy of respect creates the conditions for “careful epistemological work” that facilitates flourishing inquiry from multiple perspectives (Motta & Bennett, 2018, p. 642). Taken together, these principles seek to frame the virtual classroom as a place where students are first people and then learners—where acknowledging their full personhood, and the challenges that they might face, is an integral part of the course, and where understanding themselves as confronting forces beyond their control can inform their study of international relations.

Other Worlds Are Possible: Teaching Introductory International Relations as Constructive and Constructivist Indeed, “a pandemic pedagogy of care,” Ba writes, “opens up the possibility of ‘doing IR as if people mattered’” (2021, p. 172). As a branch of American political science, international relations is so often organized to privilege the role of states and not of peoples—it highlights domination instead of solidarity; it begins with a minimalist story about city-states and Westphalia and anarchy instead of with a rich and complicated story about empire and global exchange and variation in cooperation and exploitation; it can shy away from complicated questions about race and hierarchy and power in favor of millennia-old maxims about the strong doing what they

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will and the weak suffering what they must. Even in international relations’ methodologically sophisticated modern variants, bodies stack up on the edges of regression models, and the unnamed and uncounted dead give theories their gravity even as the dead’s humanity is never invoked or rendered whole in any way for the reader. This is depressing. It is depressing in the best of times. And the purpose of political science is not necessarily to provide hope. But nor is it to take students confronting a dark time and beat the remaining hope out of them by offering them one vision of politics without showing them that we know other versions of the world are possible—that inherent in our basic understanding of international relations is the possibility of other worlds (Srivastava, 2020). If, having learned about processes of international cooperation, students can look around the world and see how they have failed to curb the rapid spread of a virus, well then, part of the function of an international relations education is to compel them to think through what might change politics to facilitate cooperation, and how they themselves might be involved in changing these politics. This is a perspective anchored in constructivist approaches to international relations and in critical pedagogy—an understanding of international relations instruction that asks students to connect their knowledge to power and constructive action (Giroux, 2010). Accordingly, I have reframed the course around material that can help students make these meaningful connections—that do not just explain international relations, but also provide students with meaningful tools with which to confront the truly isolated, frightening world they were experiencing. This involved a comparatively straightforward pedagogical shift—for example, during the second week of every semester I had always assigned JoAnn Tickner’s (2017) work on feminist international relations, but always as a corrective to the work they had just read—as a way of illustrating that the realist formulation of human nature was partial at best, and that the world was also generative, collaborative, and supportive. And then later in the semester, I had taught global governance, offering students Elinor Ostrom’s work alongside more pessimistic visions of international cooperation (Dietz et al., 2003). Now, I offered students a reframed through-thread, beginning with Tickner, running through scholarship that highlighted global and local movements that did shape state action, all the way through Ostrom’s work, human rights literature that outlines how international agreements can be lassos or levers for action (Simmons, 2009), testimony from

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Congressman John Lewis on building movements for human dignity (Lewis, 2017), Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stepan’s (2017) work on the efficacy of civil resistance—a body of scholarship and evidence that asks how people shape international relations, not simply how states shape people’s lives. The distance between these two strands of international relations is a space for constructive action and for dynamic discussion— and it could proceed in applied ways, not simply abstract ones. Why did states succeed at eradicating endemic polio in most of the world in the 1990s, while failing to coordinate in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, for example? Why have states been successful at building a European Union, but not a global compact to meaningfully confront climate change? Is the distance between these outcomes surmountable through collective action? What kind of collective action? What would keep those politics from emerging in the world? What trade-offs and what conceptions of the good do states and people consider when undertaking these decisions? Why is a pessimistic, state-centric model such a dominant way of imagining international politics? Reframing an introduction to international relations syllabus in this way didn’t require tossing out standard texts or even tossing out the standard reader. It just required recentering the locus of conversation, ensuring that the full possibilities of political action that states and people can undertake are on the table—not because students needed to be spun a brighter world than there exists, but because they could easily see the darker world around them. An introduction to international relations course should teach students that there is no one true mode of politics, and that the world around them is not given as any one thing—and accordingly, in a plague-season, students needed not just to learn what kinds of cooperation, mutual aid, and mutual rescue were possible, but also what the key stumbling blocks and possibilities for action were: a practical, positive politics for dark times. “What will survive us/has already begun,” writes the poet Stephanie Burt; “You can build in a wreck” (2017, p. 91). This is an essay from the midst of the crisis still—with over half a million dead at the time of writing, the epicenter of disaster has long widened out from New York to encompass so many other places, and so many other families—a scale of loss and disaster that will demand continued attention in the classroom for years to come. And as hope lights out—effective vaccines, effective treatments—this mode of instruction aims to help students build in the wreck, finding creative possibilities for international relations in bleak places: to

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help determine what survives us. Building a flexible, generous, transparent virtual classroom that focused on the collaborative, human, and actionable dimensions of international politics—not merely the conflictual and structural elements of international relations—were my strategies for teaching in crisis, and for investing students in material and discussion that might at best have seemed remote and at worst have seemed entirely unhelpful from their seat in the wreck. But these pedagogical moves will remain relevant past the crisis as ways to help transform the classroom into a caring, collaborative place for imagining collective solutions to besetting problems.

References Ba, O. (2021). “When teaching is impossible: A pandemic pedagogy of care.” PS: Political Science and Politics, 54(1), 171–172. Burke, L. (2020). “#PassFailNation,” Inside Higher Ed., 19 March 2020. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/03/19/colleges-go-passfailaddress-coronavirus Burt, S. (2017). “Advice from Rock Creek Park” from Advice from the Lights, Graywolf Press, 91. Chenoweth, E., & Stephan M. (2017). Why civil resistance works. In Robert J. Art & Robert Jervis (Eds.), International politics: Enduring concepts and contemporary issues (13th Edition), 246–252. Pearson. Dietz, T., Ostrom, E., & Stern, P. C. (2003). The struggle to govern the commons. Science, 302(5652), 1907–1912. Fonseca, M. (2018, April 4). Diversifying the discipline. ISA Roundtable Presentation. Giroux, H. A. (2010). Rethinking education as the practice of freedom: Paulo Freire and the promise of critical pedagogy. Policy Futures in Education., 8(6), 715–721. https://doi.org/10.2304/pfie.2010.8.6.715 Imad, M. (2020, March 17). Hope Matters. Inside Higher Education, https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2020/03/17/10-strategiessupport-students-and-help-them-learn-during-coronavirus-crisis Larsen, A. S. (2015). Who cares? Developing a Pedagogy of Caring in Higher Education. All Graduate Theses and Dissertations. 4287. https://digitalco mmons.usu.edu/etd/4287 Lewis, J. (2017). Across that bridge: Life lessons and a vision for change. Hachette Books. Motta, S. C., & Bennett, A. (2018). Pedagogies of care, care-full epistemological practice and ‘other’ caring subjectivities in enabling education. Teaching

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in Higher Education, 23(5), 631–646. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517. 2018.1465911 Rich, A. (1973). Diving into the wreck. In Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi & Albert Gelpi (Eds.), Adrienne rich’s poetry and prose: Poems, prose, reviews, and criticism, 53–55. W.W. Norton & Company. Simmons, B. A. (2009). Mobilizing for human rights: International law in domestic politics. Cambridge University Press. Srivastava, S. (2020). Varieties of social construction. International Studies Review, 22(3), 325–346. https://doi.org/10.1093/isr/viz003 Tickner, J. A. (2017). A critique of Morgenthau’s principles of political realism. In Robert J. Art & Robert Jervis (Eds.), International politics: Enduring concepts and contemporary issues (13th Edition), 21–32. Pearson. “Total count of COVID-19 cases based on patient address by ZIP code,” https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/imm/covid-19cases-by-zip-04292020-1.pdf Um, E. R., Plass, J. L., Hayward, E. O., & Homer, B. D. (2012). Emotional design in multimedia learning. Journal of Educational Psychology, 104(2), 485– 498.

CHAPTER 7

When Teaching is Impossible: A Pandemic Pedagogy of Care Oumar Ba

Introduction In mid-March 2020, with only one week to prepare, Morehouse College decided to switch to remote delivery of all courses for the second half of the spring semester, and all students were required to evacuate their campus housing. As this major disruption occurred in a midst of a profound anxiety and confusion during the early weeks of the coronavirus spread, an abrupt change to a new learning modality and environment ushered in what has been referred to as pandemic pedagogy, with a range of e-Learning strategies dictated by the emergency situation. A pandemic

An earlier and shorter version of this chapter appeared as Ba, O. (2021). When Teaching is Impossible: A Pandemic pedagogy of Care. PS: Political Science & Politics, 54(1), 171–-172. doi:10.1017/S104909652000150X. Reprinted with permission. O. Ba (B) Department of Government, Cornell University, Ithaca, USA

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. A. Szarejko (eds.), Pandemic Pedagogy, Political Pedagogies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83557-6_7

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pedagogy, as defined by Smith and Hornsby (2020, p. 1), refers to “the approaches we employ in our learning environments to teach and foster learning in the context of a serious health crisis and the spread of a new disease.” As the authors explain, this pandemic moment and its meanings and responses to them are infused with pedagogy, power, and politics. Instruction during the pandemic occurs in moments of profound disruption in the lives of the students—and instructors—and anxiety associated with trying to establish a new normal under extraordinarily abnormal circumstances. During the early months of the pandemic, much was still unknown about the virus and how it spread and what appropriate responses were warranted. Guidelines from the local health officials, government agencies, and even the World Health Organization were not always clear and often times changed. Beyond the physical toll of the pandemic and the rising number of deaths and hospitalizations, the cacophony and conflicting messages contributed to heightened anxiety. Moreover, lives and livelihoods were disrupted not only for college students who faced campus closures, but also for families, given that schoolchildren too were confined at home (on the added difficulty of homeschooling children during the pandemic, see Chapters 8 and 11 by Allendoerfer and Oktay). Instruction during the pandemic then was but one aspect of the larger new predicament of working and schooling remotely, with a limited time to adapt and adjust and a lack of resources and support in the spring of 2020 and beyond.

Developing Men with Disciplined Minds---During a Pandemic I teach at Morehouse College, an all-male, historically Black institution. Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) were established to provide opportunities for access to higher education for African Americans when legal segregation characterized the United States. There are currently 101 accredited HBCUs, both public and private. Located predominantly in the southeastern United States, HBCUs enroll 300,000 students, 80% of whom are African American and 70% of whom come from low-income families (UNCF). Although there is wide variation among these institutions in terms of their size, curricula, and endowment, to a large extent they nevertheless share many features. They tend to be burdened by a persistent lack of financial resources, even before the challenges resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. For instance, in

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2018, only 1.4% of total major gifts (i.e., more than 1 million dollars) to US colleges and universities went to HBCUs (Price, 2020).1 In such a climate of scarcity, how do we adjust the classroom in response to the disruption caused by the pandemic in the middle of the 2020 spring semester? This article focuses on my Introduction to International Relations course. The majority of the 40 students in the class were freshmen and sophomores pursuing a degree in political science or international studies. A few students from other departments across campus also take the course to fulfill their general education requirement. This introductory class is offered every semester, and I had been teaching it over the last four years.2 The mission of Morehouse College is “to develop men with disciplined minds who will lead lives of leadership and service.” As an HBCU, the college also “assumes special responsibility for teaching the history and culture of Black people,”3 which is reflected in the curriculum and the school’s traditions. Students who attend Morehouse are part of a long legacy of a unique institution and culture which makes the “Morehouse Man” and perpetuates the “Morehouse mystique” (Trescott, 1987). For these students, brotherhood, belonging, and community are essential to their cultivation and matriculation. Hence, while navigating the disruption caused by the pandemic in the delivery of the courses, I had to be mindful of the special circumstances of the environment in which we existed, as members of the Morehouse community, especially given that the closure of the campus mid-semester presented a major challenge in the attempt to maintain the educational and social community for the students.

1 In 2020 however, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and Black Lives Movement protests, there has been a sharp increase in donations to HBCUs and other minority-serving institutions, such as the gifts of over $800 million by McKenzie Scott, for instance. See Anderson and Lumpkin (2020) 2 My typical course load is 3 classes a semester: a First Year Experience course, the Intro to IR course discussed in this article, and an upper lever IR course. 3 See Morehouse College’s Mission, available at www.morehouse.edu/about/mission. html.

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A Duty to Care---Beyond the Digital Divide It is well documented that the digital divide remains one of the main challenges of the virtual and remote learning environment and the pandemic has exacerbated the inequal access to the technological infrastructure (Correia, 2020). An adaptive pedagogy during the pandemic must then be mindful of the technological gap and digital divide that many students experience, especially for institutions like Morehouse, when even the prepandemic conditions posed challenges for access to technology, due to limited resources. For instance, as the instruction switched to remote learning, the college had to raise funds to provide computers, tablets, and internet access for some students.4 Yet, even the mere access to technological devices do not in itself provide an equitable learning environment, as the socio-economic divide persists. The closure of the campus posed another set of challenges for students who now had to live in and attend classes from a different physical location that may not always be an optimal situation. Students who had planned to live away from home for the whole semester were now forced to return home, which was a duress for some of them. Morehouse had also to provide emergency housing to students who could not simply “go home” when the campus was evacuated. And those who were home may have needed to join the class sessions from shared living spaces or shared technological devices. Indeed, these socio-economic barriers, compounded by racialized inequality, increase in the age of emergency e-learning (Murphy, 2021, p. 189), which is a “critical juncture” (Alves and Ferreira, Chapter 2), or in other words, a time during which teaching occurs amid “multiple, overlapping, and mutually abetting crises” (Ettinger, Chapter 1). Beyond the digital divide that is laid bare by online teaching, a pandemic pedagogy of care calls for a focus on the actual pandemic and how it physically and emotionally impacts students, their families, and their communities. Before the end of the spring semester, some students had already notified me that they had been sick of the coronavirus, hospitalized, or have had family members who fell sick or died from the virus. A pandemic pedagogy of care therefore goes beyond the concerns of effectively delivering the course and meeting the learning objectives, but 4 See Morehouse College’s campaign to raise funds to support students experiencing hardship. Available at https://ignite.morehouse.edu/project/20382.

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rather remains mindful of the larger set of circumstances and effects of the pandemic on not only the students, but their family and community as well. All these structural and contextual constraints affect the students’ ability to complete the course requirements and actively participate in the collective learning endeavor. A pandemic pedagogy of care in the case of Morehouse therefore ensures that students are fully supported, not because they are incapable of facing and surmounting challenges but rather because they are already in a disadvantaged position, which compounds the effects of the pandemic. A pandemic pedagogy of care does not hold unto unreasonable expectations from students in times of mass death and distress. In other words, it is not just enough to make deadlines. This can be sometimes complicated due to institutional requirements that set hard deadlines for instance on when grades must be entered in the system, which can also affect students’ future endeavors such as graduation or financial aid applications. Yet, to the extent possible, a pandemic pedagogy of care requires working with students and accompanying them in completing the assignments and successfully finishing the course. Students may not always be comfortable asking for an extension or sharing details to justify a request for an extension. A proactive instructor can make a difference—keeping in mind that being proactive also entails both more and less interventionist approaches (see Chapters 6, 8, and 10 by Dayal, Allendoerfer, and Glazier). In my case for instance, I reached out personally to the students who had not completed the assignments to ask if they needed or wanted extra time. When the semester ended, with a couple of students not having completed the final essay, I ask if they wanted an “incomplete grade,” which would then give them extra time, until the midpoint of the following semester, to complete the work. This participates to ensuring that every student would have the tools necessarily (time and flexibility among them) to complete the work, with the understanding that in these extraordinary moments, a “good-enough” approach “in the here and now” is good enough (Steele, 2021, p. 187; Schick, 2012, p. 129). A pandemic pedagogy of care is necessarily adaptive and dynamic, which Dayal (Chapter 6) alludes to as “improvisational generosity,” allowing for some flexibility and responsiveness to the evolving pandemic and its effects. It must also strive to provide a supportive, collaborative, nonhierarchical, and reflexive scholarly community with the students (Hutchison, 2021). Such pedagogy of care entails a commitment to

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ensure that students will have all the support they need to successfully complete the course, making the classroom a safe, supportive space, and above all, a living space in times of a pandemic and mass death.

The Classroom as a Living space---In Pandemic Times Building and sustaining the community of brotherhood and learning being central to the project of making Morehouse men, it was important, despite the pandemic, to keep us all (remotely) connected within our micro-community of learning while reflecting about the rudiments of the IR theories. Beyond the classroom, the community of co-learning was to provide a lively space of intellectual support, especially for freshmen and sophomores in a course designed to introduce them to the IR subfield. The classroom as a living space is a community of co-teaching, co-learning, and co-creation, a dynamic micro-community that may not be confined within the four walls of a (class)room. It was therefore important, despite the different time zones and the challenges of connecting with each other remotely, that the class stays alive, through the maintaining of a routine and regular meeting times to share a collective space and social presence. As Daigle and Stuvland (2020, 2021) demonstrate, prioritizing social presence through both synchronous and asynchronous formats positively impacts students’ motivation and participation, increases actual learning outcomes, and enhances course satisfaction. Ensuring the social presence of the students in a lively classroom was accomplished through a hybrid model of asynchronous lectures with synchronous class discussions. For each class session, I prerecorded the video lecture and posted it on the course website the day before the scheduled meeting. Therefore, the synchronous class sessions—twice a week—over Zoom would not be devoted to lectures but rather to discussions and student engagement through collaborative work. As Ray (2021, p. 173) demonstrates, students have shown appreciation of the combined use of both recorded lectures and synchronous meetings. In times of pandemic and social isolation, connecting within and through synchronous class sessions does make a positive difference, despite the technological and socio-economic challenges discussed earlier. Lemke (Chapter 5) argues that 60/40 is a “right balance” for the

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synchronous/asynchronous ratio, which, along with active learning techniques, can help maintain student engagement (see Gaufman and Möller, Chapter 3). Moreover, one doesn’t strive to make the classroom a living space only because it makes it easier on us to teach but also because we owe it to the students to create a lively and engaging atmosphere for our collective community. This requires an effective participation of both the students and the instructor, which certainly explains why many instructors require students’ regular attendance and participation. For the classroom can be a lively space only to the extent that students are willing and able to actively participate as co-learners, co-teachers, and co-creators of knowledge. I, too, give class engagement points as part of the students’ final grade—some instructors call it a participation grade—at the end of the semester (I also assign a partial grade for class engagement mid-semester, so students can make the adjustments necessary if needed before the end of the semester). Cognizant of the fact that we all have different abilities or willingness to speak in class, I strive to make class engagement as accommodating and inclusive as possible. I remind students that there are many ways to be engaged in class. Students can ask questions, or respond to questions during class, and share their thoughts. They can email me their questions or comments on the class materials, or they can join me during office hours to discuss the class, or simply chat about anything they want to talk about. All these activities would account for their class engagement grade and participate also to enliven the classroom experience. During the Zoom discussions, I also encouraged students to use the chat function. Furthermore, I also maintained the group projects after the class moved online mid-semester, despite protests from some students, who pointed to the difficulty of working together across different time zones. It was important, I believed, that students learn to coordinate and carry out tasks in teams, conduct their research and present their findings in class, despite the potential difficulties. The group assignments have the added benefit of contributing to create and maintain not only relationality, but also our micro-community of learning (Schick, 2019). Indeed, the classroom as a living space entails a relational pedagogy which implies relationality not only between the instructor and the students, but among the students as well, and between the students and the class materials. Having taught this introductory IR course every semester for the past four years, I have come to know that the students are acutely aware of and interested in

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connecting global politics to domestic issues such as the economic recession, mass shootings, state and police violence, income inequality, poverty, refugees, and environmental degradation. For if teaching is impossible and learning is unlikely, especially during a pandemic, at least we can try to make the classroom a living space, not only by building rapport with students through meaningful human connections (Glazier, 2021b, Chapter 10), but also by drawing upon the connection between the students’ experiences and concerns with the class materials that we cover in class. A relational pedagogy in making the classroom alive also, as Schick asserts, “unsettles traditional binaries of teacher and student, knower and known, and it rejects the confident accumulation and dissemination of useful knowledge that seeks technical ‘solutions’ to complex and deeply rooted problems. This unsettling pedagogy… [invites] students to reexamine their beliefs about global politics in supportive communities of learning” (Schick, 2019, pp. 32–33). In such relational pedagogy, the instructor too is fully embedded in the learning community and the colearning experience blurs the demarcation between teacher and learner. The instructor enters the classroom as a living space with their own desire to learn; for as Inayatullah (2019, pp. 19–20) wonders, why else teach without such desire to learn? The relational pedagogy opens up spaces of possibility and growth for the instructor too, as their desire to learn from the students is made explicit. Yet, a pandemic pedagogy of care too extends beyond relationality.

A Pedagogy of Care, Beyond Relationality Because socio-economic contexts affect not only how students learn, they also necessarily must affect how we teach IR. In such a socioeconomic context marked by a pandemic therefore, instructors “must balance their pedagogical preferences (i.e., what is desired) with the contextual constraints (i.e., what is possible)” (Frueh et al., 2020, p. 4). A pandemic necessarily affects the realm of what is possible to achieve in terms of learning outcomes in a classroom. But in any case, even outside of a pandemic, the pedagogical preferences of the instructor must also be structured around the institutional and academic constraints of the university or college, and also the lived experiences and struggles/concerns of the student population. To that extent then, beyond the relational pedagogy linking the students to the materials, the students and the instructor,

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a pedagogy of care entails also cultivating that community of not only learning, but care in learning and living. For students often come to class not necessarily because their attendance is required or necessary to pass the class, but also because being in the classroom offers them an experience that they would have otherwise missed: learning in a community, co-learning with their peers and the instructors. It may not always be the case that the students will have always absorbed and mastered the class materials, but the collective enterprise that being in the classroom affords, whether physically or virtually, participates in the co-learning experience and shared space of existing, especially if the class materials and the classroom experience connect to their lived experience or primary concerns of the moment. In a middle of a pandemic especially, the classroom must be a living space that acknowledges the troubling moment in which we are floating and allow for the expression of and connections to the class materials and the lived experiences. For students of color and first-generation students especially, studies have shown that a meaningful relationship between the instructor and the students has a positive impact on the latter’s persistence and success (Glazier, 2021a). Online learning and the pandemic make the search of such meaningful connection in the spaces of higher education all the more crucial.

Situatedness, and Care in Reflecting on Our Collective Predicament Yet, this relational pedagogy extends beyond the connection between the instructor and students or among the students. In international relations especially, it is important to build up what Kate Schick referred to as “relational ontology,” which “emphasizes the ongoing process of coming to know ourselves and our location in global politics” (2019, p. 38). Building up on the notion that international relations is not something that happens “out there,” teaching during a pandemic especially requires an awareness of our situatedness within both local, national, and global politics. From the narrative of a foreign virus infecting our body or invading our country to the border closures and restrictions in movement, the pandemic and its attendant consequences and the failure to anticipate or contain the spread of the virus is deeply enmeshed with global politics of the personal. The personal is political, as it ever was. And teaching during a pandemic is personal.

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Although the syllabus content and scheduled reading materials remained the same after the class switched to remote delivery, the class synchronous meetings over Zoom, which I dedicated to discussions in a seminar style, were tied to our current collective predicament of living through a pandemic in uncertain and tragic times—in no small part due to catastrophic failure of public policy in the case of the United States. The discussion of IR theories and concepts was built around this collective predicament. The final exam, which—under normal conditions—would have consisted of a set of short answers, was changed to a long takehome essay format. The exam asked, “What IR theories and concepts can help us make sense of the global spread of the COVID-19 pandemic and its implications on world politics (broadly defined)?”. Students’ responses to this essay question demonstrated a range of serious and personal engagement with IR theories and concepts and the pandemic, as well as the ways in which it disproportionally affected racial and ethnic minorities, low-income families, and otherwise vulnerable populations in the United States. Drawing from Marxist and postcolonial theories and a critique of capitalism, many students argued that COVID19 was but one of numerous other medical and social pandemics that afflicted especially their segment of the population, and which can be traced to the legacies of unequal distribution of power and opportunities in the United States and around the world. These reflections from the students and our class discussions align with the adoption of pedagogical frame that resists the urge of teaching global politics as something that happens “out there” (Schick, 2019, p. 37). Moreover, given that IR as a discipline and the IR syllabi crystalized around a western and Eurocentric bias, it was important, for an audience of African American men, to ensure that the course speaks to their place within a western society, within a global polity, and within a pandemic disruption that upended the “normal.” Doing so, a pandemic pedagogy of care opens up the possibility of “doing IR as if people mattered.”5 In this instance, for a student population of young Black men in America, the COVID-19 pandemic along with the police and state violence and Black Lives Matter movement that flared up following the murder of George Floyd as the 2020 spring semester was coming to an end are all central to how we make sense of and relate to the world of (international) politics.

5 I am grateful to Jonneke Koomen, from whom I first heard this expression.

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Conclusion Ultimately, if we accept Inayatullah’s (2019, p. 18) polemic that “Teaching is impossible. Learning is unlikely… [W]e enter the classroom to encounter others. With them, we can meditate on the possibility of our own learning,” perhaps then a pandemic pedagogy of care is simply that: encountering our students so we may all meditate on our collective predicament. In these pandemic times especially, the usual concepts in IR may be even more inadequate to address our collective moment and anxieties in global politics. More than even therefore, we ought to create the living space—the classroom—that leaves place for the expression of our anxieties and concerns. The IR course during the pandemic—and after—must leave room for ambiguity and unsettledness and embrace the complexity of our predicament and the messiness of our stories (Dunn, 2019, p. 59), while we are “helping students increase the complexity of their understandings” (Frueh et al., 2020, p. 4). A pandemic pedagogy of care is truly intentional in nurturing a learning and living environment that fully supports the community of co-learners, especially in times of mass disruption and heightened anxiety and life challenges. Cultivating a relational ontology helps ground the (virtual) classroom as a living space, in which the community can meditate on their collective predicament, making a use of the learning materials as springboards from which to make sense of life in and out pandemic times.

References Allendoerfer, M. (2021). Supporting student learning through flexibility and transparency. In Andrew Szarejko (Ed.), Pandemic pedagogy: Teaching international relations during COVID-19. Palgrave Macmillan. Alves, E. C., & Ferreira, M. A. S. V. (2021). “Teaching in Critical Junctures: Challenges to international relations bachelor’s programs in Brazil during the COVID-19 Pandemic.” In Andrew Szarejko (Ed.), Pandemic pedagogy: Teaching international relations during COVID-19. Palgrave Macmillan. Anderson, N., & Lumpkin, L. (2020, December 18). ‘Transformational’: MacKenzie Scott’s gifts to HBCUs, other colleges surpass $800 million. Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/mac kenzie-scott-hbcu-donations/2020/12/17/0ce9ef5a-406f-11eb-8db8-395 dedaaa036_story.html Correia, A. (2020). Healing the digital divide during the COVID-19 pandemic. Quarterly Review of Distance Education, 21(1), 13–21.

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Daigle, D., & Stuvland, A. (2020). Is anybody there? Exploring the role of social presence in an online political science research methods class. Politics and international relations. https://doi.org/10.33774/apsa-2020-qm9pm Daigle, D. T., & Stuvland, A. (2021). Social presence as best practice: The online classroom needs to feel real. PS: Political Science & Politics, 54(1): 182–183. Dayal, A. (2021). Out from the Wreck: International Relations and Pedagogies of Care. In Andrew Szarejko (Ed.), Pandemic pedagogy: Teaching international relations during COVID-19. Palgrave Macmillan. Dunn, K. C. (2019). Things I’ve learned from failure and friends. In Jamie Frueh (Ed.), Pedagogical journeys through world politics, 55–64. Palgrave Macmillan. Ettinger, A. (2021). Teaching world politics in an age of crisis. In Andrew Szarejko (Ed.), Pandemic Pedagogy: Teaching International Relations during COVID-19. Palgrave Macmillan. Frueh, J., Diehl, P. F., Li, X., Gokcek, G., Kalpakian, J., Vlcek, W., Bower, A., Espinoza, R. S., Carranco, S., de Matos-Ala, J., Behera, N. C., & Acharya, A. (2020). The introductory course in international relations: Regional variations. International studies perspectives, https://doi.org/10.1093/isp/eka a009 Gaufman, E., & Möller, S. (2021). More than a YouTube Channel: Engaging students in an online classroom. In Andrew A. Szarejko (Ed.), Pandemic pedagogy: Teaching international relations during COVID-19. Palgrave Macmillan. Glazier, R. A. (2021a). Making human connections in online teaching. PS: Political Science & Politics, 54(1): 175–176. Glazier, R. A. (2021b). Teaching online during a crisis: What matters most for students. In Andrew A. Szarejko (Ed.), Teaching international relations during disruptive times. Palgrave Macmillan. Hutchison, E. (2021). Toward an ethic of care and inclusivity in emergency e-learning. PS: Political Science & Politics, 54(1): 185–187. Inayatullah, N. (2019). Teaching is impossible: A polemic. In Jamie Frueh (Ed.), Pedagogical journeys through world politics, 17–26. Palgrave Macmillan. Lemke, T. (2021). How much zoom is too much? Making asynchronous learning work. In Andrew A. Szarejko (Ed.), Pandemic Pedagogy: Teaching International Relations during COVID-19. Palgrave Macmillan. Murphy, M. P. (2021). Concluding thoughts: What can(’t) we research about emergency e-learning? PS: Political Science & Politics, 54(1): 188–190. Oktay, S. (2021). It takes a village: Harnessing institutional and professional resources to preempt and prepare for the future. In Andrew A. Szarejko (Ed.), Pandemic pedagogy: Teaching international relations during COVID19. Palgrave Macmillan.

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Price, G. N. (2020, June 24). 1 in 10 HBCUs were financially fragile before COVID-19 endangered all colleges and universities. The conversation. https://theconversation.com/1-in-10-hbcus-were-financially-fragile-bef ore-covid-19-endangered-all-colleges-and-universities-140528 Ray, A. (2021). Teaching in times of crisis: Covid-19 and classroom pedagogy. PS: Political Science & Politics, 54(1): 172–173. Schick, K. (2012). Gillian Rose: A good enough justice. Edinburgh University Press. Schick, K. (2019). Pedagogical micro-communities: Sites of relationality, sites of transformation. In Jamie Frueh (Ed.), Pedagogical journeys through world politics, 27–39. Palgrave Macmillan. Smith, H. A., & Hornsby, D. (2020). Towards a pandemic pedagogy: Power and politics in learning and teaching.https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.29280. 64005 Steele, B. J. (2021). When good enough is good enough: Department chairing during Covid-19. PS: Political Science & Politics, 54(1): 187–188. https:// doi.org/10.1017/S1049096520001572 Trescott, J. (1987, November 9). The men and mystique of morehouse. Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1987/ 11/09/the-men-and-mystique-of-morehouse/7761d840-5998-4957-bea0c64bff3b185e/ UNCF. HBCUs make America strong: The positive impact of historically black colleges and universities. https://cdn.uncf.org/wp-content/uploads/ HBCU_Consumer_Brochure_FINAL_APPROVED.pdf?_ga=2.17028409. 1251354321.1593346115-1364471786.1593346115

CHAPTER 8

Supporting Student Learning Through Flexibility and Transparency Michelle Giacobbe Allendoerfer

In this chapter, I discuss how adopting a pedagogical model of flexibility and transparency during the spring 2020 semester and the 2020–2021 academic year was valuable for students and myself and how I will carry this model into non-crisis teaching. Although the global health pandemic was the driving force behind the shift to remote learning in 2020, students faced multiple challenges during this time that affected their ability to focus on their education. As I reflect on my teaching practice, I find that caring for students and adopting policies to support them in trying times can be applied to teaching beyond pandemic crisis teaching. The ability to maintain academic rigor and a reasonable workload for myself can co-exist with flexibility and transparency. As the first section of this volume discusses in depth (c.f. Ettinger, Chapter 1 and Alves and Ferreira, Chapter 2), the abrupt shift to remote learning that many colleges and universities experienced in March 2020

M. G. Allendoerfer (B) American Political Science Association, Washington, DC, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. A. Szarejko (eds.), Pandemic Pedagogy, Political Pedagogies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83557-6_8

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was a shock to the system for instructors and students. As others in this volume have noted, different groups of students disproportionately felt the challenges of this shift. Across the board, students expressed frustration about a new method of learning, grieved the loss of the college community, and faced various challenges presented by returning home (for some) or otherwise living in various degrees of isolation or lockdown caused by the pandemic. When given a very short amount of time to pivot to online teaching, I asked tough questions about how I wanted to finish the semester. What did I want the students to learn in the remaining weeks? What was my capacity for teaching, given the new responsibilities as a full-time virtual learning monitor for my two children? What would be the students’ capacity for learning, given the myriad pressures they were facing? Some of these questions centered on content: what did I still need to “cover”? Many questions were about our capacity—as students and instructors— to teach and learn in a virtual environment with little notice amid a pandemic. Fast forward to Fall 2020 and a wide range of college and university opening strategies, many with some degree of online learning and a continued sense of uncertainty amid the ongoing pandemic. In July 2020, my university announced a virtual fall semester and decided in October 2020 to remain online for the entire 2020–2021 academic year. Approaches adopted in an emergency-triage mode of teaching in the spring had to be reevaluated with the new normal of a full academic year of virtual learning and teaching. Faculty had to decide how to proceed with the educational mission of our institutions given the continuing pandemic, protests and uprisings across the United States (and other countries), a contentious national election in the United States, and myriad other challenges. Reflecting on some of the changes I made in the spring, I largely leaned into the same types of policies when planning for the Fall 2020 and Spring 2021 semesters. Across the three semesters of remote teaching, I had a relatively light teaching load of two undergraduate courses per semester plus a one-credit undergraduate seminar. In March 2020, I taught a small Introduction to International Politics course (28 students) and a mid-sized upper-level Human Rights course (39 students). During the 2020–2021 academic year, I taught a small Introduction to Comparative Politics course (20 students), the same Human Rights course, and the Introduction to International Politics course twice. My teaching load and

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class sizes were important factors in what I could do while managing my workload. Of note, three of my courses during the 2020–2021 academic year are nearly all first-year students. This added a challenge, especially in the fall, of supporting these students as they adjusted to college entirely virtually. In this chapter, I focus on two sets of changes—around flexibility and transparency—I made during the remote teaching period. While this was not a drastic shift from my usual approach to teaching, I formalized and articulated these ideas more to myself and students when we shifted to remote teaching. What is more, I will continue to adopt them even when higher education returns to a largely in-person model of teaching. Although adopted for emergency virtual learning, I realized that these approaches support students through seen and unseen struggles and can enhance student learning. In some ways, the pandemic was an opportunity to reconsider my underlying pedagogical priorities and align my practices with these priorities. I have learned during this period that developing policies that acknowledge how the real world affects our attention, our students’ attention, and everyone’s ability to focus is not at odds with our educational mission. Before reflecting on how I adopted these policies, I will first briefly identify some of the challenges and obstacles that faced instructors and students. Although just a brief discussion, this helps contextualize the value behind flexibility and transparency given these challenges.

Challenges Facing Students As I first considered the rapid pivot to emergency remote teaching in the spring and then as I developed my courses for continued online delivery during the 2020–2021 academic year, I thought about the challenges that are facing my students, including but not limited to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. For some students, the central concern was learning how to learn online while facing various degrees of lockdown and isolation. Many had to travel home unexpectedly, although our shift to remote learning occurred over spring break when most were away from campus already. Many were stressed about the change in learning environment, worried about how to successfully complete their courses, and grieving the loss of their campus experience. For others, however, the pandemic brought additional obstacles to their learning that included economic precarity, personal or family illness, and in the worst cases death

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in the family. As Ba notes in Chapter 7, students faced different levels of access to necessary technology for virtual learning and a range of learning environments. In addition to the global health pandemic in 2020, it is critical to situate this period in the context of “multiple pandemics” facing our communities, not just in the United States but across the world (c.f. Alves and Ferreira in Chapter 2 in this volume and their discussion of the higher education crisis in Brazil and Ettinger on teaching in Canada in Chapter 1). In my fall 2020 and spring 2021 syllabi, I acknowledged the myriad stressors facing students. The Office of Diversity, Equity, and Community Engagement at my university began using the term “multiple pandemics” to acknowledge that our students are struggling with more than the global health pandemic. Weeks into the spring 2020 pandemic lockdown, the country saw the murder of George Floyd shared across social media, heard of the murder of Breonna Taylor, among others. The scale of protests across the country reached new levels. The pandemic of white supremacy and racial injustices coupled with a health pandemic that disproportionately affected Black, Latinx, and Native communities created multiple points of stressors for our students. Amid these multiple pandemics, we were asking students to attend classes virtually but otherwise act as if everything was normal. Many of the Spring 2020 accommodations like pass/no pass options, were relics of the spring semester when the pandemic was new and remote learning was unexpected. But as subsequent semesters remained online or hybrid, students still needed the support of faculty and administration to navigate online learning amid these multiple pandemics. This shouldn’t be overlooked in a conversation about supporting our students during crises. As I consider the policies that I formalized for students and in my syllabi because of COVID, I see how those policies support students who are facing other obstacles to their education and recognize that keeping these policies in place can support students regardless of the source of these obstacles. Students are people first and giving them some grace— some flexibility and transparency—while maintaining the rigor of our courses can ensure that they meet the educational goals of our classes (c.f. Dayal, Chapter 6). Engaging in a pedagogy of care (Ba, 2021 and this volume) is particularly useful to consider in light of pandemic or crisis teaching. Students need to be cared for, even more during a global health pandemic. Centering our students’ well-being—emotional, physical, mental—can

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support their learning. In her chapter, Glazier highlights how rapportbuilding helps students succeed in online learning. The simple act of seeing our students as individuals and offering support through difficult learning experiences helps them succeed. And our students notice (c.f. Glazier’s discussion of student feedback in Chapter 10). In a survey of students following the emergency e-learning period in spring 2020, Loepp (2021) finds that students “expressed appreciation for faculty understanding” (p. 169). This is consistent with the feedback I received from students. Another way of thinking about supporting students through challenges is through the expectancy x value model of motivation. This model suggests that students are motivated to learn, and put an effort towards learning, corresponding to “the degree to which they expect to be able to perform the task successfully (expectancy) and the degree to which they value the rewards as well as the opportunity to engage in performing the task itself (value)” (Barkley, 2009, p. 11). Many factors influence a student’s expectation of success, and many are out of our control as instructors. As students face external obstacles resulting from the pandemic—unreliable internet access, unexpected obligations at home, housing or food insecurity, to name a few—their expectations of success may diminish. They may believe they can’t succeed and, as such, they may give up. The structure of the course, combined with external factors, might discourage them. My goal, with the policies I discuss in this chapter, is to support students and give them the confidence that they can succeed even in the face of these external challenges. As we think about how the pandemic—or other crises—disproportionately affect different populations of our students, we can look towards the literature on adapting to online learning (Xu & Jaggars, 2014), consider how COVID-19 disproportionately affects Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people in the United States (CDC), or how the economic consequences of COVID are unevenly felt. There are a variety of reasons for why and how subsets of the student population are more vulnerable to the effects of the pandemic, as well as to other obstacles to their learning. By adopting universal policies that are available to all students, I did not have to adjudicate which students were deserving of extra support. Although the COVID pandemic will run its course and we will return to routine in-person teaching, we might consider how policies we adopted during this time can become part of our regular teaching practice.

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Flexibility As a pedagogical practice that I plan to continue after the pandemic, I found that flexibility around due dates and attendance policies were among the most important policies for supporting students. Before the pandemic, I gave students one free pass for a late assignment or makeup test; during the online teaching period, I expanded that policy and tell my students that deadlines can be extended, as long as they email me and let me know. I frame it not as “asking” for an extension but rather “informing” me that they are taking an extension. I found that this framing—shifting away from them asking for permission—means that students are more comfortable reaching out when they need extra time. This is particularly valuable for first-generation college students and other historically underserved students; these students may be less familiar with the “hidden curriculum” of college and are often less likely to ask for extensions. It is important to me that all students understand the process and are equally comfortable taking an extension when they need it. Barrett-Fox (2020) makes a distinction between charity and justice, saying students “who are least likely to ask for charity—that is, those who are taking the most responsibility for their inability to meet expectations—are disadvantaged; in contrast, those most likely to ask for charity are those most experienced at getting it” (p. 151). By being clear and explicit that extensions will be freely given, within certain constraints, my goal was to signal to all students that this option was available. I also tell them they do not have to give me any details about why they need the extension. They do not need to provide documentation or otherwise disclose their personal or family circumstances to take the extension. There is a wide range of reasons that students—during a pandemic or otherwise—need an extension and I trust that they can make that decision on their own (c.f. Jenks on equitable access in Chapter 9). For the most part, students might need an extra 48 hours, in few cases students fall further behind and then I communicate with them to make sure they stay on track to successfully complete the course. Except at the very end of the semester, when I need to submit final grades, I can work around extensions. As I tell my students, I’m not likely to sit down and grade all the assignments in one day, so it works within my grading workflow to allow extensions. Of course, there are constraints and other considerations for faculty in adopting such a policy. My courses are small, but writing-heavy, with drafts and opportunities for feedback throughout the semester. If

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papers and drafts trickled in because students used these extensions, that helped space out the workflow for myself and the teaching assistants with whom I was working. It meant a near-constant stream of grading during certain times of the semester, which was easier for me to manage than receiving all papers at once and trying to provide feedback promptly. During the virtual learning period, I de-emphasized tests and used small, low-stakes quizzes instead. As a result, I drop the lowest score. I also gave a window of time to complete these quizzes, giving students the flexibility to fit the quiz into their schedule. Flexibility around attendance is also critical during a pandemic and the unexpected shift to remote learning. For any number of reasons, students may face challenges attending synchronous classes. Wherever possible, recording class and giving students alternative opportunities to demonstrate engagement allows students to participate within their constraints. Again, I do not ask students to disclose their reasons for engaging asynchronously. Of course, there are benefits of asynchronous delivery of material in distance learning and online courses, particularly in terms of equity and access (Bali, 2014). Some of those arguments focus on students and instructors who chose online learning deliberately. Daigle and Stuvland (2021) point out that, while asynchronous delivery is often touted as a “best practice,” existing online programs have much more experience and appropriate infrastructure compared to in-person instructors who were given little time to transition to emergency remote learning. Instead, they suggest that we can “prioritize social presences” (p. 182) through effectively combining synchronous and asynchronous delivery to continue to provide students with “direct contact to faculty” (p. 182). At the same time, questions of internet access, time zone differences, and obligations that students may find while at home, all suggest benefits of asynchronous delivery methods. In many ways, requiring attendance in synchronous online classes could unduly burden students. Elsewhere in this volume, Lemke provides a valuable discussion of navigating the transition to online teaching including the trade-offs between synchronous and asynchronous modes of instruction. My institution required faculty to deliver courses primarily synchronously with recordings and flexible attendance policies. The reason was that our students—particularly our undergraduate population—matriculated to a primarily in-person university and expected synchronous learning engagement. In my experience, this is reflected in how the students are engaged—they are craving community and

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connection that they can find in synchronous courses. Others in this volume (c.f. Ba and Glazier, Chapters 7 and 10) note the importance of connections and rapport-building in virtual learning and as part of a pandemic pedagogy of care. In Chapters 3 and 4, Gaufman and Möller and Hernandez discuss using active learning techniques creatively to engage students and encourage multiple modes of participation. At the same time, flexible attendance policies allow students who cannot attend synchronous class to still fully engage. This addresses some of the concerns about accessibility issues of synchronous classes. There is certainly a difficult balance to strike between the flexibility of completely or primarily asynchronous virtual classes and the benefits of synchronous classes. Another consideration is how faculty use synchronous time. As Glazier (2020) points out: “Synchronous discussions or reviews can build community; however, we are deluding ourselves if we think we are connecting with students who log on just to be lectured at with their cameras off and their microphones muted.” (p. 176). Finding an effective balance between asynchronous and synchronous is partially about identifying what course material or activities are most effectively delivered synchronously and which are best left asynchronous. While being flexible about attendance, keeping synchronous classes encouraged community building that supported students. They enjoyed breakout groups and other ways to interact with their peers. Many felt isolated and this boosted their spirits and gave them a connection to their peers. This is consistent with the literature that finds that students appreciate the connections and engagement they get from synchronous classes (Martin & Bollinger, 2018; Daigle & Stuvland, 2021). To accommodate those that could not attend synchronously, I recorded classes and asked those students to submit a brief paragraph reaction to the recordings to demonstrate their engagement. Receiving and reading these reactions showed that these students were still fully engaged in the course content, even if they couldn’t attend synchronously. There are drawbacks to this approach, as these students could not fully engage with their peers in class discussions and activities. I want to acknowledge that the ability to be flexible with due dates, attendance, or other policies may not be equally feasible for all faculty. Depending on class sizes, certain types of flexibility may be untenable for managing workload. Some institutions required certain delivery methods. Certain types of classes may be more or less amenable to different

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approaches. The identity of the faculty member may influence what policies are feasible or risky. For example, as a non-tenure track contract faculty member, I do not have the same job security as a tenured faculty member. My teaching evaluations, in particular, carry significant weight in my re-appointment decisions. As a woman, I may not command the same authority in the class and there is a risk that giving too much flexibility could be seen as a weakness of which students may take advantage. I think it is valuable to consider where and how one can give students some flexibility while still being mindful of the constraints of the class or institution and the needs of the instructor (from status, identity, etc.) Some of these policies will be easier to carry back to regular inperson teaching than others. Flexibility around due dates, for example, can extend past pandemic teaching without much change. Significant flexibility around synchronous attendance, however, might be more difficult to translate to face-to-face instruction. One benefit of teaching virtually is the built-in mechanism to record lectures. Some universities are equipped with lecture capture tools that can record face-to-face classes, but this technology is not universally available and may not be as easy to use. Although some reasons for not attending class synchronously—like internet access or bandwidth issues—are unique to the remote learning period, others regularly occur. Typically, students are urged to ask a classmate for notes, review lecture slides, or attend office hours to catch up. Attendance policies can still be flexible in a face-to-face environment, but it is not as easy as watching a recording for students to catch up on what they missed.

Transparency The second principle of teaching that I more fully adopted during the emergency remote teaching period was transparency, including transparent assignment design and transparent teaching. I quickly realized that students—often critical of anything that feels like busy work—were even more critical of assignments where the learning objectives were not clear during this stressful time. In reviewing my syllabus for the remainder of the Spring 2020 semester and in developing subsequent syllabi for the 2020–2021 academic year, I took a close look at my assignments and revised the assignments included. In Spring 2020, this meant dropping a couple of assignments and focusing on a smaller set of crucial assignments. This was especially important as students were suddenly asked to

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leave campus and thrown into a completely new and unexpected learning environment. This meant being very clear with the students about why I was asking them to do certain assignments. Getting their buy-in on the assignments by showing them how each assignment helped meet course learning goals was critical. In addition to being transparent about my course design decisions and offering transparent assignments, this idea of transparency extends to seeking feedback and input from students and to the design of the course’s learning management system. There is a vast literature on the benefits of transparent assignment design and transparent teaching, especially for historically underserved students. First, some brief definitions. Transparent assignment design includes three key elements: (1) clear communication of the purpose of the assignment or activity, (2) description of the tasks involved, and (3) clear assessment criteria (Leuzinger & Grallo, 2019). Beyond transparent assignment design, transparent teaching “can be best defined as a combination of teaching practices that are explicit in the articulation of instructor expectations for student learning and classroom success, that rely upon unambiguous language and techniques to develop and enhance analytical and critical thinking skills and deepen student learning” (Howard et al., 2020, p. 199). In Chapter 6, Dayal illustrates transparent teaching, including showing her syllabus language about transparency. Although distinct, transparent teaching and transparent assignment design are related and studies have found that both types of deliberate transparency support students. A recent study found adopting transparent teaching methods effectively helped “mitigate the negative effects of the virtual classroom for underserved students” (Howard et al., 2020, p. 198). The transparent teaching method used in the study’s courses included both transparent assignment design and transparent language in the course syllabus. The study found that students in the online course using transparent teaching methods had “comparable learning outcomes to those students enrolled in the same course taught in person” (Howard et al., 2020, p. 205). Another study found “statistically significant benefits for first-generation, low-income, and underrepresented students who completed assignments revised according to the Transparent Assignment Template” (Leuzinger & Grallo, 2019, p. 105). In the framework of the expectancy x value model of motivation, transparent assignment design works along both dimensions to increase student motivation. For me, the first step was to identify and only keep assignments if I could clearly articulate to students the purpose, or the

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value, of the assignment. In some cases, this meant changing the format of an assignment or dropping some assignments that work well in person but are less effective online. It also meant picking what I saw as the most important assignments and activities. To do this, I focused on identifying the essential learning objectives of a course and aligning assessments with these priorities. As others have noted (c.f. Dayal and Ba in Chapters 6 and 7), we can also use our courses to provide students with tools to understand the pandemic. Second, giving students clear directions and explaining the assessment criteria helps students understand what is expected to succeed. My transparency extends beyond assignment design. I share with my students regularly why I’ve designed the course in certain ways and regularly seek anonymous feedback from students about what is working and what is not working. Before the semester begins, I administer a short survey to identify student needs and interests. When we shifted to virtual learning in March 2020, I took a survey to identify students’ internet access, availability for synchronous classes, and to give them space to share their concerns for the remote learning period (c.f. Jenks in Chapter 9 on the importance of identifying individual access needs). In the subsequent semesters where we have started virtual, I used similar surveys before the start of the semester. This signals to students that I am aware of the challenges of virtual learning and opens the conversation about why I have made the course decisions I have. In addition, I solicit feedback throughout the semester to understand how the course is working for students. I don’t always make changes based on requests, but I will share with the students why I am or am not making changes. Simple things, like making deadlines at 11:59 PM instead of 5:00 PM are relatively easy and make a huge difference for students who might be juggling a job or caregiving with schoolwork and appreciate those evening hours for getting assignments completed. One class asked if I could open the virtual classroom space fifteen minutes early so they could socialize before class. I post a link to an anonymous feedback survey (using Google Forms) to our learning management system so that students can, at any point in the semester, share feedback. I also do two check-ins (for example during weeks three and seven of a 14-week term) when the entire class gets a feedback survey. Soliciting feedback— and responding to it—allows me to change things if student feedback suggests that those learning objectives are not served by a particular assignment or policy or to clarify for the students the purpose behind

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a policy or assignment. In either case, it helps demystify the process for the students. Seeking feedback and being transparent are related to each other, along with flexibility, in giving students agency in their learning experience and helping them understand the teaching choices I make. These are principles that apply to teaching even in non-crisis times but are especially valuable when students are facing extraordinary challenges to their learning. They help students understand what is expected of them and what they need to do to succeed; it creates clarity and demystifies the educational experience. Another point of transparency that students appreciate is the organization of material on the course Learning Management System (LMS). Beginning in March 2020, I arranged the semester into weekly modules, and I include everything they need for each week in the corresponding module. Experienced online instructors likely know how to use LMS tools to effectively design online courses, but those of us thrown into distance teaching with little to no training were wading through myriad resources and trying our best to put our courses online. In Chapter 5, Lemke illustrates how he uses modules to create a transparent and easyto-navigate course. Students consistently comment on how much they appreciate this organizational structure and how it minimizes their stress. Although it took some time initially to design the course this way, I found it cut down on student confusion and emails enough to offset that initial time investment. Loepp (2021) surveyed students and found that navigation of course materials was a top characteristic of successful emergency e-learning environments. The policies I have included focusing on transparency are easily translated to face-to-face learning and are policies I intend to carry over after the pandemic ends. For the most part, these are policies I was using before the pandemic. The pandemic and remote teaching encouraged me to be more deliberate about these practices. The literature on transparent teaching methods and transparent assignment design, in particular, is clear that these policies benefit face-to-face students as well as remote students. Although I had not given a lot of thought to the organization of my Learning Management System before pandemic teaching, moving forward I plan to organize it in a module system as I did during remote learning. Providing students with an easy-to-navigate course will benefit them during face-to-face instruction as well.

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Conclusion While I hope that we don’t face another pandemic like COVID-19, there are lessons to be learned from how we navigated the shift to virtual learning and the uncertainty in higher education during the Spring 2020 and the 2020–2021 academic year. Considering how our pedagogy can embrace transparency and flexibility, during a pandemic or other crisis but also during a traditional semester, can point to ways to support students while maintaining the same level of academic rigor. What I found during the Spring 2020 and subsequent online semesters was that there is not anything about these policies that diminish what students will learn from my courses, but simply how supported they are while learning. In Chapter 6, Dayal demonstrates this balance in her syllabus language, signaling to the students that the course would still be challenging but that she recognized the circumstances of the semester. Returning to the expectancy x value model, these policies were intended to address the ways that external challenges to student learning might influence a student’s expectancy of success. If students are struggling to attend synchronous class or meeting deadlines due to factors outside of their control, I hope that these policies mitigate that. I want students to expect that they could succeed in the class even in the face of significant external factors. At the same time, I was able to maintain a high degree of rigor and students continued to learn and most remain highly engaged in the course. This flexibility and transparency do not have to come at the expense of academic rigor.

References Ba, O. (2021). When teaching is impossible: A pandemic pedagogy of care. PS: Political Science & Politics, 54(1), 171–172. https://doi.org/10.1017/S10 4909652000150X Bali, M. (2014). An affinity for asynchronous learning. https://hybridpedagogy. org/affinity-asynchronous-learning/?fbclid=IwAR3KyWd_q-BEjoMpGuH_ bGpXy9DqPPnJHpJHGHZIGRjdC7lu1Z_Cgsjzr-I, Accessed 15 January 2021. Barkley, E. F. (2009). Student engagement techniques: A handbook for college faculty. John Wiley & Sons. Barrett-Fox, R., Bayne, B., Cooper, V., & Espinosa, G. (2020). How the coronavirus pandemic will change our future teaching. Religion and American Culture, 30(2), 147–186. https://doi.org/10.1017/rac.2020.10

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Daigle, D. T., & Stuvland, A. (2021). Social presence as best practice: The online classroom needs to feel real. PS: Political Science & Politics, 54(1), 182–183. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1049096520001614 Glazier, R. A. (2021). Making human connections in online teaching. PS: Political Science & Politics, 54(1), 175–176. https://doi.org/10.1017/S10490 96520001535 Howard, T. O., Winkelmes, M., & Shegog, M. (2020). Transparency teaching in the virtual classroom: Assessing the opportunities and challenges of integrating transparency teaching methods with online learning. Journal of Political Science Education, 16(2), 198–211. Leuzinger, R., & Grallo, J. (2019). Reaching first-generation and underrepresented students through transparent assignment design. Library Faculty Publications and Presentations, 11. https://digitalcommons.csumb.edu/lib_ fac/11, Accessed 15 January 2021. Loepp, E. D. (2021). Introduction: COVID-19 and emergency e-learning in political science and international relations. PS: Political Science & Politics, 54(1), 169–171. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1049096520001511 Martin, F., & Bolliger, D. U. (2018). Engagement matters: Student perceptions on the importance of engagement strategies in the online learning environment. Online Learning, 22(1), 205–222. Xu, D., & Jaggars, S. S. (2014). Performance gaps between online and face-toface courses: Differences across types of students and academic subject areas. The Journal of Higher Education, 85(5), 633–659.

CHAPTER 9

Access is Love: Equity-Minded Pandemic Pedagogy Andrew B. Jenks

Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need for instructors to consider how, or whether, as Oumar Ba asks in this volume, learning can occur through a time which can only be characterized as a crisis for both student and instructor. In many ways, this chapter aligns with the others in this section, in answering how we, as instructors in International Relations (IR) classrooms, cared for our students when experiencing these moments of crisis. It also addresses how we can carry these practices forward as universities continue to reckon with the “new normal,” as we live with, not past, the effects of COVID-19. Yet unlike Ba (Chapter 7) or Glazier’s (Chapter 10) focus on community and creating space within the classroom to build rapport and connections between instructor and

A. B. Jenks (B) Department of Political Science and International Relations, University of Delaware, Newark, USA

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. A. Szarejko (eds.), Pandemic Pedagogy, Political Pedagogies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83557-6_9

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students, or Dayal (Chapter 6) and Allendoerfer’s (Chapter 8) focus on flexibility, generosity, and transparency, this chapter’s focus is on existing broader, systemic inequities in higher education which were exacerbated during the pandemic. The pandemic widened existing equity gaps in higher education and caused disproportionate levels of uncertainty about future education plans for Latinx and Black students (Fain, 2020). Students continued to face a number of barriers to equitable access in higher education, exacerbated by basic needs insecurity, homelessness, and food insecurity which only increased for many first generation and low income students (GoldrickRab et al., 2020; Maloney & Kim, 2020). Literature has previously highlighted the ways race impacts access to higher education in the United States (Altbach et al., 2002; Harper et al., 2009; Orfield et al., 2005; Yosso et al., 2004), as well as social class (Ardoin, 2019; Morley, 2020), which ultimately works to disenfranchise and negatively impact the student learning experience of historically underrepresented students. While literature on how to address inequitable access in higher education often suggests the adoption of inclusive pedagogy in order to meet the learning needs of students based upon careful consideration of their social identities (Arman, 2019; Blessinger et al., 2018), the realities of the COVID-19 pandemic have necessitated both a fundamental shift in how instructors understand the needs of students experiencing a wide range of barriers to access and a response to addressing student need which is itself equity-minded. In line with the approaches to care offered by other contributors to this section of the volume, my approach to “pandemic pedagogy” is informed by an assessment of student needs coupled with my own experience as an instructor trying to teach with care. My approach to teaching with care also aligns significantly with the flexibility, transparency, and ultimately more interpersonal pandemic pedagogy my fellow contributors adopted. The theme of this chapter, “Access is Love,” comes from a campaign started by disabled Asian-American disability rights activists in 2018. The campaign’s focus on access, construed broadly and cognizant of the intersectional nature of barriers to access, aligns closely with the pandemic pedagogy I adopted in my own classes as an instructor and teach others about as a teaching and learning professional. Access, in the context of higher education in the United States, is closely linked to notions of accessibility and disability, created through the accommodations disabled students are legally guaranteed. This chapter attempts to reorient and expand the concept of access, to apply to all students, not just those whose

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access needs are apparent because of disability. In expanding conceptions of what “access” is, I urge instructors to re-orient themselves to understanding access, and barriers to it, as a foundational consideration in designing and teaching courses moving forward. Access to higher education, highlighted above, is just one hurdle students face in attempting to engage in the IR classroom. In framing this discussion, it is important to remember that access to stable wireless internet, a private working space, or the ability to attend synchronous classroom instruction are not new problems for our students. They are problems which were exacerbated, affected our student populations more widely, and most importantly, were more visible during the pandemic. I argue that through creating classrooms cognizant of the diverse access needs of students, we can create spaces more inclusive and welcoming of students traditionally marginalized in higher education, those who were often most negatively affected by the pandemic. This chapter primarily focuses on two upper-level IR courses I taught in Spring 2020 and Summer 2020 at the University of Delaware; however, I will provide some examples I have since implemented in four introductory-level courses I taught at Franklin & Marshall College and the University of Delaware in the 2020–2021 academic year. The chapter is divided into three sections. “Reframing Access” uses Disability Studies theory to highlight how access is understood in higher education and help the reader think more broadly about access. While rooted in broader literatures which interrogate disability in higher education, my articulation of how we can reframe access as an interactive and relational concept to address inequity in the classroom is an original contribution. This portion of the chapter comes from professional development workshops I have presented for diverse audiences at universities across the United States since the summer of 2020, and ultimately provides some insight as to how instructors can work to create more equitable learning environments. The second section discusses the ways in which this principle can be applied in the use of access moves in the classroom. The final, concluding section returns to the theme of Access is Love to tie in my own theory and praxis of caring for students through considerations of equitable access. I wanted to highlight this theme and the work of these activists in this chapter because access is not something we can create without people, nor is it something that we can only create around specific people or one embodied social identarian characteristic of a person. By understanding access, just as we must understand equity,

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through an intersectional lens, we as instructors can work to enhance the student learning experience while simultaneously providing a needed form of care in the classroom. Within this chapter I do not seek to maintain any kind of scientific objectivity, as I am fundamentally suggesting instructors normatively embrace a pedagogical approach. I am most likely the only “out” disabled person students will ever have leading their classes at my large public university. I am legally blind, and although I “pass” as able-bodied, I cannot hide my inability to see the raised hands of my students, the presentation of very large print or zoomed in images on my computer screen, nor my inability to distinguish students from one another easily based upon their appearance. When teaching in-person, I assign groups and seating, and when teaching online I establish procedures for participation in larger class sessions which allow me to control interactions with students based upon my access needs. I have a forthcoming chapter in a volume on teaching as a graduate student which explains how I leverage my own access needs in the classroom (A. Jenks, Forthcoming). This is work I would never have taken an interest in nor been able to perform without my experience as a disabled person navigating mostly inaccessible student and instructor roles in higher education. I have a wide range of some really excellent experiences from an early age with special education professionals in K-12 education and with disability services office as a student at public undergraduate and graduate institutions. I also have experiences, with those tasked with providing reasonable accommodations in the classroom and on campus, including disability professionals and instructors, which filled me with despair, loneliness, and self-hate. While I do not begrudge, nor am I attempting to downplay the significance of the work of disability services professionals working in understaffed, underfunded bureaucratic wings of the university, this chapter highlights the ways in which the epistemic authority over access in higher education is held by those whose job is fundamentally defined by legal obligation, not care. I am arguing that a pedagogical reorientation towards considerations of access in the university, rooted in theory and praxis of Disability Studies and IR, can help others embrace access as an act of care in creating more equitable student learning experiences, just as it helped me in the pivot to online teaching and will continue to inform my future teaching and professional development work.

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Reframing Access University campuses have lots of steep steps— but the entire university experience can also be metaphorized as a movement up steep steps. The steep steps, physically and figuratively, lead to the ivory tower. The tower is built upon ideals and standards— historically, this is an identity that the university has embraced. I want to suggest that we have mapped the university in this way— as a climb up the stairs of the ivory tower— for particular reasons. Often, maps are created not to reveal exclusion, but to create it. Mapping is traditionally a mode of closing- off, of containment. Simply, maps cut people out much more than they fit people in. (Dolmage, 2017, p. 44)

This passage, from Jay Dolmage’s Academic Ableism, highlights the purpose the “steep steps” of the university serve to both signify the rigorous ideals of the university and to demonstrate that the university is not for everyone. Steep steps do not in of themselves discriminate against people with mobility disabilities, for instance, but when we try to locate ramps or functioning elevators on our university campuses, we can begin to understand the ways the university is built upon exclusionary ideals. Dolmage’s 2017 text is groundbreaking in its approach to uncovering and linking the (in)visible forms of exclusion which are not just some part of the university experience; they define the university as an exclusionary space. The steps serve as the metaphorical barriers this chapter, and a reframing of access, is fundamentally concerned with. Focusing on both the ways in which universities have historically excluded and now are seeking to re-include disabled people, Dolmage uses the concept of ableism, commonly confused with disablism in popular and academic discourse, and I want to clarify the difference here. Disablism is the “set of assumptions (conscious or unconscious) and practices that promote the differential or unequal treatment of people because of actual or presumed disabilities” (Campbell, 2009, p. 4). Comparable to racism, sexism, or classism, disablism is the exclusion or mistreatment of people based on perceived characteristics. Ableism is the “system that has also created the very category of people it refers to” (Jampel, 2018, p. 124). In the same way white supremacy produces race and heteronormativity produces straightness, ableism produces disability. Ableism produces notions that there are species-typical standards and that deviation from these standards must somehow be changed or

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adjusted to comport with what is considered “normal.” Defined as the “network of beliefs, processes and practices that produce a particular kind of self and body (the corporeal standard) that is projected as perfect, species-typical and therefore essential and fully human” (Campbell, 2009, p. 5), ableism helps perpetuate the de facto exclusion of disabled people from society, rendering their experiences invisible and perceivably insignificant. While neither this chapter nor this section is focused only on how ableism works to exclude disabled people in higher education, the process of reflexively identifying exclusionary logics behind barriers to equitable access, like steep steps, is a project which can be informed by grounding an approach to equity-minded teaching in concepts from the interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary field of Disability Studies. Access as Interactive & Relational What does access mean in the context of the university? Generally, access in the university is tied to disability in one or two ways. The first is digital accessibility—like the accessibility provided by checkers on learning management systems (LMS) that detect features of documents that are easier or more difficult for screen readers to navigate. We might consider digital accessibility when we use alt-text to describe images in PowerPoint slides, or ensure all documents in Portable Document Format (.pdf) uploaded to an LMS make use of Optical Character Recognition (OCR). The second, student accessibility (or disability) services, the office on campus which issues those letters we receive in the first few weeks of the semester, notifying us about the approved reasonable accommodations a student needs in class or for tests. On campus, disability services offices hold epistemic authority over access. Legally guaranteed (in the United States) through a network of laws like Sect. 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the Architectural Barriers Act of 1968, and the Americans with Disabilities Act, access in the university roughly means the creation of a reasonable accommodation

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for a person with a disability.1 In order to receive reasonable accommodations that do not cause undue hardship or expense, disabled students have to provide documentation from a medical professional “proving” their disability status, this document has to be interpreted by a professional working within the disability student services office, and then an appropriate accommodation must be decided upon. Access, then, is a specific kind of ad hoc move made to address the needs of students with disabilities. I am suggesting we reframe access and reorient ourselves to the concept of access, as interactive and relational, and not something static, achieved through a reasonable accommodation for disabled students, nor as something we can perfectly plan for in the classroom. In The Question of Access: Disability, Space, Meaning, Tanya Titchkosky provides a broader definition which can guide this reframing: “Access… is tied to the social organization of participation, even to belonging. Access not only needs to be sought out and fought for, legally secured, physically measured, and politically protected, it also needs to be understood—as a complex form of perception that organizes socio-political relations between people in social space (Titchkosky, 2011, p. 3; emphasis added). Access, if we take Titchkosky’s cue, is a complex form of perception which organizes us in social space and is tied fundamentally to social participation and belonging. While Titchkosky orients her study of access to disability in the context of the university, I reframe these questions and pose them to the instructor in the context of how we can consider access in the university classroom for all students. 1 I use person-first language (PFL) of “people/person with a disability” and identity-

first language (IFL) of “disabled person/people” interchangeably in this chapter. The term “person/people with a disability” is most commonly used in the United States to discuss disability in 2021, and it ostensibly serves to separate the person from their disability, thus not allowing a person to be defined by their disability (Snow, 2007). The term “disabled person/people” is an example of IFL in which people commonly identify with a social identity of disabled, like woman or Black person (Ladau 2015). PFL has become commonly used in documents and conventions of international organizations like the UN, where language used to proclaim 1981 the International Year of Disabled Persons, has been ditched in favor of PFL, in documents like the 2006 UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UCNRPD). This is not an apolitical (Titchkosky, 2001) nor unimportant change in official language around disability which occurred in both the United States where the Rehabilitation Act Amendments of 1986 changed the Rehabilitation Act of 1973’s language from “handicapped individual” to “individual with a handicap.” The debate over IFL/PFL, especially as it pertains to the disabled social and political identity is ongoing and an important site for political analysis but is a distinction I do not seek to take a proverbial side of here.

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Who counts in creating access? What is (or is not) accessible? Where is the access need/barrier? When does access matter? Why does access matter?

These questions, in the context of disability, appear somewhat easy to answer. Accessible classrooms do not have steps, and are located in buildings which have ramp access, on upper floors with elevator access. But when we expand our conception of access, and barriers to it, to all students, determining what is accessible, where access needs are located, or when access matters, become a bit more complicated. I turn to the theory of Disability Studies and a case from IR, to clarify what I mean by an approach to access as an interactive and relational concept. Orientations to Disability (and Access) Disability Studies scholarship identifies two dominant societal approaches to addressing the needs of disabled people. The Medical Model of Disability locates disability, access needs, and the accommodation of individual need within the individual. The Social Model of Disability (Oliver, 1983) locates disability, access, and the construction of material and social barriers to access, within society. As Jenks (2005, p. 152) notes, “The medical model emphasizes changing the person to fit the environment, whereas the social model emphasizes changing the environment to fit the person… those fighting for the rights of the disabled argue that disability is not the main barrier to participation in society for disabled individuals: society’s practices construct the barriers.” In this section I present how understandings of disability (and access need) which align with the Medical and Social Models are inadequate to inform considerations of access and advocate for an Interactional Model of disability, one adopted by the World Health Organization (WHO) and which appears within the United Nations in the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). Locating access needs—and the places where efforts to address inequity should be oriented—within the individual necessitates a time- and laborintensive process of considering barriers to access after the fact based upon an articulation of individual needs and tailoring responses to the individual. Barrier removal and equity can, using the steep steps

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metaphor, be achieved via the creation of a ramp to meet the needs of a student with a disability. Accessibility standards fall within this category, which would include the LMS checkers and the creation of alt-text in documents. As an instructor, an individual approach to access means an instructor is asked to create or correct automatically generated captions, produce multiple or new formats of materials, and generally come up with an equitable approach based upon individual need. A second approach understands access (and its barriers) as being societally constructed. For our purposes, this means courses might be designed with as anticipated few barriers to access as possible. In practice, time and cost create limitations on the ability for instructors to design content which is cognizant of all or even most of the barriers students may encounter in accessing course content. Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a systemic approach which seeks to eliminate barriers to access by eliminating all barriers to access (Meyer et al., 2014). Unfortunately, these goals can feel burdensome to an instructor to actualize and, unfortunately, and can create a false belief that if a course is designed utilizing principles of UDL that it is accessible to all through design and planning alone. Dolmage, among others, has questioned the “universality” of UDL, especially on how it impacts the learning experiences of students with disabilities (Dolmage, 2017; Griful-Freixenet et al., 2017; Hamraie, 2017). Reaching back towards the steep steps metaphor, a campus which has only ramps does not necessarily meet the needs of all. To extend further, does the campus which takes the time and energy to eliminate all of its steep steps meet the true needs of all of its learners? A third approach to access (and disability) locates the concept within the interaction, or the middle ground, between individual needs and universal needs of learners. This approach suggests access is interactive and not a static concept. I want to suggest that creating equitable, accessible student learning experiences relies upon acknowledging that while we can anticipate some student need based upon the courses we design, we cannot anticipate all barriers to access, or changes in the status quo like a pandemic which create new barriers to access. This approach meets the needs of students by striving to create classroom spaces, and courses, which are not completely re-engineered, nor designed according to some difficult to reach standard of accessibility. Rather, drawing from Titchkosky, this approach understands access as a relation between people in social space. It is cognizant of the fact that both barriers to access, and the meeting of access needs, are produced through the kinds of care and

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attention to the ever-changing, context-dependent needs of our students, something others in this section on care in teaching also highlight. To illustrate how an interactive approach to access works, I draw upon the case of the World Health Organization (WHO) recognizing the need to update its 1980 International Classification of Impairments, Disability, and Handicap (ICIDH) document can be used. The WHO created an International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health (ICF) in 2001 which corrected assumptions about access needs and barriers to access being universal. Each document (the 1980 ICIDF and the 2001 ICDH) includes an operationalization of how significantly a particular impairment impacts the ability of an individual to complete certain tasks on a scale which ranges from zero percent, meaning disability has no impact on completion of the task, to one hundred percent meaning the task is impossible for that person to complete due to disability. In measuring how a severe visual disability impacted preparing a simple meal, which includes planning the meal, gathering ingredients then cutting, stirring, and heating them into a finished meal, the older ICIDH considered the level of difficulty for a person with a severe visual impairment preparing a simple meal to be a single value, for our purposes 50%. When we consider how difficult it is for two people with the same disability to use two different kinds of cooking surfaces for heating food, one an open stove, fueled by firewood, and the other, an indoor range fueled by electricity, it becomes clearer that individual need, nor societal construction of a barrier to access, is universal or static. Is one of these stoves more difficult for someone with a severe visual impairment to prepare a simple meal with, or dangerous to use? WHO experts thought so as well and updated how they operationalized the way impairment impacted the ability of an individual to complete the task of preparing a meal.

Achieving More Equitable Classroom Instruction Through Access Moves When taking seriously the notion that access is an interactive and relational concept rather than one that can be simply addressed in relation to individuals or wholly addressed in a universal way, it is important to clarify what I am suggesting instructors do. I am not suggesting that we ignore guidelines designed to ensure the digital content you create or use in creating instructional resources is accessible to students with visual, hearing, and cognitive disabilities (including learning disabilities

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like ADHD and Dyslexia). You may already be familiar with the aforementioned Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework, originally developed for students with disabilities and now widely championed in the creation of courses in higher education. Its core principles (italicized) focus on expanding the ways in which course material is represented, the forms of action and expression students can use to demonstrate engagement with material, and the ways student engagement can occur, promoting knowledgeable, goal-oriented, and motivated learners. What I am advocating is a third way in navigating these two dominant approaches to access, which gear equity-minded teaching and learning towards the individual (digital accessibility) and the universal learner (UDL) respectively and can seem quite daunting to implement in your courses. Access moves can also help erase the fear that moves to create more accessible courses will cost you time, resources, and at the end of the day, will not be utilized or appreciated by your students. In considering access in equitable instruction for students in my classes during the pivot to online instruction in Spring 2020, a 40-person American Foreign Policy course, and in designing an online special topics course on Social Policy in a Global Context for a five-week session in Summer 2020, I incorporated what Jessie Male calls “access moves:” small purposeful steps intended to create more accessible learning environments for all (Straumsheim, 2017). In my case, I created surveys and evaluations to understand students’ needs and their ability to complete work during class hours, assess their ability to access online textbooks and stream video content, and to work in groups (in my Spring 2020 course) or work on their own to complete scaffolded steps of a final deliverable (in my Summer 2020 course). During both the Spring pivot to online learning and in designing a fully online Summer course, I opted for asynchronous models of instruction. Students, especially in my Summer course, were working overnight jobs, participating in protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, and coping with the overwhelming social, political, and economic changes brought on by the pandemic. In order to help keep students on track, I built in individual meetings with them, created office hours or meeting time slots which were not confined to 9–5 “working hours” and prioritized students grasping course content by and allowing them to rewrite and resubmit work when necessary. Access moves are an aspect of intentional course design which are ultimately an act of care. Many of the moves Ba (Chapter 7) and Dayal (Chapter 6) made to connect interpersonally with their students, as well as the moves

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Allendoerfer (Chapter 8) and Glazier (Chapter 10) discuss in their chapters as flexibility (all in this section of the volume) can be characterized as access moves. By making access moves, I am intentionally working to design courses which not only recognize and embrace the diversity of the student learners in my courses, I am approaching teaching with care at the forefront of how I design my courses. This act of care is one which matters. It mattered to me as a student with a disability. It matters to students in my classes who have, in the past year of online learning had to cope with joblessness, forest fires, contracting a virus which has wide-ranging and still unknown side effects, caring for family members, moving and relocating between homes and isolation dorms, trauma-inducing national protests and an armed insurrection of the US Capitol, in addition to the loss of family members during a pandemic which has killed more than half of a million people in the United States at the writing of this chapter. In approaching pedagogy, especially pandemic pedagogy, with an ethic of care, I am showing my students that access is more than something more than reasonable accommodation, it is an act of care that can be encapsulated by the theme “Access is Love.”

Access is Love “Access Is Love” is an initiative intended to raise awareness about accessibility and to encourage people to incorporate access in their everyday practice. With its genesis in the 2018 keynote of the biennial Disability & Intersectionality Summit, it is a project lead by three disabled AsianAmerican women, Mia Mingus, Sandy Ho, and Alice Wong (Disability & Intersectionality Summit, 2021). Wong’s Disability Visibility Project is a multi-faceted digital and social media enterprise which works to raise awareness to disability issues and is an example of twenty-first century disability activism. Twitter hashtags that Wong created like #SuckItAbleism not only commented upon the exclusion of disabled people in policy considerations of straw bans in 2018, they brought awareness to the ways in which considerations of access and need are so often left out of debates simply because disabled people are excluded by ableism within society (A. B. Jenks & Obringer, 2020). Combatting ableism, and the steep steps of the university, is not easy. In conjunction with inclusive pedagogy and pedagogical moves oriented towards anti-racism, the

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types of considerations I suggest instructors take to create more equitable student learning experiences are at their core related to questions of justice and addressing injustice in the classroom. Access Is Love understands disability justice as an intersectional movement towards the creation of more equitable lives for all, not just people with disabilities who experience unemployment at three times the rate of non-disabled people (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2020), are generally poorer (Turmusani, 2003), experience multiple barriers in the pursuit of higher education (Myers et al., 2014), and are ultimately still treated in many ways as undesirable in various facets of the mainstream of American life. Authentic considerations of access, and accessibility, do not just show disabled people that an attempt to meet their needs has been made, it actively includes them in the process of determining how to create more equitable events, classrooms, and public lives. By conceptualizing the making of an access move for any learner who experiences a barrier to equitable access as an act of love, instructors demonstrate their recognition of the learners in their class as people who are experiencing not only a pandemic but also as people whose voices should be valued and have not been in the past. By working to create spaces which address the larger systems of exclusion, like ableism, which have historically served to exclude historically marginalized people from higher education, I want to suggest that instructors are not only doing care work, they are also demonstrating, foundationally, that they are invested in creating a course which is truly inclusive of all learners.

References Altbach, P. G., Lomotey, K., & Rivers, S. (2002). Race in higher education. The racial crisis in American higher education: Continuing challenges for the twenty-first century, 23–41. Ardoin, S. (2019). Straddling class in the academy: 26 stories of students, administrators, and faculty from poor and working-class backgrounds and their compelling lessons for higher education policy and practice. Stylus Publishing, LLC. Arman, S. (2019). Strategies for fostering inclusive classrooms in higher education: International perspectives on equity and inclusion. Emerald Publishing Limited. Blessinger, P., O’Callaghan, P., Cobb, L. N., Galvez, D., Gonzalez, C., Graber, J., Gruberg, S. J., Hall, M. P., & Hoffman, J. (2018). Perspectives on diverse student identities in higher education: International perspectives on equity and inclusion. Emerald Publishing Limited.

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Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2020, August 10). Labor force participation rate 20.8 percent for people with a disability in 2019. TED: The Economics Daily. https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2020/labor-force-participation-rate20-point-8-percent-for-people-with-a-disability-during-2019.htm Campbell, F. (2009). Contours of ableism: The production of disability and abledness. Palgrave Macmillan. Catherine, J. (2018). Intersections of disability justice racial justice and environmental justice. Environmental Sociology, 4(1), 122–135. https://doi.org/10. 1080/23251042.2018.1424497 Disability & Intersectionality Summit. (2021). Access is love. Disummit. https:// www.disabilityintersectionalitysummit.com/about Dolmage, J. T. (2017). Academic ableism: Disability and higher education. University of Michigan Press. Fain, P. (2020, June 17). The pandemic has worsened equity gaps in higher education and work. Inside HigherEd. https://www.insidehighered.com/ news/2020/06/17/pandemic-has-worsened-equity-gaps-higher-educationand-work Goldrick-Rab, S., Coca, V., Kienzl, G., Welton, C. R., Dahl, S., & Magnelia, S. (2020). #RealCollege during the pandemic: New evidence on basic needs insecurity and student well-being. Hope4College.com. Griful-Freixenet, J., Struyven, K., Verstichele, M., & Andries, C. (2017). Higher education students with disabilities speaking out: Perceived barriers and opportunities of the Universal Design for Learning framework. Disability & Society, 32(10), 1627–1649. Hamraie, A. (2017). Building access: Universal design and the politics of disability. University of Minnesota Press. Harper, S. R., Patton, L. D., & Wooden, O. S. (2009). Access and equity for African American students in higher education: A critical race historical analysis of policy efforts. The Journal of Higher Education, 80(4), 389–414. Jampel, C. (2018). Intersections of disability justice, racial justice and environmental justice. Environmental Sociology, 4(1), 122–135. Jenks, A. (Forthcoming). I have to make my classroom accessible: Digital practice and PBL as inclusive pedagogy. In K. Armstrong, L. Genova, J. W. Greenlee, & D. Samuel (Eds.), Teaching gradually: Practical pedagogy for graduate students, By Graduate Students. Stylus Publishing, LLC. Jenks, A. B., & Obringer, K. M. (2020). The poverty of plastics bans: Environmentalism’s win is a loss for disabled people. Critical Social Policy, 40(1), 151–161. Jenks, E. B. (2005). Explaining disability: Parents’ stories of raising children with visual impairments in a sighted world. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 34(2), 143–169. https://doi.org/10.1177/0891241604272064

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Ladau, E. (2015, July 20). Why person-first lnaguage doesn’t always put the person first [Blog]. Think Inclusive. https://www.thinkinclusive.us/why-per son-first-language-doesnt-always-put-the-person-first/ Maloney, E. J., & Kim, J. (2020, May 21). The challenge of equity in higher education under COVID-19. Inside HigherED. https://www.insidehighered. com/blogs/learning-innovation/challenge-equity-higher-education-undercovid-19 Meyer, A., Rose, D. H., & Gordon, D. T. (2014). Universal design for learning: Theory and practice. CAST Professional Publishing. Morley, L. (2020). Does class still matter? Conversations about power, privilege and persistent inequalities in higher education. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 1–12. Myers, K. A., Lindburg, J. J., & Nied, D. M. (2014). Allies for inclusion: Disability and equity in higher education: ASHE, 39(5). John Wiley & Sons. Oliver, M. (1983). Social work with disabled people. The Macmillan Press. Orfield, G., Marin, P., & Horn, C. L. (2005). Higher education and the color line: College access, racial equity, and social change. ERIC. Snow, K. (2007). People first language. Including Infants and Toddlers with Disabilities, 3(4), 1–9. Straumsheim, C. (2017, March 7). How one instructor is pursuing accessibility in online education. Inside HigherEd. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/ 2017/03/07/how-one-instructor-pursuing-accessibility-online-education Titchkosky, T. (2001). Disability: A rose by any other name? “People-first” language in Canadian society. Canadian Review of Sociology/revue Canadienne De Sociologie, 38(2), 125–140. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1755-618X. 2001.tb00967.x Titchkosky, T. (2011). The question of access: Disability, space, meaning. University of Toronto Press. Turmusani, M. (2003). Disabled people and economic needs in the developing world: A political perspective from Jordan. Ashgate. Yosso, T. J., Parker, L., Solorzano, D. G., & Lynn, M. (2004). Chapter 1: From Jim Crow to affirmative action and back again: A critical race discussion of racialized rationales and access to higher education. Review of Research in Education, 28(1), 1–25.

CHAPTER 10

Teaching Online During a Crisis: What Matters Most for Students Rebecca A. Glazier

In an overwhelmed emergency room or a battlefield, physicians helping the wounded work on a triage system whereby they attend to the most serious needs first. By doing so, they are able to save the largest number of people. In college and university classrooms, we sometimes encounter crisis situations where a triage metaphor can be useful. The COVID19 pandemic, beginning in March of 2020, is one such crisis. What are students’ most serious needs and how can faculty help to meet them? The pandemic revealed many inequities in the higher education system as students struggled to find reliable internet connections or quiet places to work in the online pivot. Without campus housing or meal plans, some even found those basic necessities in question. To a certain extent, these are systemic problems that are above the pay grade of the average college professor. Neither our institutions nor our students expect us to solve them. Having enough to eat, a safe place to study, and a reliable Internet connection are required basics before teaching and learning can

R. A. Glazier (B) School of Public Affairs, University of Arkansas, Little Rock, AR, USA

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even begin. The triage that an instructor contributes can’t start without this fundamental standard of care already in place. Yet, faculty are not totally disconnected from the broader struggles of our students. When the Internet fails or a housing crisis arises, we may hear about it, if our students trust us enough to ask for an assignment extension, or even to ask if we know where they can go for help. Thus, although individual students may have unique circumstances and needs, I argue that the most important thing that faculty can do to help students succeed during times of crisis is to build rapport with them through making meaningful human connections. There is a lot we could prioritize during a crisis. Inequitable access to technology is a significant problem that has been made increasingly apparent as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. But once basic functionality is achieved, the focus should be on connecting with students. As others in this volume have demonstrated, teaching students in engaging and empathetic ways is not only possible, but is incredibly valuable (see, for instance, Gaufman & Möller in Chapter 3). Many instructors and institutions adjusted during the COVID-19 pandemic to connect with students and build rapport. Both qualitative and quantitative data from the students’ perspectives indicates that they appreciated these changes. Although the COVID-19 crisis will not last indefinitely, it will always be the case that students in our classes will struggle with personal trauma. The question for faculty is whether we will adapt our teaching for the long term to continue to build rapport with our students.

Setting Priorities in a Crisis In March 2020, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic meant that colleges and universities around the world very suddenly moved the vast majority of their courses online in what many came to call “emergency remote teaching” (Hodges et al., 2020). Although some faculty had experience teaching online, others found themselves teaching classes online that they had previously taught only in-person, and still others found themselves teaching online for the first time. As any online instructor will tell you, preparing a good online class takes a great deal of time and effort, often many times longer than preparing a face-to-face class (Cavanaugh, 2005; Visser, 2000). But in the pandemic crisis, that time simply wasn’t available. Luckily, when it comes to helping students succeed online, the

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literature is clear—a well-organized class is nice, but far more important is an engaged and caring instructor (Jaggars & Xu, 2016). For instance, in an experimental study of economics students, Carrell and Kurlaender (2020) find that something as simple as sending a few strategically timed e-mails letting students know where they stand in the class, some keys to success, and when the professor is available, can have a statistically significant effect on their grades. This effect was particularly strong for some groups that tend to be underserved, like first-year students of color. My own experimental research similarly shows that when the instructor of a course proactively reaches out to students through check-in emails, calls them by name in the discussion board, and leaves meaningful feedback on assignments, students are more likely to stay enrolled and earn higher grades (Glazier, 2016). These types of behaviors build rapport with students by sending them the message that their professor cares. In their book, “Relationship Rich Education,” Felten and Lambert (2020) argue that students are more successful when their college years are filled with opportunities to make connections and gain support. All too often, these kinds of “relationship rich” college experiences are restricted to privileged students at elite institutions or enrolled in honors colleges. Instead, they argue that “all students should experience welcome and care” (p. 6) and that the classroom is the first and most important place to look for it. One of the case studies they present in their book is of a large online university: Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU). Relationships can be particularly challenging to build at an online university. Online classes can feel impersonal, but the faculty, staff, and administrators at SNHU make a concerted effort to reach out and connect with students. SNHU’s president, Paul LeBlanc, insists that the “secret sauce” required for student success is that “there has to be someone who communicates to each student that they matter and that their education matters…Those people at SNHU are the academic advisors and writing coaches who use the power of the human voice to cultivate meaningful and sustained connections with students through regular, frequent telephone conversations with the same students over multiple semesters” (p. 164). Why do these efforts to make personal connections with students learning online have such a significant impact on their success? Online classes in particular can be challenging for students to complete because of transactional distance, or the fact that teachers and learners are spatially

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separate from one another (Moore, 2013). This physical distance between teachers and students puts the onus on the instructor to reach out and build relationships with students (Veletsianos, 2020), which can take more effort in a virtual environment. Think about the many informal and casual interactions that are possible when teaching in person: conversations about current events before class starts, a follow up question about lecture as you are packing up, chatting about summer plans at a speaker series, or just a greeting as you pass a student walking across the quad. These kinds of interactions don’t happen as naturally in an online environment, so instructors have to be more purposeful about creating them. But when they do, it can be incredibly meaningful for students. These experiences and interactions can be purposefully created by many members of a campus community. Although faculty are often the ones in closest and most frequent contact with students, others around campus, such as support staff, academic advisors, and coaches, can also help students feel connected and supported. Administrators are often critical to helping create a campus culture that prioritizes rapport-building. Online classes can be isolating experiences. Without the personal interactions that come with seeing the professor and their fellow students face-to-face, students may feel like they are taking a course all on their own. As one student put it, “Obviously we are the student, but I think when it comes to the online course, we’re also the professor because we have to teach ourselves” (quoted in Gering et al., 2018, p. 71). Research shows that students are less likely to be successful when they feel like this—when they are isolated in a class or when they are alienated from the instructor (Cole, 2007; Komarraju et al., 2010). In particular, women and students of color suffer when they are isolated and lack positive relationships in their classes (Bush & Bush, 2010; Hurtado et al., 2011; Sax et al., 2005; Wood, 2014). In general, we know that students are just less likely to succeed in online classes (Glazier et al., 2019; Hamann et al., 2020), particularly past a “tipping point” of about 40% of overall course load taken online (Shea & Bidjerano, 2018). Importantly, this finding is not based on students’ inherent characteristics—students who take online classes are not just more likely to fail—but lower success rates are attributable to the way that online courses are delivered (Jaggars, 2013; Willging & Johnson, 2009; Xu & Jaggars, 2011).

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This is good news for instructors because it means that we can overcome the challenges of transactional distance—whether in our regular online classes or when they are imposed on us by emergency remote teaching—through building rapport and connecting with our students. Building rapport and relationships with students is more than activities and active learning—although these are certainly helpful for many learning goals and there are great resources available to help instructors incorporate active learning into their online classes (see, for instance, Hernandez in Chapter 4). Connecting with students can be done through active learning, but the key is that students know that their professors are real people who care about their success and are ready to help. Research is available to illustrate meaningful ways to “humanize” our teaching (Pacansky-Brock et al., 2020), connect with students through video (Costa, 2020), and build rapport with them (Glazier, 2020, 2021). Thus, when we are setting priorities in a crisis, faculty should direct our scarce resources towards building relationships with students. In this regard, the case of the COVID-19 crisis is illustrative. The students who did best were those who had supportive instructors and institutions.

Teaching During the COVID-19 Crisis The COVID-19 pandemic presented a crisis for both students and faculty. In real time, both students and faculty were living through a traumatic event and attempting to complete the semester successfully. Because faculty were experiencing the crisis along with their students, we were likely more understanding and compassionate than we would have been with a typical student crisis. We heard from students who were losing family members to COVID-19 or contracting the virus themselves, while we also worried about family members and our own health. Our students told us about bandwidth issues, while we tried to upload lecture videos and also facilitate remote learning for children. Although there is much we don’t directly understand about our students’ lives and circumstances, in many ways, the COVID-19 pandemic was a shared experience. Through it, on both an individual level and on an institutional level, we adjusted to the crisis to help make it through together. For instance, many institutions adjusted their grading policies during the initial pandemic spring semester of 2020 (Burke, 2020), allowing students to opt for credit/no credit options in the middle of the semester. While the move was controversial at some elite institutions where students

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were used to a competing for high grades and were concerned about transcripts for graduate school applications, “ungrading” scholars applauded the move as the best one for students and as the right approach to shift the focus to learning (Blum, 2020; Stommel, 2020). Additionally, many faculty members adjusted their deadlines and assignment requirements in the face of pandemic-induced trauma. In my Introduction to International Politics class, I decided to make the final exam optional—students who were happy with how they did on the first three exams could use the average of those exams as their final exam grade. I also made all of my deadlines flexible (up until the end of the course, when grades were due). This meant that there were still deadlines in the syllabus, but if students needed to turn things in late, they weren’t penalized. Almost all students still turned in the assignments on the listed due date, but those who needed the flexibility knew they could take it without risking a failing grade. By staying in touch with late submitters, I could stave off some last-minute procrastination, as well. Faculty also adjusted when it came to content. Oumar Ba (2020) describes adjusting the final exam in his Introduction to International Relations course from a short answer and multiple choice format to a long essay that specifically addressed how IR theories could help make sense of the COVID-19 pandemic and its implications for world politics. Taiyi Sun (2020) involved students in thinking creatively about adjusting their course on civic engagement. Instead of being derailed by the pandemic, the students took it as an opportunity to engage with the local community with timely and meaningful projects. Many instructors also reached out personally to students who were struggling—emailing, texting, and even calling students who weren’t showing up for their now-online classes. Joseph Roberts (2020) talks about setting up weekly virtual one-on-one meetings with the students in one of his upper-division courses once the pandemic forced them to move online, in addition to switching to more flexible due dates. When Eric Loepp (2020) surveyed students about their pandemic learning experience, he found that “students appreciated when instructors reached out to provide updates, course reminders, or even simply to say hello and ask how they were doing” (p. 170). In Chapter 7 in this volume, Oumar Ba explicitly discusses the changes he made in his course in terms of a “pedagogy of care.” Although centering care and connection in our teaching is likely to require more of us, both in terms of time and in terms of emotional resources, there are technological tools that faculty can call on

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to help lighten the load (see Chapter 4 of Glazier, 2021 for some helpful hacks). Outreach won’t look the same for everyone, but we know that when our students believe that we care about their success, it makes a major difference for them. How we get that message to them depends on each instructor. The key thing that I think made the biggest difference for my students during the pandemic is proactive communication. I reached out to let them know that I care about them and am willing to work with them to adjust and accommodate to help them make it successfully through our course under incredibly trying circumstances. Both my personal experiences with students and broader data collection efforts during the pandemic indicate that these kinds of efforts really made a difference for students. The next section describes their impact from the student perspective.

The Student Perspective What mattered most to students during the pandemic? Both personal experience and survey data provide insight into what students view as most helpful to their success in a time of crisis. Overall, although students were often concerned about their health, suffered increased mental health pressures, and had inadequate technology, the most meaningful support, from their perspective, usually came in the form of an understanding professor. One pandemic survey at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (n = 1,764), demonstrates how much students value engaged and flexible instructors (Slagle et al., 2020). When asked what professors could do to help during the transition to emergency remote learning, fully 42% of respondents said they could be flexible with assignments and deadlines. Thirty-one percent of students wanted professors who were available and answered their emails, but only 15% of responding students said that they wanted their professors to be producing interesting and engaging content during the transition online. From the students’ perspective, the emergency remote pivot online worked best not when faculty were learning the latest online tech or editing together the coolest videos, but when they were flexible and available. That is what students in crisis need. Similarly, survey research from the University of Wisconsin—Whitewater also shows that, when students have the opportunity to look back on the experiences they had during the transition to emergency remote

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learning during spring 2020, what they found most valuable for their success was a professor who was compassionate and communicated well (Loepp, 2020). The actual materials for the course ranked 4th out of four items. Although the content of our courses is certainly important, when it comes to teaching during a crisis, it is not what matters most to our students. In times of crisis, the most important thing instructors can do to ensure their students’ success is to build rapport with them—connect with them on a personal level by being available and understanding. When I look back on my own course evaluations from the two pandemic semesters of 2020, I find students expressing gratitude for the efforts I made to be compassionate and understanding in the midst of unusual circumstances. For instance, one student wrote, “This is a weird semester and Dr. Glazier managed to make it feel like I was still getting the most out of the class. Very helpful and understanding.” Another student wrote on their course evaluation, “Very fair and accessible. Dr. Glazier genuinely wanted us to succeed and was willing to work with me a couple weeks when things were hectic at home. Strange semester but her online format is very user friendly and the weekly videos were helpful as well.” During the COVID-19 crisis, faculty and students were navigating uncertain waters together. Under such circumstances, students needed to know professors were on their side and willing to help them in challenging situations. The student perspective also came through loud and clear to me in the many emails that I received from students. Part of my pedagogical approach of building rapport with students includes proactively reaching out to them with check-in emails to let them know how they are doing in the course and to touch base if I notice that they are struggling (Glazier, 2021). I teach a 3–3 load of about 75 students per semester, so this email contact is manageable, especially with technological help like mail merge. For those who teach hundreds of students each semester, personal email contact may be more difficult, or may require teaching assistants. I stepped up my email contact during the pandemic—letting students know I was available if they had questions, extending deadlines, and providing encouragement. In response, students gave me the best efforts they could. For instances, take this email response: “I just wanted you to know I have been trying. I don’t want my incomplete and late work to come off as disrespectful—especially when you’re more than generous with reminders! I know the pandemic is taking a major toll on all of us, but I KNOW I can do better.” Or the student who kept persisting

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despite a number of personal challenges and ultimately wrote, “Grateful, that’s what I am…I lost my job last month and had to make some rearrangements in my life… I feel terrible for making your job harder with my shortcomings. I thank you greatly for your patience.” In response to extended deadlines, students emailed to say, “Thank you so much for understanding! You don’t know how much that means to me” and “Thank you for providing the chance to hang in there!”. When it comes to a crisis, students are doing the best they can. If we prioritize rapport and let students know that we are on their side and want to help them succeed, they are more likely to keep giving it all they can and make it through the course successfully. If we listen to our students, they will tell us what they need: they need us to connect and communicate with them. They need us to be compassionate and flexible.

Teaching During Crises After COVID-19 Many individual instructors and institutions adjusted to account for the difficult circumstances imposed by the COVID-19 crisis. But how many of these policies and changes will persist and how many will fall by the wayside along with the virus? It is too early to say right now, as the pandemic is just beginning to wane in 2021, whether our collective experience will change higher education for the better. The COVID-19 crisis presents higher education in general and each instructor specifically with an opportunity to examine the way we have always done things and to potentially adopt long-term changes. Future research will need to explore the extent to which instructors’ attitudes towards online teaching and willingness to show flexibility and compassion in the classroom has been affected by their pandemic teaching experience. Although we may hope for a silver lining of more empathetic teaching, some seemed only too eager to return to prior policies. Even as the COVID-19 pandemic wore on, many colleges and universities, having made it through the pandemic pivot in spring 2020, reverted to “business as usual” in fall 2020 and spring 2021, rolling back credit/no credit options and returning to typical grading policies (Lederman, 2020). Despite these institutional tendencies to return to the way things were before the pandemic, even before the pandemic itself was over, there are indications that a broader “ungrading” movement may be gaining steam. Generally conceptualized as a system where students self-assess their learning, with qualitative input from the professor (Stommel, 2020),

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ungrading has spread to even traditionally quantitative fields like math. In a 2020 edited volume entitled Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead), fifteen diverse educators shared their experiences using ungrading methods in a variety of fields (Blum, 2020). Once vaccines are fully available and the COVID-19 virus is hopefully defeated by modern science, crisis-teaching will not suddenly become a thing of the past. Indeed, some of our students will likely always be in crisis. What the COVID-19 pandemic has provided us is an opportunity to reflect on how teaching and learning during a crisis affects us and how we can adjust our teaching to be more compassionate and understanding. We see this in calls for more trauma-informed pedagogy that recognizes the real impact of trauma on students and their learning experiences (Harper & Neubauer, 2021; Imad, 2020). In Chapter 6 in this volume, Anjali Dayal challenges us to think of ways that the pedagogy of care that many of us have adopted as a result of the pandemic can remain relevant after the crisis has passed. When we consider the crises that at least some of our students are likely experiencing in any given semester, it should spark in us a desire to continue to extend the compassionate and understanding policies that became common during the COVID-19 pandemic. For instance, research shows that, just in the time that they are in college, 22% of students will be the victim of a sexual assault (Mellins et al., 2017). Knowing this information, we should assume that any given week of a semester, there are potentially multiple students in a course recovering from being assaulted. Students are also powerfully affected by the world outside our classrooms, as Ba thoughtfully reflects on in Chapter 7, in regards to his experience teaching at an all-male historically Black college during the pandemic. Research by Desmond Ang (2021) using a unique dataset with hyperlocal variation in how close Los Angeles public high school students live to the site of police killings, found that exposure to police violence led to lower GPAs, lower high school completion rates, and lower levels of college enrollment. Importantly, Ang finds that these effects are driven almost entirely by Black and Hispanic students. Police violence is causing real academic harm to Black and Hispanic students. In Chapter 2 in this volume Alves and Ferreira use surveys and participatory observation to demonstrate how the safety of students in Brazil complicated the online transition during COVID-19. We are rarely able to measure the effects

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of racism, violence, health inequities, and trauma in such clear and direct ways, but innovative research like this reminds us in a compelling way that it is there and it matters. Many students are also struggling with financial difficulties, which is reflected in data on food and housing insecurity. A survey of more than 86,000 students at 100 institutions across the country revealed that 45% of students had been food insecure in the last 30 days and 17% had been homeless in the last year (Goldrick-Rab et al., 2019). The COVID-19 pandemic has only exacerbated existing inequities. A survey conducted at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock in the early months of the pandemic showed that 77% of students were worried about paying their bills, 68% were worried about accessing and successfully using the technology they needed for their classes, 41% were worried about having enough to eat each day, and 32% were worried about having a safe and secure place to sleep. Another survey of more than 2,000 students found that 71% said that their stress and anxiety had increased during the pandemic, with nearly half registering as moderately to severely depressed, and 18% reporting suicidal thoughts (Wang et al., 2020). There are likely to be long-term effects on our students from this pandemic, but even beyond these effects, our students deserve pedagogy that puts relationships first. Research shows that it is not only what they want, but it is what is most likely to help them succeed.

Conclusion Teaching online during a crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic is incredibly challenging. In many ways, higher education rose to that challenge as institutions and instructors adjusted to help students succeed in trying circumstances. My personal experience, my reading of the literature, and my analysis of the available data all tell me that building rapport with students is critically important to their success—and even more so during a crisis. Students need certain basic needs met in order to learn, but beyond that, when faculty are doing teaching triage during a crisis, they should put their scare resources towards connecting with students. That is where they will find the highest payoff in terms of student success. Connecting with students is more important than ever during a crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic has illustrated this fact through both data and experience. It has also provided an opportunity to reflect on the way we taught before the pandemic. The empathy and understanding we

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brought to our classes when experiencing a crisis with our students are not approaches that we need to leave behind once the crisis ends. We can take the outreach, the flexibility, and the rapport with us into our future classes as well. In a crisis, it may feel easier to be compassionate. But every semester, some of our students will experience personal crises that are at least as disruptive as COVID-19. If we build rapport with our students and make real connections with them, we will be ready to help them be successful in our classes no what challenges they face. If we remember what we all went through together during this unique shared experience, we may be able to more easily find that well of compassion the next time a student comes to us with their personal crisis. Rapport-building and trauma-aware pedagogy prioritizes building relationships with students, which is good for their success, no matter whether the crisis is one we can all see or is one that students are going through in silence. By prioritizing these approaches during a crisis and carrying them with once the shared crisis has passed, we will be better prepared to help our students succeed.

References Ang, D. (2021). The effects of police violence on inner-city students. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 136(1), 115–168. Ba, O. (2020). When teaching is impossible: A pandemic pedagogy of care. PS: Political Science & Politics, 54(1), 171–172. https://doi.org/10.1017/S10 4909652000150X Blum, S. D. (Ed.) (2020). Ungrading: Why rating students undermines learning (and what to do instead). West Virginia University Press Burke, L. (2020, March 19). #PassFailNation. Inside Higher Ed. https://www. insidehighered.com/news/2020/03/19/colleges-go-passfail-address-corona virus Bush, E. C., & Bush, L. V. (2010). Calling out the elephant: An examination of African American male achievement in community colleges. Journal of African American Males in Education, 1(1), 40–62. Carrell, S. E., & Kurlaender, M. (2020, June). My professor cares: Experimental evidence on the role of faculty engagement. National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 27312. https://doi.org/10.3386/w27312 Cavanaugh, J. (2005). Teaching online-A time comparison. Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration, 8(1).

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Cole, D. (2007). Do interracial interactions matter? An examination of studentfaculty contact and intellectual self-concept. The Journal of Higher Education, 78(3), 249–281. https://doi.org/10.1080/00221546.2007.11772316 Costa, K. (2020). 99 tips for creating simple and sustainable educational videos: A guide for online teachers and flipped classes. Stylus Publishing Felten, P., & Lambert, L. M. (2020). Relationship-rich education: How human connections drive success in college. Johns Hopkins University Press Gering, C. S., Sheppard, D. K., Adams, B. L., Renes, S. L., & Morotti, A. A. (2018). Strengths-based analysis of student success in online courses. Online Learning, 22(3), 55–85. Glazier, R. A. (2016). Building rapport to improve retention and success in online classes. Journal of Political Science Education, 12(4), 437–456. Glazier, R. A. (2020). Making human connections in online teaching. PS: Political Science & Politics, 7–8. https://doi.org/10.1017/S10490965200 01535 Glazier, R. A. (2021). Connecting in the online classroom: Building rapport between teachers and students. Johns Hopkins University Press Glazier, R. A., Hamann, K., Pollock, P. H., & Wilson, B. M. (2019). The influence of transfer status and course modality on student success. Teaching in Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/15512169.2018.1515636 Goldrick-Rab, S., Baker-Smith, C., Coca, V., Looker, E., & Williams, T. (2019, April). College and university basic needs insecurity: A national #RealCollege survey report. Philadelphia, PA: The Hope Center, Temple University. Hamann, K., Glazier, R. A., Wilson, B. M., & Pollock, P. H. (2020). Online teaching, student success, and retention in political science courses. European Political Science. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41304-020-00282-x Harper, G. W., & Neubauer, L. C. (2021). Teaching during a pandemic: A model for Trauma-informed education and administration. Pedagogy in Health Promotion, 7 (1), 14–24. https://doi.org/10.1177/2373379920965596 Hodges, C., Moore, S., Lockee, B., Trust, T., & Bond, A. (2020). The difference between emergency remote teaching and online learning. https://er.educause. edu/articles/2020/3/the-difference-between-emergency-remote-teachingand-online-learning. Accessed September 1, 2020. Hurtado, S., Eagan, M. K., Tran, M. C., Newman, C. B., Chang, M. J., & Velasco, P. (2011). “We do science here”: Underrepresented students’ interactions with faculty in different college contexts. Journal of Social Issues, 67 (3), 553–579. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4560.2011.01714.x Imad, M. (2020, June 3). Leveraging the neuroscience of now. Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2020/06/03/sevenrecommendations-helping-students-thrive-times-trauma Jaggars, S. S. (2013). Online learning in community colleges. In M. G. Moore (Ed.), Handbook of distance education (pp. 612–626). Routledge.

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Jaggars, S. S., & Xu, D. (2016, April). How do online course design features influence student performance? Computers & Education, 95, 270–284 Komarraju, M., Musulkin, S., & Bhattacharya, G. (2010). Role of student–faculty interactions in developing college students’ academic self-concept, motivation, and achievement. Journal of College Student Development, 51(3), 332–342. Lederman, D. (2020, August 12). Grading in a pandemic (still). Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2020/ 08/12/many-colleges-will-return-normal-grading-fall-will-semester-be Loepp, E. D. (2020). Introduction: COVID-19 and emergency e-learning in political science and international relations. PS: Political Science & Politics, 1–3. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1049096520001511 Mellins, C.A., Walsh, K., Sarvet, A.L., Wall, M., Gilbert, L., Santelli, J.S., Thompson, M., Wilson, P.A., Khan, S., Benson, S., & Bah, K. (2017). Sexual assault incidents among college undergraduates: Prevalence and factors associated with risk. PLoS one, 12(11), e0186471. https://journals.plos.org/plo sone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0186471 Moore, M. G. (2013). The theory of transactional distance. In M. G. Moore & W. C. Diehl (Eds.), Handbook of distance education (pp. 32–46). Routledge. Pacansky-Brock, M., Smedshammer, M., & Vincent-Layton, K. (2020). Humanizing online teaching to equitize higher education. Current Issues in Education, 12(2). https://cie.asu.edu/ojs/index.php/cieatasu/article/view/1905 Roberts, J. W. (2020). Rapidly moving online in a pandemic: Intentionality, rapport, and the synchronous/asynchronous delivery decision. PS: Political Science & Politics, 15–17. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1049096520001596 Sax, L. J., Bryant, A. N., & Harper, C. E. (2005). The differential effects of student-faculty interaction on college outcomes for women and men. Journal of College Student Development, 46(6), 642–657. Shea, P., & Bidjerano, T. (2018). Online course enrollment in community college and degree completion: The tipping point. International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 19(2) Slagle, D., Gehring, C., Wiley, S., & Little, R. (2020, May). May 2020 UA little rock COVID-19 assessment of students, faculty, & staff . University of Arkansas at Little Rock. Stommel, J. (2020, February 6). Ungrading: an FAQ. Jesse Stommel. https:// www.jessestommel.com/ungrading-an-faq/. Accessed September 3, 2020. Sun, T. (2020). Forced experimentation: Teaching civic engagement online amid covid-19. PS: Political Science & Politics, 54(1), 176–178. https://doi.org/ 10.1017/S1049096520001559 Veletsianos, G. (2020). Learning online: The student experience. Johns Hopkins University Press.

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PART III

Preparing for Future Disruptions

CHAPTER 11

It Takes a Village: Harnessing Institutional and Professional Resources to Preempt and Prepare for the Future Sibel Oktay

The World Health Organization had declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic on March 11th, 2020. Up until that week, I had been teaching my courses on campus, working on a manuscript to present at the annual International Studies Association conference in April (which was, alas, going to be held in Honolulu for the first time in 15 years), preparing for a research workshop and designing a survey experiment to field in the spring. On March 13th, 2020, my family and I began our coronavirus quarantine. I scrambled to transform my on-campus course to a remote modality, revise the assignments and make sure to communicate to my students that they should not panic and that we would survive this semester, while trying to explain to our two-year-old why we all had to stay home. My research came to a screeching halt.

S. Oktay (B) Department of Political Science, University of Illinois, Springfield, IL, USA

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. A. Szarejko (eds.), Pandemic Pedagogy, Political Pedagogies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83557-6_11

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To be frank, some of this was foreseeable. Many of us had understood full well that the coronavirus was going to take the world by the storm (Allen et al., 2020). For those of us in the United States, we knew that it was just a matter of time before we would start to see cases surging across the country (Washington Post 2020) (In fact, that’s why I had stocked up on toilet paper earlier that March). Yet probably none of us had predicted the large-scale lockdowns lasting more than months at a time. We also did not predict that we would still teach to a computer screen more than one year after the first case was reported in the United States, or that when we did go back to the classroom we would wear (double) masks and continue to practice social distancing. We did not predict that we would continue homeschooling our children for months on end, struggle to find the time to do any research, and, as a result of all, experience debilitating burnout—not to mention the implications on all of these disruptions on the career trajectories of untenured and contingent faculty. More than a year into the pandemic, we have conceded that COVID19 has not just upended our lives as individuals but changed the world as we know it (Davis, 2021). Alongside virtually every industry, it has also disrupted the higher education landscape (Barsotti, 2020). It has not only exposed the financial vulnerabilities of even the strongest institutions (Hubler, 2020), but also how complacent faculty and administrators have become with the way we think about teaching and learning. This was demonstrated most vividly with instructors transitioning to online teaching and learning in a somewhat clumsy and definitely panicky way in the early days of March 2020. I was among the lucky few during this rapid transition as I had already been teaching several of my courses online since 2014. Back then, online teaching was largely frowned upon. Many had argued—and some still maintain to this day—that online learning in higher education was a farce and would be nowhere as effective as face-to-face is. There exists anecdotal, market-based, and scientific evidence that students take advantage of online learning as its flexibility allows them to continue their education while maintaining their diverse and complex lifestyles and life conditions, including students with disabilities, students who have jobs or are single parents, to name a few (Driscoll & Carliner, 2005; Kent, 2015; Koksal, 2020; Smart & Cappel, 2006). Still, many folks working in higher education deemed online education as the lesser pathway toward earning a degree (Fain, 2019). Then, the pandemic hit. Fast forward fifteen months after the first coronavirus case was reported in the United States, and many instructors

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with no prior experience in online teaching now know how to offer their courses in multiple modalities (e.g. hybrid, hi-flex, blended, remote, asynchronous—oh how vast our vocabulary has grown!). They have learned to work with new technologies to deliver the course content and take advantage of the full suite of features that their until-then-hardly-used learning management systems (LMS, e.g., Blackboard, Canvas, Moodle) offered. Most importantly, the pandemic forced faculty to think more intentionally about student learning, assessment and accessibility. This was perhaps a thin silver-lining of the ongoing global public health catastrophe. Regardless of how much prior experience we may have with online teaching, however, trying to navigate these changes individually resulted in massive numbers of faculty reporting burnout (Gewin, 2021). Indeed, transforming an existing in-person/face-to-face course plan into online is a major feat on its own. I speak from experience. In the recent past, I had converted two of my in-person upper-level elective courses to online. I took time during the summer to do this, though, as each course took at least a week to transform. Creating new discussion and writing assignments, building the course website, and providing detailed technical manuals for students to complete non-writing assignments such as presentations are major tasks on their own, let alone preparing plans, notes, slides, and recordings for each lecture. The fact that faculty—especially those with no prior experience in online teaching—did all of that in a matter of days in order to keep up with the academic calendar must be recognized and commended for. Add to that the sudden lack of childcare and workspace for parents and the broader pandemic anxiety about our physical and economic wellbeing. No wonder we are now dealing with a trifecta of mental health problems: burnout, anxiety, and depression. The longer we have been living with the pandemic, the clearer is the need to introduce institutional and professional support mechanisms for faculty, including those who are tenured, untenured, or in non-tenuretrack positions. What could we learn from this disruption and prepare for the next one, however far away that might be? In this chapter, I take stock of this debate. I focus on the ways in which we have reimagined teaching and learning in the face of the coronavirus disruption, the types of support systems that we have already put in place, and future steps that both our institutions and professional organizations should take to prepare and take care of ourselves, as a discipline, for the next emergency.

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The Impact of COVID on Teaching and Learning (and Research) in International Relations Online teaching and learning have always been received with some skepticism (Fredericksen, 2015). Does it work? Can we achieve our learning outcomes as effectively in an online modality as we do face-to-face? Do students learn? How can we engage them better? None of these questions is going to go away any time soon (Drezner, 2021). But neither will online teaching. It is here to stay. As I have said in the previous section, what we have done so far as teachers and scholars to pivot to online on such short notice is remarkable. Still, I argue that there is ample room to think about what else we can do to streamline our efforts across the board and, as a result, support each other as members of the discipline. I delve deep into this discussion in this section. Let us consider the silver lining first. Compared to the applied, labbased courses in STEM fields or the arts, us International Relations scholars have had a relatively easy time transitioning online. Although developing course material for virtual delivery is an incredibly laborintensive exercise in IR as anyone who taught an online course would agree, we were still not as challenged as our colleagues across campus who had to produce elaborate videos of chemistry experiments in their labs for their online classes. Instead, since March 2020, we have collectively produced hundreds of slide-decks and thousands of minutes of recorded content in audio or video form. We have also harnessed the power of existing resources such as podcasts and YouTube videos more than ever to expose students to a variety of material on the topics we teach, that we may not have necessarily used frequently in the past. Although some could maintain that these alternative resources are counter-productive to learning as they over-simplify course content for students and sacrifice rigor, others (like Sebastian Kaempf in Chapter 12) would disagree. Indeed, research shows that students with different learning styles need a variety of material to not just to stay engaged but also to understand and synthesize information.1 In effect, the pandemic-induced changes and additions to the way we teach International Relations also forced us to think more intentionally 1 The visual, aural, read/write, and kinesthetic sensory modalities, or VARK, are of course the most well-known in this literature. See Fleming, N. D. & Mills, Colleen, “Not another inventory, rather a catalyst for reflection,” To Improve The Academy, 11, 137–155.

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about student learning and engagement, learning outcomes, assessment, and accessibility. As a result, we have become more thoughtful instructors both inside and outside the (virtual) classroom. COVID has also altered how we engage in scholarly activity. On the research front, in the absence of on-site conferences, we have experimented with new ways to disseminate our works in progress and interact with colleagues across different time zones. In addition to virtual conferences, several initiatives such as Seth Jolly (Syracuse University) and Catherine De Vries’ (Bocconi University) European Politics Online Workshop,2 Rosella Capella Zielinski’s (Boston University) Political Economy of Security Workshop,3 or the MIT Security Studies Program’s Wednesday Seminar4 broadcasts convened researchers and students from around the world to share and discuss new work. Danielle Lupton’s (Colgate University) International Relations and Comparative Politics Job Talk Series in Fall 2020 was an incredible resource for graduate students on the academic job market, giving them an opportunity to practice their research talks and receive feedback from faculty. Paul Poast’s (University of Chicago) podcasts offer short bursts of analysis and reflection on the history of international relations, current events, and everything in between.5 To be fair, these efforts hardly scratch the surface of the incredible things that IR scholars have done for their students and their professional communities in the time of COVID. But the common thread that runs through them all is that they have been individual-level efforts. From course development to virtual workshops, these tasks depended on the presence and motivation of the individual scholars behind them. If it weren’t for these individuals, we simply would not have these resources. So, what can we do in the short and long term to sustain, support, increase, and most importantly, to consolidate these efforts? This is where we should ask our institutions and professional organizations to step in.

2 www.europow.com. 3 https://www.bu.edu/pardeeschool/research/research-initiatives/project-on-the-politi

cal-economy-of-security/. 4 https://ssp.mit.edu/events/wednesday-seminars. 5 http://www.paulpoast.com/podcasts/4594743252.

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What Can Our Institutions and Professional Organizations Do to Support Us? Although we do not nearly earn as much as those working in Hollywood or on Broadway, the notion that “the show must go on” is very much etched on our hearts in higher education. An important debate that we have not reckoned with during the ongoing global pandemic, however, is that faculty are not isolated from humanitarian crises. Even though the nature of our profession gives us immense privileges such as tenure and the ability to work from home at an instant’s notice, we may well become incapacitated just as much as folks working in other industries. We may have to cope with health and family emergencies during a pandemic let alone fall sick ourselves, leave our homes in the face of wildfires (as many colleagues had to do in western United States in 2020), or lack access to electricity or internet service following a weather crisis (colleagues in Texas would relate).6 Even more importantly, the existing global disparities further expose the different degrees to which countries cope with such crises, and, in effect, teachers and researchers who live in those regions. As the coronavirus pandemic has clearly shown, the Global South remains a lot less prepared against public health emergencies (Bhattacharya & Islam, 2020). What happens to the education of students then—not just in the Global North but elsewhere too? How can we shield students from the repercussions of these crises on our own livelihoods, wherever we may be? In order to minimize the impact of any incident that disrupts the delivery of courses as well as the training of students more broadly construed (e.g. masters or doctoral training), we need to go beyond individual-oriented measures. We need to develop and sustain tools that harness the power and resources of the collective. Departments and professional organizations should constitute important hubs to fulfill this need through developing and supporting a series of tools and practices. These tools should focus on achieving three key goals. First, they should diffuse the burden away from the individual faculty member to community, either construed as the department or their immediate scholarly community, to make sure that the effect of their absence is minimal on their students. Second, they should take advantage of global connectivity opportunities and minimize the capability gap individual 6 See also Chapter 2 by Alves and Ferreira in this volume.

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scholars and their institutions—both at the national and international levels. Third, these tools should be designed with the objective that they expose students to diverse and accessible sources of information. Indeed, the tools should aim to engage students with the discipline regardless of where they might be. Diffuse the burden away from the individual to the departmental or professional community: If I will be temporarily incapacitated tomorrow due to an emergency, what can I do now in order to minimize the impact of my absence on my students’ learning? This should no longer be an individual question for faculty to consider. First, at the level that is closest to the individual faculty member, departments should develop mechanisms to support their faculty to minimize the possibility of absence in the first place. If absence is inevitable, then the department should establish practices to prevent course disruption as much as possible. Several solutions can be considered to these ends. First and as the pandemic has brutally revealed, departments and their institutions should introduce policies to support faculty members who are parents. Subsidizing some hours of childcare per week in the event of an emergency absence due to school closures or other crises could pay big dividends in terms of supporting faculty wellbeing, teaching excellence, and research productivity. Another solution is to develop department-wide repositories for course material. Thanks to our forced transition to online teaching in 2020, we have accumulated large amounts of digital content, including assignments and reading material. Cloud computing and sophisticated learning management systems provide great platforms to collect and consolidate this content for department faculty to access. In the event of an emergency absence, other department members can easily pick up this course on behalf of their incapacitated colleague. This would be especially useful for smaller departments where faculty members rarely have overlapping expertise areas and cannot cover for each other at short notice. To be sure, since these materials will routinely have to be revised and updated to keep up with the developments of the discipline, I do not think that these types of initiatives would ultimately put us out of business. Instead, they serve “band-aid” measures to ensure that students are not left in the dark when an inevitable disruption occurs in the course plan. In fact, if we prioritize modularity when developing course content from the start, then we can these modules for other initiatives as well. If

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I am teaching a week on international law and organizations in Introduction to International Relations, and my department colleague, a scholar of international law, already has a recorded short module explaining what these terms mean, then I could share that module with my students. Doing so, I would be showcasing my colleague’s expertise in my own class and potentially pique their interest in her course while teaching them a topic on which I have little expertise. This could be done across institutions as well, with great success. For instance, in 2020, Professor Jessica Blankshain (U.S. Naval War College) published online a series of short lecture videos. Her content, which accompanies her co-edited textbook on American Foreign Policy, should be of great use to professors in the United States and beyond who teach classes on U.S. foreign policy.7 Diffusing the burden away from the individual faculty member can be achieved most quickly at the department level. Therefore, what I have described above can well be implemented as a short-term tool. In the long term, however, professional organizations should continue to develop and promote tools that serve the International Relations community more broadly. The International Studies Association, the largest professional organization for scholars of international relations, already provides some of these tools, such as offering on-site childcare facilities at its Annual Convention (as well as providing some financial support for it). Recognizing the reality of family obligations, ISA has become a lot more accommodating for parents more broadly, and quite frankly, academic mothers more specifically. ISA’s efforts to support IR teaching should also be recognized. The ISA Compendium is an excellent example. More importantly, several ISA sections, such as the Foreign Policy Analysis section, run annual campaigns to collect course syllabi from faculty from around the world for its syllabi repository. These are important sources for faculty to tap into when developing new courses or revising existing courses. ISA already consolidates these efforts under one roof on its official website. It should continue to sustain and promote these efforts so that more of us use it on a regular basis. Importantly, academic departments should also recognize and reward faculty members for contributing to these efforts (e.g. authoring articles for the Compendium, soliciting syllabi on behalf of ISA 7 Blankshain’s teaching content can be viewed at: https://screencast-o-matic.com/cha nnels/cYiZVOVhqn?utm_source=awin&utm_medium=affiliate&utm_campaign=78888& awc=16296_1622064941_8ca9f1427d7b9051e2906350d2deea88.

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sections, etc.) in terms of teaching, research, and service at the time of reappointment, tenure, and promotion reviews. Moving beyond syllabi collections, professional associations like the ISA could also develop the kind of modular course content library that I have proposed above. This library could feature videos from a diverse group of scholars selected by the corresponding ISA sections. The videos would provide mini-lectures of 10–15 minutes on the scholar’s expertise area. The “difficulty level” of these lectures could also be varied, such that different videos could cater to undergraduate (with greater connections to recent or historical events) or graduate (with greater connections to theoretical and empirical debates in the field). Some ISA journals, such as Foreign Policy Analysis, already feature short videos where authors describe and discuss their published research article. The ISA webpage could also bring together these videos under its umbrella, categorized by subject area, to serve students and scholars alike. All of this content could then be readily deployed by teachers in various international relations courses around the world. These initiatives would not only serve ISA’s existential goal by connecting international relations scholars from across the globe but also amplify the work of historically underrepresented scholars in IR including on the dimensions of race, gender, disability, geography, type of institution, and research area. Certainly, these efforts need the shoulders of the individual faculty members to rise, but they also need organizational support to be coordinated, maintained, amplified, and utilized across the discipline. Relatedly, these initiatives would achieve yet another goal that I discuss next. Take advantage of global connectivity and minimize the capability gap: The transition to online teaching and learning would not be possible without the incredible achievements in global internet connectivity.8 Although there still remains significant discrepancies in connectivity around the world and still across diverse communities within countries that severely impede educational attainment, student retention and success, the internet also provides everyone around the world an immense potential to access vast amounts of specialized knowledge. In a similar vein, global connectivity also helps mitigate the capability gap across institutions around the world. Students (and scholars, too) everywhere are now able to watch mini-lectures or research seminars from 8 See also Chapter 13 by Hallock in this volume, who argues for greater transnational connectivity across higher education institutions across the globe.

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established experts as well as early career researchers in any subject area. Global connectivity could therefore allow professional organizations like the ISA to achieve an unprecedented educational reach if the organization chooses to invest in consolidating and streamlining content. I believe none of this would put us out of business either. We are, after all, the producers of this knowledge through our scholarship and its curators through our teaching. These initiatives would also be accompanied by the numerous virtual workshops and seminars that are already in place and bring together researchers of IR from around the world, some of which I have listed above. Professional organizations could collate and keep track of these efforts (many of which are announced on social media regularly), while individual faculty members could direct their students to these sources as they complement course content or graduate training. Expose students to diverse and accessible material, engage them where they are: Importantly, these materials should take into consideration diversity and accessibility, and engage the students where they are. First, there should be a renewed effort to ensure that students engage with diverse course materials. These materials should reflect the voices and viewpoints of scholars who come from underrepresented communities and regions of the world to provide students with a more complete and comprehensive understanding of the world we live in. As international relations scholars, it is imperative for us to demonstrate an appreciation for diversity, equity and inclusion in how we teach students about the world for that reason. The coronavirus pandemic showed us how even the most advanced economies of the world were not immune to the virus or its social and political consequences. Perhaps more dramatically, the global fight against the virus also exposed the fault lines of major practical debates surrounding nationalism, international cooperation, transparency and accountability, international trade, and of course, globalization. Moving forward, greater inclusivity in course materials, starting with the reading lists of our syllabi, should be a starting goal in our teaching. Second, we need to accept and respond to the fact that online teaching is not just here to stay, but it requires a new approach to achieving accessibility in course materials. Making the material accessible to accommodate various special needs, such as the inclusion of written transcripts or closed captioning on videos, is now a much easier task than it used to

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be thanks to the technical developments in language processing and transcription. However, these are still time-consuming tasks that force faculty members to reallocate their time away from their core duties (teaching and research) toward making, say, PDF documents accessible for students with disabilities. This is where we need to deploy the resources of departments, institutions, and professional organizations to ease this burden. These support systems should allocate the funds and labor that the faculty need toward making content accessible on any given day, but especially now in the context of the coronavirus pandemic and beyond, which has exposed the need to always be inclusive toward communities with disabilities. The level of content (introductory or advanced) should be easy to categorize by the individual faculty, department, or the professional organization. Third, and relatedly, we must keep in mind that only when we achieve diversity, inclusion, and accessibility will we be able to meet our students where they are—physically and ideationally. A New Hope? Conclusions and Implications In this chapter, I have overviewed the various initiatives and advancements that we have made in teaching, learning, as well as disseminating research in international relations in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Next, I have offered some solutions, suggestions, and prescriptions with the objective that, moving forward, we do not duplicate the resources that we have created on an individual basis since March 2020. Instead, we should take full advantage of our collective efforts and begin teaching IR “outside the box.” As we harness the resources, power, and support of our individual departments and professional organizations, we should be much better positioned to respond to the next disruption with greater agility. Wherever we may be right now, we should be able to utilize the resources that are already out there and complement them with our own tools and approaches to teaching and disseminating research. The sense of connection and integration that these tools provide will give our students a broad view of how international relations is studied and taught around the world across different communities with different approaches and interests. Collectively as IR scholars, we have created an immense digital reservoir of knowledge in any and all subject areas since 2020. Existing technologies and resources allow us to collate, consolidate, and share

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these efforts and, as a result, learn from and take advantage of each other’s contributions. The coronavirus pandemic showed us that the virus spreads indiscriminately across continents and national borders. We should be taking stock of our collective experience since 2020 and approach our production and dissemination of knowledge with the same perspective in mind.

References Allen, J., Burns, N., Garrett, L., Haass, R. N., Ikenberry, G. J., Mahbubani, K., Menon, S., Niblett, R., Nye Jr, J. S., O’neil, S. K., & Schake, K. (2020, March 20). How the world will look after the coronavirus pandemic. Foreign Policy (blog). https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/03/20/world-order-after-cor oanvirus-pandemic/ Barsotti, S. (2020, September 14). Higher education was already ripe for disruption. Then, COVID-19 happened. http://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/arc hives/2020/september/higher-education-covid-disruption.html Bhattacharya, D., & Raisa Islam, F. (2020). The COVID-19 scourge: How affected are the least developed countries. OECD: Development Matters (blog). https://oecd-development-matters.org/2020/04/23/the-covid-19scourge-how-affected-are-the-least-developed-countries/ Davis, W. (2021, February 28). 1 year of COVID-19: People share when they realized life was changing. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2021/02/28/972 281960/people-share-themoment-they-realized-the-pandemic-was-changinglife-as-they-knew Drezner, D. W. (2021, February 10). Some politically incorrect thoughts about remote teaching. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ outlook/2021/02/10/some-politically-incorrect-thoughts-about-remote-tea ching/ Driscoll, M., & Carliner, S. (2005). Advanced web-based training strategies: Unlocking instructionally sound online learning. John Wiley & Sons. Fain, P. (2019, January 16). Online learning fails to deliver, finds report aimed at discouraging politicians from deregulating. Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2019/ 01/16/online-learning-fails-deliver-finds-report-aimed-discouraging Fleming, N. D., & Mills, C. (1992). Not another inventory, rather a catalyst for reflection. To Improve the Academy, 11(1), 137–155. Fredericksen, E. (2015, February 4). Is online education good or bad? and is this really the right question? The Conversation (blog). http://theconver sation.com/is-online-education-good-or-bad-and-is-this-really-the-right-que stion-35949

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Gewin, V. (2021). Pandemic burnout is rampant in academia. Nature, 591(7850), 489–491. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-00663-2 Hubler, S. (2020, October 26). Colleges are slashing budgets during the coronavirus pandemic. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/ 26/us/colleges-coronavirus-budget-cuts.html Jolly, S., & De Vries, C. (n.d.). European politics online workshop. Accessed June 1, 2021. https://europow.com Kent, M. (2015). Disability and elearning: Opportunities and barriers. Disability Studies Quarterly, 35(1). Koksal, I. (2020, May 2). The rise of online learning. Forbes. https://www.for bes.com/sites/ilkerkoksal/2020/05/02/the-rise-of-online-learning/?sh=68a 4254072f3 “MIT Security Studies Program (SSP).” (2020). https://ssp.mit.edu/events/ wednesday-seminars “Podcasts—Paul Poast.” (n.d.). Accessed June 1, 2021. http://www.paulpoast. com/podcasts/4594743252 “Project on the Political Economy of Security|The Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies.” (n.d.). Accessed June 1, 2021. https://www.bu.edu/par deeschool/research/research-initiatives/project-on-the-political-economy-ofsecurity/ Smart, K. L., & Cappel, J. J. (2006). Students’ perceptions of online learning: A comparative study. Journal of Information Technology Education: Research, 5(1), 201–219. “TSDM Policy Analysis 2020.” (n.d.). Screencast-O-Matic. Accessed June 1, 2021. http://screencast-o-matic.com/channels/cYiZVOVhqn Wan, W., Achenbach, J., Johnson, C. Y., & Guarino, B. (2020, March 19). Coronavirus will radically alter the U.S. The Washington Post. https://www. washingtonpost.com/health/2020/03/19/coronavirus-projections-us/

CHAPTER 12

Getting Our Teaching “Future Ready” Sebastian Kaempf

Introduction As teachers, we are currently facing two separate but interrelated challenges. On the one hand, we are living with some degree of uncertainty over whether, how long, and how often face-to-face teaching will be disrupted during this global pandemic. On the other hand, universities are already drawing their own lessons from having had to switch most if not all of their teaching into online mode since March 2020. The question over what we as individual teachers can therefore do to be more “future ready” occurs at a time and in a context when the university sector is—by accounts from the US, UK, Australia, and Canada—undergoing profound reflections over what the future mode of teaching and learning might look like. This context makes planning for the future of our teaching uncertain and therefore difficult. How much longer will we be teaching in online mode, and when will we be able to move back to face-to-face teaching? Will we ever move back, or will online teaching become “the

S. Kaempf (B) School of Political Science and International Studies, The University of Quensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia

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new normal”? In light of this, how and how much should we as facilitators invest in providing high-quality online learning? In the middle of a global pandemic, the answers to these questions are anyone’s guess. The best pathway to planning ahead, I am arguing in this chapter, is to think in less binary terms about the future mode of our teaching—i.e., will it all be online or will we be able post-COVID 19 to simply revert back to what we had been doing before? Instead, we are better advised to view our current situation as a real opportunity to rethink and adjust our teaching practices in ways that are more based on how today’s students actually learn and can learn more effectively. So what I am suggesting here is that the best way to get our teaching “future ready” is to be less hamstrung by the questions over whether the future will be online, faceto-face, or hybrid (i.e., a mix of online and face-to-face), and to focus on more fundamental aspects of teaching innovation instead: to shake up the old-fashioned model of how we lecture and run tutorials/seminars, to adjust learning activities to student attention spans, to spaced and selfexperiential learning, to mixing individual and collaborative learning more thoroughly, and to generate a combination of immersive, flexible, and face-to-face learning activities. In other words, what I am arguing is to take seriously what learning designers have been telling us for some time as this will ensure both a better, more student-centered form of pedagogy while also generating sound learning activities that more flexibly can be adjusted in response to potential future lockdowns. Let us think of learning and pedagogy first, and then think about how this can be translated flexibly into online or face-to-face classrooms.

The Broad Results from Rushing into Online Teaching Mid-March 2020, my university, The University of Queensland (UQ), announced that in response to the global pandemic, it will pause all ongoing courses for one week in order to allow academic staff to change and adjust teaching to full online mode. Being one of the top and biggest universities in Australia, UQ managed to turn over 4,000 on campus courses into online delivery within seven days. This was an amazing achievement in and of itself, and one that most teachers across the international university sector will have experienced. However, with hindsight and perhaps also understandably, this sudden move into the world of online teaching was primarily driven by the

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impetus to simply be able to “teach out” the semester. Given time pressures and a general unfamiliarity with online learning by most teaching staff, significantly less consideration was given to how to effectively teach in online mode. Having been a member of several UQ panels that reviewed and took stock of this shock-induced transition to online learning, it crystalized very quickly that two broad scenarios played out in the first half of 2020. Either course conveners simply took all elements of their on-campus courses (for example, 2-hour lectures, a 1-hour tutorial/seminar, and consultation hours) and delivered them live through Zoom or/and through pre-recorded lecture videos. Here, the only real change to the courses was that everything now took place online. Nothing much changed except for the delivery mode. Or, in scenario two, course conveners significantly reduced the number of contact hours (say, thirtyminute lectures, fewer tutorials, etc.) when they moved their courses online. Here, the delivery format changed and the amount of contact hours between teachers and students was reduced. In other words, what became clear was that the vast majority of courses saw hardly any adjustment in terms of pedagogy and teaching innovation beyond being offered online rather than on campus. And in many cases, what was offered to the students was significantly less than they would have experienced on campus. This applied in particular to innovative, teaching-intensive courses which, during the move to online teaching, simply scrapped all non-traditional, innovative ways to teaching and reverted back to older, more traditional forms of teaching. For instance, many courses that, on campus, had offered simulations, role plays or collaborative, practical activities, simply replaced them with ordinary lectures and tutorials. Overall, then, COVID-19 resulted an actual reduction in innovative, student-centered learning. But in light of the sudden-ness of the mid-March lockdowns, that was perhaps the best we could do in order to simply ensure that we could continue to run our courses somehow. And I am certain that this was not just specific to UQ but also shared globally across the tertiary education sector.1 1 For personal context, like all tenure track academic staff in my School, I am teaching three on campus courses per year, and some of them in very innovative, interactive and collaborative ways. With the onset COVID-19, these have been taught in online mode, and the key decision I took was to not lose the innovative character of these courses. This included the element of “spaced learning” that I discuss later, as well as the studentcentered, collaborative elements of my courses. This included, for instance, a three hourlong practical “MediaLab” I was now teaching via Zoom. I spent a lot of time thinking

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The important question to ask, however, is about how this all played out in subsequent semesters. Having undergone a shock-induced crash course in online teaching, it was good to see that many colleagues started to experiment a bit more in their courses during subsequent semesters. But overall, the vast majority have merely continued to teach along the same ways that we have seen in the first semester under lockdown. Again, this is not to blame anyone. It is very understandable for all sorts of reasons: research-led universities placing significantly less emphasis on high-quality teaching, unfamiliarity of academic staff with online pedagogy, and the simple but hopeful calculation that many of us seem to have made that this was merely for one semester or two as the pandemic would be over by the time we will have to teach this course again. Why, therefore, make huge investments into online teaching now and at a time when we are also busy with all other, non-teaching challenges that COVID-19 has been throwing at us (like threat of job redundancies, home schooling, lockdown, health issues, etc.)? A year into pandemic, however, it has become clear that we will be living under and with COVID-19 for much longer. And with regards to our online teaching, there is now the temptation to simply keep doing what we have done. By now, we have taught all our courses in this new and often unfamiliar format once. It is working somehow. So why change things? There is a certain degree of path-dependency at work which militates against taking additional yet necessary steps to really innovate and adjust. But that is a fallacy: simply flipping our courses from on campus to online mode is not real innovation. It is merely a change in delivery mode, but nothing more. Teaching in online mode requires very different sets of approaches and teaching abilities than working with students in person. But even if the pandemic will postpone our longed-for return to the campus classroom, what might be some useful steps to bring real innovation to our teaching?

and redesigning these sessions to make them work in an online space and—to be honest— I had a few sleepless nights before the course started as these are central to the course (alongside lectures and tutorials) and to student learning. I was not sure if it would work via Zoom and if students would respond well to them. But it worked and students, through course evaluations, pointed out how, if designed well and meaningfully, they saw these as fun, interactive and exciting. At the same time, it was a risk I deliberately took— and which I felt I could take as I am tenured and had won many teaching awards which placed me in a safe position and one that allowed me to experiment and to potentially fail. I recognize that taking this risk was less of an option for casually employed staff.

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How to Offer More Effective Learning to Our Students In the remainder of this chapter, I am putting forward a number of suggestions. What they all have in common is a call to change the order in which we think about and implement innovation in our courses. Let us start by placing questions over delivery mode (online, in-class, or hybrid) down the list of importance when thinking about effective teaching. Instead, let us start with what the cutting-edge research on best teaching practices has been saying for a long time, but which most of us have either happily ignored or remained blissfully unaware of. Let us think about core pedagogical aspects and fundamentals of how students learn effectively first and then, and only then, find ways to translate this into our online teaching (and—in some future scenario—back into our on-campus classrooms). Moving forward to these basics, I am arguing, affords us the best strategy to make our teaching “future ready”. Let’s Rethink the “Lecture” Element This will come as no surprise to many, but strikingly very few have acted upon it: the traditional lecture format (with a professor speaking for 1 or 2 hours, followed by a short Q&A at the end, maybe a YouTube clip in the middle) as a tool for student learning is proven to be hugely ineffective. Starting with his 1971 book, What is the use of lectures?, but also replicated in numerous studies since, Donald Bligh and others have shown through striking empirical evidence that the method of the traditional lecture is not effective at all in terms of actual student learning (Biggs & Tang, 2011; Bligh, 2000). In fact, as this research has shown, the only thing the traditional lecture is good at is information transfer. But even with regards to information transfer, the lecture is not any better than other methods and formats (such as giving students a text to read, for instance). Crucially, the lecture is actually terrible at teaching understanding and changing thinking and behavior (Bajak, 2014; Biggs & Tang, 2011; Bligh, 2000; Clark, 2014; Freeman et al., 2014). And yet, this is still our default format and practice to this day. The word “lecture” is drawn from the word “reading,” because in the old days, commonly seen as having started in the fifteenth century when

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books were still a rarity, lectures were all about reading a book to an audience (Liessmann, 1994). And still today, when most texts are available to students at the click of their mousepads, the average lecture has not changed much over the past 500 years (and many lecturers still simply read out their notes or merely read out their PowerPoint slides). So, knowing all this, the first starting point to getting our teaching future ready has to be to rethink how we engage students and how we can improve their learning in the physical and online lecture halls. Added to this imperative is the notion that our students’ attention spans are quite limited. Research suggests that students’ attention spans and their ability to effectively consume new knowledge and develop an understanding of content is limited to around 15–20 minutes (Bradbury, 2016; Khan, 2012). This is even further reduced when we move to the online lecture: statistical insights existing from online formats such as Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) strikingly reveal that students’ attention spans drop more dramatically once a lecture video exceeds the six-minute mark (Guo, 2013). Again, most teachers will be aware of this, but how many have adjusted their lecture to this reality, be it on campus or online? According to John Medina, “if keeping someone’s attention at a lecture was a business, it would have an 80% failure rate” (Medina, 2014). In response to these insights, we need to accept that good education has to be good entertainment. By this I do not mean the superfluous or the decorative, but the idea of breaking large topics down into smaller pieces and interspersing those ideas with meaningful applications and student-centered activities to reduce cognitive load. In the pedagogical literature this is referred to as “spaced learning,” which suggests that the learning of new information and materials should be spaced out over time in order to aid in both, fostering critical understanding and moving that new understanding into long-term memory (Kirschner et al., 2006). It is the idea that we need to design our lecture slots to move along a variety of learning-centered activities. To give you an example from the MOOC “MediaWarX” that I have produced and convened, it was designed along the following lines. The typical lecture topic begins with students engaging with a survey or conducting a specific task. They then watch a short video (5–8 minutes long), which is immediately followed by an active, student-centered activity, be this a multiple-choice quiz, a short assessment, a short survey, a discussion forum prompt, the reading of a text plus critical reflection, a

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practical exercise, or an exercise with peer-review. After this activity, they watch the next short video, which again is followed by a short student activity. Over the course of the 7 “lectures” of the MOOC, students thereby watch 65 mini-lectures (9 or 10 short videos for each “lecture” topic), engage in 14 multiple-choice quizzes, 26 short formative assessments (in true/false or open response formats), six surveys, 23 discussion fora, five critical reading exercises, six practical exercises, and one exercise with peer assessment (Kaempf & Finn, 2021). You might be reading this and nodding, or maybe you are shaking your head. But at the same time, in the back of your mind, you might also be thinking that this sounds like a lot of work for which you do not have the time. These are legitimate reservations, especially if the pandemic has thrown additional challenges and time constraints into your life. My larger point, however, is to encourage us to rethink the role of the lecture in general, be this for our on-campus courses or their online deliveries. And once we start understanding that a one-hour lecture should not consist of conveying one hour of content, but of, say, 30 minutes of content interspersed with 30 minutes of student-centered learning activities, then time becomes less of an issue. And the example I have given is of course just one way of redesigning and rethinking lectures. There are plenty of other ways of doing this. And once we have come to grips with how the traditional lecture can be redesigned by taking into account the principles of spaced learning and the issue of student attention spans, this can be applied to either on-campus or online teaching. The key design objective here is that the lectures ask students to do something. Effective learning for them is not just about listening or watching, but about active doing (Horton, 2015). It is, if you wish, based on the old Confucius dictum that “I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.” Let’s Talk to Our Students About How They (Should) Learn Learning is what being a student is all about. But surprisingly, we tend to spend little to no time actually talking to them about their learning and, importantly, how learning in our courses is designed for them. We tend to point to assessment items and then go right into the content matter of the course without talking about the structure of learning behind our courses. This often leads to a mismatch between what students think they

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need to in order to learn and what the course convener assumes students do. One of my colleagues in Psychology at UQ, Professor Blake McKimmie, responded to this mismatch by dedicating the entire first lecture of each of his courses to talking to his students about their learning. And what he does right at the beginning is to quiz them about what they think are the top three most effective ways in which they study and learn and he then presents this in a word cloud to them. He then brings up on the second screen what the latest research has shown to be effective ways of learning and studying. And every time he does this, there is a mismatch between what students intuitively do and what, according to the research, they actually should be doing in order to learn. This allows him and the students to then have an interactive conversation about what effective learning is and what is not. For instance, having students take notes during a lecture and rewriting or even rereading their lecture notes is not an effective way for them to learn. Instead, he employs what is called “retrieval practice,” building into the course various opportunities for students to test their knowledge and understanding. Each week, students get tested before they come to the lecture; this is unmarked and designed to orientate them towards what it is they will encounter in the lecture. Then they do another test after the lecture; this is marked to assess how much they have learned during the lecture. Crucially, both tests come from the same pool of questions and are randomly generated. The idea is that even though the first test does not count for marks, students are motivated to do it because it gives them a preview of the sorts of question that they will get in the second test that counts for marks after the lecture. It is a practice that is based on research which shows that if you ask people about a topic before they even hear about it, they actually learn more effectively (McLaughlin & Rhoney, 2015). And part of the reason is because people sometimes think they know a topic (and in psychology, but also in International Relations, people have the daily experience of the world and so they tend to think they know how the world works) and so one of the barriers we have is that people come into the lecture thinking they know it already. And by testing their knowledge before, they suddenly realize that they don’t quite know everything and this sharpens their sense to learn about that new topic in the lecture (HigherEd Heroes, 2020a). Again, this is just one example among many others that we can think about. It is a very basic point, but the essential part here is to make

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students aware of how they learn effectively and—through the course design—to entice them to orientate their practices of learning along these lines. Learning Anchored Around Physical and Self-Experiential Exercises One of the great assets we have in IR is that the real world of politics provides us with a plethora of examples we can use to illustrate and to study. Merely pointing to examples is easy but, as research tells us, making students physically and emotionally experience what we are trying them to grasp is actually an even more effective way of helping them learn. And part of the reason is that a bodily, physical experience not only boils topics down to their own lives, but also fosters cognitive understanding more productively as it allows them to relate to the topic more fully. To give a few examples, for instance, when talking about globalization and increasing transnational interconnectivity, I borrowed a practice from Professor James Arvanitakis (HigherEd Heroes, 2020b). Students are instructed to identify—for themselves and without revealing who— two other students in the room and to place themselves in equi-distance to these two students in the room (the distance they select is of their own choosing). If you imagine every student in the class doing this, it automatically will lead to a lot of movement and shifting around, as everyone has to adjust their standing position vis-a-vis two students who themselves have to adjust their position to others. It can take a few minutes before the class movement has settled. At that moment, as a teacher, you can now take one student and move that student by say one meter. The effect this has, of course, is that all other students now need to readjust their own position to make sure they keep their equidistance. And this allows for a powerful way to illustrate the effects of globalization: for instance, when higher taxes on imports are imposed by one country then this has ripple down effects elsewhere in the world. Or take a wonderful exercise from my colleague, Dr Al Stark, who starts his political science lecture on the topic of “power” by telling all students to stand up. He then instructs them to first stand on their right leg, then their left leg, to then turn 360 degrees, to then touch their noses with their left index finger, to then turn to the person next to them and to tell that person their best kept secret about themselves. Yes, you read correctly: to reveal their best kept secret about themselves. The students respond in similar fashion, they tend to laugh or look surprised. But most

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importantly, they refuse to follow his instructions. This then enables him to ask them: ok, so what just happened when they think about their experience in this exercise in terms of power in the world of politics? Why did they follow his instructions more or less blindly until—at a certain point— refuse to follow them? What does this tell them about the functioning of power? HigherEd Heroes (2020c). Finally, for one of my courses (also taught online during the pandemic) on the topic of surveillance and big data mining, students—alongside their readings and prior to our class on this topic—are tasked to take and submit pictures on their cell phones of public CCTV camera they encounter over the course of one week. In the class, they are then given access to an interactive google map onto which I upload all the 900 + pictures of CCTV cameras they had crowdsourced (Fig. 12.1). Following some self-reflection on this exercise, students then can choose between researching—in Zoom breakout teams—the evolution of CCTV cameras in Brisbane, Australia, or worldwide, before reporting

Fig. 12.1 Screenshot taken of the CCTV cameras of Brisbane, crowdsourced by my students in 2020, and uploaded onto Google Maps

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their findings back to the class. Students find this exercise extremely disturbing, yet eye-opening. We then engage in a class-wide discussion on whether the elimination of privacy is a prize worth paying in the name of security. The key here is a learning design that not only brings the real world into the classroom, but that also anchors student activities around their own personal use of the very same infotech we analyse (Kaempf & Finn, 2021). Think of these three examples here and contrast them with how students would learn about globalization, power, or surveillance, had each lecturer just talked about it. Yes, students would still get it. But the physical experiences enable them to relate to these topics in ways that are simply not possible if taught exclusively through cognitive ways of generating understanding. They anchor student learning through physical experiences (and day-to-day technology) and thereby foster ways of engaging and understanding that students can feel and, thereby, instantly understand. This is based on many studies around experiential learning which highlight how concrete experiences enable students to not only better reflect and interpret but to also to apply new understanding to a topic (Kolb, 1984; Grünewald et al., 2013). And it is particularly effective when dealing with more abstract concepts and theories. In other words, moving beyond the mere cognitive engagement with a topic has tremendous benefits in allowing students to learn. The big take-away point here is to encourage us to rethink how we are trying to design learning and foster understanding that centers on generating physical, self-experiential activities. Include Students in the (Re-)design of Your Courses The idea here is to lend students a larger voice in their courses than would normally be the case. In particular, it centers around the idea of involving students in the actual design (and redesign) of their courses. This not only ensures that students actually find the course more approachable, engaging, interesting and easier to navigate, but also helps the convener to learn and to better understand how students “tick.” This is not an abdication of academic expertise but an invitation by the convener to understand how topics and ideas can be better made to work for the student cohort.

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A great example here is a colleague, Dr. Nic Carah, in Communication and Arts, who made this his course design motto. Every year (including during COVID-19), he recruits 6 students as partners and works through his entire course with them. For instance, students record a podcast for their peers in which they talk about their different essay writing strategies and how to approach assessments more generally. They also help him chose different case studies and ways of engaging various topics in different ways, thereby ensuring that the format and content is anchored more appropriately in the lives of their peers. While not without challenges, his overall experience has been extremely rewarding as student bring in ideas and suggestions that have allowed him to rejig the course in ways that he would have never been able to do himself. It also has brought in more diverse voices and ideas into his course in ways that spoke more directly to the students’ learning practices and lived realities (HigherEd Heroes, 2020d). This practice obviously goes well beyond integrating feedback from student evaluations into a course. And the reason why this matters is that while the lecturer is the privileged expert in a course, the way that a course is pitched and designed ultimately determines how well learners can engage with the subject matter and learn.

Conclusion These four aspects (rethinking the lecture; talking to students about how they learn; building learning around self-experiential learning; and including students in the course design) are nothing more than basic principles that enable us to think around generating a more effective learning environment. They are, as I stated on the outset, based on what the pedagogical research has been stating for a long time, but we oftentimes either do not read or ignore or simply fail to consider these works given other job and life priorities. But the point I am making here is that if we are serious about getting our teaching to be future ready, then they need to be at the heart of how we start to think about delivering tertiary education. Rather than thinking about “how do I flip my course into an online mode of delivery,” the starting point should rather be about “how do I deliver a teaching experience that is more effective”. Thinking about these principles gives us a good way of breaking open some of the fallacies and obstacles which we have reproduced semester after semester. And once we

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have devised and revisited the basic architecture of our courses and the tools and methods we want to use, then we can start thinking about how we want to translate them into an online learning environment. Not all of them can be replicated one by one. But by starting from these broader pedagogical and design principles enables us to more effectively identify ways in which we can make them work in an online environment. And they have the benefit of allowing us to offer better student learning, no matter what the future holds, whether it will be online for the foreseeable future (or forever) or whether it will be hybrid, or simply revert back to on-campus teaching like most of us did prior to COVID-19.

References Bajak, A. (2014, May). Lectures aren’t just boring, they’re ineffective, too, study finds. ScienceMag.org. Retrieved July 13, 2018, from https://www.sci encemag.org/news/2014/05/lectures-arent-just-boring-theyre-ineffectivetoo-study-finds Biggs, J. B., & Tang, C. (2011). Teaching for quality learning at university. Open University Press. Bligh, D. A. (2000). What’s the use of lectures? Jossey-Blass. Bradbury, N. A. (2016). Attention span during lectures: 8 seconds, 10 minutes, or more? Advances in Physiology Education, 40, 509–513. Clark, D. (2014, May 15). Ten reasons why we should ditch university lectures. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-net work/blog/2014/may/15/ten-reasons-we-should-ditch-university-lectures Freeman, S., Eddy, S. L., McDonough, M., Smith, M. K., Okoroafor, N., Jordt, H., & Wenderoth, fM. P. (2014). Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111, 8410–8415. Grünewald, F., Meinel, C., Totsching, M., & Willems, C. (2013). Design-ing MOOCs for the support of multiple learning styles. Retrieved May 12, 2018, from https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-40814-4_29 Guo, P. (2013). Optimal video length for student engagement. Retrieved May 15, 2018, from https://blog.edx.org/optimal-video-length-student-engagement HigherEd Heroes. (2020a). Blake McKimmie on how to redesign your courses around the way students learn. Retrieved February 26, 2021, from https:// www.buzzsprout.com/813707/5914903-highered-heroes-blake-mckimmieon-how-to-redesign-your-courses-around-the-way-students-learn HigherEd Heroes. (2020b). James Arvanitakis on learning as a journey and the classroom as both a safe space and a brave space. Retrieved February 26, 2021, from https://www.buzzsprout.com/813707/5513971-highered-her

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oes-james-arvanitakis-on-learning-as-a-journey-and-the-classroom-as-both-asafe-space-and-a-brave-space HigherEd Heroes. (2020c). Yay we’re live but what’s this all about. Retrieved February 26, 2021, from https://www.buzzsprout.com/813707/2487405highered-heroes-yay-we-re-live-but-what-s-this-all-about HigherEd Heroes. (2020d). How to involve students in the resign of your courses. Retrieved February 26, 2021, from https://www.buzzsprout.com/813707/ 2488153-highered-heroes-how-to-involve-students-in-the-re-design-of-yourcourses Horton, B. (2015). “I hear and i forget, i see and i remember, i do and i understand”—putting learning models into practice. Planet, 3(1), 12–14. Kaempf, S., & Finn, C. (2021). Teaching international relations through the format of a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). International Studies Perspectives, 22(1), 1–24. Khan, S. (2012, October 2). Why long lectures are ineffective. Time Magazine. http://ideas.time.com/2012/10/02/why-lectures-are-ineffective/ Kirschner, P. A., Sweller, J., & Clark, R. E. (2006). Why minimal guidance during instruction does not work: An analysis of the failure of constructivist, discovery, problem-based, experiential, and inquiry-based teaching. Educational Psychologist, 41, 75–86. Kolb, D. A. (1984). Experiential learning: Experience as the source of learning and development. Prentice Hall. Liessmann, K. P. (1994). Über den Nutzen und Nachteil des Vorlesens. Eine Vorlesung über die Vorlesung. Picus. McLaughlin, J. E., & Rhoney, D. H. (2015). Comparison of an interactive e-learning preparatory tool and a conventional downloadable handout used within a flipped neurologic pharmacotherapy lecture. Currents in Pharmacy Teaching and Learning, 7 (1), 12–19. Medina, J. (2014). Brain rules: 12 Principles for surviving and thriving at work, home, and school. Pear Press.

CHAPTER 13

Disruption in an Open-Access Institution Stephanie A. Hallock

Pedagogical “readiness” in a community college is all about keeping students engaged and committed to completion. As an open-access institution, the student population is incredibly diverse in terms of age, socioeconomic status, college-readiness, and the school/life/work balance. It is all too easy for many of these students to be sidelined from their academic progress for financial, family or health reasons. In a “normal” academic environment, community colleges are regularly challenged to meet each student’s needs. The shift to remote learning during the COVID-19 quarantine only exacerbated those challenges, particularly (1) the wide disparity in students’ access to technology and/or Internet; and (2) adequate learning conditions for the large segment of our student population with significant child/family care responsibilities and/or full-time employment. Harford Community College is the only post-secondary institution in a rural/suburban county on the northern border of Maryland and is the anchor for most academic and cultural activities here. Our credit S. A. Hallock (B) Behavioral and Social Sciences Division, Harford Community College, Bel Air, MD, USA

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student population is roughly 7,500 full- and part-time, and the number of full-time faculty hovers around 100. It is the kind of small community institution that fosters a sense of family and responsibility to one another. I grew up here, left for 15 + years to study wherever I could that wasn’t here, and was then quite surprised to find myself back here to raise my own daughter. Almost all of my professional career has been at Harford Community College, working my way through tenure and promotion and serving on what feels like every single committee at some point. I have been through multiple administrative changes and the re-orientations that come with them, and I served as the Interim Dean for the Behavioral and Social Sciences division during one of them. I have been granted reassigned time to serve as the Coordinator for Global Education and Engagement and have been very active in Faculty Council leadership. Community colleges are focused on teaching first and foremost, followed by campus and community service. Scholarship is certainly an option, and it is often centered on pedagogy rather than disciplinespecific research. We only teach 100- and 200- level courses that must transfer to state institutions, and full-time faculty spend a lot of time mentoring adjunct instructors in the art of teaching. A few years ago, we began a faculty-led project to create a Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) to provide ongoing professional development and encourage innovation in how we achieve student success. When the pandemic arrived abruptly, we on the Steering Committee knew that CETL must provide the stability and resources our full- and part-time faculty needed to keep our students on track.

The Data In order to capture the faculty’s immediate reflections on the transition to remote learning mid-semester of spring 2020, CETL created and administered a survey immediately following the submission of final grades. The intent of the survey was to measure the degree to which faculty were impacted by the challenges of remote teaching, as well as to gauge their perception of how students were impacted. The institution is using the results of this survey to better understand the challenges faced by students and faculty, to guide future professional development efforts for faculty, and to establish a solid foundation upon which to build for potential disruptions in the future.

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The survey was deployed via HCC email to approximately 600 fulltime and adjunct faculty and was available from May 19, 2020 until June 5, 2020. Overall, 131 faculty (approximately 22%) responded to the survey. Of those who responded, 47% were full-time faculty and 53% were adjunct faculty—52% of respondents had never taught online prior to the transition to remote learning. The primary challenges faculty faced: • 79% of faculty responded that they employed new teaching strategies to aid in the delivery of remote learning, which typically meant learning new technology. • 68% of faculty indicated that they required at least 5 more hours per week on course management during remote learning, and 18% of faculty indicated that they spent 20 or more additional hours per week on course management during remote learning. • 35% of faculty responded that it was not easy to adapt their instruction to a remote learning environment. The most common specific issue cited by faculty in the transition from face-to-face to remote learning was that preparation, teaching, and grading required significantly more time to complete (34%). Almost 30% of faculty noted that their courses did not translate to the remote learning environment well in terms of content, assignments and communication. As many of my colleagues in this text have pointed out, teaching remotely in spring 2020 consisted primarily of putting existing course materials online and lecturing via virtual platform. (See Sebastian Kaempf’s excellent discussion in Chapter 12.) If that took considerably more time and effort, what would it take to truly create innovative and effective learning experiences for our students in a remote environment? Over the summer, our CETL and eLearning teams worked quickly to create a multi-level system of training for effective remote and online teaching and course design. Using a portion of the CARES Act funding the institution received from the federal government, they developed and deployed the Teaching Online Academy (TOA) for beginners in online instruction and the TOA-Next Level to enhance effectiveness in online instruction. In January 2021, CETL deployed a new Virtual eLearning Design Institute that focused on best practices in online and remotelearning course design. The institution also purchased specific technology

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tools and licenses that faculty identified as needed to be effective online teachers, and provided equipment such as second monitors and webcams to faculty who did not have them at home. As Sibel Otkay notes in Chapter 11, the concern for minimizing negative impacts on students when a disruption occurs can no longer be the sole responsibility of an individual instructor. The institution has a crucial role in fostering faculty and student success. Faculty perceptions of the challenges their students faced: • 20% of faculty reported that approximately half or fewer of their students demonstrated the resilience necessary to achieve the student learning objectives. • 14% reported that students did not have adequate access to all technology necessary to be successful in their courses. • 38% said that their students performed slightly or significantly worse than they did before the switch to remote learning in mid-March. Obviously there are many factors that could have impacted this, but we did make an attempt to collect information on the primary ones. Faculty were asked to give the reasons that students cited for being unable to complete course requirements. They reported that it was largely due to increased occupational requirements (78%), personal hardships (63%) and/or increased responsibility for children’s education. Approximately one-half of the faculty said that their students cited technology-related issues, such as limited devices in the household (51%) and/or repeatedly poor Internet connection (50%), and 36% of faculty said that their students lacked familiarity with general technology platforms/applications. Students were, of course, directly surveyed separately. CETL’s goal in seeking faculty perceptions of the challenges students faced was two-fold: (1) to encourage faculty to reflect on what the experience looked like from the student’s perspective, and (2) to compare it to the student responses to find out if there was a significant gap in understanding between faculty and students. This data was used to re-shape course offerings for fall 2020. Mindful of students working full-time and/or responsible for supervising their children’s virtual education, the course schedule provided a balance of fully synchronous and fully asynchronous course options. Academic Affairs and Student Affairs worked in tandem on an informational

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campaign to explain which courses would be best for students depending on their specific needs. Many students, however, were pushed into courses driven by their work and childcare requirements rather than which learning style suited them best. It then became incumbent on the instructor to identify students’ needs and offer flexibility in the mechanisms they used to support them. Tobias Lemke shares his experience with this in Chapter 5 of this text. As for technology, the institution provided a loaner program to students for laptops, tablets, and webcams until existing supply was gone. Since students knew they were enrolling in remote-learning courses for the fall, there was an assumption that students would not register for a course unless they had access to the technology they needed. Anecdotally, that was not the case, although most students were prepared. This project was certainly not unique—most institutions conducted similar surveys internally, and there were several national studies done as well (Lederman, 2020). What is interesting is the degree to which the outcomes are consistent across types and sizes of institutions and regions of the country. Perhaps as a result of such data collection, a common notion has emerged that we pivoted to “triage pedagogy or Emergency Response Teaching.” (Rebecca A. Glazier provides more discussion on this topic in Chapter 10) Disruption in pedagogy is not limited to this moment, the future of higher education remains unclear in the wake of the financial, structural, and procedural changes the COVID-19 global pandemic has wrought. Community colleges rely heavily on state and county funding—roughly 2/3 of our operational budget comes from those two sources. As costs related to the pandemic rise and revenue due to unemployment decreases, publicly funded institutions will find far less financial support from the government in the foreseeable future. But a shift toward technology-reliant pedagogy is likely to increase the cost of effective teaching and learning. Long before this particular disruption, faculty practices have lagged behind the technological advancements, and pedagogy has remained unnecessarily stagnant. Because faculty have not demanded them, institutions have not invested in the full breadth of technological tools, instructional design experts and professional development opportunities that are available to enhance pedagogical effectiveness. The global pandemic forced faculty to quickly pivot in their practices, but they

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certainly cannot “go backward” and “return to normal” when they now know that they are capable of meeting students where they are rather than requiring them to fit into an outdated vision of higher education. In this sense, disruption has presented institutions of higher education with an opportunity to re-orient themselves around more student-centered structures and practices.

The Faculty’s Role Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) have existed in higher education for more than three decades. They have proven to be very useful in bridging the often competitive space between administration and faculty by creating understanding and empathy around the common goal: positive student learning experiences. PLCs promote collaboration toward continuous improvement “in meeting students’ academic, social, and cultural needs through a shared vision … [and] seeking ways to maintain high standards for all students …” (Hilliard, 2012). Because they must demonstrate progress, they produce deliverables such as master courses and common rubrics. PLCs encourage faculty and administrators to collaborate on problem-solving. Ideally, goals and expectations in a particular area are standardized and clarified, a more robust pool of resources is developed, and multiple perspectives and areas of expertise are included in the process. For example, the use of Open Educational Resources (OERs) is a current movement in higher education, but if we want to use them effectively in our own institution we must pull together a diverse team to look at if/how OERs can benefit our own students. The way we utilize PLCs at Harford Community College creates consistencies across academic disciplines on campus—we take the best practices from each and adapt them to fit our own. As a result, there is a “common student experience” that is institutionalized in campus culture. It is time to redesign Professional Learning Communities. While consistency makes for a more comfortable and predictable student experience, it does not challenge students to adapt to different pedagogical practices nor help them appreciate the value of differences in our approach to teaching and learning. PLCs should be champions of diversity and innovation. They should challenge faculty to try something new rather than tweak what someone else has done. Rather than use PLCs as a mechanism for accumulating data and finding the norm, faculty should design

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PLCs as experimental learning laboratories to promote individual creativity around a common theme. The need for faculty to reconsider, redesign, and reinvent pedagogical practices is all the more urgent because of the increased reliance on technology brought about by the sudden shift to remote and online teaching. There are two related concerns here. First, if faculty don’t change how they design and deliver courses, they will find themselves intertwined in the technology life cycle, where they become increasingly reliant on the next “new” technology to resolve the problems that the “old” technology created. Kumar (2020) uses the example of online exam proctoring tools to highlight a real concern, “Are intrusive technologies the price of university education?” As experts in their disciplines, faculty must find new ways to deliver content and assess student learning rather than rely on technology to try to recreate traditional methods. A second and related concern is the corporatization of higher education. When instructors are reliant on instructional technology, academics becomes reliant on technology corporations, which of course have their own vested interest in selling their products. Since these products are expensive and often require institutional licensing, when the administration decides what tools to purchase, faculty will have to adapt how they teach to accommodate the technology, which may well ultimately influence what is and what is not taught. We must be more proactive and vigilant as academicians to preserve academic integrity in the curriculum. Public opinion of higher education was on the wane before the COVID19 pandemic (Lederman, 2019) and will certainly decline further if students perceive they are not getting a valuable, high-quality education that cannot be purchased through a technology corporation. Faculty and students know that effective teaching and learning happens in all sorts of interactive and spontaneous ways, and that simply clicking through an online module with embedded self-checks is not the same thing. While it may make data collection and institutional assessment easier, it most certainly does not help students comprehend and internalize competing information, nor does it develop the kinds of listening and critical thinking skills so vital to success in any academic or professional field. There are pedagogical practices that rely on commonly available technology rather than specialized products—for example, the model of Collaborative Online International Learning first established by SUNY in 2004 (SUNY COIL Center). Numerous case studies in a wide variety

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of academic disciplines demonstrate that it is a highly effective practice for developing intercultural competencies through experiential learning (Marcillo-Gomez & Desilus, 2016). COIL-type programs are generally housed within an institution’s Global Education Office, consistent with their goal of providing equitable access to global learning, and tacked on to existing courses for ease of incorporation. For the discipline of International Relations, collaborative online learning should be pervasive in the classroom. Courses should be built around global interactions so that experiencing the challenges of international diplomacy is embedded in the curriculum. Time zone differences exist in global reality—learning to work in and around them is part of the practice of international relations; therefore, they should not stop us from engaging with others as part of our teaching and learning. Once these institutional partnerships are established they offer multiple pathways for student interactions in a variety of formats. For example, I have a colleague in Bulgaria who teaches an Introduction to International Relations course. We have created an assignment that requires students from each institution to work together online in small groups on a particular project, which forces them to recognize and delve into just how much geopolitical perspective impacts the way a person views the world. Students remain connected on social media long after the project is over and may soon get to travel for a visit or to study abroad. The learning never ends.

The Institution’s Role Administrative leaders in institutions of higher education must comply with DHS/CDC guidelines, as well as state and county laws to ensure a clean and safe learning environment. They must also be responsive to the financial, health and, accessibility needs of their students, faculty and staff. And they must do all of this with rapidly decreasing funds. While this is challenging for all institutions, the community college model can offer a blueprint for stability and continuity of service during disruptions. Many community colleges are just that—they serve as a primary academic, cultural, and social resource for the community at large. They forge partnerships with local entities such as public libraries, Boys & Girls Clubs, the Y, and private companies. It is an interdependent relationship in many ways, and allows for the pooling of resources and the delivery of services in multiple locations, including directly in the neighborhoods that need them most rather than on a central campus. These connections

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build safety nets for accessibility and are vital in mitigating the potential damage of future disruptions. A pre-pandemic study found that partnerships between community colleges and community-based organizations do indeed contribute to student success. Students who participated in the study cited “knowing how to ask for help, academic preparation, mental illness, hunger, and money for books” as primary obstacles they face (Butler, 2018). All of these become even more challenging when a disruption such as a global pandemic or natural disaster occurs. When students can turn to the institution to access services and resources they need, they are far more likely to remain in school. Internally, the lessons institutions learned during “triage” remote teaching over the past year cannot be ignored. Faculty were able to make the necessary adjustments to meet students’ needs in large part because they listened to the students directly and collaborated with them in the learning process. Institutions should encourage this and support studentcentered, faculty-led changes in pedagogical practice. They must resist the urge to look for an “easy fix” in technology to replace what was lost during the pandemic, and instead recognize that the technology is a support for what faculty do best—teach. As tempting as it would be to go back to working within the established, traditional frameworks, institutions must embrace this opportunity to empower their faculty to reflect, evolve, and perhaps even shift mindsets. The institution must allow space for experimentation and risk taking in teaching and learning. The notion that students must expand their viewpoints and learn from failure is a key component of our institutional missions, yet administrations are risk averse when it comes to faculty doing the same. Managing disruption takes innovative thinking and doing, which can only happen in a space that is process oriented rather than outcomes oriented. Even where institutions have committed resources to internal Centers for Teaching and Learning, the focus is often on best practices and group-oriented professional development. When faculty performance is evaluated only on what is accomplished within specific rubrics and definitions, it restricts innovative thinking and consigns faculty to complacency for fear of losing their jobs. Evaluating faculty performance in a meaningful way requires recognizing that each faculty member has different strengths, unique talents, and personal career expectations and goals. We do not operate in isolation—effective teaching is a team sport. Obviously student evaluations

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are a key factor, but they should be designed to elicit nuanced responses rather than to generate a standardized score. Even better, reach out to alumni for their perspectives on how well-prepared they felt for the next step in their journey. Classroom observations provide a wonderful snapshot of a single class period created to follow the observation rubric, but cannot provide insight to the overall effectiveness of the instructor. And they would be better conducted by peers who know the subject matter and the student body rather than administrators who no longer teach. Faculty should create their own professional goals centered around challenging themselves outside of spaces where they have already found success. Self-reflection is the best measurement here, and excellence is demonstrated by making progress toward a goal rather than by accomplishing an activity. The people who choose a career in academia tend to be self-motivated and curious, which cannot be accurately reflected on a standardized rubric.

The Professional Organization’s Role One of the most palpable conditions of remote-learning teaching is isolation. Particularly for faculty who thrive on interactions in the classroom, it is difficult to feel like you are making the connections between your students and the content that need to be made for real discovery to happen. And although many academic and technology companies have quickly developed interactive teaching tools, it can be overwhelming to sift through them all. It is here that professional organizations like the International Studies Association and the American Political Science Association can provide leadership to ensure that the discipline’s best interests are met at the intersection of pedagogy and technology. Professional organizations can promote the importance of pedagogical research and provide leadership for academic institutions in redefining what counts as “scholarship” in the twenty-first century. IR departments must incorporate technological tools in content delivery where relevant rather than rely on the technology companies that view the curriculum as a secondary interest. For example, professional organizations can exert pressure on global institutions, both IGOs and NGOs, to provide access to resources and databases that faculty and students can use in practical applications of course content. Student projects can be constructed around the UNDPs Human Development Data Center or the World Inequality Database (Sami & Hallock, 2017). With the global resources

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they are able to garner, faculty can build learning modules based on realtime data that can be deployed asynchronously whenever needed. Some non-partisan organizations are beginning to develop their own simulation activities, workshops and games based on real-time data that are easily accessed and deployed in face-to-face or online courses. Climate Interactive, a non-profit organization with ties to MIT Sloan is a great example (https://www.climateinteractive.org). Most large professional organizations have established regional cohorts, as well as teaching and learning tracks to promote pedagogical scholarship. These existing networks should be reinforced with technological resources to ensure continuous access even in times of disruption. As faculty develop and share online pedagogical tools, ISA, APSA and others can provide peer-reviewed critiques and publish them on their own platforms for members in the same way as they do with scholarly articles. Let’s give excellent teaching the same respect we give excellent scholarship. Just as students need collaborative relationships, peer-to-peer learning, intellectual engagement, and a sense of belonging, so too do faculty. Professional organizations should supplement in-person events, virtual conferences and webinars with year-round virtual opportunities for faculty to interact with one another. Monthly online roundtables provide an accessible mechanism for faculty to present research they are working on, share pedagogical approaches and tools, and discuss their experiences in academia. They can be hosted by the professional organization, funded by vendors, moderated by leading academicians and available to all members. As institutional funding becomes more scarce, professional organizations can take the lead in keeping faculty and departments connected and sharing resources that can help mitigate the chaos when disruption occurs. This will get easier as communications technology advances.

Conclusion According to UNESCO, 191 countries implemented country-wide closures of their schools and universities during the COVID-19 pandemic. That means 1.58 billion students around the world (91%) relied on instructors and professors to overcome the disruptions and challenges they faced to ensure continuity of high-quality education (Holmes, 2020). We quickly built learning environments that did not rely on campuses, buildings, and labs. What happens to those environments when this global pandemic subsides? Will they continue to exist

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independent of physical spaces? If so, we—faculty, administrations, and professional organizations—must go back and build stronger foundations grounded in pedagogical research and stringent academic standards. And if we do not—if we return to our familiar patterns and pedagogies—we have missed an opportunity to evolve and improve. As Alexander Wendt says, “anarchy is what states make of it” (1992). The same is true with disruptions to our “normal” lives—we can (and should) make potential disorder into a collaborative, constructive experience for institutions and the communities they serve.

References Butler, O. N. (2018, January 1). Can partnerships with community-based organizations improve students’ success at mid-size urban community colleges? ProQuest LLC, ProQuest LLC. EBSCOhost. https://search.ebscohost.com/ login.aspx?direct=true&db=eric&AN=ED584538&site=eds-live. Accessed 27 February 2021. Hilliard, A. T. (2012). Practices and value of a professional learning Community in higher education. Contemporary Issues in Education Research (CIER), 5(2), 71–74. https://doi.org/10.19030/cier.v5i2.6922 Holmes, K. (2020, April 27). Sustaining learning communities through and beyond COVID-19. UNESCO Futures of Education Ideas LAB. https:// en.unesco.org/futuresofeducation/holmes-sustaining-learning-communitiesCOVID-19. Accessed 28 February 2021. Kumar, R. (2020). Assessing higher education in the COVID-19 era. Brock Education: A Journal of Educational Research and Practice, 29(2), 37–41. Lederman, D. (2019, June 17). The public support for (and doubts about) higher ed. Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/ 06/17/survey-shows-publicssupport-and-qualms-about-higher-education. Accessed 27 February 2021. Lederman, D. (2020, October 6). Faculty confidence in online learning grows. Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/ 2020/10/06/covid-era-experience-strengthens-faculty-belief-value-online. Accessed 27 February 2021. Marcillo-Gomez, M., & Desilus, B. (2016). Collaborative online international learning experiences in practices: Opportunities and challenges. Journal of Technology Management & Innovation, 11(1), 30–35. https://doi.org/10. 4067/S0718-27242016000100005 Sami, F., & Hallock, S. (2017, May). A global learning infusion for introduction to statistics. MathAMATYC Educator, 8(3), 31–34.

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SUNY COIL Center. (2004). Welcome. https://coil.suny.edu/. Accessed 27 February 2021. Wendt, A. (1992). Anarchy is what states make of it: The social construction of power politics. International Organization, 46(2), 391–425. http://www. jstor.org/stable/2706858.28. February 28, 2021.

CHAPTER 14

Pedagogy and Institutional Crisis: Higher Education as Public Good and Scholarly Advocacy After the Pandemic Stephen Pampinella

Introduction In January 2021, the auditing and consulting firm Deloitte and Strata Education Network released “The hybrid campus: Three major shifts for the post-COVID university” (Selingo et al., 2021). Its authors argue that the COVID-19 pandemic offers an opportunity to remake the university around a “technology-enabled student experience.” The business sector offers a template for managing this transformation, they write (Ibid., p. 4): Think of the hybrid campus as similar to the retail model that sits somewhere between the physical and digital worlds, with little distinction

S. Pampinella (B) Department of Political Science and International Relations, State University of New York, New Paltz, NY, USA

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. A. Szarejko (eds.), Pandemic Pedagogy, Political Pedagogies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83557-6_14

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between the two. Many retailers that started online also operate physical outlets to spark sales on their websites and increase customer loyalty. Most customers, however, don’t make a distinction between the two. The same thing happens when we shop at Home Depot, which started as a brick-and-mortar store: We don’t differentiate between buying online or driving to the store. What’s critical here for institutional leaders is not the technology necessarily but the changes to campus culture and operating models that go well beyond the acquisition and deployment of new tools.

The report quickly made a splash. In his blog for Inside Higher Ed, Kim (2021) welcomed the use of retail business as a metaphor for restructuring the university and called on administrators to begin thinking about implementation. Others may find such language worrying when offered as a response to the pandemic and its related economic recession. Prior to March 2020, higher education was already a troubled economic sector as the tuition-dependent fiscal model of US colleges and universities was becoming unsustainable. The sudden shift toward distance learning offcampus led many students to think twice about paying high tuition and housing costs. The result for some small colleges was insolvency and permanent closure (Nietzel, 2020). For the vast majority of remaining colleges and universities, distance learning has been implemented while simultaneously coping with fiscal stress (Natow, 2021). In the same way that businesses seek economic efficiency, distance learning can enable universities to provide maximal instruction with minimal faculty and reduce institutional costs by eliminating instructional positions. Such a policy response would be easily justified as an extension of fiscal austerity frameworks already practiced by higher education leadership. It would remain consistent with the use of the university as a site of “workforce development” rather than an institution of liberal education. In this chapter, I argue that scholars ought to resist the use of education technology to further austerity. Instead, we should be advocates for higher education. By this, I mean that scholars must engage policymakers inside and outside of the university to demand resources for the provision of a variety of pedagogical modalities. This objective requires rethinking not just the university, but the notion that universities ought to be subject to market forces. Rather than treat universities as a business providing private goods to students as customers, we should defend education as a public good worthy of public funding. As John Dewey once argued (1916, 1938), education is necessary for a democratic society. It provides

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a site for reflective deliberation in which students can learn to logically weigh the merits of various ideas and recognize their obligations to each other as members of the public. In the aftermath of the Trump presidency and its authoritarian overtones, democratic education is needed more than ever. It can train students to defend formal rule of law and informal democratic norms, two aspects of democratic institutions that block the ambitions of aspiring authoritarians (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018). By reviving the university’s role as a public good, our profession can contribute to the preservation of a democratic society while simultaneously accounting for past injustices. This argument is not new and has long been made by critical pedagogy scholars (Fabricant & Brier, 2017; Giroux, 2014; Newfield, 2018). However, the “political time” (Skowronek, 2008) in which our current crisis unfolds is certainly novel. In recent years, US residents have become increasingly concerned with economic inequality and private corporate influence upon the rest of society. A January 2020 Pew Research Center poll indicates that 61% of US respondents say there is too much inequality in the United States, and then more than half say that the federal government, large businesses, and state governments are responsible for reducing it (Horowitz et al., 2020). This trend has fueled growing support for wealth distribution and the strengthening of public institutions. For the first time in almost 50 years, a political opportunity has emerged favorable to the reconstruction of the welfare state. If we seize it, we can ensure that university education remains accessible to all and promotes the critical thinking skills necessary for democratic citizenship. Doing so requires that we actively work with civil society institutions, such as unions and other economic advocacy organizations, that call for public assistance to higher education and income redistribution. While our own professional associations are less suited to this work, the American Political Science Association (APSA) and International Studies Association (ISA) can promote a culture of advocacy that normalizes political mobilization in defense of university funding and participation in labor organizations. Some caveats are in order. First, my argument is not that we should refuse the use of distance learning as a pedagogical modality. There is no turning back the clock to the pre-pandemic time in which online instruction was an occasional supplement to in-person classes. In addition, new technologies can enable universities to meet a wider array of student needs, including different forms of learning. We owe it to our students to use technology to realize these goals. However, we must ensure that

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the logic by which new technology is incorporated into higher education is centered upon students rather than cost-cutting. While the market may consider large numbers of university instructors as unnecessarily redundant, we know from our own experience that increasing student loads per instructor leads to less engagement with faculty and less valuable learning. The point is not to oppose the use of technology. As Oktay and Kaempf demonstrate (in Chapters 11 and 12, respectively), technology can foster pedagogical innovations that benefit students. Instead, we should be wary of the use of technology in ways that reduces costs at their expense. Second, my argument is biased in two ways. Any call for increased government funding for universities is bound to favor public over private institutions. While highly prestigious private universities with large endowments will survive the pandemic mostly unscathed, small non-selective private universities face a challenging future regardless of increased advocacy. What I discuss below will not be helpful to those institutions, unless they are absorbed by public university systems. In addition, my argument is US-centric. I recognize that notions of social democracy which animate my argument have little purchase in developing countries since their position in the world economy has never afforded them resource flows which enable a Keynesian welfare state. However, the broader movement toward increased economic regulation and redistribution is one that ought to be considered at global level, too. This is not merely an idea of the Global North—the New International Economic Order (NIEO) is a product of the Global South.1 My call for increased advocacy for public support should be understood as part of a greater need to regulate the world economy as a matter of global governance and provide economic rights to all. I proceed in the following way. First, I discuss how the pandemic exacerbated higher education’s existing crises. Second, I discuss the present political opportunity to challenge higher education austerity. Last, I suggest how scholars can advocate for public funding for universities.

1 The NIEO was a 1970s-era set of proposals to reform the global economy and ensure that developing nations benefited from global trade. It represented a continuation of the global project of decolonization that was ultimately ignored by the United States and other Western powers, but today it is gaining renewed attention. See Gilman (2015).

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Austerity and the Pandemic: Higher Education’s Perfect Storm Before the pandemic, the fiscal model for higher education faced significant structural challenges. Universities faced rising costs due the same personnel costs faced by all employers across the economy. They relied on a variety of revenue streams to cover growing expenses, including increased tuition paid and fees paid by individual students and their families as well as private philanthropic giving. However, macroeconomic and political dynamics have placed this fiscal model under stress. As universities increased tuition, they subsequently drove students into five- and six-figure sums of debt and unwittingly provoked a societal debate about the value of a college education (Lapovsky, 2013). Today, universities are staring down a “demographic cliff” of declining potential future students, threatening the viability of tuition dependence. While some universities recruited international students who could pay higher tuition, the Trump administration’s xenophobic immigration policies combined with the pandemic led to substantial enrollment declines, and university revenues subsequently (Quintin, 2020). Philanthropy has been an uneven source of income. Non-selective universities receive far less in private donations compared to selective counterparts and yet are locked in a paradoxical competition with them for both faculty and students (Cheslock & Gianneschi, 2008, see also Ba, Chapter 7). All universities developed these novel sources of revenue over the past decade, but public universities had an additional motive: declining state assistance. Since the 2008 financial crisis, public universities have faced a loss of $3.4 billion in funding as states reduced spending on higher education by 11.6% per student (Jackson & Saenz, 2021). Public divestment from higher education is part of the broader trend toward fiscal conservatism and austerity budgeting which swept across the Englishspeaking world since the 1970s (Blyth, 2002; Swarts, 2013). Policymakers adopted neoliberal economic practices which assumed that markets ought to be maximally integrated and managed by technocratic experts rather than democratic institutions (Slobodian, 2019). The notion that competition for private investment would fuel economic growth led to the rise of austerity budgeting, in which states reduced public spending in order to cut taxes. These policies are directly correlated to cuts in state assistance to higher education between 1961 and 2001 (Archibald &

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Feldman, 2006). When applied in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, austerity budgeting triggered department closures and layoffs across US public universities. The entrenched acceptance of austerity led Archibald and Feldman to suggest that state universities “shift from being state-supported to state-affiliated or state-allied” as a means of becoming less dependent on public funding (Ibid., 2010, p. 239). States would subsidize students rather than directly fund universities. The broad adoption of neoliberal practices had additional effects on university governance and the provision of basic services to students. The assumed economic efficiencies associated with markets led universities to develop public–private partnerships. Universities contracted with private corporations to provide a variety of university functions, including basic services such as management of dormitories and cafeterias as well as information technology software. Policymakers even scaled up the public–private model to build entire new campuses as a means of spurring economic development. For example, under the direction of Governor Andrew Cuomo, the State University of New York established a new SUNY Polytechnic Institute (SUNY Poly) that offered research space, equipment, and labor in the form of graduate students to corporate partners.2 As the university became increasingly aligned with the market imperatives of maximizing human capital for economic competition, it effectively abandoned its public mission to educate students and prepare them for democratic citizenship (Giroux, 2014, 2002). In this context, instructors and students are forced to do more with less. SUNY provides a notable example. The creation of SUNY Poly coincided with the closure of five academic programs and layoffs of tenured faculty at the University at Albany, just next door to the new rival campus. At SUNY New Paltz, departments and programs are often unable to hire instructors and offer courses necessary for different major and minor offerings. Department chairs were asked by administrators to advise transfer students without being paid a customary stipend. Meanwhile, compensation remains comparatively low. For example, assistant professors at SUNY New Paltz are paid 25% less than the average salary

2 At Governor Andrew Cuomo’s direction, New York State provided SUNY Polytechnic with millions in funding which was matched by corporate partners. For one example, see Vielkind (2018).

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of an identically-ranked faculty member at a four-year public university.3 Adjuncts are paid about $3,000 per course, which leaves many struggling to make ends meet. The result is an overburdened and increasingly burnt out faculty which struggles to provide a basic education for SUNY students. When the pandemic initiated a broad move toward distance learning in March 2020, it forced faculty and staff to adjust within this setting.4 Public universities must cope with the loss of not just student payments via tuition, fees, or room and broad, but additional declines in state funding. Administrators now face difficult choices regarding which programs to keep or which programs to cut. Such decisions are likely to exacerbate the existing inequalities in higher education. Public universities offer the greatest opportunities for social mobility in the entire higher education sector, yet continued fiscal stress will undermine their capacity to serve low-income and marginalized communities. Blankenberger and Williams (2020) call for accountability and oversight regarding how universities respond to these challenges. But broader questions remain: to what set of norms will universities be held accountable? If neoliberal standards continue to be dominant, cost cutting becomes the appropriate response. In this context, the shift to distance learning can enable public universities to reduce personnel costs and rely more in forms of pedagogy that minimize face-to-face interaction and maximize online learning. While students at elite private colleges will continue to receive multiple forms of instruction attuned to a variety of learning styles, students at public universities will have far fewer choices. The result may be increased burdens on scholars to adapt to online learning without institutional support rather than fulfilling the proactive recommendations made by Oktay and Kaempf (Chapters 11 and 12, respectively). 3 Data developed using The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Salary Calculator. https://data.chronicle.com/196176/State-University-of-New-York-at-New-Paltz/ faculty-salaries/. 4 Scholars in other countries faced their own unique challenges. As Alves and Ferreira note in their chapter (this volume), public colleges and universities actually received increased governmental support over the last several decades, but this centralization of support left those institutions dependent on the political environment in the federal capital. The relatively decentralized funding structures for US higher education mitigates against some of these political vulnerabilities while leaving colleges and universities locked into state-level political dynamics. I discuss these issues below.

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As scholars, we should view the prospect of a two-tier higher education sector as a direct threat to our professional identities. We ourselves are students of politics who are bound by a commitment to educating every interested person and preparing them for participation in a democratic society.5 Achieving this objective requires reflective pedagogies that enable students to realize continuous personal growth. We must provide students with social experiences which allow them to question existing habits or institutions and propose new ones through deliberative interactions with their peers (Dewey, 1938). If distance learning technology is implemented through dominant norms that promote efficiency and cost-cutting, the vast majority of students will not have access to such opportunities. We must also recognize that the onset of the pandemic has caused the academic job market to collapse.6 If distance learning is institutionalized in ways that enable universities to avoid hiring full-time faculty, we should not expect any significant recovery. Current doctoral students will be denied the possibility of a meaningful academic career while those who find some employment will be consigned to the use of cost-efficient pedagogies. Even if resource-rich private universities may avoid these trends, even their students will struggle to find a full-time position.

Reframing the Meaning of Higher Education To preserve equal access to quality pedagogy as well as the future of the academic profession, I argue that scholars must defend public funding 5 Some might question this statement as a containing a hidden liberal ideological bias— indeed, some conservatives have argued that US colleges and universities discriminate against conservatives and conservative thought. They might claim that my proposal, consistent with that trend, would further the agenda of indoctrinating students with liberal or leftist political orientations. However, these arguments are a straw man. Rockenbach et al. (2020a, 2020b) use survey data to demonstrate that over 90% of US college students reported not experiencing pressure to adopt the beliefs of their instructors. What a wellfunded college education can do is enable students to have open and honest conversations that expose them to various perspectives and worldviews. Any opposition to fully funding public universities would ultimately undermine such educational experiences. 6 According to data analyzed by Wolbrecht, IR job postings for tenure-track positions declined from 143 in 2018–2019 to 65 in 2020–2021. Similar declines were noted across other major political science fields. See Christina Wolbrecht, Twitter post, February 11, 2021, 4:44 pm: https://twitter.com/C_Wolbrecht/status/1359981596594601986/pho to/1.

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for higher education. To be clear: we should not harbor any illusions that the university can return to its pre-pandemic model and reject the use of distance learning. Doing so would deny some students who do benefit from distance learning, in either fully remote or blended models, pedagogies which may be helpful to them. Instead, we should ensure that universities train graduate students and faculty to provide instruction in all forms. Achieving this goal requires that state institutions appropriate necessary funding to universities and overcome neoliberal expectations about university management. The contemporary political climate creates an opportunity to challenge those norms. Scholars of American Political Development present political contention as a struggle among coalitions with alternative visions of the political order (Orren & Skowronek, 2004). As “political time” unfolds (Skowronek, 2008), some coalitions institutionalize their preferred regime but eventually give way to alternatives. These moments take place during disjunctive presidencies, in which the old regime collapses amid a failed attempt at rehabilitation and a new regime is inaugurated by a transformative president. For Skowronek, there are good reasons for assuming that the conservative regime institutionalized by Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party—the same one which institutionalized neoliberal norms of economic governance—is breaking down (Kreitner, 2020). What replaces it is unclear, but the collapse of the ancien regime suggests that a transition away from governance based on market logics is possible. As scholars, we should recognize these events as an opportunity to redefine the value of public education and demand funding from state institutions. Evidence of this opportunity is widespread. As recently as 2016, 67% of Americans were found to support new taxes on millionaires (Sawhill & Pulliam, 2019). Similar policies have become a bedrock offering of left-leaning Democrats, including Senators Bernard Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, as well as growing bloc of progressives in the House of Representatives. The revival of economic redistribution overlapped with pre-pandemic calls from mainstream higher education experts for renewed state assistance to public universities (Archibald & Feldman, 2017). Educators in the K-12 sector have begun to make similar demands. 2017 and 2018 saw a wave of “Red for Ed” strikes, often organized outside of existing unions, among teachers demanding raises and more resources for students. Labor advocacy is even becoming prominent in higher education. The unionization of adjuncts and graduate students has become

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commonplace across private institutions while limited mobilizations of public university faculty in pursuit of fair contracts and salary increases have also emerged.7 The public, policymakers, academic observers, and our colleagues are all challenging the dominance of austerity budgeting. A political opening now exists for higher education advocacy to be successful. How should we use this opportunity? Scholars should begin by reframing our debates about higher education. We should challenge existing narratives which establish the purpose of higher education as a private good to students-as-customers necessary for market competition and workforce development. Instead, we should redefine the university as a public good, one that provides both market and nonmarket value to both individual students and positive externalities for society (Newfield, 2018). The university can serve as a primary institution of democratic renewal as the United States recovers from the authoritarian tendencies of the Trump presidency and the 6 January 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol (Giroux, Forthcoming). In an age rife with misinformation and dehumanizing ideologies, higher education can train students to filter out false information through the skeptical appraisal of arguments or reject arguments that undermine basic human rights. It can also enable what Dewey (1916, p. 101) once described as “associated living”: it can enable students to reflect upon personal and collective experiences in a communicative process that allows each to consider one’s own actions and concerns in light of others. In this way, we can promote democratic citizenship by encouraging students to reflect upon each other’s perspectives on the basis of mutual respect. Defending higher education as a public good can complement emerging norms within the university. Struggles for racial and gender equality have led universities to mainstream Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). Universities dedicate both programming and administrative positions toward fostering institutional cultures that enable all community

7 Faculty and staff at SUNY New Paltz organized around contract negotiations between

their union, United University Professions (UUP), and Governor Andrew Cuomo. After a semester of rallies and protests which incorporated state senate candidates and primary challengers to the governor, the governor’s office finally concluded contract negotiations with UUP in June 2018 and accepted merit raises and salary compression bonuses, two provisions which the governor previously opposed.

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members to feel welcome while promoting consciousness of how historically marginalized peoples are excluded from US institutions. But DEI initiatives have already been co-opted by market logics which treat education as a means to adapt to economic competition. Instead, we can follow W.E.B. Du Bois’s radical critique of inclusion and promote an “education of transfiguration,” (Bourassa, 2019, p. 19) one that fosters creative acts informed by the knowledge of subaltern peoples and works toward a more equal society. A more emancipatory form of education is possible if we treat it as a right to which all persons are entitled, but it requires curriculum and resources made available to students and instructors that challenge neoliberal norms. Most importantly, it requires hiring persons of color, especially Black and Indigenous scholars, who have been historically marginalized in institutions of higher institution. As we describe the university as an institution essential to the creation of a multiracial democracy, we can justify policies that guarantee these resources. Framing higher education as a public good also overlaps with growing awareness of obstacles to college affordability. Although federal financial aid programs offer assistance to students seeking a college education, their stringent work and income requirements as well as complex bureaucratic procedures leave many students behind (Goldrick-Rab, 2016). State programs have similar problems. New York State’s Excelsior Scholarship requires that students complete thirty credit hours a year to remain eligible, a requirement which many students who work part-time or have other commitments are unable to meet. Narratives which treat university education as a societal benefit can be mutually supportive of proposals to reform financial aid and tuition-free programs. If higher education is supportive of a democratic society, then it ought to be publicly funded and students ought to be able to access it without incurring significant debt.

Advocacy for State Support of Public Universities Reimaging the purpose of university education is only the first step in ensuring new technology is adopted in ways that benefit students. The second, and more important, involves compelling government institutions to raise revenue and devote it to higher education. Scholars should incentivize policymakers to enact redistributive policies and treat public education as worthy of taxpayer dollars. This is no easy task. Success requires that scholars go beyond merely the study of politics and actually

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engage in political advocacy. We know how to do this. Many of us study how social movements and political institutions interact to generate policy outcomes. By putting our own expertise into practice, we can ensure that all students can enjoy the benefits of distance learning without sacrificing in-person instruction to the need for cost cutting. The key target of scholarly advocacy must be state governments which ostensibly manage public universities. As scholars, we must educate governors and legislators on the ways in which higher education has suffered under austerity budgeting. They are unaware of how decades of prepandemic budget cuts have devastated our ability to educate our students. Nor do they conceptualize the university in terms of its public benefits to their respective constituencies. They do, however, often voice commitments to student success, rising graduation rates, democratic governance, and racial equality. We should call on policymakers to meet words with deeds. Funding public higher education can enable them to meet the above objectives and ensure that all types of pedagogies are available to students regardless of their institutional affiliation. Educating policymakers is only one step. The other involves educating ourselves about state budget processes and engaging in political mobilization. Based on my own experience, most faculty and staff at universities are unaware of budget cycles or the funding priorities of state lawmakers. How budget processes begin, when they are initiated during a state’s fiscal year, or the relationship between executives and legislatures is information that is meaningless unless one is actively invested in shaping state spending. By educating ourselves about budget processes and reducing uncertainty regarding public university funding sources, we can better engage in basic forms of advocacy common to democratic citizenship. These include direct phone and email contacts to legislators, writing letters to the editor of local newspapers, and even holding in-person mobilizations once it becomes safe to do so. In these ways, we can create greater demand for policymakers who represent our institutional interests. The prospect of elections further enables us to hold policymakers accountable for austerity while rewarding those who support public universities. Our mobilization objectives should be three-fold. First, scholars can demand that state governments increase taxes on the superwealthy. We can contribute to policy debates about economic redistribution which are often informed by neoliberal assumptions about the economy which lack empirical evidence. Consider debates about income taxes informed

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by beliefs about tax flight by high earners. Recent research suggests that these concerns are overblown (Young, 2017).8 If millionaires do not flee high tax localities, then states can raise income taxes without losing their tax base. In turn, they can divert some of that additional tax revenue to higher education institutions. Scholars can advocate for both policies while ensuring that public debates about them are well-informed. Second, scholars can demand that public universities are no longer used for purposes which deviate from their educative and democratic missions. While some public–private partnerships may help universities achieve these objectives, many do not. We should oppose such initiatives within state government and insist on legal accountability and fiscal transparency. For example, an audit of SUNY Poly by the New York State Comptroller found that it lacked sufficient oversight of economic development and real estate initiatives (Rulison, 2020). Its campus president, Alain Kaloyeros, was previously arrested and convicted on corruption charges for rigging Request for Proposals offered for campus dormitory construction (Weiser & McKinley, 2018). Greater political involvement by faculty can ensure that policymakers and administrators remain faithful to the purpose of the university while partnering with private corporations, especially those offering education technology services. Mobilizing faculty to advocate for funding and basic mission of the university will not be easy. Unlike other professions, such as medical doctors, we lack a single all-powerful group such as the American Medical Association which can represent our interests as a unified collective. The discipline-specific focus of our scholarly organizations, combined with the separate existence of higher education unions, has created a more fragmented landscape. Some organize academic conferences and promote research and pedagogical innovations while others focus specifically on labor protections. We should generally respect this division of labor. Given their staffing and budgetary limitations, neither APSA nor ISA should get into the business of political advocacy. However, our professional organizations can promote greater engagement by their members in the labor movement and other supporting organizations. They can foster a culture of advocacy that encourages political scientists and IR scholars to participate in unions which do possess the resources needed to engage state policymakers. At the organizational

8 Arguments against the tax flight myth are not new. See Tannenwald et al. (2011).

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level, professional association leadership should build cooperative relationships with the higher education leadership of national unions, state-level affiliates, and other progressive organizations that promote economic redistribution.9 Union organizers and leadership can be invited to our own conferences to promote greater awareness of state financing of public universities and encourage local advocacy. Unions can also provide information about budget processes to associations, which can then distribute such information using their existing information technology systems. APSA and ISA should be well aware of budgetary threats or opportunities in various states and encourage their members to mobilize accordingly. Third, we should acknowledge that the dynamics of political polarization will enable scholarly advocacy to be more successful in some states than others. When Republicans control both legislative and executive chambers, revenue raisers are unlikely. Initial success is most likely in states that feature one-party rule by Democrats in which existing movements for economic redistribution are quite strong and policymakers are likely to be more receptive. However, if the present political moment is one in which we see a transition from our existing governing regime to another, then demands for raising taxes on the superwealthy as well as fully funding public institutions will only grow stronger.10 In this context, it is plausible to expect that redistribution can become more popular overtime in swing states outside of Democratic strongholds. As social movements and organized labor mobilize there, scholars can join as partners and demand that additional revenue is dedicated toward public universities.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have argued that stronger political advocacy on the part of scholars can enable us to take advantage of the contemporary political moment and ensure that higher education institutions remain 9 These are the American Federation of Teachers, the National Education Association, and the American Association of University Professors. One nationwide organization promoting economic redistribution is People’s Action. 10 We already see similar policy initiatives gaining traction at both the international,

federal, and state levels. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is leading negotiations with G7 countries about a global minimum corporate tax rate which would lessen tax competition among developed economies (Stein, 2021). The Biden administration is proposing a variety of tax increases on the superwealthy (Iacurci, 2021). The New York State legislature passed a series of similar tax increases in its 2022 budget (Vielkind, 2021).

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viable in the future. Skeptics might justifiably ask if these suggestions are overly optimistic and rely on a rosy picture of the mobilization potential of university communities. I agree that rosy projections about our own agency will be unrealized. The fiscal problems faced by public higher education are extraordinary and will not be solved with rallies and protests. However, sustained reinvestment in public colleges and universities, even at moderate levels, will only be possible if faculty and staff embrace public advocacy and put higher education on the political agenda. If policymakers have to answer for flat funding or reductions, they will be less likely to continue starving our institutions. The need for greater advocacy dovetails with this volume’s multiple recommendations regarding how to change pedagogies in response to the pandemic. Technology that enables online learning can be pedagogically useful if faculty are provided with organizational and institutional resources to employ them. Doing so is necessary to ensure that disadvantaged and marginalized students can overcome the variety of barriers they may face while also preserving a role for in-person learning. In the absence of such resources, faculty will struggle to provide quality educational experiences while students will struggle to adapt to a variety of learning modalities, none of which receive necessary institutional support. The scarring experience of teaching during the pandemic should remind us of how difficult that instructional environment will be. The potential for future disruptions, including another public health crisis or other emergency, should motivate us to take seriously the need for more stable funding streams. Otherwise, we risk a future in which public higher education is restructured to meet the needs of austerity budgeting rather than our students.

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Blyth, M. (2002). Great transformations: Economic ideas and institutional change in the twentieth century. Cambridge University Press. Bourassa, G. (2019). Neoliberal multiculturalism and productive inclusion: Beyond the politics of fulfillment in education. Journal of Education Policy, 36(2), 253–278. Cheslock, J. J., & Gianneschi, M. (2008). Replacing state appropriations with alternative revenue sources: The case of voluntary support. Journal of Higher Education, 79(2), 208–229. Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and education: An introduction to the philosophy of education. Macmillan. Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and education. Touchstone. Fabricant, M., & Brier, S. (2017). Austerity blues: Fighting for the soul of public higher education. Johns Hopkins University Press. Gilman, N. (2015, Spring). The new international economic order: A reintroduction. Humanity Journal, 1–16. Giroux, H. A. (2002). Neoliberalism, corporate culture, and the promise of higher education: The university as a democratic public sphere. Harvard Educational Review, 72(4), 425–463. Giroux, H. A. (2014). Neoliberalism’s war on higher education. Haymarket Books. Giroux, H. A. (Forthcoming). Trumpism and the challenge of critical education. Educational Philosophy and Theory. Goldrick-Rab, S. (2016). Paying the price: College costs, financial aid, and the betrayal of the american dream. University of Chicago Press. Horowitz, J. M., Igielnik, R. & Kochhar, R. (2020). Most Americans say there is too much economic inequality in the U.S., but fewer than half call it a top priority. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/ 2020/01/09/most-americans-say-there-is-too-much-economic-inequality-inthe-u-s-but-fewer-than-half-call-it-a-top-priority/. Accessed 2 May 2021. Iacurci, G. (2021, April 29). Biden wants to raise $1.5 trillion by taxing the rich. Here’s how. CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/29/how-bidentax-plan-would-hit-the-wealthy.html Jackson, V., & Saenz, M. (2021). States can choose better path for higher education funding in COVID-19 recession. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. https://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/states-canchoose-better-path-for-higher-education-funding-in-covid. Accessed 23 April 2021. Kim, J. (2021, February 1). Reacting to ‘the hybrid campus’ from deloitte insights: Higher education after the pandemic. Inside Higher Ed. https:// www.insidehighered.com/blogs/learning-innovation/reacting-hybrid-cam pus-deloitte-insights

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Index

A academic integrity, 86, 209 accessibility, xxx, 134, 146, 148, 149, 152, 153, 177, 179, 184, 185, 210, 211 access, xxvi, xxxi, xxxii, 20, 22, 28, 30–32, 43, 48, 67, 74, 80, 82, 88, 91, 105, 114, 116, 131–133, 135, 137, 142–153, 198, 203, 206, 207, 210–212, 224, 227 accessible, xxxi, 51, 81, 84, 85, 94, 149–151, 181, 184, 185, 213, 219 active learning, 40–42, 44, 46, 50, 51, 54–56, 60–64, 70, 83, 119, 134, 161 game(s), 34 simulation(s), 34 administrators, xxvii, xxx, xxxi, 159, 160, 176, 208, 212, 218, 222, 223, 229 American Political Science Association (APSA), 213, 219, 229, 230

C care, xxxi, xxxii, 4, 52, 53, 99, 100, 102, 104, 105, 116, 117, 121–123, 142, 144, 150, 152, 153, 161, 163, 177, 203 collaboration, xxxii, 64, 84, 86, 92, 100, 208 collaborative, 56, 61, 65, 86, 95, 109, 111, 117, 118, 190, 191, 210, 213, 214 community college, 104, 207, 210, 211 compassion, 85, 94, 95, 165 contingent faculty, 74, 94, 176 course evaluations, 192 student evaluations, 200, 211 COVID-19, xxiv, xxvii, 4, 28, 29, 31, 33, 40, 46, 48, 52, 59, 60, 62, 70, 71, 122, 131, 139, 141, 158, 161, 166, 176, 191, 192, 200, 201, 207 pandemic, 16, 19, 20, 26, 27, 40, 42, 47, 73, 94, 106, 114, 122,

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. A. Szarejko (eds.), Pandemic Pedagogy, Political Pedagogies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83557-6

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129, 141, 142, 158, 161, 162, 165, 166, 176, 209, 213, 217 public health, 28 critical pedagogy, 103, 109, 219 critical thinking, 49, 61, 64, 136, 209, 219 D departments, xxx, 48, 90, 94, 115, 180–182, 185, 212, 213, 222 disability, 29, 142–153, 183 disabled, 142, 144–148, 152, 153 E exams, 5, 68–70, 81, 84, 85, 88, 92, 103, 104, 122, 162, 209 F faculty, 12, 15, 32, 34, 35, 40, 56, 99, 132–135, 157–162, 176, 177, 179–185, 204–214, 220–226, 228, 229, 231 flexibility, 54, 59, 74, 75, 77, 100, 104, 107, 108, 117, 127, 129, 130, 132–135, 138, 139, 142, 152, 162, 165, 176, 207 flexible, xxvii, 13, 14, 31, 50, 94, 111, 133–135, 162, 190 G generosity, 100, 101, 107, 108, 142 grading, 31, 34, 50, 62, 107, 132, 133, 161, 165, 205 graduate students, 13, 15, 56, 144, 179, 222, 225 H higher education, xxxi, 19–22, 26–30, 40, 54, 114, 121, 129, 130, 139,

142–144, 146, 151, 153, 157, 165, 176, 180, 207–210, 218–221, 223–231

I inclusivity, 184 inclusive, 14, 63, 104, 119, 143, 152, 153, 185 international students, 76, 221 International Studies Association, 175, 182, 219

L layoffs, 222 lectures, xxxi, 13, 40, 46, 56, 62, 68, 69, 76–82, 91, 92, 101, 105–107, 118, 135, 160, 161, 177, 182, 183, 190–196, 200 lecturing, 78, 205 libraries, 26, 62, 210

P papers, 43, 45, 46, 61, 65, 133 essays, 122 private universities, 220, 224 private colleges, 223 professional associations, 183, 219, 230 professional development, 144, 204, 207, 211 Professional Learning Communities (PLCs), 208 public funding, 218, 220, 222, 224 public financing, 20 public-funded, 22, 26, 35 public universities, 20, 22, 30, 221–225, 228–230 public colleges, 223, 231

INDEX

Q quizzes, 54, 69, 84, 88, 91, 133, 195 R recording, 102, 133–135, 177 resilience, 206 resiliency, xxxi resilient, xxvii, xxxii retention, 69, 183 rigor, 108, 127, 130, 139, 178 S scholarship of teaching and learning (SOTL), 75 seminar, 41, 43–45, 47–56, 76, 122, 128, 191 social media, 28, 43, 48, 49, 130, 152, 184, 210 surveys, 20, 21, 30, 32, 34, 137, 151, 166, 195, 207 syllabus, 4, 45, 51, 53, 54, 59, 60, 62, 79, 88, 89, 101, 110, 122, 135, 136, 139, 162

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syllabi, xxxi, 53, 105, 106, 122, 130, 135, 182–184

T teaching asynchronously, xxix, 94 asynchronous teaching, 77 synchronously, xxix, 94 synchronous teaching, 76, 77 technology, xxxi, 43, 77, 83, 84, 88, 90, 92, 116, 130, 135, 158, 163, 167, 199, 203, 205–207, 209, 211–213, 217–219, 222, 224, 227, 229, 230 transparency, xxix, xxx, 16, 61, 103, 105, 106, 108, 127, 129, 130, 135–139, 142, 184, 229

U undergraduate students, 4, 8–10, 44, 62