When COVID‐19 came to Maine mid‐March and our university shifted to emergency remote learning, our rhythm was disrupted in tandem with our lives. The pandemic (re)shaped our social justice teaching and added complications and complexity to our classroom. It also showed us the importance of collaborative social justice teaching and learning as well as caring‐first class pedagogy.
Emergency Remote Teaching and Emergency Remote Social Justice
When we pivoted online after spring break, we initially assumed our course would be asynchronous online teaching and learning. At the time, our institution was encouraging faculty to utilize asynchronous methods for completing the semester. It appeared to be the most logical way to encourage continued access and equity, which the pandemic had put into jeopardy. But when we surveyed students about their preferences for holding class, their desire to meet synchronously via Zoom was unanimous. So, after ensuring that all of our students had access to stable housing, food and the internet, we decided to finish our social justice seminar using synchronous videoconferencing. Such a shift would not have worked without these privileges.
In hindsight, the students' desire for same‐time connection made sense. The seven students in our graduate seminar knew one another well and grew increasingly close during the first eight weeks of the semester. Part of this was because we had carefully crafted a sense of community and belonging in our on‐site classroom by emphasizing the collaborative work of social justice.
To become a collective, we had to embrace vulnerability and engage these issues and ideas together. From the beginning of the class, we invited the students to serve as co‐instructors, because everyone was responsible for social justice teaching and learning. Support and responsibility needed to carry over into our virtual classroom too.
Nurturing Normalcy in the Not‐So‐Normal
Initially, we had prepared ourselves to spend our first post‐COVID‐19 class exclusively, and entirely, engaged in emotional triage. During our prep meetings, we talked in‐depth about the benefits (and difficulties) of processing the pandemic together; we even integrated a guided meditation and energy check‐in (something we made a regular practice for the rest of the semester). It was a scary time for students (and for us). After all, even with access to the basic necessities, some students were now stuck in hot zones. Some students couldn't go home. Lives had been upended, and uncertainty was the only certainty.
As such, we were prepared for students to share feelings of exhaustion, fear and overwhelm. Instead, or rather in addition, they shared how glad they were to be able to come to class. “This feels normal,” they shared. Students saw synchronous class time as a form of stability in their uprooted lives. The general sense was that class time was a time when, for a few hours at least, students could escape the feelings of uncertainty brought on by the pandemic and return to a place that felt normal for them—a place a little more concrete.
Even though it made sense that students would crave this certainty, we were both a bit surprised when students encouraged us pretty quickly to move away from emotional triage toward nurturing a bit of normalcy. They still wanted to dig into the readings, plan for upcoming projects and ponder what it meant to be social justice educators, in a broader context and beyond the pandemic. There was a certain amount of relief in our ritual. It became clear that our job as teachers amid the pandemic wasn't creating a new community in a new online space and place but sustaining the community we had already started in different ways.
Our ability to lead from a caring‐first perspective stemmed from our own caring‐first practices with one another.
Social Justice Pedagogy in a Pandemic
Admittedly, as social justice facilitators, we did have some complex feelings about this desire for normalcy. This is a class about social justice, we thought to ourselves, Of course, we have to talk about COVID‐19. But did we?
The idea of resisting discussions about COVID‐19 might sound counter to a course focused on social justice. However, for students who had been studying social justice intently for half of the semester in this course, and well before in other courses—our higher education program prioritizes social justice pedagogy—the pandemic did not cause them pause. They understood the enormous and varied inequities that existed in society prior to COVID‐19. The pandemic allowed us, students and educators, to continue to discuss the various ways in which we could actively fight against these systems of oppression—before, during and after the pandemic.
Even with these intentional nods toward normalcy, the pandemic still permeated (probably permanently) our classroom practices. In our planning and prep meetings, we were conscientiously reworking and revising the syllabus in real time, making room for COVID‐19 as part of our caring‐first course (re)design.
For example, one larger project post‐pandemic was supposed to be a visual analysis highlighting social justice issues in higher education. However, many of our students lacked access to the tools necessary to complete the project. So, we adjusted accordingly, allowing students total freedom to design, write or create, with whatever they could find, anything that might express ideas about a topic related to class and their passions for social justice.
And even though extra credit isn't typical at the graduate level, we developed our own COVID‐19 care package, offering a substantial point boost to any student who submitted archives to the university library, which was working to memorialize the moment as it was still unfolding.
Our ability to lead from a caring‐first perspective stemmed from our own caring‐first practices with one another. Each week, as we met to plan for our following class meeting, we began by checking in with one another. We would discuss the challenges of working and parenting from home, sometimes with our kiddos on our laps. We were transparent about our responsibilities outside of the classroom and what these looked like during the pandemic. We also discussed health rituals we had created, like daily runs and walks with our families. We made space to discuss our own exhaustion as well as our many privileges, like secure access to income, food, housing and the internet. Ultimately, our practice of caring for one another allowed us to create a space where we could utilize care‐first with our students.
When we first started talking about writing this piece, we were initially a little stumped about how to explain our experience teaching social justice during a pandemic—which was both so similar to teaching social justice pre‐pandemic and utterly different. This makes sense, though. COVID‐19 created chaos at the same time it (re)confirmed key tenets of social justice teaching and learning.
When we moved to emergency remote instruction, we realized even more fully the value and importance of collaborative teaching and learning. Of moving forward with care and compassion first. Of listening to our students and what they needed at that moment. We learned how to rethink our pedagogy on the fly, reworking previously rigid policies and practices, as we moved slowly toward a new form of social justice pedagogy—one that was the same but also slightly shifted to our new circumstances.
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COVID‐19 and Caring‐First Social Justice Classrooms - Bond - 2020 - The National Teaching & Learning Forum - Wiley
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