PEDAGOGY IN A TIME OF EXTREMITY, a thread.
Fellow professors: I’m remote teaching the climate crisis during a pandemic crisis. Instead of taking attendance the analogue way, or allowing Zoom to do it in the digital way, I’ve been starting each class w a mental health check-in.
Fellow professors: I’m remote teaching the climate crisis during a pandemic crisis. Instead of taking attendance the analogue way, or allowing Zoom to do it in the digital way, I’ve been starting each class w a mental health check-in.
This doubles as a roll call. Sometimes I go first and set the tone and sometimes I go last but either way students popcorn around and all say hello to each other and offer a few (non compulsory) words about their own mental and emotional state.
The results have been amazing.
The results have been amazing.
First off, I feel like we’re collectively normalizing the idea that these are extraordinary, surreal times and no wonder we go through freak-outs and suffer bouts of anxiety and not being ok. It’s a relief to just say that out loud and then... offer each other empathy.
I’ve never before disclosed to students my own therapeutic practices—what techniques I use to redirect my own nervous system away from flight, fight or freeze or how I cope with insomnia—sometimes caused by pandemic fears, sometimes by the climate crisis.
These disclosures have opened a space for reciprocal revelations.
Some of these come out in class as passing observations during the mental health check in/roll call and some are revealed to me in subsequent private conversations outside of class.
So far I’ve learned that...
Some of these come out in class as passing observations during the mental health check in/roll call and some are revealed to me in subsequent private conversations outside of class.
So far I’ve learned that...
...one of my students was recently living in his car. Another has been suffering migraines and needs to leave her camera off bc of photosensitivity. One can’t afford the textbook. (I just ordered them a copy on and had it delivered fuck it.) And many have ongoing fears of COVID.
The upshot so far: I can actually push them harder in class. I didn’t expect that. By reminding ourselves at the start of each class that we are doing heroic work under circumstances so terrible that we can’t even sit in a classroom together, we can then rise up together...
...and confront the climate crisis.
By offering my understanding that students might not always be able to prepare for class—because these are exhausting times and I’m not always making it through my own task list every day—I am getting better preparation and participation.
By offering my understanding that students might not always be able to prepare for class—because these are exhausting times and I’m not always making it through my own task list every day—I am getting better preparation and participation.
This is not reverse psychology. Or at least I don’t intend it that way. It’s just me trying to model how to carry on when distressed—and carry each other when some of us are going through some bad shit. It’s not strategy. I just can’t teach in any other way right now.
Anyway. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
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