Pedagogy and Plague: Teaching in the Age of COVID-19
1/21/2021
The Excellence in Teaching Committee’s 2021 Virtual Winter Colloquium
The Excellence in Teaching Committee hosted a virtual Winter Colloquium—Pedagogy and Plague: Supporting the Whole Student in the Age of COVID—Friday, January 22.
The Winter Colloquium featured topics pertinent to the global pandemic, including “How to Respond: The Distressed Student and the Professor” by Matthew Lowe, LMHC of the College’s Counseling Center. He discussed the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on students who now bring an increasing number of concerns—about the physical, emotional, financial, familial, or social threats of the pandemic—to their professors, who continue to be experts in their respective academic fields without formal clinical mental health counseling training.
Watch the 2021 Virtual Winter Colloquium
The discussion covered topics such as managing countertransference, understanding the different coping and communication styles of anxiety, embracing the responsibilities and limitations of the professor as “second-line responder,” using particular tactics to help the student-in-distress and knowing when to refer them to counseling.
Mr. Lowe aimed to help faculty gain greater emotional self-awareness around exchanges with distressed students; to balance the responsibility and resistance to their roles as “second responders”; to identify adaptive and maladaptive coping/communication styles for (pandemic) anxiety; and to offer tips and examples of compassionate responses within the classroom setting.
“We can’t be just teachers; we are in a position to do more,” he said. “The professor is on the frontlines and is in the position to have an impact on each student. We can’t save people from the world or what they’re feeling and often, the best we can do is be with them.”
Another topic featured in the Colloquium was “Utilizing the Online Polling Tool Socrative for Student Engagement and Real-Time Assessment” presented by Assistant Professor of Biology Brian Haney. He discussed the importance of student comprehension assessment during class and fostering student-to-student interaction as crucial for successful learning—two facets of teaching that are easily lost in a virtual classroom format.
“Students are hesitant to engage with the professor or other students during an online conference lesson, forcing many instructors to blindly speak to the digital void,” Dr. Haney said. “One approach I’ve taken to amend these limitations is the free online polling tool Socrative, which allows faculty to save complex question sets organized by class, view student accuracy and comprehension in real time, utilize the ‘think-pair-share’ strategy for improved retention and student engagement, and easily download class results for points/attendance. Students respond to the Socrative questions on their phones, so this program is easily implemented in both online and in-seat classes.”
Dr. Haney demonstrated the features of the online polling tool and how it can be paired with Canvas conferences to achieve meaningful student-to-student interaction in online classes. Participants learned how to set up and deploy Socrative questions, how to check student comprehension in real time, and how to download results for integration into a gradebook.
He underscored that having students interact by answering questions, faculty are attaching an emotion to the experience of virtual learning. “Students are teaching each other, they’re talking about it, and it’s going to make them remember the content,” Dr. Haney said.
Associate Professor of Italian and History David Aliano discussed “The Global Pandemic and Teaching Solidarity Across Borders.” He aimed to provide mission-centered perspectives on the shared experiences of grief and solidarity around the world to help students through the pandemic.
“One significant way to help students understand and get through this difficult time is the knowledge that we are not alone in our suffering and are part of a wider global community,” Dr. Aliano said. “My talk will focus on specific assignments that I have created that focus on this theme, as well as on the organic way in which my students have approached this topic within the existing assignments in my course curricula.”
Dr. Aliano shared the story of students in one of his classes who had online conversations with students in Italy regarding their online learning experiences during the global pandemic. “Quite understandably, many students talked about the challenges of having classes online—as opposed to in person,” he said. “Being unable to attend classes, anxiety about finishing classes and exams, and it helped to hear from someone in similar situations in another country.”
Finally, Assistant Professor of Sociology Matthew Archibald presented ‘The Coronavirus as a Thousand Schoolmasters: Reflections on the Current Moment.” His goal for the discussion was to examine how medical sociology investigates health and illness to understand a society’s social, economic, and political institutions, as well as its ideals and shortcomings.
“The challenge for us is to connect classroom knowledge such as this with students’ burgeoning self-reflexivity,” Dr. Archibald said. “I will use medical sociology to examine how the pandemic—like other cataclysmic events, from natural disasters to market collapses—provides students an opportunity to understand the nature of modern socioeconomic and political institutions by locating their experience within it.”
Students benefit most from this comprehensive framework when it bridges their experience with the world-at-large, according to Dr. Archibald, who provided Colloquium participants with relevant pedagogy from scholarly sources.
Dr. Archibald discussed the sociological method of making the familiar unfamiliar to look at a problem from a new perspective. “We’re confronted with a huge amount of uncertainty—suffering in isolation, facing our own mortality, the mortality of those we love—we’re watching socio-economic systems collapse,” he said. “During this pandemic, we’re learning a lot about ourselves and the systems we take for granted. This is a way of engaging with something other than ourselves and it makes us better human beings.”
The virtual Winter Colloquium offered an opportunity for a deeper understanding of how the global pandemic is affecting the teaching environment at the Mount, across the nation, and the world—we are all apart but together living through this global experience.
About the University of Mount Saint Vincent
Founded in 1847 by the Sisters of Charity, the University of Mount Saint Vincent offers nationally recognized liberal arts education and a select array of professional fields of study on a landmark campus overlooking the Hudson River. Committed to the education of the whole person, and enriched by the unparalleled cultural, educational, and career opportunities of New York City, the College equips students with the knowledge, skills, and experiences necessary for lives of professional accomplishment, service, and leadership in the 21st century.