Seen, Heard, and Empowered: Meeting student needs in our remote learning classrooms

By Professor Jennifer Lee, English, Rockville

At the close of this difficult semester, as we all take a moment to breathe, recover, and look forward to another semester that begins in the remote classroom, we are all engaging in the work of learning or fine tuning our technological capabilities and reevaluating the merits of the various tools at our disposal. We should also ask ourselves, beyond how to best use new technological tools to facilitate teaching and learning, what is it that we should look to be and give to our students in the fall? How should the students’ experiences of us, as their teachers and supporters, look differently in remote vs face to face environments?

After having to make an unexpected pivot together, these are some of my reflections on the most critical needs of our students and the ways we can meet them. It goes without saying that our diverse body of students bears needs greater and more urgent than those typically found in our four-year counterpart institutions. There is an urgency we must acknowledge in this challenging season when more uncertainty and insecurity undoubtedly await. It is all the more crucial now that our students find these needs met in our classrooms.

Our students need to feel seen—even when they seem to embrace their invisibility in the classroom. Despite quiet, reserve, or hesitance, students will develop trust and confidence when they experience, even for a fleeting moment, being the focus of our attention and interest.

bell hooks (1994), scholar, author, educator, and social activist, wrote in Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, that “the professor must genuinely value everyone’s presence. There must be an ongoing recognition that everyone influences the classroom dynamic, that everyone contributes” (p. 8). She also asserts that “to teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students is essential if we are to provide the necessary conditions where learning can most deeply and intimately begin” (hooks, 1994, p. 13). Caring for students’ souls and believing in the value of each of our students is all the more critical in a remote classroom during a pandemic.

This semester, I had a quiet and seemingly timid female student who sat in the front of my early morning ENGL 101 class. In our first conference together, I learned that she had arrived in Maryland from China the month before to continue her studies in the US and was living with two older cousins. When the news about how COVID-19 was affecting life in China came to dominate the newspapers in early March, she came to my mind one evening. I wondered if her family was safe and how, if at all, she might be coping with the fear and loneliness of living through a pandemic far from loved ones who resided in its epicenter. So, I texted her and only asked “Is your family doing OK back home?” Just a few minutes later, I received her response: “Everything is OK. I’m really thankful. The disease is going around and sometimes it gives our family a little bit of panic. I just got back from a night class and it’s really a beautiful thing to receive a care, a concern from someone. Thank you very much professor.” I relate to the significance one can feel upon being remembered, considered. It affected her presence, confidence and engagement with the coursework and with me as we continued our semester post campus closure. It’s important that students feel individually seen, regardless of a quiet presence in class. In the upcoming fall semester, since our engagement with our students from the first meeting will be virtual, there may be even more of these quiet students who still need to feel acknowledged and valued. In these precarious times, the impact of these seemingly light interactions is heavier, more substantial.

Our students need to experience assurance in our classrooms when they experience struggles, both personal and academic. Strictly based on age, many of my students are new to adulthood. However, we’ve seen during this pandemic, that in their own families, they are oftentimes close to being heads of households. They are sometimes the oldest children with a trailing line of younger siblings acting as stand-in parents and guardians. To us, they may seem youthful, carefree, and confident, but ultimately many of them are in supportive roles in their families, without another adult who truly understands their perspectives, vulnerabilities and academic responsibilities. In the midst of a global pandemic, they are hovering over the line that marks the shift between childhood and adulthood. What that means sometimes is needing a safe place to say “I’m scared” Or “I can’t” without receiving a quick dismissal or “maybe you should drop the class.”

One such frightened student texted me shortly after the campus closure: “I have some really bad news and I’m scared.” He is 18 years old but works to contribute to the household income, pays his own tuition and has two younger siblings. He was texting me to tell me that he and his father had both tested positive for COVID-19. No one in their house would be able to continue working and earning. He was worried about his dad and his asthma. It struck me as we were texting back and forth that he may not have another adult in his life to whom he can say that he is scared and be given assurance that it will be fine, both academically and otherwise. We both knew that I cannot make life fine for him, but there was some comfort in grounding him in the ways that, at least for the things that we can control, we will make it work for him. Now that he is fully recovered from his fight with COVID-19, in the early weeks of summer break, he is just one more revision cycle away from successfully completing our course.

Our students need guidance from us in navigating the systems we build and maintain. Even in non-pandemic times, in the context of our own familiarity with academic systems and processes, we take for granted that our students understand and capably navigate the bureaucracy of our campus systems. There are so many different sources of information and resources, that without institutional knowledge, fluency with academic processes, and a know-how of the practices of engagement, they become lost when trying to meet their needs for advising, financial aid, extracurricular opportunities, and academic support.  More often than not, those students who don’t even know that they don’t know enough are more likely to be first generation college and minority students. An ethnographic study on the ways that students from different social classes employ academic engagement strategies showed that those whose parents had completed college “tended to interact with others to succeed academically, while first generation students tended to rely on themselves” (Yee, 2016, p. 839). They reached out to their professors and academic support systems. They acknowledged that there was a way to work this system to their advantage and “felt entitled to seek help from faculty and other instructional staff in ways that tangibly improved their grades” (p. 843).  First generation college students in the study “didn’t seem to realize that there were other reasons and ways to engage with university personnel…they had no idea how to go about doing this” (pp. 849-850). The author of the study stressed that these students first “have to learn the rules of the game to navigate the field” (p. 851). An implication for practitioners from this study is that we must “explicitly teach all students how to effectively communicate with faculty and staff, not merely offer general encouragement to take advantage of campus resources” (p. 854).

We cannot overlook that the need for this guidance is exacerbated even further when students are required to access college services remotely. As faculty, like it or not, we are the face of the college to our students. We also are much more familiar with the processes that students are required to know in order to survive and thrive in this system. In pandemic times, love for our students means explicitly assuring them that we will stand in the gap between where they are and where they need to go. Some examples of this could include sharing with students the following:

• The actual forms or screenshots of important information, not just a link (that they won’t realize applies to them and therefore won’t click through to investigate)
• An announcement at the start of class meetings with highlights from communications you have read from college administration about important decisions, events, and resources (ex: form that explained the new grade options for classes this past spring, application link for aid from the MC Foundation/college)
• An individual email to a student that says “I thought of you when I saw this email about this internship, scholarship or leadership opportunity” with details attached

In the course evaluations at the end of spring semester, many of my students made note of an appreciation for the communication and assistance with locating resources through the college. One student texted this: “Thank you for everything this semester—info about the internship, letters of recommendation, and all the other info you’ve been giving out.” He then thanked me for caring for my students. He read sharing of resources as care.

Our students need us to help them reframe the narrative they build for themselves in this new environment. There is power in our words that help them see themselves and their capacity differently. It is important that we explicitly name this trauma and stress and the ways that it manifests in our bodies and minds.  This is not to let them off the hook or relieve them of the responsibilities they have as students. It is freeing them from the weight of things for which they should not feel responsible. They are quick to tell us that they are lazy and didn’t manage their time or energy well. It is important for us to tell them that sometimes, it’s not laziness, it’s trauma and stress and this is how human we all are. It is important to tell them about the ways we ourselves experience that same inability to read and work as efficiently as we once did. We can help them see what they are doing well, that there is growth they may not be obvious to them, and help identify and celebrate those small victories. I don’t think we should do this through hyper-cheerful and empty words devoid of weight. Let’s just say out loud when we agree with them that something is terrible and hard. Then let’s assure them that even though it is awful and unfair, we’ll figure it out together and make it work. Assure them of your confidence in their success. Be convincing.

I told my students on a Zoom class meeting during remote instruction that just the fact that they could endure these absurd and scary circumstances, and draft up an annotated bibliography of eight scholarly sources and write coherently about their research process feels to me like witnessing a miracle of human capacity. Helping them to see their own accomplishments, steps on an upward trajectory, divorced from their own destructive self-talk, lethargy, and negative perspective helps them to see possibilities for growth, not just survival. After the semester was over and final grades were posted, a student wrote this to me: “You have taught me that it’s OK to feel uncomfortable in a situation, that there is still a light at the end of the tunnel.” This came from a student who, by the end of the semester, really impressed me with her persistence and growth.

The time for when these practices is appropriate is not only on this side of the pandemic. These are evergreen principles for building trust in relationships with our students and facilitating their success. Without explicit support from us, more likely than not, students will quietly disappear from our classes. This is especially true in remote learning. In the emergency pivot that faculty had to navigate and will continue to maneuver, we are reevaluating what is critical to our courses, what can be flexible and what is unnecessary weight. Just as we continue to learn more about Blackboard tools, different course designs and delivery modes, it is equally important that we engage deeply with the question of what students need from their professors to come out of college life during a global pandemic whole, healthy and productive.

References

Hooks, B. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. Routledge.

Yee, April. (2016). The unwritten rules of engagement: Social class differences in undergraduates’ academic strategies. The Journal of Higher Education. 87(6), 831–858. doi:10.1353/jhe.2016.0031

Professor Jennifer Lee began her teaching career in adult education, developing a Bridge Program curriculum for college writing and preparing low-income GED graduates for college in Washington, DC. She started teaching full-time at the Rockville campus of Montgomery College in 2019, after three years as part-time faculty at Takoma Park/Silver Spring. She also has experience in public relations and communications as an account executive working in social issues and education advocacy. In her teaching, she incorporates diverse and relevant social issues and voices, especially those that have profound impacts on minority and first-generation college students. Her teaching philosophy focuses on the value of student presence and contribution in the classroom.