Teachable Moments with COVID 19: a walk-n-talk with my soul-sister Shamili
Interview #4 in the Teaching Climate Change series & study
This morning I called one of my colleagues on the mainland to see how she was coping, and teaching, in this strange time of sheltering and flattening and distancing. She had a little time to talk in between her online class session and a Zoom forum; we spoke by phone on her daily walk-n-talk. It was morning for me, sunny, windy and 76 degrees, and a brisk late-afternoon 40 degrees for her, in the midwestern town where she teaches Environmental Biology at a large suburban community college.
I call Shamili my soul-sister because even though I teach English and she teaches Biology, we have similar interests and teaching styles, and a passion for teaching sustainability. She lives in the same town as my mother, and last summer we got together for a walk around her gi-normous campus. She showed me the campus garden, and explained how she was part of an interdepartmental team that organized and planted the garden, taught students how to grow tomatoes for their own food security, and how they made jars of tomato sauce that they could give away at their campus food pantry — (ponder the bureaucracy and liability issues on that one for a moment, as well as the complex intersections of botany, economics, equity, and food systems, and you will understand the awesomeness of this woman!). My favorite moment of that visit was walking through the chin-high grasses of the restored prairie that rings Shamili’s campus. So that’s how I pictured her during our conversation.
I want to talk about teachable moments, I said to my soul-sister. Not about the whole remote-learning thing, but about how we, as college faculty, can meet this topic of Coronavirus with our students. What is our messaging? What do students need from us? What does Covid 19 mean in the context of climate change education, and vice versa?
I pictured students anxiously logging in as the pandemic began to unfold and intensify, eager to talk with an expert in Biology about the intricacies of the coronavirus. “Did they have a lot of questions for you?” I asked. (I mean, I did!) With a Master’s Degree in Environmental and Forest Biology, and a doctorate in Education (Instructional Design), Shamili has a unique expertise on how to teach us about things like bats and pangolins and vectors. “Oh my goodness no,” she said,
“Learning biology is the last thing on their minds right now. My expertise in Biology doesn’t matter so much. What matters is the human response and someone who cares about them.”
Her students were having trouble focusing and keeping track of what they needed to do. She reminded them, “you may be working independently but you are not working alone.” We are in physical distancing, but social solidarity! So, we keep in mind that always, the front line for the faculty is to be a caring human, sometimes almost like a social worker.
We discussed the Covid 19 assignment that she’s designing, just a step ahead of the students on this whole topic. “I’m trying to connect this moment to the idea of civic engagement,” she said. She was inspired by this Politico article, which she will assign as a reading to frame a question about how coronavirus will change the world “hopefully, in some ways, for the better, as we may learn from this crisis some ways to make the world more sustaianble.” The assignment will then be scaffolded to include a short online survey called Pathways of Public Service and Civic Engagement, from the Haas Center for Public Service at Stanford University .
I took the survey, which asks general questions what kind of things you like to do, and what you think has the most impact. (For example, in this current moment, would you be more into direct service such as sewing facemasks, or would you be more into raising money for student relief fund, maybe with a living-room Zumba-thon or something.) Guess what, I discovered that my favorite pathway of service is Community Engaged Learning and Research, and I might be most effective at “connecting coursework and academic research to community-identified concerns to enrich knowledge and inform action on social issues.” Bingo! Shamili’s students then brainstorm, looking for intersections between their personal pathway and of ways coronavirus might change the world.
(So I decided I better sit down and write this blog post, because next to staying home, this appears to be best thing I have to offer.)
Of course, this virus is about biology. But it’s also about ecology — such as this Scientific American article about how deforestation leads to emergent diseases. As Shamili described the different lenses she was using to “teach Covid” I pictured the transparent overlays of an anatomy book laid over the coronavirus: “It’s about genetics, the genome of the virus, and then about sociology, and food systems, and the environmental consequences of our actions.” And it’s about ethics, and art, and even math, oh the possibilities for teaching those exponentials!
Flattening the curve is the new hockey stick. In fact, teaching the coronavirus is exactly like teaching climate change; it’s just faster, and more in your face. The same practices that work for climate change education work for teachable moments with Covid 19, and as get over our personal panic and we better understand the long-term implications for higher education, Covid 19 can become an opening or overlay for the issues and complexity of teaching climate change.
My soul-sister, once again, is way ahead of me on this one, having taught a Learning Community (LC) course with an film studies professor designed around the theme of One Health. They titled the course, which they taught in 2009, Defining Human Health on a Changing Planet. One Health is an education model, “a collaborative, multisectoral, and transciplinary approach with the goal of achieving optimal health outcomes recognizing the interconnection between people, animals, plants, and their shared environment.”
Teaching an LC was another thing that Shamili and I had bonded over, since I also designed and taught an LC with my local biology colleague, Dr. K. Our course was titled (with a nod to Naomi Klein) Decade Zero: Understanding the Science & Rhetoric of Climate Change. Unfortunately, after two semesters (the best teaching of my twenty-year career, during which I also had to take Biology & Ecology twice, sitting in on Dr. K’s portions of the course) we had to shelve the course because: 1) too hard to schedule the rooms, 2) too hard to enroll the students in the same 2 courses and 3) too much time for me and Dr. K. (basically two class sessions, which brutalized the workload even as it made the learning more fun and rich and wonderful.) To the best of my knowledge, most Learning Community approaches have suffered this exact problem — great idea, tough to implement.
But what new online or hybrid pedagogies might emerge if Covid 19 makes remote learning a new normal, or even if it just extends to the fall semester?
Shamili’s current Environmental Biology course is also a learning community, this time with a Communications professor teaching a course on small group communication. The course is titled Our Earth, Our Species, Ourselves. After they do the brainstorming about the Politico piece and reflecting on their Pathways, students will have an opportunity to deliberate and evaluate their ideas for civic action in the new context of Covid 19. They will learn about group dynamics and practice talking to each other. They will practice having what Gail Mellow, the longtime former president of LaGuardia Community College, famously called: “difficult conversations about things that matter.”
This conversation with my soul sister wasn’t part of my formal study on Teaching Climate Change (so I used her real name because soul sister, Shamili, has such a nice sibilance to it). I’ve been working through last week’s interview transcripts and thinking about the topics that ten days ago we didn’t really realize we’d be wanting to discuss. The purpose of the Teaching Climate Change study is to understand what faculty know, think, feel, and do about climate change education, so that we can better understand how to support faculty professional development, student learning, and new pedagogies. Coronavirus doesn’t change the importance of climate change education: it amplifies it.
This blog, my field notes journal for the study, is really to highlight what it is that college faculty actually DO, the richness (and messiness, and tedium) and the complex layers of training that they bring, even to ordinary college classrooms at suburban community colleges. And even, now, remotely…
Remember, you may be working independently, but you are not alone.
