Corona Classroom:
Reimagining Curriculum Amid the Pandemic
“To soldier through a semester of predetermined content is to potentially miss a once-in-a-career opportunity to share a cross-generational experience with our students.”
We are living through an unprecedented global crisis. Schools, offices, restaurants, movie production sets, concert halls, museums, malls, and cafes have closed. Millions of workers have been laid off as main streets across America are deserted and the global economy teeters. Friends and strangers keep their distance in grocery store aisleways, while nurses and doctors scramble to assist thousands of patients — many of them gasping for breath — who have begun overwhelming the United States healthcare system.
On the homefront, the classroom has gone virtual, as Coronavirus thrusts teachers and students alike upon a digital crossroads — Do we give up? Do we soldier on? Do we rebel? — while the media ambushes us with the metaphors of war. Within days of sheltering in place our lives became platformed as Zoom, Loom, Google Classroom, Canvas, WebEx, and Blackbaud performed forced takeovers of our daily lives and left derelict the campuses upon which we once stood.
All of this has taken place amid the backdrop of education’s current great debate pitting content against skills. In the rush to plug spring’s virus-depleted term, most educators have been force-fed one of a thousand emergency action plans laying out in five easy steps how to rapidly pivot to online education. To a T, these self-help tip sheets encourage educators to carry on — “You’ve got this!” — to stick with what they know, and to substitute, augment, and, at most, slightly modify their curriculums with swiftness, ease, and technical precision.
I have seen the results of this first hand, as within three days of their elementary school closing, my three children were handed Chromebooks, desks-worth of office supplies, and impeccably organized manilla envelopes containing worksheets, schedules, and instructions for the first two weeks of remote learning. As an educator, I’ve been floored by the time, dedication, and commitment of my children’s teachers and amazed how quickly they’ve adapted their courses to online learning. As professionals, they rallied in a time of crisis, made a plan, and executed it beautifully.
Three or four weeks into our collective corona-education, a quick scan of social media message boards like Facebook’s Higher Ed Learning Collective — where thousands of educators have turned to ask questions, post tips, and give advice — reveals that, as the technological challenges of online learning fade, the lament for the loss of authentic human connection has grown as well as a heartfelt concern about the struggles students are going through in this global emergency. As UNLV instructor Aldo Barrita reminds fellow educators, “For anyone minimizing or invalidating student struggle… 1) please check your privilege 2) [these are] not ONLINE classes, [these] are classes taken at “home” due to a pandemic crisis.” And the University of Mary Washington Associate Professor John Broome amplifies, “Please go easy on your students and try not to overwhelm them with information.”
“Integrating students’ experience of the COVID-19 pandemic into class content creates space for personal connections in ways that go beyond small group Zoom discussions.”
In addition to this advice, I’d like to suggest that, as much as possible, integrating students’ experience of the COVID-19 pandemic into class content creates space for personal connections in ways that go beyond small group Zoom discussions and, if structured well, provide valuable, much-needed moments of insight and reflection for both students and educators. Coronavirus touches nearly every aspect of our lives and, likewise, can be viewed through the lens of almost every discipline. Biology: check. Chemistry: check. Economics: check. Technology, arts, sociology, statistics, cultural studies, business, social justice, communications, and literature: all checks.
To say that the COVID-19 pandemic is historic is hackneyed at this point. But, the magnitude of this moment began to sink in for me during a brief exchange with my 9-year-old daughter while we both stood in our kitchen.
Ember: “Dad, are they going to make an American Girl doll about kids like me sheltering in place?”
Me: “Yes, of course, they will.”
What I left out of my answer, however, was the additional clause, “…if there is still an American Girl Doll Company.” This thought — this realization that the pandemic is likely to cause a massive disruption to the foundation of American life — and thoughts like it, however, are on all of our minds as we struggle to comprehend the enormity of our current moment. Personally, I keep coming back to the question, “Is my school even going to open this fall?” and its answer, which looms ever ominously by the hour.
As educators, to ignore this backdrop, and the fears, insecurities, and questions that arise from it, and to soldier through a semester of predetermined content is to potentially miss a once-in-a-career opportunity to share a cross-generational experience with our students — an experience which contains within it the seeds for facilitating the type of authentic connection and intellectual engagement which is difficult to manufacture even within the walls of a classroom. Redefining the conronavirus pandemic and the pivot to remote learning as an opportunity takes some, admittedly, creative thinking. And educators who are pining at this moment to bathe themselves in the luxurious rivers of long Victorian novels or complex problem sets will understandably want nothing to do with foregrounding an unfolding global pandemic in their curriculums. However, following the advice of a teacher I once had who learned how to ride a bike in adulthood—the trick he said, “is to steer in the direction you are falling”—I believe it’s the way to go.
My first attempt at corona-schooling came last week in my junior/senior-level Creative Nonfiction course. Using the class’ WebEx Teams’ message board, I asked each student to post a 3–4 minute-long audio recording of themselves describing their experience with coronavirus. They could respond as they saw fit, or choose to answer one of more than a dozen questions and prompts that I gleaned from the radio journalist, Erica Heilman. Inspired by Heilman’s “Our Story” series for her Vermont-based Rumble Strip Podcast, in which she collages together recordings of her podcast’s listeners who describe their own experiences sheltering in place, I taught myself how to use Apple’s GarageBand and set about arranging my students’ recordings into a podcast of my own.
“It was when my students spontaneously started emailing me to thank me for putting the podcast together that I knew I was onto something.”
Using the same techniques of curation, collage, juxtaposition, anaphora, repetition, erasure, and arrangement that I’ve taught for years, I cobbled my students’ various introductions, musings, worries, reflections, songs, and descriptions into a single podcast that brought my class together and into a deeper place than my other remote learning assignments. My lean into the pandemic garnered a small amount of outside praise as well. My school’s Communications Director described the podcast as “incredibly powerful,” while including a link to it in our school’s Parent Page and then, Heilman, herself, labeled it “frickin awesome” on Twitter. But, it was when my students spontaneously started emailing me to thank me for putting the podcast together that I knew I was onto something.
So, with an assignment description and model podcast complete, my students are currently engaged in making their own Corona Sessions episodes comprised of audio recorded responses from their extended families. Throughout this podcast unit, we will cover some of the same skills and content that I’ve covered for years while teaching list poems. In addition, students will gain experience interviewing family members as well as learning to use GarageBand to splice their recordings together into a cohesive podcast. Of course, I have the opportunity to use this curriculum whenever we’re allowed to return to the classroom, but my sense is that this assignment never would have occurred to me had I been teaching right now within the comfortable confines of my classroom’s four walls.
For their next assignment, I’m currently planning a unit on Instagram Narratives, modeled after the Virginia Quarterly Review’s social-media experiment in nonfiction: #VQRTrueStory. Adopting VQR’s model of Instagram storytelling for the COVID-19 moment we are in, my students will combine text and pictures to tell one narrative story from their own Corona-life.
I’ll let you know how it goes or, better yet, follow the stories on Instagram at #TellingTru_PA.
