Hypatia Online: Pandemic Pedagogy, Philosophy, and Parenting
This professor discovers the importance of flexibility and patience
Albert Camus’ The Plague is a fictional account of the Algerian coastal town of Oran beleaguered by an epidemic.
Early in the book, the epidemic grows increasingly deadly and officials seek out measures to contain its spread, including closing off Oran.
But once the town gates were shut,
Camus writes,
every one of us realized that all…were, so to speak, in the same boat, and each of us would have to adapt himself to the new conditions of life.
He notes, however, that “some were completely unprepared for it.”
In the week before my university’s spring break this March, similar drastic measures were taken throughout the U.S. to contain the spread of the coronavirus.
American universities, including mine, overwhelmingly decided to send students home and move to online platforms.
As a philosophy professor at a university in Camden, New Jersey, I contemplated how to best capture the Socratic model of philosophizing as an activity of debate and critical discussion while being forced online.
There were many possible obstacles to a seamless transition to online learning: students may lack access to a personal computer, relying on their iPhones to read material, watch recorded videos, and even write.
Moreover, the student body on my campus faced an increase in obligations in other areas of their lives.
Students holding essential worker positions saw an increase in hours. Other students became responsible for caring for younger siblings or older family members. Some became responsible for any trips outside the home for food shopping and pharmacy visits.
Staying mindful of the background complexities in which many were likely attempting to finish out the semester contextualized how I would move forward as their professor.
In my own case, I scrambled to balance pedagogical standards, students’ needs, and my obligations as a parent alone in a house with two children.
I scoured the internet in those early days of lockdown looking for the best advice on how to manage all my competing responsibilities.
Most of the writing I found on working at home during the lockdown with children in the house didn’t quite capture the struggles I faced with parenting effectively. My children are teenagers and, while largely self-sufficient, still brought their own set of parental challenges.
Instead of being responsible for educating and entertaining them, I found myself living with two other people who gradually adopted very different work, sleep, and eating schedules than mine.
As I struggled to rouse my sons each late morning in order to begin their day, prompting them to log on and start their schoolwork, it eventually occurred to me that my sons were not that much different from my own students.
While a couple of years younger, my sons nonetheless gave me a window into what my students were experiencing: missing the social interaction of being around their friends; anxiety about the level of responsibility that comes with learning online; trouble adjusting and staying focused; and a general sense of sadness about the disruption to their lives before.
Given all this, I decided that my core commitments as I transitioned to teaching online would be to:
a) help students understand the relevant material,
b) assign work that encouraged them to think about and apply the material,
c) create spaces for dialogue and discussion, and
d) help students accomplish the other three.
It took me some time to get my footing in those first weeks of transitioning online.
I realized that for every student who notified me about difficulties moving online, there might be others who did not for a whole host of reasons. The abrupt and radical shift in how students were expected to learn and complete assignments demanded flexibility out of simple fairness.
In the seven remaining weeks of the semester I continually made clear to my students that I would work with them through whatever means possible in order for them to complete the semester.
I was prepared for that to possibly involve emails, phone calls, and even assignments dropped off at a location on campus if there were no other alternatives.
Flexibility as a disposition, therefore, meant patience.
It also meant assessing what material was essential to cover and how to best accomplish that in a philosophy course moving online, given the above sensitivity to students’ possible limitations.
Once I scaled back the material to be covered, I created detailed downloadable summaries of the readings in lieu of our in-person lectures and discussions.
The summaries included the historical context of each thinker, quotes from the readings, video/article links, and critiques of the various arguments presented. These ended with discussion questions that students were expected to answer online by the end of the week.
If they were unable to log onto our course website in time, I offered to accept assignments however they could submit them. Optional were weekly online forum discussions on our course website and live discussions through WebEx sessions every other week.
Students were invited to participate as frequently as they were able to, giving them the opportunity to ask questions, discuss the material, and see/hear each other and me.
The live sessions were not an ideal replacement for in-class philosophical discussion but, given the above considerations about teaching during a pandemic, it meant embracing the flexibility of giving up on ideal standards in favor of ones that were fair.
Now that my semester has drawn to a close, this combination of considerations, obligations, and struggles has given me better insight into effective parenting, effective pedagogy, and effective philosophizing during a pandemic.
Among the humanities, philosophy may place the greatest emphasis on the importance of face to face conversation, with roots dating back to the ancient world.
Hypatia of Alexandria was a mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher born in the 4th century who lectured on the works of Plato and Aristotle. She was known to be a gifted and popular teacher who “made difficult mathematical and philosophical concepts understandable to her students.”
Hypatia has become an iconic symbol of female brilliance and philosophical acuity.
Her commitment to teaching is now legendary because Hypatia continued to promote paganism in an increasingly Christian region and was eventually murdered at the hands of a Christian mob for it.
Hypatia’s passion and excellence as an educator can serve as an inspiration for us today.
With an eye to the fall semester, I look forward to the opportunity to put these various lessons to use in a more deliberate and structured way instead of the frenzied arrangement necessary in the spring.
If courses will be held online this fall, I hope to implement what worked during the spring and find creative solutions for what wasn’t as successful. In particular, I will prioritize finding ways to better recapture the in-person conversations that are so crucial to philosophy.
Whatever the case, flexibility will be my guide as I do my best to honor the example of Hypatia.
