Hi everyone,

For the past 15 years I’ve worked as an educator with adolescents and youth ages 14-25 in emergency contexts. Since Wednesday afternoon when received the news that we would move our classes on line, as students and as professors, I’ve been thinking more and more about some of the things I’ve learned through this work. I’ve especially been thinking about how I’ll use these lessons in my online teaching.

As an exercise for this class, I thought I would write them up as professional practice for myself – as a humanitarian responder I’m supposed to be quick with ready, practical, reliable guidance for other educators, so I’ll give that a try and see how I do in this emergency (more about the term “emergency” below). I also thought it would be interesting to think and write about how I can try to put some of the lessons I’ve learned into practice in designing and carrying out my undergraduate class online. I hope what I’ll come up with might be interesting and even useful reading for the you.

In this post I’m offering an outline of the key points I’ve include in my draft. For my explanations, examples of how this has worked in other contexts, ideas about how I’ll work these into online teaching, and a whole bunch of caveats, please see the draft attached.

That attachment is DRAFT and I know it is a rough one! I’ve written this as quickly as possible to get it written. In case you might find it helpful I wanted to share it with you – and I’m wondering if you think I should edit and refine it to share with others. I’ve found it helpful to write it (so thank you if you read it, and thank you if you can find patience with anything you feel I got wrong). Also, please please forgive me if my tone is off – sanctimonious or patronizing – I don’t mean to position myself as an “expert,” just trying to share things I find helpful. (Feel free to share feedback on my tone to make it better in the draft).

Please also share any further feedback if you feel I might work on this and make it a resource for other educators. I would also LOVE your ideas about whether or how you might put these into practice ein your own online teaching.

Finally, all of this comes with one big caveat that I’ll share here: Many of these lessons are designed especially for educators like me who do NOT have formal training in psychology, by people who do have such training, and have worked in emergencies. And I know many of you are studying psychology, and know more than I do. If you are a psychologist or psychology student/specialist, please read these in context; please correct me if I got anything wrong.

Here are my key lessons:

1) Psychosocial wellbeing – young people’s emotional wellbeing and social roles and relationships – is most immediately and negatively affected when students’ formal education is disrupted. Conversely, education in an emergency can be designed to play a key role in fostering and supporting their psychosocial wellbeing.

2) We and our students are under significant stress, and it is affecting us all right now.

a. We are dealing with significant worry and uncertainty about the outbreak itself, and how it will affect our lives in the coming weeks and months.

Education in an emergency be a powerful tool to operationalize young people’s human need to feel hopeful and feel a sense of productive agency over their future.

b. Our roles, relationships and routines have been completely disrupted through the closure of “regular” school.

Education in an emergency can recreate and restore this space for young people, giving them a negotiating tool to make time for themselves, and an opportunity to connect with their peers.

c. We are all facing more social isolation than usual, and this may increase. And social isolation can be much more stressful and unhealthy than we realize.

Education in an emergency can reintroduce these opportunities for students to take at least some time to themselves, possibly connect with others and have something to look forward to in an otherwise boring, isolating day.

3) Normal responses to intense and sudden onset stress fall into two categories:

1. Extra-energetic feelings, such as being jittery, forgetful, crying, irritable, angry, jumpy, talkative, laughing or crying
2. Feeling exhausted, lethargic, depressed.

Again, these are NORMAL responses to intense stress. We need not see them as signs of mental health problems that will have long-term consequences for our students (more on that, below).

Education in an emergency can accommodate students’ intensified feelings and behaviours, giving them some helpful ways to cope with these feelings without pathologizing them.

4) Education during and after an emergency can recreate helpful structure and routine for young people, giving them some possible solutions for the practical problem they are facing, and relieving stress.

5) Young people benefit when their education during and after an emergency gives them the option to take a break from the “emergency.”

6) Educators can be most helpful and avoid harm by using education practices they know well, while avoiding improvising with psychological diagnoses, terminology and clinical practices in an education context (unless they have relevant, specific training in those areas of psychology). It is especially important to avoid the term “trauma” in our own thinking, in our assumptions about how emergencies are affecting us, and in the way we talk with our students.

7) Friendships and peer relationships are especially important and helpful for young people during an emergency, and education create opportunities to build and strengthen these relationships.

8) Educators who work directly with young people in emergencies are among the people positioned best to connect them with other essential services and supports they may need.

9) Young people have the ability and the human right to make an active, positive difference in an emergency. Education can open opportunities for young people to formulate their own ideas and opinions with respect to their situations, and take action to pursue their priorities.

… and being helpful to our students can help us as educators, too. Thank you for reading this, and thereby giving me a chance to feel better by feeling helpful!

“The traditional system of scholarly communication is outmoded, expensive, and suboptimal. And, exploitative too!” (Cirasella)

“As enrollment pressures and funding shortcomings continue to shape higher education decision making, many schools switch to OERs. Clearly, free is cheaper than alternatives. Clearly, more students, especially low-socioeconomic-status ones, will be better able to afford a textbook and even education in general. But are OERs as good as traditional, albeit costly, resources? It is too early to tell from the research so far.” (Gurung)

For this set of readings, the authors provide a detailed account of what is Open Access, and what are the current debates revolving around OA (in academic publishing, academic institutions, libraries, and other professional organizations). Cirasella begins by highlighting the exploitative relationship in academic publishing, particularly by describing the labor process behind it: beginning with the research conducted by scientists whom are sponsored by government or university funds (either in state-funded institutions or with government-sponsored grants – such as NSF/NIH/NEH), which then their research is published on scholarly journals (which in many cases are owned by for-profit companies). Finally, the universities need to pay the publisher in order to grant access to the articles and scientific production that was created with government-sponsored funds. In other words, this is a cycle that, not only is exploitative to those that conduct the labor, but at the same time restricts the access to the scientific production that was conducted, in many cases, by government and tax payer sponsored funds. She continues to elaborate and describe the labor process: a system that is rooted in inequality, exploitation, and extraction through free labor, “peer-reviewing” (a.k.a. “service to the profession”), which concludes with the researchers surrendering their copyrights to the publishers. This also is extremely costly for libraries whose budgets have shrunk in the last decade, meanwhile the costs to gain access to the databases have increased. Cirasella proposes Open Access as a solution: accessible at no-cost, increase in accessibility, institutional savings in the long-term, and broader access to knowledge production.

All this conversation on Open Access reminded me of the decision made by the University of California last year, in which the institution cancelled its contract with Elsevier https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/03/01/university-california-cancels-deal-elsevier-after-months-negotiations
This sends a political message to the for-profit academic publishing industry, but as the article mentioned, this doesn’t undermine their power.

Having stated this, how can we continue to push this conversation when profit-driven systems (such as the corporate university) are part of the institutional exploitation (i.e. adjunct labor, underfunded laboratories, underfunded doctoral students)? What other spaces can we foster in order to publish academic scholarship that don’t necessarily rely on the traditional academic journal? Can OA Journals become a solution to this issue, or are they just one alternative in this profit-driven system? How are some of the “Open access myths” (Suber) still undermining the mission of this publishing system?

This week’s readings bring us a variety of perspectives and thoughts on the use of Open Educational Resources and Open Textbooks.  Robin DeRosa, a professor at Plymouth State University in New Hampshire, discusses the multiple considerations in adopting Open Education Resources in her essay, “OER: Bigger Than Affordability.” While DeRosa points out that OERs can be an economical choice for the college/university classroom, she also challenges educators to rigorously question the concept of open. DeRosa reminds us that OERs are not just about cost but they are intrinsically tied to issues of social justice and who has access to knowledge and who does not. DeRosa also underscores the relationship between OERs and technology and how this intrinsic relationship can actually detract from the openness of a given resource. As all of us scramble to flip our courses to distance-learning formats, how are we considering these challenges while keeping in mind that not all of our students will have access to the necessary technologies to continue their educations this semester?

A pioneer of the Open Textbook movement, Rajiv Jhangiani offers his thoughts on how faculty view OERs in his essay, “A Faculty Perspective on Open Textbooks.” Jhangiani offers possible faculty perspectives on the moral, financial and pedagogical benefits of adopting open textbooks in the higher ed classroom, highlighting the flexibility and effectiveness of open textbooks. While advocating for the use of open texts, Jhangiani also highlights another important issue related to open textbooks – faculty labor. The development of open texts is largely left to faculty, often with little to no institutional support.  While administrators frequently support the idea of OERs and Open Texts, colleges and universities need to create more effective systems of support to assist faculty in the creation of OERs and supporting materials.

With the work of DeRosa and Jhangiani in mind, and with our work this week to create accessible courses for our students during this unprecedented time, I wanted to leave you with some questions to ponder for our virtual meeting on Monday:

• How are OERs and open texts that much more important during times like this? How would OERs/open text aid courses that need to move online quickly?
• What does “open” really mean when we talk about OERs and open textbooks? What are the multiple levels of considerations needed when faculty are trying to create something that is truly open?
• Lastly, and related to the closing of Jhangiani’s essay, take five to ten minutes to imagine what the ideal open textbook would look like for one of your courses? What is the content? How is it structured? How is it accessible? And what voices are represented therein? Taking time to envision these considerations may help us one day create them.

* Please note that the Salter reading is currently unavailable online.

I hate Blackboard, but for the time being I’m using it with my students in my undergrad Education class anyway. Our readings and class discussions, especially last week, gave me a lot of very helpful strategies I can use, and am using now, to try to make Blackboard work as well as possible for my students. If you have any practical tips for what you do (or don’t do) to make Blackboard actually work well as a learning tool, I would love it if we could gather and share them here.

Meanwhile, I’m especially thankful to Ayo for the reminder that the best way to find out what works (and what doesn’t) for students is to ask them, so I did that today. By doing so I learned something very useful that I thought might be helpful to others:

Apparently when students are using Blackboard on mobile devices they can’t access any Word documents or PowerPoints that are uploaded. However, they can access PDFs. I didn’t know that – and had uploaded all kinds of assignment guidelines, my syllabus, etc. that were either in Word or PowerPoint. So, now I’ll be converting all of those to PDFs and re-uploading them – and making sure I convert to PDF any other files I might share in the future.

As I mentioned in class, another strategy I use is NOT to require students to submit any assignments on Blackboard – they’re required just to e-mail them directly to me. This seems to work well for everyone, including me.

Apologies if any of this is very obvious to some or all of you – I’m guessing that I may not be the only one who is new at this and still figuring it out. Thanks!

In Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom, John Bean discusses the link between writing assignments and critical thinking, and provides numerous suggestions for instructors to incorporate the two into their own courses. Students should be seen as more than just an empty repository for us to dump all of our course content into; we should also focus on developing students’ skills in engaging with the material, thinking critically about it, and considering other sides or opinions to an argument or theory presented. Writing, Bean argues, allows for this process of critical thinking to occur (including through writing and revising multiple drafts of an assignment), and a final written product is evidence of the critical thinking process. Bean also discusses the importance of including writing assignments that are more exploratory and personal, as opposed to only teaching professional, academic writing. Incorporating different kinds of writing assignments can help students find a writing style that works for them with while giving them experience with forms of writing that they are less comfortable with. Different students may excel at and benefit more from one type of writing assignment over another; there isn’t a best or one-style-fits-all assignment that can facilitate the development of critical thinking, and these differences and different ways of developing critical thinking skills should be taken into account as we develop our courses.

With this in mind, I have some questions for us to consider:

• Do you include writing assignments in your course? If not, does one of the misconceptions about writing and critical thinking prevent you from doing so? If so, do you agree with Bean that these misconceptions are actually misconceptions?
• Bean states that “teachers need to articulate where they stand with regard to traditional academic writing” (50). Where do you stand? Do you feel it is more important for students to complete more academic writing assignments in your course, or do you emphasize more personal or expressive writing?
• In Chapter 2, Bean discusses that college students focus more on right answers than on making an argument and defending it while considering counterpoints to their chosen argument. Do you think that high school adequately prepares students to begin thinking beyond being right, or that high schools should place more emphasis on the development of critical thinking and writing skills for all students? Should developing these skills be primarily on the shoulders of undergraduate instructors?
• What modes of assessment do you use in your classes? Do you rely on primarily one method to make up the bulk of a student’s grade, or do you use multiple kinds of assessments and assignments? Do the same students succeed on all the assessments you use, or is there a noticeable difference in students’ work and ability across assignments? Do you take students’ differences into account when designing your course?
• Though Bean focuses on the struggles of college students, we as graduate students spend a significant chunk of time writing. Do you face any struggles with your writing and writing process, and how do you overcome them?