However, I think there are lots of ways to provide care that can be easily implemented. The emails at the end of the week take less than five minutes. The conversations in class take nothing. And I'm a firm belieber that the payoff is a hundred fold. I think it can support students, especially adult learners returning, first gen, previously under-served, under-represented students.
But it's worth a discussion amongst lecturers, adjuncts, women, Women of Color, queer faculty in your spaces about the pitfalls unique to your situation.
Some of the easiest parts of care are beyond faculty and rely on the institutions.
Decades ago I remember someone saying that the easiest way to show students you care was in your building. Were windows cleaned? Trash taken out? Bathrooms clean? Supplies always available? Floors mopped?
These seem like givens but I constantly see pictures online from students and faculty of leaks in ceilings, moldy spaces, no paper towels in restrooms, broken classroom furniture. I'm not even talking about asking for working technology, or smartboards, or anything fancy. I'm talking about simple environmental factors.
Especially now, with temperatures rising and new viruses and allergens and in some areas continuous wildfires, working air conditioning and heat and air filtration, clean air, is vital not only to our students' health but how well they can engage and participate.
Care can and should be built into design.
If you have a lot of adult learners, commuters, is there a place for them? Literally? Is there easy parking, night or weekend classes, housing for families? Signifcant online classes? Specific advisors to address their needs?
What about first generation students? Students who need access? Colleges should be able to provide laptops and notebooks to students that need them. Support and answers on "how to college." Spaces where they feel safe.
Classes should be accessible for all. ADA compliant at the least. Classrooms that all can navigate. Texts that can be read aloud. Materials written in fonts that help learning disabilities. Classrooms that use closed captions and microphones. Events with sign language interpreters. Shuttles that operate dependably on campus.
Campuses and classes should be built with the most accommodations in mind.
Care should be baked into everything.
Students should not have to feel as though they have to share or perform their personal lives, details, traumas, in order to be treated with basic decency.
Many campuses have on-site food banks, some may offer housing for the unhoused. What resources, how good the supports are though vary widely from place to place. Campuses should offer all students need. Housing and food should be free. For all students, including off-campus ones. PLUS the food bank. Housing should include options for families. Student health should be all-encompassing. Pharmacy, mental and physical health, vaccinations, meal planning. Computer laps AND laptop rentals. Clothes banks.
Relevance of Coursework and Its Presentation
- "Coursework feels repetitive"
- "classes in which instructors read off of slides"
- "cheating as a defensible response"
- "When describing the context in which they cheated or not, students taked about whether they trusted the professor"
- "professor's job is merely to provide content"
- "in their lived experience, integrity has not been highly valued"
I hear a lot from first year students that they are frustrated having to take the "same" math, science, history, language classes "again." For students coming straight from high school they feel like they just TOOK algebra, chemistry, and do not understand why they have to take them again.
General Education classes that first year feel repetitive to them. The issue from my perspective is that these classes should NOT feel repetitive. They should be the foundational introduction to a liberal arts education. They should both build on and challenge their previous educational experiences. They should actively ask students to reconsider and reexamine what they know and think they know in new lights.
When I was in undergraduate I had an 8a art history class. I liked it. But a dark auditorium first thing in the morning after I'd often worked late, was often a challenge. I got As on all tests but failed it because of a strict attendance policy. I often share this with students as the beginning of my issues with attendance policies. Then and now it struck me as unfair.
If I was in a class where the professor just read off of slides, I would have a hard time seeing why I needed to be there too. I'd look for a shortcut. And if you think you wouldn't, think about how well as a faculty member you're engaged in a faculty meeting or completing mandatory online HR training.
There's an old teaching adage that students respect what you inspect.
If a course seems designed to not care, I understand why students might assume that professors might not care about cheating either.
Professors and teachers have said for years that the easiest way to stop plagiarism and cheating is in assignment design but it's also in how the assignment is baked into your class. In my classes if the end of module assignment is to create an informational text on a social issue, students choose their own issue. We have conversations in class about why they chose that, why they care about it. We have group discussions about what they learn from initial research and why it matters. They choose how to represent all this- flyers, models, posters, presentations. And I watch them work on these, craft them, in class. I see it come together. Then they conference with me, presenting the final product to me and answering questions about their choices. Because of the design and process, students can't cheat on this. But more importantly, they don't want to.
There are a thousand different ways to show students that your content matters, why it matters, and what they need.
Trust your students. They are adults with full lives and capable of their own decisions. This doesn't mean a free for all, or that the role of the professor with both content knowledge and experience is not important. It is. But the infantilizing of students, referring to them as "kids" is a special blend of condescension and elitism. My content knowledge and experience teaching means I can guide students. But it is also what allows me to design classes with broad strokes and let them fill in the specifics. To change my live syllabus if they need more time, or if a better reading would fit them, or if I need to try something else because what I planned is not the best fit, or does not best serve the students in front of me.
Every class, every semester, has new folks. The last few years our lived reality radically changes each semester. Profesors should explore and experiment. Add new readings, a new artist, a new approach. Think more of your class as a living, changing, experiment and not as a locked in set of pieces that only go together one way.
During the pandemic "triage" teaching the first few months set an awful precedent that colleges, faculty, students, have not challenged since and it's doing a lot of damage. MY content knowledge on how to teach and WHAT to teach, is valuable. I went to school for a long time to learn it, I read and learned on my own to tweak and experiment what worked and didn't. But my greatest gift in the classroom is my ability to look and listen to my students and adapt. This is true of good teaching in a face to face or online classroom. At the beginning of the pandemic professors who had no training, or in some cases interest, were rushed to put their classes online and this often looked like just replicating what they were doing in their classrooms before. They recorded and uploaded lectures and PDFs. They paced things the same and expected the same work.
But the ground shifted under our feet, the world tilted on its axis and we are all permanently changed.
Year five now in the ongoing pandemic and many professors are still teaching this same way. My incoming first year students this year spent the end of middle school and all of high school under pandemic conditions. Teachers and students constantly out. Classes merged for supervision but not necessarily focused on content or learning. Instability of classroom communities because of these interuptions means that students struggle with talking to each other, looking up from the tech devices they've been TOLD to, TRAINED to, constantly be on, and serve as woobies, their only connection in many cases to online friends and relationships, perhaps the only ones they have. Then there is the grief, the trauma, that no one has been given the time to deal with. On top of all this is the economic stress of rising prices due to corporate greed and struggling to help or support families that are themselves struggling under incredible weights of elder care, more people in the house due to no available housing or riding housing costs.
Content dump teaching is not teaching. Watching a ninety minute lecture is not teaching. Completing an assignment that is only ever marked turned in or not is not learning. Teaching and learning is a flexibility. It is a give and take. I understand why this approach has continued. It's easy. It builds on the egalitarian promise of MOOCs and places like Khan Academy- the democratization of education. It also builds a vast depository of information universities own and can use to teach AI with the ultimate end of replacing in person teaching. It's the ultimate end for the neoliberal university, tech bros, and billionaire "philanthropists" who insist on reinventing education even though they do not have a single clue how it works. It is, and will continue to be, the justification for cutting and not replacing full time faculty, for abusing contingent professors, and increasing exploitive work conditions.
Faculty and students need protection, and in some places unions are doing their work here. But not nearly enough.
Exploring and Experimenting
- "Rather than taking risks and exploring new subjects, students are laser-focused on maximizing GPAs and building résumés."
- student has "an exaggerated fear of failure"
There is a ton of research and ink on ungrading, the harmful impact of grades, and various experiments and how they work. I won't duplicate that work here but I will share how things work in my class.
The last few years as students conference with me, the last step if they email their final product with a reflection on the work, the process, and the feedback they received. I also had them write, based on all that, what grade they think the work earned and why. It was an alien concept to all, and some struggled (mostly folks who always got As, and defined identity by grades), but after the first module, it becomes (based on their end of semester reflections) one of their favorite parts of class.
While the syllabus language says I reserve right to argue against grade they argue for, I almost never do.
This all ends up tying into the above- students are more willing to experiement, do a hands on project, try a difficult subject or approach, because they know they will not be punished.
Hard core STEM students draw and make models. They cook meals. Projects and versions of unessays are common parts of my class. But so are writing assignments with specific audiences and purposes- PowerPoints for elementary students, or graphics for a nature trail, or an argument to a town for climate change recommendations. Part of this is because the structure of the class frees them to. But part of it too is because the last few years, I've actively rebelled against the "prepare for job" trend in English classes. My students learn software skills, and how to use programs, and think about design and layout, but the main focus is them learning what they think about a variety of things and then supporting and expressing those.
We look at art. We read articles about social issues. We read poems and essays and food blogs.
I'm vocal that the purpose of my classes and humanities classes in general is to make better humans.
Most students enjoy this and it engages them. It helps them see how the class matters to them, how they can transfer these skills to their other classes, to their lives.
This year, students still conference, and I do the check in surveys, but I've changed so when the university asks me to report progress report grades (are they at risk of failing or not), midterms (letter grades), and end of semester final grades (letter again) I ask the students to write a detailed reflection on their work, process, engagement in class, ideas, etc. and tell me what to post.
Students' Reality
- "spend so much time working to pay for college that they can't take advantage of all it has to offer"
- "faculty member spent the bulk of class time rehashing the readings because few students had done them in advance"
- Students don't read
For the most part, the structure of higher education assumes that every student they serve is 18, lives on campus, does not have to work, can afford supplies, has access to technology, and the privilege to navigate college and advocate for themselves.
None of this is true anymore. Students work, often full time jobs, and often may have to miss class to pick up shifts. Yet the class schedules and out-dated attendance policies don't reflect this. In 2024 the assumption that everyone has a computer is countered by so many students trying to complete their work on their cracked phones, often forbidden in class, so they sit in the parking lots of McDonald's to access their wi-fi. Huge swaths of the United States are internet deserts but programs, loading videos, online textbooks, often require high speed internet.
On campus resources of computer labs, libraries, dining halls, which might fill these gaps close and 5 or 6, locking out working students.
Students may be trying to follow a class on Zoom while at their desk at work.
Students may not have childcare that day.
Or maybe daycare or school is closed because of mass illness.
Students may not understand or have ever had the value of a dedicated working space.
Maybe no one taught them how to study.
Some may live an hour away and some weeks can't afford the gas.
Students get sick and often a full recovery takes over a week, but again, draconian attendance policies don't allow this. So students come back after a day or two getting others sick as well as ensuring they'll be out again the next week because they're not recovered. They email their professors photos of them in hospital beds right after surgery or giving birth, begging their professors not to penalize them. In a world where not everyone has health insurance, or maybe can't afford the copay, or can't sit in an urgent care for six hours to be seen, or is just too sick to get out of bed, requiring doctor's notes or documentation is beyond cruel.
There are lots of reasons ADULTS might need to miss class. MAKE class important, SHOW them that, then trust them to make the decisions they need to.
In the United States there is a toxic expectation of work that the pandemic has only made worse. If you're home sick you're expected to still attend the Zoom meeting, check email, complete work, produce. If you're exhausted from your regular week too bad because you still need to work nights and weekends. Returning to care, one of the easiest, best things you can do for your students is simply give them permission not to participate in this toxic feedback loop. Throw out the punitive attendance policy. Tell them to feel better and not worry about work when they email you they'll be out sick. Not only will sick students be more likely to stay home, which is better for everyone, but they'll BE better.
I am always surprised when administrations ask faculty some version of "what can we do to accomplish X?" involving the students. Why not ask the students? I'm pretty sure that students would prefer to have laptops and help than new marketing. Parking that was accessible and that they didn't have to pay for rather than performative events. Actual structural issues fixed rather than a new, branded, coat of paint put over them.
If you ask students what they need, or want, they'll often tell you, although sadly I've noticed in my check in surveys a lot don't believe there is help to be had. They've had "rigor" and "grit" pounded into them for so long that they answer "nothing" to offers of help or say "it's my fault" or "I should be able to do this." They internalize institutional failures. And we should push against these answers and point out the structural issues AND offer ways to help.
As an English teacher I WANT to spend my time talking about what we read- poems, essays, novels, plays, articles. I want to hear what students have to say and guide discussions and ask questions. I used to get so frustrated when I'd plan a whole class around discussion and then no one did the reading and I didn't know what to do. I did punitive reading quizzes. I canceled class, sent folks home. But at some point I asked myself why they WEREN'T doing the reading. And that changed everything. Because they had really good reasons. Some had no time. Some didn't have time management skills and the every other day schedule confused them. Some got lost. Some couldn't concentrate. Some had never been taught to read critically.
One of the consequences of Covid has been a lack of concentration, brain fog, memory issues, all of which compound all the reasons above that affect students being able to read for class.
So now in my classes we read shorter pieces to start, I read stuff out loud, we talk about how to annotate and why. We talk about active reading and reading for different purposes. We talk about interacting with the text. As we move through the semester we read longer texts and I set aside classtime for them to do it, doing reading math in my head. If they don't finish they finish for homework. We have discussions first about what questions they have. I define words, they Google stuff, I answer things about "real" names and what is fiction.
In my upper level English classes I use a lot of the scaffolding skills when we start out, but I run all these classes as one night 3 hour seminars that are totally dependent on the students leading the conversation so they learn quickly.
In general, if I have not taught a student something, I don't assume they know it. I ask. And if they don't we go over it.
Systematic Issues
- "Mired in campus bureaucracy"
- Customer service, transactional relationship model where professors work for student and therefore must do what the student wants. The "I'm paying to pass, earn credit, graduate" expectation/perspective.
- "holding colleges accountable for students' rentention, graduation, and future earnings"
Bureaucracy should never be a barrier for students. If they need housing give it to them. If they're hungry feed them. Everybody knows the struggles students face and everybody knows what the answers are. Places choose not to implement them. The FAST Fund is a great example of what is possible. A student comes to you and needs gas to get to campus, so you walk to the ATM and you give it to them. Or they need to pay their cell phone bill or daycare or textbooks. You just trust them and give them what they need so that they can continue to be students.
There are some "rock star" educators who have advocated that students build the class syllabus, set the learning outcomes, design it all.As much as student choice is important to my classes, that approach has always bothered me, in much the same way content dump teaching does. Teaching is not me dumping information into students' heads but it's also not being absent from the teaching. I, as a teacher, am valuable because I can bake certain things into the design of the class, scaffold skills, schedule mini-lessons and opportunities for students to practice. I am valuable because of the feedback I give and how I support students and suggest ideas, readings, improvements. Students can choose topics and how they demonstrate knowledge and progress on those topics, but they don't have my education or experience. That doesn't mean their knowledge is not valuable, or that they have nothing to teach me. It just means that in the classroom while I'm not the dictator, I am the expert in teaching and learning. I do know best about some things. I change my classes every semester based on what I've learned from students, how better to serve them, to reflect new scholarship and approaches. I strive always to do what is best. A lot of that includes listening to student feedback. But learning is not and should not be transactional. Going back to the "make better humans" bit, we read and write and create art because it is what makes us human and connects us. THAT is what we get out of it, and enriches us, and that cannot be transactional.
If a professor, a major, a university, is not consistently passing students, graduating them, that is symptomatic of larger issues that I argue have more to do with care and all the other things I mention above than anything else. Give students a good foundation, support them with what they need, and they tend to do well.
But to hold individual programs, usually humanities, responsible for what comes after graduation is madness in this lived reality. Whole fields can disappear in the blink of the shelf-life of a new technology. New ones are created. The skills used in earning one degree may prove useful for a totally different field. Students may choose to not use their degree but take a 9-5 day job to prioritize family or community. Students may get ill, become disabled, move somewhere else with a lower cost of living. To expect universities to be responsible for all the elements that affect lives after graduation is ridiculous. As ridiculous as expecting schools to somehow fill the gaps created by poverty, lack of healthcare, support, food and housing insecurity, yet not actually address any of those issues.
Most of what I write about here are based on my experiences, what works in my laboratory of a classroom on a daily basis. But I think part of the answer here, to the issue of repetiveness specifically lies in larger changes. In k-12 education for decades now, the premise of pre-assessments to see where students are, what they know, what can be skipped, what needs focus, have been implemented one way or another. But these are not wholesale accepted in college. For certain GE classes, why aren't pre-assessments conducted? They would help students and faculty. There also needs to be a fairly radical redesign of GE. Most students need statistics and financial literacy more than algebra. Sustainability studies is a better science choice than upper level physics. More classes in global studies, geography, current events, ethics. Health and PE should be more about creating healthy adult habits that will serve them all their lives.
For majors that require upper level science, math, languages, pre-assessments can see where students should be put. Maybe these classes run on quarters so students can be moved up or down based on what they need to succeed. That the demonstration of knowledge maybe isn't a "C" or above in chemistry but a demonstration of specific skills on an assessment.
Coursework, especially at the GE level, might seem more relevant, less repetitive, be of more use, if it actually WAS the foundation for larger studies.
In my experience, all of these things has made my work infinitely easier. I spend less time on nonsense and policing and compliance and this freed up time allows me to walk around all of class and listen to students and offer feedback, have conversations. It allows me to email feedback to lots of student work.
The last few years I've been gathering supplies in my office in the hopes of us being back in our assigned building and me being able to teach in my own room. Now, I know in higher education this is not a thing. However, we are a small school and we have lots of classroom space. But also, I think some of what I'll describe below COULD scale up and be useful.
My classroom is set up in pods. I've done this for a very long time. One, I do it because it's a physical signal to students how class will be. The focus is not on me lecturing. It is on them, working and talking together. Especially with Covid, and students struggling with social interactions, this set up plus structured conversations, starters, ways to begin, and having students first answer what do you think about X and sharing before diving into content is really helpful.
Students learn in a print rich environment. This is true whether you're in middle school or college. Especially with the brain fog, trouble concentrating, and memory loss associated with Covid, this is helpful. The top of my boards have action verbs, I have giant Post-Its with anchor charts of steps to common acitivities. 
