When Barnard moved all courses online for the remainder of the spring semester on March 12, 2020, the First-Year Faculty and their students faced a particular challenge: how could their intimate intellectual communities be maintained during the shift to emergency online teaching and learning? While the need and desire to maintain community was certainly felt by all instructors, students, staff and administrators throughout the College, it was a particularly acute concern in the First-Year Experience seminars: the First-Year Writing course and the First-Year Seminar. These courses are only open to first-year students and are centered around the close intellectual and personal relationships created between instructors and first year students and between the students themselves.
In the First-Year Writing program, cultivating that sense of community is essential to helping students understand writing as something that one does to find one’s unique place in a larger conversation. As a result, much of their pedagogy is focused on helping students understand how ideas are produced in scholarly conversations, how to challenge and complicate them, and how to produce new insights and ideas in order to find their own place in these conversations. Classroom activities are designed to facilitate this: aside from class-wide discussions, students practice skills like close reading, peer-editing, and presenting on secondary sources in pairs or small groups.
“I think there was something special about the way First-Year Experience classes functioned after the move online,” says First-Year Experience faculty member Meredith Benjamin. “For many first year students, this was their one small-group, seminar-style class this semester. Accordingly, it was the one class where they still had group discussion and engaged with their peers directly face-to-face. A number of students mentioned how these classes in particular felt like they helped them maintain their intellectual community from Barnard, even as we were dispersed across the country…[they were] a space to connect specifically with other first-year students, who could most closely empathize with their experience of disruption.”
But moving such close-knit seminars online was not without challenges. First-Year Writing faculty member Andrew Lynn describes the greatest hurdle as not having been able to have face-to-face contact with his students. “So much of what makes a seminar feel like a shared intellectual space depends on social cues that are extraordinarily hard to replicate over videoconference,” he says.
Lynn describes the difference between discussion in an in-person seminar and via Zoom as one that potentially truncates conversations because social cues are harder to read online and also restricted by the structure of the platform. In a face to face classroom setting, he explains, seminar conversation can possess a subtlety and fluidity that can be hard to achieve on Zoom. “‘I’m thinking about something and I’m not sure if I’m right but should be called on so we can all figure it out together,’” Lynn says, describing the in-person classroom. “I’ve found that Zoom tends to collapse these situations into much tider alternatives: ‘I have, or do not have, something to say.’” When First-Year Experience Program Director Wendy Schor-Haim surveyed the students in her class about what parts of the class they most wanted to preserve as they transitioned to a virtual classroom, they responded that open and responsive class discussions were their top priority. But realizing such discussions was awkward at first. “No one quite knew how to make clear that they wanted to talk,” Schor-Haim recalls, “and we couldn’t read one another’s body language to figure out when someone else could jump in. Plus Zoom only allows one person at a time to speak and creates weird silences when people are talking simultaneously.”
Zoom also presented privacy concerns for faculty and students. First-Year Seminar faculty member Cecelia Lie-Spahn, who is also Associate Director of the First-Year Writing Program and Director of the First-Year Writing Workshop Program, shared her initial apprehensions. “First, I had no idea who might be in the background, listening in on our conversations, something I was particularly worried about in my First-Year Seminar Workshop course -- Race, Science, and Reproductive Justice -- since students often share stories about their upbringing as they discover both gaps in and appreciation for the way their parents talked to them about sex,” she explains. She also worried that bringing her seminars online would weaken or even completely diminish what she felt was only available in person. “I assumed that practicing intellectual vulnerability was dependent on being embodied,” she says, “on being able to see visual cues from me and their peers that convey trust in ways we're not even conscious of.”
How to create community on Zoom therefore became a major focus of First-Year Experience pedagogy. “Instructors made efforts to try and recreate a sense of community online, in their individual classroom, and this quickly became a topic of the weekly development meetings the program began to hold online so that they could discuss how to adapt,” says First Year Writing faculty member Vrinda Condillac. A central concern was how precisely the same learning principles, skills, and strategies, and assignments could exist online, and First Year Experience worked together throughout the semester to ensure that they could. “The program itself operates with as much community and collaboration and sharing in developing pedagogically as it asks of its students,” Condillac explains. “And instructors have been engaged in a continuous process of sharing and developing their online pedagogy.” To make up for the lack of faculty hallway conversations in the LeFrak Center, First Year Writing Lecturer Alexandra Watson created a Slack channel for generating ideas and resources to complement the already existing Google drives where First-Year Experience faculty regularly share pedagogical resources.
Using software and digital technologies that facilitate collaboration, such as Google Docs, faculty found ways to encourage and sustain learning and community building. In Andrew Lynn’s courses, working together on a shared document, for example, allowed for pedagogical approaches and processes similar to the in-class experience. “The aspects of writing instruction that pertain to the teaching of specific skills have been surprisingly easy to reproduce,” he says. “Collaboratively redrafting a paragraph so that it clearly differentiates between the writer's ideas and those of her interlocutors, for instance, isn't all that different in Google Docs.” Wendy Schor-Haim’s experience was similar. “I found working as a class on Google Docs to be an excellent way to build community and spark discussion – whether students write blog posts outside of class on a Google Doc and respond to each other there, or whether I’m sharing my screen on Zoom as we annotate a text as a class,” she says. “I was a little nervous to try [screen sharing annotation] but my First-Year Writing faculty colleagues encouraged me!” Faculty member Liz Auran found Canvas discussion boards were very useful for collaborative learning and for structuring group discussions during class meetings. “In groups of three, students posed a discussion question about the assigned reading once weekly which students responded to [prior to the Zoom meeting],” she says. “When class started, everyone was ready to go.” In addition to moving the majority of her class materials to Google Docs, First-Year Writing instructor Penelope Usher created a virtual “blackboard” for each Zoom session to mimic the classroom blackboard they left behind in their Barnard classroom. “I also designated space on our virtual blackboard for group work,” Auran explains. “When students split into groups to discuss and work together in Zoom breakout rooms, each group designated a member to take notes so that we could track the different conversations happening and share ideas as a class afterwards.”
Using software and digital technologies that facilitate collaboration, such as Google Docs, faculty found ways to encourage and sustain learning and community building. In Andrew Lynn’s courses, working together on a shared document, for example, allowed for pedagogical approaches and processes similar to the in-class experience. “The aspects of writing instruction that pertain to the teaching of specific skills have been surprisingly easy to reproduce,” he says. “Collaboratively redrafting a paragraph so that it clearly differentiates between the writer's ideas and those of her interlocutors, for instance, isn't all that different in Google Docs.” Wendy Schor-Haim’s experience was similar. “I found working as a class on Google Docs to be an excellent way to build community and spark discussion – whether students write blog posts outside of class on a Google Doc and respond to each other there, or whether I’m sharing my screen on Zoom as we annotate a text as a class,” she says. “I was a little nervous to try [screen sharing annotation] but my First-Year Writing faculty colleagues encouraged me!” Faculty member Liz Auran found Canvas discussion boards were very useful for collaborative learning and for structuring group discussions during class meetings. “In groups of three, students posed a discussion question about the assigned reading once weekly which students responded to [prior to the Zoom meeting],” she says. “When class started, everyone was ready to go.” In addition to moving the majority of her class materials to Google Docs, First-Year Writing instructor Penelope Usher created a virtual “blackboard” for each Zoom session to mimic the classroom blackboard they left behind in their Barnard classroom. “I also designated space on our virtual blackboard for group work,” Auran explains. “When students split into groups to discuss and work together in Zoom breakout rooms, each group designated a member to take notes so that we could track the different conversations happening and share ideas as a class afterwards.”
Meredith Benjamin, who taught a First-Year Seminar on Feminism and the Politics of Anger in the spring 2020 semester, found that in addition to Google Docs, the Zoom chat function was very helpful in bringing students into the classroom discussion who might be shyer or more reticent to jump into online conversations. “Students were able to comment on the discussions or jump in more easily via text. It was also an interesting exercise in the different types of rhetoric we use in different spaces—we noticed how the chat box ended up encouraging more informal responses, as well as affirmations of students’ work or contributions.” Post-doctoral Writing Fellow Duygu Ula used skills she learned in CEP workshops, using the software StoryMaps to create annotated maps of the two novels they read in her seminar, Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin and Orlando: A Biography by Virgina Woolf. “Since a lot of the novels were set in places students were unfamiliar with,” she says, “this tool helped them better orient themselves.” Ula used the same software to create a “class map”: students provided Ula with their location, a short reflection on their semester and a message to their classmates, and an image of their choice. “On the last day of the seminar,” she explains, “we ‘traveled’ through the map together to reflect and share, and they got to keep the link to the map as a token from the semester. I think it really helped students feel connected and have a sense of community despite the switch to remote learning.”
Instructors also facilitated community building through “low-tech” approaches that proved to be vital, such as regular, informal check-ins and the beginning of each seminar meeting, free-writes and using the “popcorn” method where students call on one another to read or respond. Liz Auran transformed her “focused free writes,” in-class writing usually done during the first five minutes of class to the night before class, which students posted on the discussion board prior to class. “At the beginning of the Zoom class, after greetings, I would sort students into breakout rooms to discuss their insights,” she explains. “I found this feature a great tool for replicating the intimacy of the classroom, to 'warm up' the students, to remind them of their more personal connections to each other....and when they rejoined the larger Zoom everyone was more comfortable and fluid.” Schor-Haim also found that consistently randomized Zoom breakout rooms had an added benefit: while in the classroom, students tended to sit in the same seats and often worked in pairs with the students they sat next to in the classroom. The changing breakout rooms motivated a different, wider range of student interaction. “I noticed that when students commented on one another’s Google Doc posts as homework,” she says, “there was a wider-ranging discussion between students who had (probably unconsciously) tended to comment on posts by their partners in [the face to face] class. This was a really unexpected bonus!”
For Benjamin and her First-Year Experience colleague Alexandra Watson, regular check-ins at the beginning of seminar meetings were also essential for maintaining the classroom community that had been cultivated before the move online. “Each student—as well as myself—would respond to the general question ‘How are you feeling? How are you doing?’” Benjamin explains. “Students shared on a variety of levels—from the new hobbies they’d picked up to how they were dealing with feelings of uncertainty and lack of focus. We started doing this in the first class over Zoom as a way of acknowledging the unusual and challenging nature of the situation, and then decided to make it a weekly practice.” These brief discussions at the beginning of each class meeting also ensured the inclusion of everyone’s voice, Benjamin says, which in turn helped to foster a sense of belonging and responsibility to one another. “In an end of class survey, a number of students mentioned that accountability to their classmates was one of the things that kept them motivated; they wanted to do the reading so they could engage with others’ ideas in discussions and they cared about their writing because they knew their peers would read it. In this sense, creating and maintaining community became, to me, one of the most important goals of our classes.”
First-Year Experience faculty, like many faculty throughout the College, also adapted their assignments to allow students to research and reflect upon the impact of Covid-19. Post-Doctoral Fellow Penelope Usher, who taught a First-Year Writing seminar on the theme of Metamorphosis in Spring 2020, gave her students the option to write about Covid-19 for their final research paper, asking them to reflect upon the ways in which viruses transform the body. “About a third of the class wrote papers on the topic and produced really exciting and varied work.” she says. “One student focused her research on the science of the body’s immune system, writing about how the body’s process of fighting and becoming immune to a pathogen generates permanent change in order to protect it; another researched studies done in Wuhan, China, about damage by Covid-19 to the lungs and to metabolic function in ways that do irreversible damage; others researched and wrote about metamorphosis on a larger, societal scale—changes in social behavior, environmental impact, politics, racism.” One of her students, Lillian Bryan, wrote a personal essay about how her own life has metamorphosed in response to the pandemic; incorporating diverse secondary sources (on zombies, on online embodiment, on social networking) she wrote about technology, autonomy, and intimacy in the context of Covid-19. In Andrew Lynn’s classes, many students voluntarily used the course materials to reflect on the contemporary moment. In his First-Year Writing class, one student considered the way things undergo time in the central section of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse and her own experience of "quarantine time." “In my First-Year Seminar, we were set to begin a unit on epistolary fiction when we were all forced to leave campus, which all felt a little too on the nose at the time,” Lynn says. “There were...very thoughtful [class] discussions of how physical distance can enable particular forms of intimacy during those weeks of the course.”
As the fall semester approaches, the First-Year Experience faculty has been actively exploring ways in which its pedagogy itself can be even more collaborative and are planning a video library dedicated to teaching individual writing and critical thinking skills that instructors can share with each other or refer students to and have been expanding their use of digital tools like hypothes.is that help students annotate texts collectively. Faculty are also reflecting upon the spring 2020 semester, pointing to the diligence, care, and hard work of their students during an unprecedentedly disruptive and uncertain period and one during which they managed to connect with one another in important intellectual and personal ways.
“What surprised me was that, on the last day of class, students' reflected that our collective sense of bonding and trust actually peaked when we went online,” Lie-Spahn recalls. “I'm still trying to work out why they felt this way -- we spent more time just sharing how we were all doing and working through various and often disparate forms of upheaval, and I certainly did things I never would have done otherwise, like write poetry together that we read out loud. Maybe it was just the reality that we were all going through such a profound and historic life experience together; maybe the ‘unknowns’ of our worlds became a kind of shared text about which we could all be different kinds of experts. Whatever it was, I want to bring this feeling with me into my future classes, whether or not we are online or in-person.”