Active Learning as Care for Pandemic-Era Students

By: Mary Strasma (Associate Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy) on November 28th, 2022

Before COVID, I considered myself an educator committed to teaching for student engagement. I worked to create courses that would stimulate students to participate actively, and to see classes as a co-created educational space, rather than an entertainment product to be consumed (or not) passively, or a box to be cynically checked off. Through active discussion, problem-based learning and writing prompts, role-playing and debates, I pushed both students and myself to achieve more. These were not easy classes, for students, or for me as an instructor, but the engagement made it worthwhile.

Of course the sudden March 2020 move to online learning presented challenges to this model. Creating the same sense of active participation in a learning community by our students, even when we were not together synchronously, took some retraining.

By this fall, though, a bit over a year since returning to largely face-to-face classes, I found myself ready to do the reverse: to incorporate lessons from the pandemic into my “normal” classes. Many of these lessons had less to do with course content than with understanding what life is like for our students now. For example, I’ve learned from teaching – and grading – asynchronously that firm deadlines are not as necessary as I used to believe. I now generally give a “submission window” for assignments, and tell students I will be as accommodating as possible when their lives require a slightly different schedule than the one I had laid out for the group as a whole.

And their lives can be complicated indeed. Our students not only work long hours in paid jobs while taking a heavy credit load, but are often also primary caregivers for their own children, grandparents, or younger siblings. The load of caregivers also increased exponentially during the pandemic, as everything from supervising children’s schooling to locating and preparing food became considerably more complicated. My syllabus now has explicitly parenting-friendly language.

I have also begun to learn about trauma-informed teaching. We have students who have experienced both personal trauma and losses related specifically to these times. While social isolation has eased with the return to on-campus classes, students continue to be affected by the political environment. Expressions of extremism may be experienced as existential threat, on the basis of race, gender, or sexual orientation, or more broadly as the threat to democracy and the rule of law that we all depend on for civil society, and education, to function. This can manifest in difficulty with focus and concentration, which add to the complications of completing a heavy course load along with other responsibilities.

With this new knowledge, then, I debated whether to return to the high-involvement, heavy-workload active learning approach of my pre-pandemic courses. I had previously used the Reacting to the Past role-playing “game” Defining a Nation: India on the Eve of Independence, 1945 in an upper-division world history course that I center on the theme of nations and nationalism, and wanted to do so again. The unit requires everything that we have been finding students have struggled with: long hours, concentrated reading of source material, showing up and being focused in the moment to respond quickly to the work of classmates, and connecting with each other to accomplish group tasks outside of class time. How would pandemic-era students fare? Was I expecting too much?

The answer, to my amazed delight, was that this class absolutely shone. These students knocked it out of the park, and they did so as a group, not just a few standouts. They did everything we want them to do in our major: researching and using sources effectively in making persuasive arguments, viewing events from multiple perspectives, and diving deep into exploring why people took the actions that they did. They coordinated as teams. Of greatest delight to me is that they pushed each other to be better. When they made arguments from their assigned roles, they questioned, responded to, and challenged each other’s ideas, in character, in the moment.

Why did they do so well? While perhaps some of this year’s success is due to my increased experience and knowledge of how to scaffold the activities, I was left to wonder whether the pandemic had taught us something we didn’t already know about the value of active learning. The beginnings of an answer came during the debriefing session. One of the prompts that I offered students was to thank a classmate whose work pushed them to be better. A student spoke of how she had experienced a personal crisis during the time of the assignment. But rather than say that this made it harder to complete the work, she explained that it was knowing that she got to come to this class in which she would be working actively in a team, with other students, instead of just sitting quietly in forward-facing rows, that carried her through what was happening in the rest of her life. Another group singled out for praise one student who put in many hours researching and coordinating the plans that they presented. That same student, in turn, indicated that it was a student in an opposing faction who, on the first day, made him realize that he was going to need to significantly up his game from the limited amount of work he had initially planned on putting into the course.

I continue to work on my awareness of things that students might need to be different post-pandemic. For example, although I assigned roles randomly this year, I allowed students to opt-out of a role that they would find difficult to engage with for whatever personal reason they may have. And while the structure of a Reacting to the Past game doesn’t allow for making up missed classes or late submissions of many assignments, I am newly flexible on due dates wherever it is practical.

But the surprising takeaway from this semester’s outstanding work is that active, engaged learning that allows students to work with each other is not only better for student’s learning outcomes in the ways that we already knew. It also allows students to reach higher standards, precisely because they are there for and interacting with each other. I can’t wait to see where we can go from here.