Connecting Classroom to Community During COVID-19

Service learning has been part of my pedagogical repertoire since 2008. I was a full-time faculty at Polk State College in central Florida (2008-2013) and took advantage of generous professional development funds to go to conferences and get involved with Florida Campus Compact. There were myriad projects in which Polk students were able to become deeply involved with the surrounding community including a community garden project, an after-school tutoring program in public housing, and working with Winter Haven Police Department on policing changes for the community’s underhoused and homeless population. Side-by-side with my students, we saw sociological insights in real time and found an endless array of community partners that wanted to work with college students across the disciplines. Eventually, I became a connector of sorts, and worked with faculty on my campus as well as across the State of Florida as a Florida Campus Compact STEM Service Learning Fellow. These first five years of my career helped me to explore and solidify a pedagogy that centered around service and was grounded in social justice issues in the community in which the community college was located and fused two parts of any institutions tenure process--teaching and service--as the latter became inextricably linked to the former as my service positions at the college began to reflect my pedagogy.

When I returned to New York City in 2013 and started working at Hostos Community College, I didn’t have any connections with community based organizations (CBOs) in the South Bronx. Throughout graduate school, I lived in Brooklyn and went to school in Manhattan, and the Bronx was entirely new terrain. Immediately, I joined Hostos’ Service Learning Committee and faculty on that committee helped me to connect with CBOs, namely Patterson Senior Center, which is located in the Patterson Houses, New York City Housing Authority. Walking distance from the college and serving my favorite population, senior citizens, I was thrilled to design service learning courses for English Language Learners (ELLs) taking Introduction to Sociology that involved cultural conversations between students and seniors at Patterson once a month.

A seven-year collaboration with Patterson Senior Center came to a screeching halt in mid-March when New York City shut down as a result of COVID-19. Not only was physical service at Patterson impossible, but we were also unable to transfer the project into wellness calls because there was not sufficient staff and technology to protect the seniors’ phone numbers. In Fall of 2020, I pivoted and sought out online opportunities for my students to engage in service learning and found New York

Cares to be a comprehensive site with an online training, background check, and phone banking opportunities. Moreover, there were many opportunities for Spanish-Speaking Senior Calls, which is ideal for many students at my dual-language institution. Similarly, the majority of seniors at Patterson spoke Spanish, so speaking in Spanish and translating to English was good for both the seniors and my ELL students in introductory courses. My pandemic courses have been nearly all liberal arts capstone courses so although I have many bilingual and multilingual students, I did not have any students taking co-requisite remedial classes.

Another partnership that evolved this semester was with The City’s Missing Them Project, a virtual memorial site dedicated to New Yorkers who died from COVID-19. Students in a 3 ½ week winter session of Introduction to Sociology piloted the project and produced impressive tributes in a short period of time. During that term, a former student died from COVID-19, so I wrote a tribute alongside my students that was used as a sample project. Our primary point of contact for The Missing Them Project is a faculty member at the Columbia School of Journalism who was able to create a style guide for Hostos students and speak to my spring class about the project early in the semester. For the dozen or so students that selected this project, there was an overwhelming sense of closure and peace in their reflection papers.

As Black Lives Matters protests unfolded on streets across New York City, condemning specific acts of state-sanctioned murder as well as hundreds of years of policing and killing black and brown bodies in the United States, students were invited to connect these experiences to their own for their class projects. Some students wrote about the emptiness in not being able to participate in protests for fear of the virus and their family’s safety and a few, mostly adult learners, conducted interviews with parents whose children were targets of police violence or surveyed peers about racial profiling in their community.

Connecting our classrooms, physical and virtual, to the community deepens ways of knowing and disrupts many of the hierarchical systems in our institutions and in our society. Students can choose where to direct their energy and focus. They see the benefits sometimes directly during conversations with elders, sometimes in a deeply personal way as they cope with the death of a loved one by writing a tribute or reflecting on systemic racism. Twelve years into teaching, continuously working to connect students to the community enriches the virtual classroom and deepens my connection to students because it opens up new ways of knowing.