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This post is part of a blog series, ‘Adventures in the New Humanities,’ by Judy Kutulas, the Boldt Family Distinguished Teaching Chair in the Humanities.

I can’t be the only academic wide awake at 3 a.m., worrying about transitioning to distance learning. Humanists, I suspect, have it easy relative to, say, those who need to figure out nursing classes or chemistry labs or rehearsals, although I do like the idea of the St. Olaf Choir singing together — apart — on Google Meet.

I can offer no useful advice on teaching unfamiliar disciplines at a distance. Nor would I dare to offer any thoughts on the technology of distancing beyond “Talk to the experts.” My husband and I did an hour-long two-on-one with St. Olaf’s amazing Instructional Technologist for Digital Media Ezra Plemons and while I am sure we will forget the details of all he taught us about Google Chats and Panopto, I am unafraid to tackle some technology — and I am confident that when I run into problems, there are people to help me solve it. Where I have been centering my 3 a.m. awakeness is on this question: How can I transition the humanness of my classes to distance learning?

Where I have been centering my 3 a.m. awakeness is on this question: How can I transition the humanness of my classes to distance learning?

The largest course I took at Berkeley had 700 students in it. The prof used a microphone and stood on a stage. Occasionally, in this pre-PowerPoint era, there were old-fashioned slides or a short film. Many students didn’t attend class on a regular basis because they bought the lecture notes that summarized each day’s lecture. There were no papers, just exams graded by teaching assistants. A lot of my friends took this class during different terms and we just passed around the books and notes. One term, the instructor died unexpectedly and another stepped in and delivered more or less the same content, probably learning just as many student names in the process as the old prof knew — which is to say, none. I can easily imagine this class going online and there being the same amount of engagement online as off.

To be fair to Berkeley, I feel I should add that my smallest class at Berkeley had 11 people in it and was taught by a renowned historian of Germany who went out of his way to get to know each of us, read drafts of our research papers, and really made us think about the elements of our discipline. We had deep conversations, each week led by a different class member. Transitioning this class to distance learning would be considerably more difficult and what would be lost would be that human interaction at the center, the prof getting us excited and engaged about the subject.

My small Berkeley class was the essence of the liberal arts; my large Berkeley class was its opposite. What I love about teaching at Olaf is doing what my Berkeley seminar professor did: creating a class as a community. Most days, I like to think that what happens in the classroom results in more shared understanding of a topic than anyone walked in the door with. Except now, we can’t walk in the door.

Most days, I like to think that what happens in the classroom results in more shared understanding of a topic than anyone walked in the door with. Except now, we can’t walk in the door.

So I’ve been asking myself: What are the crucial elements that will make temporary distance learning consistent with a St. Olaf education and a positive experience, one where students don’t fall by the wayside or give in to isolation, worry, and frustration? 

At this point I want to pause and acknowledge that there will be cases where students might end up slipping by the wayside from our classes because their immediate realities are too dire. When such situations arise, I intend to immediately put aside all professorial thoughts and react as a fellow human being. I know you’ll all do the same. But for now I want to think about the non-emergency parts of this emergency, how to teach Olaf-style from a distance, how to bring our best selves to our virtual classrooms.

Studies show that distance learning can be a retention nightmare. An EdTalk by Dr. Rebecca Glazier that St. Olaf Professor of English and Director of Center for Innovation in the Liberal Arts (CILA) Mary Titus circulated last week talked about retention. The good news for us is that partially online courses have the best retention rates. Since we’ve already all logged half the semester together, we fall into that category. That means we have already established rapport and delivered personalized attention to our students, which Dr. Glazier suggests are crucial to successful distance learning. Now we just need to maintain it. 

As students began to scatter and then we were asked not to teach on campus, the first thing I realized that I missed were the before-class interactions. I’m one of those annoying profs hovering outside your classroom door as you finish up your class, eager to get inside, ostensibly to set up my technology, but actually because I enjoy the informal chats with the others who show up. Already I miss conversations with Jazmin about what she’s brought for breakfast from the Cage, comparing California stories with Carol, and talking to Luke about primary season. In a lecture hall of 700 with a mic-ed up prof on a stage, such conversations don’t happen, but for us they serve as a vital time to gauge the status of our students. Are they tired? Confused? Preoccupied about room draw? Until a few weeks ago, most were talking about spring break and now their lives, like ours, have been upended.

Granted, right now I can probably guess the mood of my classes even at a distance, but that doesn’t mean we can’t imagine ways of creating a little before-class informality, even asynchronously. I was thinking about posing questions that invite a bit of self-reflection about students’ current circumstances, like asking them about how they decide what to wear for social distancing or foods they are craving — trivial things that can, but don’t have to, lead anywhere beyond a little shared consciousness. The point is to create a virtual world not about the class directly, but about the community of the class. Also, I want to know what Jazmin eats for breakfast now that she’s at home. 

I accidentally hit on another tool I’m going to use to make my distance classes meaningful, something I’d call Olaf-izing. During the moment when the first people were departing campus, I reimagined a class that was supposed to be about early-1960s student activism to accommodate students who were leaving as well as those who were still around. I turned my class loose on the digitized early-1960s St. Olaf yearbooks and asked students to sleuth out change and continuity on the Hill. I asked them to assess such things as what seemed to be important to the community (their answers: sports, religion, and music), what they noticed about gender and race (lots of activities designed to pair up men and women, only occasional students of color but signs, based on visitors, performance, and some extracurriculars, of attempts at diversity), and if they saw any signs of the beginning of change (more informality, more individuality, beards and folk singers).

Some of my class did the project collaboratively in class and those who couldn’t come to class did it on their own. For 55 minutes my students were rowdy and engaged, shouting out observations and sharing finds. It was a great moment. I just finished reading the on-your-own worksheets and more than one came with a note attached that read, “This was fun!” 

Digitized yearbooks have just become a thread in my class. My students will be revisiting yearbooks in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s and, yes, PDA, they’ll be looking for you. I have found a way to create continuity, build skills, and help keep a group of first-year students bonded to the college and one another. 

Digitized yearbooks have just become a thread in my class. My students will be revisiting yearbooks in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s and, yes, PDA, they’ll be looking for you. I have found a way to create continuity, build skills, and help keep a group of first-year students bonded to the college and one another. 

Consider this page from the 1962 Viking:

Engaging, is it not?

Granted, not all classes can make use of the specifically Olaf digitized resources, but there are lessons for humanists here, the same truth that I understand explains the popularity of Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, the Bachelor, and Star Wars: immersion into a new, fully-realized world. Immersion engages us. It’s escapism, but, over time and with study, we come to see patterns and understand conventions, the social rules and norms. We become experts at those worlds and we like to talk to other experts about them. So much of the humanities plunges us into these fully-realized worlds, whether they be fictional, historical, philosophical, or rooted in another culture.

I’m going to keep immersion as a concept in my head as I redesign my classes, adding exercises that take students into sources that let them explore those worlds, turning them into active learners, and making sure they have opportunities to talk to one another about them. Yes, I will still have to post some mini-lectures and PowerPoints, but I want my students immersed in some worlds of the past. 

As it turns out, immersion into worlds of the past has been an implicit part of my classes all along. Following our transition, one class will be immersed in Tim O’Brien’s famous novel about American soldiers in Vietnam, The Things They Carried, and the other will be reading Cheap Amusements by Kathy Peiss, which is subtitled Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York. Until this moment, I never thought of either one as an immersive experience into history rather than a text. Now, though, I’m finding this realization a very reassuring connection between the classes I’m letting go of and the ones I’m getting ready to teach. 

My role model has become my high school physics teacher, Mr. MacRae. Anybody who knows me might be a little surprised to discover I loved high school physics and briefly entertained majoring in it until I realized what I actually loved was less physics than Mr. MacRae’s teaching style. He gave us challenges and sent us out to solve them, which, having logged a lot of Big Bang Theory episodes now, I realize is probably the way experimental physics works, designing experiments to answer challenges or questions. Problem-solving, I believe, ought to pair well with immersion into sources because its early questions, at least in my field, are what sources will I use and how will I read the data? Applied critical thinking. It’s exactly what my class did with the yearbooks: use their familiarity with a type of source and then read them from a different cultural perspective. The last question on my yearbook worksheet read “What surprised you the most about these yearbooks?” and the answers ranged from “how much was familiar” to “how different the world was then,” because the answer always is, both familiar and different. We walk that line now, between familiar and different.

When I think about walking the line between familiarity and difference, I realize that my classes need my essential Kutulas-ness for continuity and I need to find ways of converting that essence to changed circumstances. I want my strengths and my quirks to carry through to my students, to reassure them and throw them no curveballs at a stressful time for us all. So, professor, know thyself. I know my students expect a lot of pop cultural content (I already sent them lists of relevant feature films they might watch over break), they have learned to tolerate my propensity for “weird assignments” and my family stories, and they know I’m likely to include a deep dose of college history moving forward. Indeed, on that latter point, my U.S. women’s history class just completed posters on aspects of college history relevant for Women’s History Month. We were going to display them in the Crossroads, but couldn’t, so I’m working on a virtual display to share. They are the outcome of the summer sprint I wrote about last fall. Stay tuned.

When I think about walking the line between familiarity and difference, I realize that my classes need my essential Kutulas-ness for continuity and I need to find ways of converting that essence to changed circumstances. I want my strengths and my quirks to carry through to my students, to reassure them and throw them no curveballs at a stressful time for us all.

Before I head out to take a socially distanced walk with my family, I want to end with one thought about our teaching process: it’s going to change. Ordinarily, my teaching is divided into distinctive elements. There is the prep work that comes before stepping into a classroom, whether it’s doing the reading for the day, preparing some images or finding maps or imagining a collaborative exercise. There is the fixed time in the classroom two or three times a week, along with weekly office hours — showtime, so to speak. Then there is the time devoted to evaluation, assessment, and feedback, aka grading. And, speaking of walking, I suppose there is also the mulling-over time, those free-form thinking moments when I am doing something else and have a brainstorm about something classroom-related. 

As we step into our new phase, there is going to be much less classroom in the sense that we have known it because some will be synchronous and some won’t. The traditional categories of prep and class and even class and feedback are going to blur. This is going to be hard for us. It is going to be even harder for students. Some of that is distance, some of that is newness, some of that is because we are preoccupied by a lot of other weighty things. We should all cut ourselves some slack. I was once a virtual guest on a mom-centric radio program and voiced the opinion that it was OK to be a good-enough mom rather than supermom. The hosts’ shocked silence was palpable and I was never invited back, but right now it is OK to be a good-enough professor and we should adjust our expectations of our students as well. 

To me the more crucial variable is that we preserve the essence of community, collaboration, and the liberal arts. Like Rosie the Riveter, we can do it.

Judy Kutulas is a professor of history at St. Olaf College, where she teaches in the History Department and the American Studies program, along with American Conversations. She is the Boldt Family Distinguished Teaching Chair in the Humanities, charged with helping to revitalize humanities teaching and learning at the college. Read her inaugural ‘Adventures in the New Humanities’ blog post here.