The Covid-19 pandemic has made the practice of creating learning communities online very challenging with classrooms having to adopt one of three modalities of instruction, in-person, online, and hybrid. In many cases, I have observed at the University of Miami, and through instructors who are active on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook to be expressing serious concerns regarding the discordance that the choice of multiple modalities during a pandemic has created. In other words, the multiplicity of multiple modalities can actually be a hindrance in the process of creating online learning communities because it creates confusion as well as a sense of non-belonging when compared to traditional and in-person modes of pedagogy.

As the geographical reach of my English Composition & Academic Writing course expanded transnationally with students zooming in from Uruguay, China, Brazil and various parts of the U.S. with different time zones, I was motivated to adapt to flexible modes of communication and learning. These include group reading practices and discussing writing metacognitively even before beginning to write an assignment. Some strategies and examples can be found below:

Critical Questioning = Critical Thinking

I spend a significant amount of time in the semester to engage in critical questioning, where more often than not, I am not the one asking the questions, instead I facilitate sessions where every student is encouraged to ask the difficult and awkward questions. For example: for an observation assignment last semester (Fall 2020) in my course titled, “Writing Across Race, Gender and Community”, my students conducted a comparative study of Garnette Cadogan’s experience of walking as a black person in America in “Walking While Black,” with Frantz Fanon’s idea of the “Fact of Blackness” and the recent police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. As my students analyzed the politics of surveillance or the constant sense of being observed as a potential threat that people of color are subject to, they also wrote about their own experiences of being observed as an ‘other’. One student in my class who had faced similar forms of discrimination and police surveillance for being a black person in a predominantly white neighborhood in Orlando, Florida presented his story in a lecture-style presentation over zoom. He followed the academic conduct of the class and connected his personal narrative with texts we read in class. He asked the class, “can you think of ways in which we can make talking about race easier in the classroom?” This student was under the impression that his presentation would make everyone uncomfortable. However, at the end of this class almost every student had either responded to his question with a suggestion or a counter-question that helped everyone rethink other modes of classroom communication. All of this happened over Zoom and the point I’m trying to make here is while these engaging sessions are facilitated by me, it is always the students who through collaborative and productive discussions create a sense of community and togetherness that makes learning complex texts much easier. Given the times we are living in acknowledging and developing an intimacy with our discourse communities has become even more important. After all, finding solace and solidarity within our own discourse community during a pandemic and economic crisis is calming.

Alternate Texts = Transformative Teaching Practices

Josh Eyler in his book How Humans Learn: The Science and Stories Behind Effective College Teaching emphasizes the idea of transformative teaching practices. Eyler writes that while there are numerous handbooks that explore step-by-step techniques to implement inquiry-based approaches of effective teaching methods, only through one’s personal experience can an instructor know why students learn more when certain techniques are used over others. In Eyler’s words, a sense of belonging and an emphasis on student collaboration is critical for nurturing a class where students build knowledge together. So, I utilized diverse multimodal approaches to ensure maximum classroom engagement. I integrated journalistic pieces, blog posts, films, videos and even online museum archives as alternate texts that dominate over a more traditional reading list comprising books, academic essays etc. For example: last semester I directed my students to write a review of The Help (2011). But, instead of asking my students to watch film on their own, we shared screen, kept our cameras on and watched it together exactly like how we would watch it in class, in-person. In order to foster the smooth functioning of my teaching-diverse-texts approach, I also design my course assignments in a way that students get multiple chances to write academic papers as well as collaborate on projects using digital tools such as Adobe Spark, Power Point presentations, Photo Story and share it virtually with the rest of the class. By doing this, I am able to ensure a sincere consistency of written work throughout the semester, without making it seem boring or overwhelming.

How to tackle virtual silences?
Remote but still collaborating with classmates. How?

My current work as a Composition Program Fellow at the University of Miami involves mentoring graduate Teaching Assistants in their teaching; helping them cope with first-time teaching anxieties. A common feeling that a lot of TAs as well as full-time faculty members shared is the looming sense of disconnect that they faced while teaching online classes. Their main concern is how to deal with virtual silences, and by that I mean students keeping their camera off, not responding properly or just keeping silent when the instructor expects active engagement in class. This is where I suggested doing timed peer reviews using Google docs, posting short responses under Discussion Board on Blackboard (a course management software that my university uses) and ultimately making the students accountable for their submissions. Insisting on keeping their cameras on (of course in a respectful way) also worked well for most people. For example: I have a weekly writing activity that I call, Flash Writing Wednesdays. In the age of social media and insta-posting, I treat these writing activities as quick and instant responses that need to be posted without much revision and are then opened up for discussion. The topics are always related to the course or the text that they are currently reading. However, these are not surprise quizzes. These are writing activities that still require a scholarly response and critical thinking.

Discussion Board on Blackboard allows instructors to keep accountability of the number of posts, missing responses and the total number of student participants.