Chapter 7
Transformative Learning in a Time of Crisis
Description
This class was organized as a check-in giving students an opportunity to talk as little or as much as they wanted about challenges in their own lives and the world around them and to reflect on our emergency transition to remote learning during the COVID-19 Pandemic.
Agenda
Opening planning:
- Check in with groups that still need to lead team-taught class. Do you want to dial back the amount of required readings? Change your focus or activity? Our situation has changed entirely. Feel free to rethink accordingly.
Hour 1: Opening Inventory Exercise— Transformative Learning in a Time of Crisis
Transformative Learning in a Time of Crisis: Please respond on the Google Doc but only with information you feel comfortable sharing with your colleagues in this class:
(1) How is each of us doing? What is each of us doing to take care of ourselves right now?
(2) What are we learning from all of this? What are the lessons we are learning? How do we apply this to our future teaching?
(3) What is one “transformative” idea/experience/interaction we will take away from this class into the future (in teaching? In social interactions? In community?)
Hour 2: Synchronous discussion on video call!
Spring 2020
UNC — Chapel Hill
Principles
- Nobody signed up for this.
- Not for the sickness, not for the social distancing, not for the sudden end of our collective lives together on campus
- Not for an online class, not for teaching remotely, not for learning from home, not for mastering new technologies, not for varied access to learning materials
- The humane option is the best option.
- We are going to prioritize supporting each other as humans
- We are going to prioritize simple solutions that make sense for the most
- We are going to prioritize sharing resources and communicating clearly
- We cannot just do the same thing online.
- Some assignments are no longer possible
- Some expectations are no longer reasonable
- Some objectives are no longer valuable
- We will foster intellectual nourishment, social connection, and personal accommodation.
- Accessible asynchronous content for diverse access, time zones, and contexts
- Optional synchronous discussion to learn together and combat isolation
- We will remain flexible and adjust to the situation.
- Nobody knows where this is going and what we’ll need to adapt
- Everybody needs support and understanding in this unprecedented moment.
Texts — Suggested/Optional/Not-Required/For Another Time Reading
- Davidson, Cathy N. (2017) Chapter Two, “College for Everyone,” The New Education
- Vianna, E. & Stetsenko, A. (2019). “Turning Resistance into Passion for Knowledge with the Tools of Agency: Teaching-Learning about Theories of Evolution for social justice among foster youth.” Perspectiva, 37 (3).
- Gutiérrez , Kris D., and Barbara Rogoff (2003), “Cultural Ways of Learning: Individual Traits or Repertoires of Practice.” Educational Researcher, Vol. 32, No. 5, pp. 19–25
“Education is always already a site of political contestation even when it appears to be confined within the classroom walls (which in fact it never is) such as when students learn, for example, about evolution or laws of gravity, or even just the multiplication table….Education is also, at once, about activism understood as the right and ability to know for oneself within what is one’s own—unique, authentic and authorial, and ever-emerging and shifting—quest to make a difference and to matter in the world.”
— Eduardo Vianna & Anna Stetsenko “Turning Resistance into Passion for Knowledge with the Tools of Agency”
Class Participation Below
Student responses redacted for privacy and respect.
PROMPTS
Transformative Learning in a Time of Crisis: Please only respond with information you feel comfortable sharing with your colleagues in this class:
(1) How is each of us doing? What is each of us doing to take care of ourselves right now?
(2) What are we learning from all of this? What are the lessons we are learning? How do we apply this to our future teaching?
(3) What is one “transformative” idea/experience/interaction we will take away from this class into the future (in teaching? In social interactions? In community?)
*** Responses in our learning community are kept confidential.
Note from Eduardo: I wanted to share some articles that came out last week that I found illuminating:
Slavoj Zizek: Coronavirus is ‘Kill Bill’-esque blow to capitalism and could lead to reinvention of communism
Capitalism is an Incubator for Pandemics. Socialism is the Solution.
Social Justice in a Time of Social Distancing
Decolonizing Mental Health: The Importance of an Oppression-focused Mental Health System
My Life Is More ‘Disposable’ During This Pandemic