Reflections on Neurodiversity Institute

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend the Neurodiversity Institute at the University of Denver. This workshop took place over two days and featured a great mix of content (i.e., expert presentations on dyslexia and ADHD) as well as information on ways that faculty can access already existing resources on campus (such as the Learning Effectiveness Program and the Office of Teaching and Learning, two programs who contributed so much to the workshop). Faculty from all over DU (humanities, social sciences, STEM, business, etc.) participated, which really made for great discussions as we brainstormed ways to implement what we were learning in our respective courses.

Some basic takeaways:

1. We have way more students with some type of disability than we think we do. 1 in 4 people in the US have some type of disability.

2. Making accommodations to students on a case-by-case basis takes up way more bandwidth than redesigning courses with Universal Design for Learning (UDL) in mind. UDL includes many things, but key examples include making sure you turn on closed caption support in Zoom and PowerPoint, hi-quality PDF’s that screen readers can easily process, as well as differentiated assessments (offering students the choice of whether to participate in class by serving as a peer note taker vs. making oral presentations), and taking advantage of UDL tools built into Canvas (these can quickly scan through your Canvas course shell and identify accessibility issues, such as pictures that have no description, or PDF’s that are untagged).

3. Students who receive accommodations are NOT asking for an advantage over their neurotypical peers, they are asking for accommodations in order to be able to fully access course materials and participate in our courses.

4. UDL makes things better for everyone, not just those students who receive accommodations.

5. Research indicates that many students entering college do not request accommodations even when they received those accommodations in high school, largely because they do not think that their professors will work with them. Research also indicates that in many cases students who have this perception are correct. I can vouch for this personally, as I have had numerous students thank me for giving them the accommodations that they are guaranteed under federal law (specifically the Americans with Disability Act). 

6. We as faculty have to be better on this, working to ensure that our students know that we will honor their accommodations (again, not really a choice, because federal law). There are lots of ways we can do this, including syllabus statements, explicitly discussing why we value UDL and explaining how we incorporate UDL into our courses, and (I think most importantly) telling students that we are open to feedback on ways to adjust the course so as to make it more accessible. It goes a long ways towards building trust with our students if we can admit that there is no quick fix to prioritizing accessibility in an ableist world, that we are doing the best we can, but we don’t know everything (I know, the horror, the horror!).

My next steps include:

(1) reading Jay Dolmage’s Academic Ableism (University of Michigan Press, 2017)

(2) reworking a few of my assessments to make them more accessible; 

(3) hopefully getting on the agenda at a department meeting to discuss what needs my colleagues have in terms of learning more about UDL;

(4) Reflecting on the intersection of UDL and DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) work. 

A few more helpful links:

https://studentaffairs.du.edu/learningeffectiveness

https://www.cast.org

New job at DU!

Today is my official start day for a new position as Visiting Teaching Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Denver (DU). I will be teaching a variety of courses in the Religious Studies department, including:

Intro to Islam; Islam in Film, Islam in the U.S., Islamic Mysticism, Modern Muslim Thinkers (19th-21st CE), and Religion in Science Fiction

I had a wonderful time teaching two courses in the department last academic year (Intro to Islam, Qur’an and Hadith), and am looking forward to getting to know more of the students, as well as my colleagues in the department. Last year I worked a lot with graduate students, and this year will be more focused on undergraduate courses.

Stay tuned for updates later this fall on some writing and research projects!

Back in the classroom! Reflections on teaching in person for the first time in March 2020

Yesterday I taught in person for the first time in almost two years. Here in Colorado it was March 2020 when the COVID-related shutdowns hit us. Just before Spring Break, I remember taking a few minutes at the end of class with my World Mythology students at Front Range Community College to discuss what we guessed was "probably/definitely” going to happen: converting our course from in person to remote. One student even wanted to shake my hand to thank me for how much he was enjoying the course up until that point, we then all laughed — in a bit of gallows’ humor, perhaps — about how we hoped that this one handshake didn’t turn into an outbreak (and thankfully, it did not).

One key question that we discussed was whether or not we should convert to remote synchronous or asynchronous. Some students wanted us to meet synchronously because they already had time in their schedule blocked off for our class. Other students reported (both in class and privately) that they did not feel comfortable with the synchronous format because they did not have an appropriate place at their home for Zoom calls. In the end, I opted for the modality that ensured everyone had access, which was asynchronous. Was that the right decision?

Looking back over the past two years, during which time I have taught both synchronously and asynchronously, I’m still not sure. Take my preferences out of the equation - the truth is that there are some students who do better in one of those two formats than others, so there was no way to make that change from traditional in person learning to any type of remote format without essentially disenfranchising some of the students. After all, they signed up for an in person class, not a remote class. But the pandemic meant we were all making due with the “least worst” of possible choices. It was a shock to the system regardless, and I think we all muddled through as best we could. I mostly gave them full points for (virtually) showing up at all, turning in assignments, participating in discussion threads, and showing me that they were still engaging with the material.

Fast forward almost two full years, and yesterday I stepped into a classroom again. It was very strange at first. I realized how comfortable I have become with my improvised Zoom studio in my garage, complete with shoji screens to distract my audience (and myself) from the reality that I am sitting in…well, a garage, complete with boxes of Christmas ornaments, power tools, and left over floor tile all on full display on the shelves behind where I have set up a small workspace. In this new classroom, I first had to ask for help to find the classroom, then I had to figure out how to set up the class projector, then — all importantly — which way to the cafeteria? Everything worked out, except when it came to project my screen, the system that worked perfectly before class apparently decided it did not want to work during class, so I had to play audio clips using my computer’s rather modest speakers. The students didn’t seem to mind, and I reminded myself of the mantra developed over many years of teaching: “just take a breath, roll with it, it’s okay.”

After a few hours, my mask — N95 for the win!?!? — really hurt the bridge of my nose. I had met these students a few times for remote sessions earlier in the term (they all looked taller to me on Zoom, for some reason), but it was wonderful to get to see them in person. The physicality of being in person is so different. One student wore a hat with the slogan “This is native land,” and we talked about how relevant that was almost everywhere imaginable in the U.S. Another student marveled at finally being able to have a class in person, since their entire time in the degree program up until yesterday had consisted of remote learning. And I realized how hard it can be for me to remember students’ names without those handy built in name tags at the bottom of the otherwise dreaded black boxes of Zoom! Also - my handwriting has definitely degraded by several orders of magnitude — and this was already from a place where my students in the past asked me in all honesty if I was writing in English or Arabic on the board, they couldn’t quite tell the difference…or maybe they were being cheeky? But the feeling of a dry erase marker in my hand was amazing. I looked at the board, filled with notes (including where students wrote out their discussion questions), and I did think, “This is what education looks like.” Of course, it hasn’t looked like this for a long time, and all of us have adjusted as best we could to these conditions. As comfortable as I have become teaching remotely, I have to admit that teaching in person again was invigorating…even if slogging through traffic on the drive home was…less so.

Conversation with Anthony Pinn on Religion and Anti-Black Racism

This past week I had the sincere pleasure of joining Prof. Jeff Scholes (UCCS) as we hosted Prof. Anthony Pinn (Rice University) for “A Conversation on Religion and Anti-Black Racism.” During the discussion we touched on the relationship between religion and race here in the U.S., white evangelicals and Donald Trump, Pinn’s journey to eventually embracing secular humanism, and (at the end) a little bit on science fiction (specifically Octavia Butler’s classic Kindred). The whole talk runs about 90 minutes. The first 55 minutes is a discussion between Prof. Scholes, myself, and Prof. Pinn, and then we opened it up to questions posted on the YouTube live stream. You can view the recording here.

In addition to learning a great deal from the conversation, I am using this recording in my World Religions course in the units on Christianity as well as Atheism. I’ve also already heard from a number of students who attended that they learned a great deal.

On Teaching Full-Time

Today is the first day of the semester, and as always, I am very excited to get going. After weeks of wondering what a particular class will be like, what kinds of questions the students will come up with, and wondering how on earth to finish all that grading, I finally get to just move forward and do it. In addition to all of the usual “first day of the semester” feelings, I also feel deeply satisfied to be back in a full-time teaching position for the first time since 2013. From 2013-2018 I was in school full-time, and my PhD program included both the usual coursework and then years of research, along with ample opportunities to teach both as a TA and teaching my own classes, but since then I’ve been on the adjunct road.

Last semester I taught at three different institutions, juggled three different e-mail addresses, three different sets of institutional deadlines (even though two of the three schools are part of the same state system…), and just in general felt like I had too many plates up in the air. A few of these proverbial plates “dropped” during the semester, which was completely predictable. Toss in everyday life, parenting, being present for and with my partner, and yes, I was relieved when the spring semester wrapped up. When one course ended, I would like “it is finished” (bonus points to you, dear reader, if you catch the reference)…and then I would quickly realize that “it” wasn’t quite finished, because there were two other sets of due dates to keep track of! This semester is different.

I have a full-time instructor position this semester. It is a “visiting” position because I am effectively filling in for another faculty member while they are on leave (taking a visiting position elsewhere), and no one knows what will happen in the future. But for this academic year, I have job security, benefits, and increased pay. On the home front, we’re talking about maybe putting a bit more money towards my student loans, and hopefully saving up a bit more. My department is incredibly supportive, and I feel very fortunate to be working with a group of people who really appreciate what I have to offer. In my experience, adjunct faculty are treated all too often as if they are simply a cog in the machine of academia. From a certain point of view, that’s all any of us are, no matter what industry or sector we work in, but it makes a huge different to me that for this year, I am valued more highly. I feel encouraged to put more into my classes, which is made possible by the fact that I don’t have as many classes to teach as last semester, and that I’m being paid so much more per class (roughly 2.5x, if my calculations based on the per credit hour rate are correct). The paycheck is part of it, but there’s a lot more beyond money. At work, I have so much more to give each and every one of the my students. At home, I know I will have more emotional space to show up for my family. In turn, this means I will have more energy to give back to the community at large, especially through volunteering. That is why I’m looking forward to this semester more than others in recent memory.

"Reality Shifting" and Coping with COVID - Episode of The Cut

I'd like to share this recent episode of The Cut, titled "Get Out of Your Head," in which the producers discuss a variety of coping techniques they have used to deal with the incredible challenges of the past year. One of these techniques is called "reality shifting," and I was thrilled to see my former student, Alice Wilder, doing such great work in discussing this fascinating practice. My World Religions courses at UCCS are looking at New Religious Movements this week, so the timing is perfect. Alice and I touched base last year as she was working on this project, so I even get mentioned in the credits!
https://lnkd.in/eG2FReR

Link to UCCS talk, "Religious Diversity: The Promise and the Warning

Last night I had the privilege of participating in the UCCS Philosophy in the City series in a talk titled “Religious Diversity: The Promise and the Warning.” A recording of the event is available here. In our 90 minutes, we covered a wide range of topics pertaining to the history of religion in America. Enjoy!

Talk on Religious Diversity at UCCS - February 5, 2021

I am thrilled to announce that I am giving a talk on religious diversity as part of the University of Colorado Colorado Springs (UCCS) “Philosophy in the City” event series! On Friday, February 5th, 5:30-7pm MST.

Religious Diversity: The Promise and The Warning

Is embracing religious diversity the way towards a healthy and vibrant society? In the U.S., we have struggled to sincerely engage with diversity (religious or otherwise), and its cultural and political ramifications. In this discussion, Dr. D’Silva will explain the “promise and warning” of religious diversity using historical and contemporary examples. This live virtual event is free and open to all, and will take place on Friday, February 5th, 2021, 5:30-7pm MST. Please register to receive the livestream link. Part of the Philosophy in the City series, hosted by UCCS Philosophy. To register, please click here: https://www.cvent.com/d/2jqmmw

“Survey Says”: On the Value of Teaching Intro and Advanced Courses

For the past few years, most of my teaching has consisted of survey courses, specifically World Religions and World Mythology. I enjoy these courses. I enjoy working with students on what is usually the first time they are studying these subjects in an academic setting, and I get to walk with them as they begin to critically analyze religious traditions and other myth-making elements. That said, it is also very fulfilling when I have the opportunity to teach more specialized courses. For example, last year I taught an Islamic Philosophy course, which gave me the chance to teach thinkers like al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, al-Ghazali, and Suhrawardi. I also had the chance to work with students on more in-depth research papers, which I think is one of the most fulfilling aspects of teaching at the undergraduate level.

So far in 2021, it looks like I will get to teach Sufism, Qur’an, as well as a course on Yoga -- or is it yoga? This is one of many questions we will discuss during the course! I have taught units on each of these subjects at different times in the past few years, but this will be the first time teaching entire semester-length courses. So…lots to prep! But also, lots of excitement. When I’m teaching survey courses, I often feel that I’m just scratching the surface. In my World Religions course we have a unit on Islam, and our textbook mentions Sufism, but that’s nowhere near the amount of detail that I can go into without referring to notes. My dissertation involved a careful examination of Sufism as a discrete category and field of academic study, but how often to I get to flex those proverbial muscles?

This is actually the case for most of us teaching at the college level. We cover GenEd courses, which are necessarily at the introductory level. There is very little overlap with our dissertations, or with the research we develop upon completing graduate school. However, teaching survey courses is important work for many reasons.

First, more students will take an intro course than an advanced seminar. This means that the intro course is actually where we get to make the most significant interventions. If I teach one hundred students about the history of religion as a category (that is flows out of the European enlightenment, that is has a strong bias towards Protestantism, Euro-centrism, etc.), this actually does more in terms of promoting critical thinking on a societal level than my sitting down with ten students and doing a close reading of Rumi’s classic piece of Persian mystical poetry, the Masnavi. I have to be satisfied with spending part of one day in class (just part of one day, not even a whole day!) on a subject I could talk about for a whole year.

Second, in terms of how departments “earn” their funding: the more students you teach, the more the deans and other administrative folks approve of what you are doing. This is known as “credit hour production” (if you do a search for this term online, you will come up with lots of links to the institutional research offices at various campuses). This is because when you teach a large course, you “produce” more credit hours of instruction than when you teach a smaller course. That some students might sleep through lectures – and that this is quite difficult to do in a small seminar – is glossed over. On paper, the more students sign up for a course, the more education we are performing/producing. We can decry the rise of neoliberalism in higher education, but this is a nuts-and-bolts reality that governs how administrations hand out limited pieces of the financial pie at each institution. This is especially the case now as colleges and universities around the country look at pandemic-related drops in enrollment.

Thirdly, your students can point you in new directions! In a survey course, you are often the first person to introduce a particular concept or piece of content to students. You never know what that will spark. Someone might decide to travel to a place you mention in class, they might change their major, or they might make other life choices…all on the basis of what you assign in class, how you design (and execute!) your lectures, and much you do to excite them about the subject matter. Your intro students are learning this material for the first time, and that fresh perspective can yield amazingly innovative questions (and if new questions don’t excite you, then I’m not sure that academia is going to be your desired flavor of chai). Once during my grad school days, I was TA’ing our department’s survey course on Islam. We were discussing Qur’anic recitation, and a student asked me if there were theological connotations to the type of recitation style that a person performed, or even preferred. I was stumped. This is a field within Qur’anic Studies that I read about quite a bit, but I had never come across anything that fit with the student’s question. I forwarded the question to a listserve with at least 700 Islamic Studies scholars. My question turned into a thread with almost twenty posts and gave me ideas about a possible research project. All from teaching an intro course!

For all of these reasons, survey courses are critical, and I will always teach them. And when the opportunity presents itself to do something more focused, I will teach that as well. Doing both makes for a more fulfilling overall teaching experience and greatly informs my scholarship.

Lecture series through Pitkin County Senior Services

I am happy to announce that the first of several lectures introducing religious studies as a field, as well as talking about some different religious traditions, is now available online. Below are links to the Pitkin County Senior Services website (where you can browse through the different offerings), and then my “Intro to Religious Studies” lecture is available via YouTube.

In the coming weeks I will be completing general introductory lectures on Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, with one more specific lecture on Sufism. Lectures are all 30-45 minutes long, and include information on each tradition’s history, key institutions, rituals, holidays, and demographics. Each presentation also contains an “additional reading” section. The goal for each lecture is to provide an introductory presentation to a 101-level college course.

My colleague, Thomas DeZauche, is completing presentations on Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism, and indigenous traditions from North America. Once completed, these presentations will provide a nice survey for anyone interested in learning about religious traditions from around the world.

Enjoy!

https://www.pitkinseniors.com/virtual-events--activities.html  

https://youtu.be/HB23ioPrCSM

P.S. I will post to my website as more and more of the presentations become available online.

Teaching Through the Pandemic

In the past month teachers and students all over the world have made the transition from face-to-face to online learning. Of course, online learning has grown by leaps and bounds over the past few years, becoming much more common place than a “few” years ago when I was a college student. In my particular case, I am teaching four courses this semester – two sections of World Religions, one of Introduction to Philosophy, and then World Mythology. The first three were already online to begin with, so there were no changes to the format for me or my students. My mythology students, on the other hand, had to make a significant change to the way they were going to learn. The current situation with the global pandemic is truly unique, and I have worked to incorporate it within my teaching when appropriate.

For example, for my Intro to Philosophy course, I had prepared discussion prompts for the various philosophers we cover each week. I thought it would be relevant to ask my students to speculate on how people like Kant and Marx would have commented on our society’s response to the pandemic. Concerning personal freedom vs. collective responsibility, where does the “categorical imperative” take us when we look at stay-at-home orders and the ensuing protests? What kinds of evaluations can we make using a critique of the means of production and the inequitable suffering from the pandemic based on socio-economic class? The pandemic has been heartbreaking in so many ways, but I have to admit that for once I knew that my students would have some knowledge of an important event, and thus I felt comfortable asking for their opinion in an assignment. Similarly, when a colleague of mine put together a website cataloging how religious communities were responding to the pandemic, I shared this with my World Religions classes and asked them to comment. This didn’t produce much in terms of discussion on our weekly threads, but at least it is there for them to investigate, and I can plan on integrating it in my syllabus from the beginning of the semester next time around.

There are so many times where I want to make a connection between material I am covering in class and the students’ daily lives. After all, without an avenue to apply this knowledge and these critical thinking skills, what is it all for? To use a baseball analogy, sometimes I hit a virtual home run...while other times it is more of a foul ball, or even a straight up swing-and-a-miss. My friends and I talk about how our pop culture references suddenly don’t yield any response from the students, and then we have to think about other ways to make the same kind of point. Since I really want to engage with my students, I know that unless I meet them where they are – including in the realm of their popular culture references – that most of what I say will probably just pass by them. This is a lost opportunity. I have to strike a balance between playing to the ever increasing emphasis on the present cultural moment, and cultivating a more nuanced understanding of the past. Far more important than any content that I teach (well, except for my beloved Mughal dynasty - that they have to learn about!) are the skills that I aim to foster in my courses. Critical thinking, the ability to read, speak, and write with a bit more sensitivity, and encouraging them to question the world around them; this is the most important thing that I want for my students.

Origin Stories - Back at FRCC, 10 years later

This past week I started teaching a course titled “World Mythology” at Front Range Community College (FRCC) in Westminster, CO. This is a very exciting class for several reasons. First, much of my research centers on poking holes in the constructed categories that many of us (myself included) use day in and day out without too much thought. I am looking forward to lots of conversations with my students discussing how, where, and why we draw the line between myth and religion - especially where we see differences of opinion. Second, FRCC was the first place where I taught college-level courses. I had the good fortune of meeting two FRCC faculty members in a course on Islam that I taught through Naropa University’s Extended Studies program, and afterwards I was invited to teach Arabic at FRCC. That then turned into teaching Comparative Religions, History of Islamic Civilization, and a Humanities survey course. All that teaching experience was wonderful, especially as I was so young at the time! I still look back at those first few years teaching at FRCC and think about how much I learned working with those students. It was truly life changing, and convinced me that I wanted to work in education. That same teaching experience was also great for my resume, and helped me in applying for a full-time teaching job at CU-Boulder, and then going on for my PhD at UNC Chapel Hill. This past spring I showed up for “new faculty orientation,” and it was so much fun walking through the same hallways, running into so many folks I used to work with, and telling them the good news that I will be around again a couple days a week. Perhaps I can find an old FRCC faculty ID card and compare it with my new one…now THAT would be a great before/after comparison!

Studying Philosophy and Religion...all that different?

After completing three degrees in religious studies (BA, MTS, PHD), this year I find myself teaching in a philosophy department. In the particular case of UC Colorado Springs (UCCS), there is no formal religious studies program on campus, and the philosophy department is the place where the study of religion has found a proverbial home. After visiting campus for the first time a few weeks ago (see my earlier blog post) and meeting some of the philosophy faculty, I have to say I didn’t feel out of place at all. After all, the dividing line between these two disciplines is largely arbitrary, and can be traced to particular social and cultural histories in European and North American academies. Especially after attending Harvard Divinity School, which some forget is technically a seminary, I came to appreciate how many subjects philosophers and theologians have in common, and how religious studies as an academic discipline overlaps with both while also retaining some space of its own. At dinner with my colleagues, I was amazed at how many people told me about their love for teaching al-Kindi, al-Farabi, and Ibn Sina (the name I prefer to the Latin transliteration, Avicenna, but that’s a different blog post).

I developed a course called Islamic Philosophy for UCCS this semester, and will be teaching another course called Modern Islamic Philosophy in the fall. So far, the syllabus each course (one in progress and one under development) is not that different from a course I took at Harvard called…wait for it…”Islamic Philosophy and Theology.” Reading al-Kindi, al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, al-Ghazali, Ibn Rushd, Mulla Sadra, Sayyid Ahmed Khan, Muhammad `Abdu, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Said Qutb, and so forth in one department vs. another is not that different, especially at the undergraduate level. True, most of my students at UCCS have taken philosophy courses before, and have more familiarity with Aristotle than you would expect from the typical 21 year old in the United States, but almost none of them have read anything from Islamic intellectual history before, so that previous knowledge only serves them when the authors we cover in class address the Greek “classical” writers. The rest of the time, I have to explain everything else the same way I would when teaching this material in a religious studies department.

In terms of scholarship, my training and specialization is in studying texts, analyzing them in order to produce new insights — either because no one else has looked at the texts in question for a very long time, or because I seek to make an intervention in the current scholarly discourse surrounding the subjects that these texts address. So, studying Indian divination techniques known as “the science of the breath” (Persian: `ilm-i dam), brings up these challenging questions - how do we draw the boundaries between science, religion, and magic? How do those boundaries shift from one historical or cultural context to another? What happens when we take boundaries generated in a particular context and apply them to another without adjusting for different political and religious sensibilities? What role does colonization and Orientalism play in the way that knowledge from non-European cultures has been received, interpreted, and marginalized - especially over the past 300 years? These are all questions that I know I can pursue in cooperation with this band of philosophers with whom I now find myself joined.

In truth, after spending five years immersed in a religious studies program, it has been a breath (ha!) of fresh air to change gears. I’m reminded of my undergraduate institution, Macalester College (Go Scots!), where the Departments of Religious Studies and Philosophy shared the same floor in Old Main, and I was known to bother professors from either department if they left the door open…inviting me to stop by and ask questions. In addition to religious studies, I also majored in classics, and read some of these ancient philosophers in the original Greek.

This is all to say that in my experience, a scholar of religion teaching in a philosophy department is no “stranger in a strange land” situation. Instead, I think it is a real opportunity for growth. I get to talk to people who have spent a lot of time analyzing texts, but also considering other approaches to knowledge (embodiment and visual/material culture especially). We sit, we think, we ask questions. We want to know more, understand more, question more. Sounds like “love of wisdom” (philo-sophia) to me.

Redefining Presence...while Teaching Online

This past fall I started a new part-time teaching gig, teaching world religions and Islamic philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Colorado - Colorado Springs. The trick was that the semester started in August, while I was not going to move back to Colorado until October…sooooo, I started teaching online. I have taught online before, but that was in 2009, and I was curious to see different the experience would be.

Currently on my third online course at UCCS, I can say definitively that I am enjoying the experience, in large part because the students are very engaged. Just like traditional “brick and mortar” classes, there is always the possibility of a few students who are not very active in class and do not prepare. But the vast majority are clearly doing the work, and even going beyond the participation expectations that I have set for the course. As someone who continues to work at establishing a daily writing practice, sometimes I am amazed at how many words per day I produce through participating on discussion threads and correspondence with my students. Beyond typing constantly, I am also learning to take advantage of all of the wonderful audio/video features so that students hear my voice, see my face, and generally appreciate that they are working with a real life person on the other end of the screen. And still…it is just so different from standing in front of a lecture hall or sitting at a table in a seminar. Being in person, I pay attention to students’ body language, facial expressions, as well their questions and comments. Teaching online, there is a serious disembodiment factor that I think still merits quite a bit of attention.

I recently had the opportunity to visit UCCS for the first time to participate in the department’s external review process (see awesome mountain lion statue below!), and I was struck by how excited I was to tell my students that they could meet me in person. A colleague in the department lent me his office, so instead of meeting students over Skype or talking over the phone, I got to be present with them IRL, as the kids say. In these conversations, it struck me how much laughter there was in the room - using humor judiciously is a major part of my teaching style, and it is one of the things that I miss the most about being in a physical classroom. But perhaps there are other ways to approach this issue.

The first would be stop trying to make online teaching somehow equivalent to traditional teaching. So much of the technological innovations around audio and video are designed to make it easier to connect teachers and students in a way that mimics being together in person. These are wonderful adaptations, and I will continue to learn how to use them more effectively, but I also think that it is important to acknowledge that online education is a different realm. Especially for courses that are asynchronous, meaning that there is not a “live” connection where I am sitting at my computer at the same time as my students, there are incredible benefits in terms of flexible scheduling and increased access. When my schedule is disrupted by things like a child home sick from school, or an interminable trip to the DMV, I’m not that stressed because I know that I can log on and respond to my students at any time of day or night, and they can too.

I put in the effort to provide extensive feedback on assignments so that students know that I take their work seriously. I would do this in a traditional course, but with teaching online, this feedback is even more important because there are no other ways for me to connect with my students. There is no equivalent to a friendly wave when our paths cross on campus. There is no opportunity for chitchat about last night’s basketball game. Instead, I find that all of my interaction is very business oriented, dealing with course content, fielding questions about assignments, and doing all. that. grading.

Something I would like to learn more about is how this all feels from the student side. Given how busy undergraduates are, juggling school, multiple jobs, family commitments, and life’s daily grind - what do they think about online vs. traditional courses? Especially at schools where there is a mixture of the two, and there are often students taking both types of courses simultaneously. This is a question I’m going to pursue with my students this semester, and hopefully have some type of meaningful data to write about in May when the semester is over.

Perhaps the longer I teach exclusively online, the more normalized this will all become. I do have to admit, I don’t miss struggling to get ready for work, worrying if I have my power point saved to the right USB drive, finding parking in the morning, and finishing teaching only to remember that I didn’t have time to eat breakfast, and now I have to splurge at the campus food court to buy lunch when I’m trying to stick to a tight budget (grad student habits never die). Maybe I will start holding occasional class sessions on Second Life, so I can really see my students (albeit in the form of their digital avatars), or I will double-down on platforms like Web-Ex to do more live video conferencing. But maybe I will just accept that this is a different kettle of fish, and find a different way to tell all of the jokes I have built up over the years.