Literacy and Learning in Times of Crisis

Acknowledgments

In 2019, CUNY Central Offices invited scholars from across our urban public university to apply for the Faculty Fellowship Publication Program (FFPP). This program brought untenured faculty together to share work in preparation for publication. The editors (and some contributors) of this collection met as fellows of this group. We began the fellowship prior to pandemic shelter-in-place so we met face to face three times before shifting our final meetings to virtual Zoom sessions. If the initial physical meetings allowed us to review each other’s work and commune over lunch, our virtual meetings offered us some communion during some difficult moments of isolation. Regardless of our meeting modality, we realized we collaborated well and that we were working through a historical moment of teaching. Our collaborative writing labors and generative discussion during this period inspired this collection.

We all valued the importance of literacy (really literacies) and the impact of sound pedagogical approaches, even more pressing in times of crisis. After our work together, we wanted to capture the emergent labors of instructors and administrators during times of emergency. Of course, the immediacy of the novel Covid virus loomed over our thinking, yet we knew that multiple emergencies had influenced classrooms (or should have). Beyond the 2020 global health crisis, students had learned during wildfires, active shootings, terrorist threats, and systemic racism; teachers had innovated their normal teaching praxis to meet students’ needs in that particular moment of duress. When zones of proximal ←xi | xii→development occur under traumatic situations, instructors need to redesign the contact zones where they and their students meet. Emergent contact zones of proximal development demand pedagogical expertise, creative innovation, and sensitive compassion. Our contributors demonstrate all of those practices and we want to thank them (even when, sometimes, their institutions overlook what they bring to the educational table).

Introduction

In early February 2020, forewarnings of an infectious virus began to appear in U.S. news. By mid-March, epicenters of the disease began on both coasts, soon to spread nationwide. People quickly realized that isolated clusters of the virus could not be contained, so more concrete measures would need to be taken to mitigate the spread of Covid-19. For post-secondary institutions, these rising Covid-19 statistics coincided with the first quarter of their academic calendars, so university and college administrators needed to make decisions quickly about campus closings and conversion of courses to distance learning. Faculty adapted their course curricula to online modalities, and students scrambled to readjust their educational lives to meet burgeoning expectations that no one really had the time to consider carefully or critically. A menacing microscopic red-spiked ball would hover everywhere in our lives and, consequently, educators (at all levels) were lunged headlong into technological platforms that they perhaps avoided, pedagogical approaches that they had evaded, and senses of teacherly selves that they heretofore not explored or embraced.

The effects of COVID-19 were compounded and exacerbated by existing racial disparities in access to resources and discrimination, leading many to dub 2020 as the year of the “Dual Pandemic.” In tandem with the rise of COVID-19, anti-Asian discrimination burgeoned in the United States and abroad. As of August 18th 2021, AAPI has registered over 9,081 incidents of discrimination against Asians in the United States alone, many of which were amplified by ←1 | 2→the racist rhetoric of the Trump administration referring to COVID-19 virus as the “kung flu” and “China Virus.” In May and June, still in the early months of the Covid-19 crises, protests and resistance broke out in response to the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. The U.S. entered an explicit state of racial unrest, and countries across the world joined in protest against systemic racism and, particularly, against police violence toward Black Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC). As reported by the New York Times, Black Lives Matter protests occurred in nearly 550 locations with an estimated 15–26 million people participating in just the U.S. alone. Campaigns emerged for the removal of Confederate monuments and memorials, and calls for anti-racist education grew louder. Desperate times demanded desperate measures. Teachers and administrators responded with statements denouncing anti-Black racism and with resources and training on antiracist approaches to teaching. Contexts of teaching and learning took on paradigmatic shifts for which many of us felt unprepared. Still others avoided, put off, or ignored altogether making changes to their teaching in response to calls for antiracist approaches.

• How could the comparison of the teaching in varying catastrophic occurrences inform how we might respond to future events or to the return to our normal classroom contexts?←2 | 3→
• How can narratives (data-based or anecdotal) by teachers and students who have taught and learned during crises teach us about our comprehension about learning, about the power of literacy, about our resilience and compassion?
• What can instructors across the curricula teach us about the effect of disciplinary approaches upon teaching in crisis?
• What can students (or observations about students) teach us about the experience of learning during crisis?
• How are specific groups of students (e.g., racialized, immigrants, special education, commuter) affected by the effects and/or affects of emergency learning?
• What technologies during a crisis help or hinder acts of teaching and learning?
• What approaches to reading, writing, research, and critical thinking have teachers used as interventions in moments of crisis?
• What institutional support do teachers wish they had had during these educational moments of crisis?
• What institutional support do students need/desire during these educational moments of crisis?
• What does crisis do for our teaching strategies, our pedagogical knowledge(s), and our sense of teacherly worth?

Our contributors’ judicious responses to these questions resulted in them bringing pedagogical expertise, administrative know-how, and compassionate sensibilities to our inquiries about pedagogy during crises. They offer a variety of institutional contexts, a mix of historical dilemmas, a range of disciplinary perspectives, and a robust texture of voices and genres. As a result, Literacy and Learning in Times of Crisis: Emergent Teaching Through Emergencies offers its readers a broad contextual pedagogical consensus in which to compare their own teaching and learning experiences as well as the inspiration to tell and analyze their own stories of emerging teaching practices during less than conducive conditions. The contributors to Literacy and Learning in Times of Crisis offer insights from theoretical, historical, and pedagogical lenses and these insights emerge from their academic, scholarly, and personal experiences. If some authors have taught while battling COVID, others reconcile school-based violence. If some have taught the analysis of the discourse of crisis, others critique the missteps of policy-making during calamity. If some have looked at the finesse of micro-teaching at emotional levels, others find the means to develop macro-structures of programmatic curriculum. The authors of this collection offer a broad range of experiences, expertise, and engagement with pedagogy during emergencies that we currently face, but they also frame issues of emergencies that will inevitably ←3 | 4→challenge educators in the future. Literacy and Learning in Times of Crisis highlights some of the endeavors that educators have used to cope with the dilemmas that they and their students face at the turn of the millennium but also offers an archive of ideas and methods of essential educational first-responders that hopefully future teachers will call upon when and if needed.

While this collection may be among the first post-COVID-19 books dedicated to pedagogical approaches aimed at navigating crises, educators have previously explored teaching during emergencies. Scholars of writing studies and beyond have conducted studies and published personal accounts detailing site-specific responses to different national crises like 9/11, Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, and various mass shootings (Borrowman, 2012; Clinnin, 2020; DeBacher & Harris-Moore, 2016; Johnson et al., 2009; Marback, 2005; Murphy et al., 2005; Piano, 2014; Schlachte, 2020). Some have investigated more individualized and student-specific crises (Payne, 2000; Thompson, 2004), while others have outlined general practices for addressing crises and the traumas involved with experiencing them (De La Ysla, 2014; Hodges Hamilton, 2016). This research provides an important backdrop to the chapters of this collection.

More specifically, prior research on teaching during crisis shares two points of view that merit emphasizing here. First, when it comes to facing crises as teachers, it is not a matter of if but when. Rather than responding haphazardly to crisis situations after the fact, institutions must devote more resources to offer faculty pre-emptive training that will better prepare them to negotiate a diverse range of crises that will inevitably emerge. Second, we need the development and circulation of many more narrative and research accounts that help instructors better fully understand and respond to the nuances of different crises within and beyond their classrooms. This collection acknowledges and attempts to fulfill the pressing gravity of these two important convictions. We hope that the chapters will add to the growing research on teaching and learning during crises so that both teachers and their institutions have additional resources to draw on—ideally prior to being in the midst of another disaster when its immediate challenges make it difficult enough to prevail much less have the time, stability, and space to introspect about and experiment with unfamiliar pedagogical approaches.

Becoming acquainted with the complexities of emotional labor, trauma-informed pedagogy, and antiracist pedagogy, we believe, is integral to sufficiently preparing to teach during emergencies. Ample scholarship exists in writing studies that investigates the inextricable connection between our work and our emotions (e.g., Jacobs & Micciche, 2013; Micciche, 2007). In the recently published book, The Things We Carry: Strategies for Recognizing and Negotiating Emotional Labor in Writing Program Administration, several chapters use the framework of “emotional labor” to examine emergency teaching and how writing program administrators (WPAs) can support teachers during these difficult times (Wooten et al., 2020). ←4 | 5→In recounting her experience leading a writing program following the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas, Kaitlin Clinnin emphasizes the challenges facing WPAs who, during disasters, ultimately “function as programmatic crisis responders and perform unrecognized emotional labor in this role, often without the necessary training, compensation, and support to ensure their own mental and emotional safety” (p. 132). Offering a comparable perspective, Carl Schlachte shares his story as an adjunct instructor who felt programmatically unsupported during the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Schlachte draws on interviews with eleven faculty members to illustrate the importance of responding sensitively and emotionally to students (and instructors) during moments of crisis; his research also highlights the regret that in hindsight these teachers felt about their responses to students’ emotional needs in the aftermath of Sandy. Schlachte’s analysis reminds us that even when students are not directly affected by a given crisis, the underlying emotional impact influences their learning potentials. “A sensitive response to disaster,” he thus cautions, “requires a particular emotional response, not just a logistical one” (p. 150). Schlachte’s interviewees reveal that ignoring the disaster as well as students’ particular experiences with it problematically evades our emotional and moral responsibilities to their well-being, while, furthermore, forcing premature disclosure may risk traumatizing students even more. The contributors to Literacy and Learning in Times of Crisis expand and amplify this already existing scholarship.

Research on trauma-based pedagogy is likewise crucial for preparing teachers to teach effectively and ethically during emergencies. Students and educators alike may experience retraumatization when engaging with curricula that pertains to painful experiences they endured and/or continue to endure during crises (Carello & Butler, 2014). To avoid retraumatization and approach pedagogy in ways that honors the humanity and dignity of victims of traumas as well as those who are learning about them, Rachel Spear (2014) suggests that educators move away from course objectives that center on trauma and towards discussions that (r)evolve around healing. Spear urges educators to engage in a “wounded healer pedagogy,” which highlights an interconnectedness of learners, and encourages individual and communal healing. Contributors to this collection aptly illustrate how they attuned to students’ difficult circumstances with compassion and responsibility, and also created opportunities for the healing of crisis-induced trauma.

Last, we highlight the importance of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and antiracist pedagogy as necessary foundations for responding to crises in and through our teaching. Anti-racist pedagogy, informed by CRT, grounds curricula and discussions in analyses of structural racism, power relations, and social justice. Such an approach to teaching and learning acknowledges intersectional identities and amplifies the voices of BIPOC communities (Kishimoto, 2018). Readers of this edited collection will find numerous examples of how anti-racist pedagogy can ←5 | 6→be used during emergencies to foster students’ critical analytical skills and self-reflexivity, encourage students to consider how institutional racism differentially shapes individuals during crises, and structure classroom environments that aid students in working through crises productively.

Furthermore, critical pedagogy could be a useful tool through which educators can approach what Deborah Britzman calls “difficult knowledge” during a time of crisis and beyond (1998). Drawing upon a Freudian psychoanalytic framework, ←6 | 7→Britzman coined difficult knowledge as comprising affective and epistemological challenges in teaching and learning about/from social and historical traumas. When learners encounter difficult knowledge from traumatic events, they can experience a breakdown in meaning, an internal crisis, and resistance to knowing that which implicates them in the systemic violence. Many employ a range of psychic defenses to shield themselves from becoming un-done by others’ difficult stories. Racial violence and systemic racism amplified by the pandemic forced educators, staff, and students to grapple with difficult knowledge pertaining to crises in a variety of ways.

Teachers’ thoughtful and critical responses to crises—and to the roles of literacy and learning during crises—are far from new. Throughout history and across numerous geographic regions, dedicated educators have repeatedly met the challenges of natural disaster, health crisis, social inequities, and economic austerity. For example, the AIDS virus compelled activist ventures into safe-sex education, Katrina forced teachers to learn how to regroup students after displacement, school shootings have repeatedly called on teachers to find methods of healing ←7 | 8→their students, racial injustice has demanded that we, as educators embodying different positionalities, address generative discomforts, and now this pandemic has nudged us out of the face-to-face classroom and into the virtual one. But the current crises, especially the pandemic, affects us all in unprecedented ways. As Paul Reville (2020), the Francis Keppel Professor of Practice of Educational Policy and Administration at Harvard Graduate School of Education, states:

We’ve certainly had school closures in particular jurisdictions after a natural disaster, like in New Orleans after the hurricane. But on this scale? No, certainly not in my lifetime. There were substantial closings in many places during the 1918 Spanish Flu, some as long as four months, but not as widespread as those we’re seeing today. We’re in uncharted territory. (https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/04/the-pandemics-impact-on-education/)

These crises vs. education situations exemplify only a few of the scholarly inquiries into teaching in a state of emergency. And, as in any exploratory endeavor, the uncharted foists people into the undiscovered, the uncomfortable, and the unresolved. If in uncharted waters lie dragons, in uncharted educational odysseys lie problematic histories, contentious ideologies, and unresolved policy-decisions; dire conditions have brought these issues to the explicit surface. Front and center of those larger issues treads frequently floundering students who need reliable educators to buoy them, never more so than in the midst of an emergency.

In these situations and with an assured (yet sometimes critically skeptical) belief in the value of education, instructors have addressed these challenges and constraints with critical and dispositional labor, manifesting in the forms of creativity, flexibility, and innovation, frequently under extreme conditions, sometimes with or without the support of institutional policies, and always with our students’ potentials and expectations at the forefront of our thinking. Students also have fulfilled their end of the pedagogical bargain, taking agency in their own educational plights and pursuits. In fact, as we know, students, especially those at the margins, have historically organized, built coalitions, and protested for change (Kynard, 2013; McBeth, 2019). This collection strives to honor both sides of these pedagogical endeavors under duress and to analyze when, where, why, and how these classroom leaders resolved teaching and learning problems under less than conducive conditions.

In our normal everyday university proceedings of planning and policy making, literacy educators have often remained unheeded by the powers-that-be; their expertise in teaching has often remained overlooked as superfluous to the workings of the university. However, the panic of the viral onslaught often made professionals of literacy and pedagogy an institution’s go-to experts and, therefore, advisors who could assist less adept professors into the imposed urgency of virtual teaching. These current emergencies have placed us in contact zones that we may ←8 | 9→have never imagined, and these exigent predicaments compel us into zones of proximal development for which we may be unprepared. Teaching, learning, and an awareness of our educational limitations become even more important as we navigate the ins and outs, the contours and trajectories of emergency. As scholars who have constantly revisited the importance of literacy and its discourse-making role, these teachers/scholars of literacy and pedagogy suddenly surfaced as primary resources in the pandemic learning curve of less pedagogically-inclined colleagues. Pedagogy under contagious circumstances suddenly had resurgent and emergent importance under emergency. Our contributors—through their scholarship, critical insights, and experiential reflections—make those pedagogical interventions so pellucidly vital to our current mission.