Name, Rank, and Student ID Number

Back when I was in high school, in the late 1990s and early 2000s - i.e., in the olden days of yore - high school teachers all told us the same thing:

"In University, your professors don't care about you - you are just a number to them."

Ask anyone who went to high school around that time, and they'll nod their head in agreement. Funny (well, not really) thing is, you talk to kids who are in high school today in 2023, and they are still hearing the same message loud and clear - once you reach college or university you are nothing but a student ID number to your instructors. You cease to become a person.

Here's the thing. That never bothered me as a student. I knew I'd go from a class size of 30 to 300 - how could you expect the professor to learn everyone's names? It just didn't seem feasible to me in the first place. I never had the mindset that I needed my professors and instructors to actually care about me - their job was to teach me. MY job as a human is to care about me and do the things I need to do to be successful. In case you haven't deduced this yet - I'm a bit of an odd duck.

Twenty years later and I'm on the other side of the podium. I'm the instructor in front of a class of a couple hundred students - and you know what? I care. I care about them and their well-being, and who they are as a person. This notion that students are nothing but a string of X digits is complete poppycock! Also, what a great word that is just not used enough (at least not here in Canada anyway).

Furthermore, in my current position working in educational development & instructional design, I work with faculty, staff, instructors, and graduate students, and guess what - they all care about their students too! There is a large focus on how to support students from a course and instructional design mindset. In consultations, I talk a lot about Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and how this can help students AND can help instructors as well. We talk about "slip days" as a way for students to be able to hand in an assignment a bit past the deadline without penalty, and without having to send their instructor an email the length of War and Peace explaining why they need an extension. Furthermore, sometimes those emails mean that students feel like they are required to disclose highly personal information in order to be granted an extension. They don't want to have to send them, and many instructors feel bad that the student feels that they need to disclose sometimes highly sensitive information. Slip days as an instructional method helps everyone all-round. This is just one example of ways that college and university instructors are, albeit subtly, supporting and caring for their students.

So, can we stop this pervasive narrative that those working in tertiary education don't care? To students - you aren't just a number. You are a person, and we want you do develop and thrive - as a person.

Image Source: Public Domain Pictures - Free Stock Photos

Where Have All the Students Gone?

I don't know what it's like where you are, but on university campuses in southwestern Ontario, the students are missing from our classrooms. Furthermore, WE AS INSTRUCTORS are missing them from our classrooms. This is something I am hearing from instructors across campus - where have all the students gone? It prompts me to think of the 1997 song by Paula Cole "Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?" Aside from the title, the song lyrics bear no similarity to the case of the missing students, but the brain makes interesting neural connections. And, it's a good song.

September of 2022 marked "The Great Return" to normal, or at least "more normal" college and university experiences here in Canada, with the majority of courses returning to in-person teaching. After almost 2 full years of online teaching and social distancing, the buzz and excitement around returning to normal for the Fall 2022 term was at an all-time high.

Of course, the Great Return was not without its challenges. We knew there would be challenges and that we would have to remain flexible and adaptable to the working environment and the needs of our students. I am not, however, sure that we anticipated the extreme lack of presence of students in the classroom as one of them. Where did they go? Or, to be more correct (yes, I said more correct), why are they not here in the first place? This current term, Winter 2023 (Jan-April) seems to be particularly impacted, with the campus and classrooms barren of students.

In order to maintain aspects of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and flexibility in their courses, many instructors kept some forms of hybrid teaching; they live stream their lectures, they record their lectures to post later, they have posted narrated PowerPoints that were created in the pandemic. All to help students who had to miss a class due to illness or some other life event (because let's face it - life happens). We also know that there is a major housing shortage in the region (well, in most places in Ontario really) so many students have remained living at home and commuting to campus; sometimes on a bus-ride that can be 2-3 hours one way. Being mindful of these challenges faced by students is yet another reason why instructors are recording lectures. I love it when instructors keep student wellness in mind!

That said, many instructors also chose NOT to utilize any of these methods for the fear that students would not come to class. Maybe they were onto something as this fear has come to fruition. So how do we force them to come? What is the carrot that we can dangle on the stick? Participation marks? In-person assignments and assessments? Sure, these work, but they kind of feel like bribery, don't they? Not that I am completely opposed to this - but I do question why we have to / should we have to "force" adults to attend classes in person. A colleague teaches M/W/F morning at 0830 hrs and live streams their lectures. By the end of the term, the majority of students have not attended class in-person but rather have "attend" lecture by setting their alarms for 0825 hrs, turning on their computer while still in bed, watching the lecture, and then going back to sleep. Handy = 1, Good Learning Environment = 0.

It might sound arrogant, but I generally like to think of myself as the carrot. Or at least I hope I'm the carrot. I put a lot of time, care, consideration, and effort into designing my course, lessons, and active learning activities. I aim to educate and (somewhat) entertain. This is when another pop culture reference comes to mind: Russell Crowe in Gladiator when he walks around the Colosseum saying, "ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED?!!!!!" The audience would be the students, and they are all giving me the thumbs up. Well, they would, if they were actually there. Many instructors are hitting a breaking point - they are so disheartened and demoralized by students not showing up. Why am I putting in all of this effort for students who don't care to benefit from it?

How do we encourage students to value the in-classroom environment as a more ideal place for learning? How do we encourage them to see the value of making social connections in the classroom with their peers and their instructor? Get them to value the active learning activities that were designed for them? I think many of us have ideas and have been implementing different strategies, but we are still not getting the student buy-in.

I think many of us are hoping that this is a residual effect of the pandemic which will hopefully undergo its own natural restoration and our students will return to our classroom spaces and interact with us, their peers, and the content. Right now it appears it will be a waiting game, and we'll have to wait and see what happens over the 2023-2024 academic year. Keep me posted.

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The Value of Vague

"Hey Google. What should I do with my life?" If only the decision-making process was that simple.

This semester (January - April 2023), I am teaching a course called HEALTH 100: Foundations of a Healthy Lifestyle. It is a service course, meaning that I have students from all faculties (arts, engineering, environment, health, math, and science) and I have students from 1st - 4th year of study. One of the learning objectives of this course is for students to be able to critically appraise information and their own health. How do I get them to do this? Through reflective writing. Which they are unfamiliar with, and do not like. To my students I say: "You're welcome."

In the planning phase for this course, I considered ways to best support student success on this major assessment component. I could provide links to critical and reflective writing resources. I could verbally provide an example of how to connect information. But do I provide an exemplar? This was designed to be a scaffolded assignment, so should I scaffold the grade weighting? I ultimately decided the best way to support them was to not support them (in a sense) and let them figure it out on their own.

I told my students at the beginning of the term that many would struggle with the reflective writing assignments since critical reflective writing would be new to them - and that is OK! That is why we have 4 of them (worth 10% each). After they received feedback and marks on the first one, many students were frustrated. Some mentioned that they would have liked an exemplar. I took the opportunity to be transparent with my students and explain why the assignments are set up the way they are. First, if I provide an exemplar, what do you as the student do? They all agreed that they work to the example. Right. So, does that really help us to develop our critical reflective writing skills? No, not really - the class reluctantly agreed.

I also shared with students my thought process on how I determined the weighting of each assignment. I considered weighting assignments 1-4 at 5, 10, 15 and 20% respectively. This way, the earlier ones where we are still learning to reflect critically are worth less of our grade. BUT, then you as the student are more likely to view the later ones as "more important." Or that the content we are reflecting on as more important. This is not the case. Okay, so that is out. What if I drop the lowest of the 4 assignments? I could even say that as long as all 4 are submitted, I'll drop the lowest one. Great. But what do busy students do? The class agreed they would probably put low effort into one of them as they wouldn't care because it would be dropped. Since I value the purpose of the assignments and more importantly, I want YOU, the students to value the purpose of the assignments, what am I left with? As far as my brain can compute, equal weighting of all assignments.

I tried to impress upon my students the "value of vague." In this life, we will be faced with complex problems that are large, vague in nature, and un-Google-able.

Here's the example we worked our way through in one of our lectures:

"You are a graduating student and you and your partner have been together for 2 years. You have been applying to jobs and your partner has been applying to master's programs. You received job offers in Hamilton Ontario, Toronto Ontario, Halifax Nova Scotia, and Sydney Australia (you applied on a whim to that one).

Holy smokes Batman, how do we decide which job to accept? The points of consideration that we came up with as a class are below:

Salary	Livability of the city	Permanent vs. Contract Position
Benefits Package	Housing Availability	Perceived Job Satisfaction
Pension Plan	Housing Affordability	Commute Time
Relocation Funding Support	Transportation options in the city	Workplace Culture
Proximity to Family & Friends	City Recreation: sports, concerts, trails, restaurants, gyms, etc.	Company Reputation
Vacation Time	Parental Leave	Sick Leave

But wait, you haven't even factored in your BAE (before anyone else) yet! What if the only master's program they were accepted to was in Halifax, NS, and that employment position is really the last one you would choose to accept? What decisions do each of you make regarding your education, employment, and relationship status? I hate to break it to you but Google, Alexa, Siri, and ChatGPT can't give you an answer. Trust me - I've tried! See below:

While I personally believe in the value of vague as a means to teach students to think analytically, thoughtfully, critically, and creatively, I'm not sure they were really buying what I was selling. Being transparent with students is a large component of my philosophy towards teaching and education. I'm happy to continue to encourage students to value the process of learning over their GPA, but I'm not sure I've fully figured out how to do this. Maybe this is an area of vagueness that college and university instructors must value, and further explore themselves, in order to continue to help our students navigate this mindset.

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