High Impact Teaching in the Age of the Pandemic

Abstract

Pre-registration required

Limited to 40 people

With the sudden onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, U.S. colleges and universities were confronted with an emergency that none were prepared for. As schools shuttered their classrooms, much of the burden of transitioning to online instruction and aiding students through that process fell on the shoulders of contingent faculty. With large teaching loads and often minimal institutional support, contingent faculty devised novel digital instructional methods, found their own resources and support, and informally counseled their students as they grappled with unprecedented events. Amid these difficulties emerged pedagogical experiments and experiences that extend way beyond the traditional classroom. As historians, they also confronted the emergency and the simultaneous movement for racial justice as an opportunity to teach about a historical moment while living in it. This teaching panel seeks to advance conversations about the ways the repercussions of COVID-19 and our institutions’ policy decisions enable or inhibit contingent faculty’s capacity to preserve teaching excellence We will discuss pedagogy, tools, resources, and challenges as well as the need for self-organization, both in traditional and in new frameworks, in light of massive budget deficits, which will impinge greatly upon contingent faculty. The long-term effects of this moment for our students, our classes, our disciplines, our institutions, and our jobs remain unknown; with this panel, we aim to discern the opportunities and dangers before us.

Chair: Lance C. Thurner, Rutgers Newark
Lance Turner specializes in the history of the Americas and hosts the podcast . He takes a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene. 

Presenter: Janine Giordano Drake, Indiana University
Janine Giordano Drake, Clinical Assistant Professor works primarily with Indiana University’s dual enrollment program in US History, including ongoing graduate and professional education for high school teachers.  The pandemic put her in the position of developing emergency lesson plans, and forums, for high school teachers struggling to do college teaching online during the pandemic. 

Presenter: Marc Kagan, City University of New York, Graduate Center
Mark Kagan is a Ph.D. Candidate in U.S. History at the CUNY Graduate Center. He has taught in various roles in the CUNY system, after many years as a union activist, transport worker, and High School teacher.

Presenter: Eric Schuster, City Colleges of Chicago
Eric Schuster has worked as a program manager for public history projects and as a part time history instructor at community colleges in the Chicago area since 1998. His focus is U.S. social history and history of technology.

Presenter: Rosa Squillacote, Hunter College, CUNY
Rosa Squillacote Adjunct Assistant Professor, Dept. of Political Science, Hunter College, CUNY. Rosa Squillacote teaches courses on gender and the law and is a leader in CUNY’s Professional staff Council, the Union of academic employees at CUNY.