Introduction

In Fall 2021, I taught Monday evenings, walking around each week on a very quiet campus.  I remember returning to my office for the first time in 18 months.  My Spring 2020 course card was still on the door, as were those for my officemates.  Everything was eerily as I had left it.  Books I hadn’t seen in almost two years sat on their shelves.  Piles of papers I left that day in March expecting to be back in two weeks (tops!) were sitting there on my desk.  I felt teary.  Here I was, back again after so long. I had changed since I last locked that door, and now I was filled with conflicting emotions.  My co-editor Elizabeth had a similar experience returning, as I imagine so many of you have done as well.  We still have a long way to go to get back to what we were before the pandemic.  And perhaps, with the lessons we learned during Covid, we should never go back to exactly the way things were before.

This issue of the Inquirer considers some of the lessons from these last years.  What did we learn about ourselves, our students, our communities, our institution?  We begin with a study of 1,205 BMCC students conducted during Fall 2021 by the BMCC Academic Assessment Committee.  The study considers student challenges to learning during academic year 2020-2021. Categories for investigation within the study include comparisons of student learning in-person, synchronously and asynchronously, and students’ experiences with tutoring and other college services.  The committee’s work puts into specific focus what challenges our  students have, such as their need to balance work and family life with their classes, as well as issues they face around technological connectivity.  The study goes on to correlate the ways individual students answered the questions in order to see specifically how the challenges in one area affect a specific student in other parts of their experience at BMCC.  At the end of the discussion, the committee lays out specific recommendations for faculty, staff and administration to improve learning for BMCC students post-pandemic era.

Next, C Ray Borck, Peter Consenstein, Adele Kudish, Rifat Salam and Kristina Varade reflect on their experiences as individuals and educators.  This section provides personal reflections on how the experience of the pandemic has shaped us each individually.  C Ray Borck beautifully holds sociological training with deep feeling about the pandemic.  Where are we? Where are we going? What can we count on?  These questions guide his reflection:  “I don’t think the new normal will resemble the old normal. I suspect that the ability to recuperate past normals—and rely on the certainty that there are dependable and durable immediate futures—is extremely socially stratified.”

Next, Peter Consenstein reflects on those early days as we met our students online.  He talks of the stark contrast he felt between his own circumstances and those of his students, but also of the camaraderie built during those early days. “We learned together while our city lost 800 people a day.  It was obviously not too much to bear, because we all bore it,” he writes.

Adele Kudish and Kristina Varade both were outside the U.S. as Covid hit in March 2020, Adele in Paris and Kristina in Dublin.  They write about what it was like to be so far away from family and home, about the difference in responses to Covid where they were and here and what lessons they bring forward with them returning to back to the U.S.

This section of the issue wraps up with Rifat Salam’s reflection on resilience and compassion, heroic striving and ambiguous grief.  She calls for 360 degrees of compassion.  Most of us have compassion for our students, but Rifat reminds us to turn that compassion back on ourselves as well:  “While we were told to offer (and genuinely felt) compassion for our students, we gave and were given very little to ourselves.”

Christopher Aviles, Maria de Vasconcelos and Boyda Johnstone follow this section as they consider community building, so important especially now as we rebuild.  Christopher begins with a review of theories about community building and describes the ways he has applied these concepts in his Early Education classes as a way to be and teach “anti-racist educators by providing opportunities for exposure to diverse classrooms.”

Maria de Vasconcelos follows with a discussion of civic pedagogy to describe her narrative, dialogic approach to teaching, apropos Simone de Beauvoir, Paulo Freire, Gloria Anzaldúa and bell hooks.  Her aim is to bring a humanism into her classrooms “often stolen from our students by the ideological advocates of neoliberalism pretending that their political is our personal instead of vice versa.”

Boyda describes a “collaborative learning experience” between her BMCC Introduction to Shakespeare class and a class at Ashoka University just outside New Delhi, India during Fall 2021. The classes came together to read and respond to The Tempest, and Boyda concludes the cultural exchange and the process pushed “students to produce meaning horizontally while mastering understanding of the source text and engaging in such higher-order thinking as analysis and critical reflection, moving from a perception of knowledge as static and rote to dynamic and contingent.”

Sam Sloves considers our political and social moment by asking questions about what Casablanca and Birth of a Nation can tell us.  Sam shows us the eerie similarity between the narratives and aftermath of these two movies to events of Trump’s America and the culture wars, from fake news to mainstream treatment and acknowledgement of race.  Sam tells us, “It is uncanny the way films’ relationship to history maps onto our present day, almost like… well, almost like a sequel.”

Following Sam’s consideration of history’s prequal as told through film, former Inquirer editor Page Delano writes of ways she has used Art Spiegelman’s Maus to challenge what students know about the history of World War II and the Holocaust specifically—and how the use of Maus disrupts and complicates the narrative they have constructed around these events.  She writes:

In my general encounters [with students], they knew Hitler was bad, but they had NO idea how he came to power.  The history of anti-Semitism was out of the reach of many….And, if they knew anything about the Holocaust, they thought it happened at Auschwitz.  The extensive network of killing camps, the overwhelming power of industrial murder, the Nazi methods of rumors, deceit, manipulation, were not readily evident….Spiegelman’s complex narrative gives a wide berth for looking at this terrible moment in history, and the burdens a child bears in living with the traumatized.

Next, Robin Isserles bookends the conversations taking place between the pieces in this issue of the Inquirer.  In this excerpt from her new book The Costs of Completion: Student Success in Community College (Johns Hopkins UP 2021), it is as if she is responding to the specific concerns raised in the first essay from the Faculty Senate Assessment Committee.  Robin considers the context of community college completion crisis, thinking through the policies and research funding driving our relationship to students on an institutional level.  She writes, “Perhaps the most important [contradiction in the ways we have come to conceive [the completion crisis] is that as higher education has become more accessible to more and more ‘non-traditional’ students, public funding for higher education has waned, becoming more restrictive and unleashing a host of casualties that have not only contributed to the slower progression toward degree completion, but more importantly demeaning how we think about student success.”  She goes on to consider how policies designed around austerity, accountability and completion have shaped the present-day community college experience, and she considers the alternatives to such policies.

Recommendations raised by the Faculty Senate Assessment Committee report are concerns similar to those brought up in our next essay by Cheryl Comeau-Kirschner.  She writes of a survey she conducted with Writing Center Directors where she asked for a wish list.  What could be done in a writing center with unlimited institutional support?  What could we offer students if writing center directors could make up a wish list?

The final essay is a description of an NSF-funded grant headed by WHO by BMCC project leaders Younes Benkarroum, Elizabeth Wissinger & Mohammad Azhar. The study brought together students from CIS 101 and BUS 104 students to help “bridge the gap” between STEM courses and non-STEM courses in their use of Computational Thinking (CT).  The piece describes the goals, outcomes and reflections about ways all disciplines can incorporate activities to help their students use CT problem-solving techniques (breaking problems down into separate parts (decomposition), looking for similarities or common differences (pattern recognition), filtering out information that is not necessary to solve the problems (abstraction), and developing step-by-step instructions for solving problems (algorithms)) that will help students in their careers and daily life.

As we head into the 2022-2023, we hope these essays can be inspiration and guide.  May we use the knowledge gained through the cracks opened by the pandemic to serve our students and care for ourselves and families.

Holly Messitt (English) and Elizabeth Wissinger (Social Science), Eds.

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