In Fall 2021, I taught Monday evenings, walking around each week on a very quiet campus.\u00a0 I remember returning to my office for the first time in 18 months.\u00a0 My Spring 2020 course card was still on the door, as were those for my officemates.\u00a0 Everything was eerily as I had left it.\u00a0 Books I hadn\u2019t seen in almost two years sat on their shelves.\u00a0 Piles of papers I left that day in March expecting to be back in two weeks (tops!) were sitting there on my desk.\u00a0 I felt teary.\u00a0 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. \u00a0My co-editor Elizabeth had a similar experience returning, as I imagine so many of you have done as well. \u00a0We still have a long way to go to get back to what we were before the pandemic.\u00a0 And perhaps, with the lessons we learned during Covid, we should never go back to exactly the way things were before.<\/p>\n
This issue of the Inquirer<\/em> considers some of the lessons from these last years.\u00a0 What did we learn about ourselves, our students, our communities, our institution?\u00a0 We begin with a study of 1,205 BMCC students conducted during Fall 2021 by the BMCC Academic Assessment Committee.\u00a0 The study considers student challenges to learning during academic year 2020-2021.\u00a0Categories for investigation within the study include comparisons of student learning in-person, synchronously and asynchronously, and students\u2019 experiences with tutoring and other college services.\u00a0 The committee\u2019s work puts into specific focus what challenges our \u00a0students have, such as their need to balance work and family life with their classes, as well as issues they face around technological connectivity.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n Next, C Ray Borck, Peter Consenstein, Adele Kudish, Rifat Salam and Kristina Varade reflect on their experiences as individuals and educators.\u00a0 This section provides personal reflections on how the experience of the pandemic has shaped us each individually.\u00a0 C Ray Borck beautifully holds sociological training with deep feeling about the pandemic.\u00a0 Where are we? Where are we going? What can we count on?\u00a0 These questions guide his reflection:\u00a0 \u201cI don\u2019t think the new normal will resemble the old normal. I suspect that the ability to recuperate past normals\u2014and rely on the certainty that there are dependable and durable immediate futures\u2014is extremely socially stratified.\u201d<\/p>\n Next, Peter Consenstein reflects on those early days as we met our students online.\u00a0 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. \u201cWe learned together while our city lost 800 people a day.\u00a0 It was obviously not too much to bear, because we all bore it,\u201d he writes.<\/p>\n Adele Kudish and Kristina Varade both were outside the U.S. as Covid hit in March 2020, Adele in Paris and Kristina in Dublin.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n This section of the issue wraps up with Rifat Salam\u2019s reflection on resilience and compassion, heroic striving and ambiguous grief.\u00a0 She calls for 360 degrees of compassion.\u00a0 Most of us have compassion for our students, but Rifat reminds us to turn that compassion back on ourselves as well:\u00a0 \u201cWhile we were told to offer (and genuinely felt) compassion for our students, we gave and were given very little to ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n Christopher Aviles, Maria de Vasconcelos and Boyda Johnstone follow this section as they consider community building, so important especially now as we rebuild.\u00a0 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 \u201canti-racist educators by providing opportunities for exposure to diverse classrooms.\u201d<\/p>\n 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 Anzald\u00faa and bell hooks.\u00a0 Her aim is to bring a humanism into her classrooms \u201coften stolen from our students by the ideological advocates of neoliberalism pretending that their political is our personal instead of vice versa.\u201d<\/p>\n Boyda describes a \u201ccollaborative learning experience\u201d 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<\/em>, and Boyda concludes the cultural exchange and the process pushed \u201cstudents 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Sam Sloves considers our political and social moment by asking questions about what Casablanca<\/em> and Birth of a Nation<\/em> can tell us.\u00a0 Sam shows us the eerie similarity between the narratives and aftermath of these two movies to events of Trump\u2019s America and the culture wars, from fake news to mainstream treatment and acknowledgement of race.\u00a0 Sam tells us, \u201cIt is uncanny the way films’ relationship to history maps onto\u202four present day,\u202falmost like… well, almost like a sequel.\u201d<\/p>\n Following Sam\u2019s consideration of history\u2019s prequal as told through film, former Inquirer<\/em> editor Page Delano writes of ways she has used Art Spiegelman\u2019s Maus<\/em> to challenge what students know about the history of World War II and the Holocaust specifically\u2014and how the use of Maus<\/em> disrupts and complicates the narrative they have constructed around these events.\u00a0 She writes:<\/p>\n In my general encounters [with students], they knew Hitler was bad, but they had NO idea how he came to power.\u00a0 The history of anti-Semitism was out of the reach of many\u2026.And, if they knew anything about the Holocaust, they thought it happened at Auschwitz.\u00a0 The extensive network of killing camps, the overwhelming power of industrial murder, the Nazi methods of rumors, deceit, manipulation, were not readily evident\u2026.Spiegelman\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Next, Robin Isserles bookends the conversations taking place between the pieces in this issue of the Inquirer<\/em>.\u00a0 In this excerpt from her new book The Costs of Completion: Student Success in Community College<\/em> (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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 She writes, \u201cPerhaps 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 \u2018non-traditional\u2019 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.\u201d\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n Recommendations raised by the Faculty Senate Assessment Committee report are concerns similar to those brought up in our next essay by Cheryl Comeau-Kirschner.\u00a0 She writes of a survey she conducted with Writing Center Directors where she asked for a wish list.\u00a0 What could be done in a writing center with unlimited institutional support?\u00a0 What could we offer students if writing center directors could make up a wish list?<\/p>\n 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 \u201cbridge the gap\u201d between STEM courses and non-STEM courses in their use of Computational Thinking (CT).\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n As we head into the 2022-2023, we hope these essays can be inspiration and guide.\u00a0 May we use the knowledge gained through the cracks opened by the pandemic to serve our students and care for ourselves and families.<\/p>\n \n Holly Messitt (English) and Elizabeth Wissinger (Social Science), Eds.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Holly Messitt (English) and Elizabeth Wissinger (Social Sciences), Editors<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3579,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"portfolio_post_id":0,"portfolio_citation":"","portfolio_annotation":"","openlab_post_visibility":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"post_folder":[],"coauthors":[12],"class_list":{"0":"post-637","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"czr-hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/inquirer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/637","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/inquirer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/inquirer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/inquirer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3579"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/inquirer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=637"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/inquirer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/637\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1225,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/inquirer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/637\/revisions\/1225"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/inquirer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=637"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/inquirer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=637"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/inquirer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=637"},{"taxonomy":"post_folder","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/inquirer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post_folder?post=637"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/inquirer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=637"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n