Challenges and Opportunities for Community Colleges in a New Normal
The students we saw in our classrooms in 2019 will not return to our classrooms in the fall of 2021 or the spring of 2022, or ever. The global pandemic and the protest summer of 2020 have changed people permanently. Both the pandemic and the racial reckoning related to the…
New Resources for Post-Pandemic Teachers and Learners
One of the most profound shifts in higher education that was illuminated by COVID-19 in 2020 was the challenge the pandemic posed to (re)envisioning the pedagogical frameworks and practices employed to structure education in the classroom. Pandemic pedagogy, a term that is increasingly employed to describe the phenomenon at the…
Meeting the Movement: A Glimpse of a New Future
As the COVID 19 pandemic stretched across the globe during the summer of 2020, the necessity of social distancing and isolation hit Performance Studies hard. Perhaps no other subset of the Communication discipline is more dependent on people sharing space together than Performance Studies. Performance Studies retains a genealogical connection…
Revisiting the LOCs – Do They Stand Up in the New Normal?
When asked to write an article about NCA’s Learning Outcomes in Communication (LOCs) and if I believed they would stand up in the new normal, my initial answer was yes, of course. After all, I had participated in the development of the LOCs. This multi-year, multi-phase project was some of…
It’s Not Me, It’s Zoom – A conversation analyst reflects on remote synchronous teaching and learning.
Nothing has made me appreciate being in a classroom with students more than not being in a classroom with them. What’s so special about being physically together? Why does being together online feel so different? Trying to teach while surrounded by our families (who are also trying to teach, learn,…
Addressing Classroom Communication post Covid-19: Challenges and Changes
March 2020 brought about rapid change and disruption in higher education that left many teachers scrambling to move their face-to-face courses to the online environment. Some of us were suddenly faced with teaching Communication courses such as Basic Public Speaking, Communication Research Methods, and Group Communication online, via web conferencing…
What Is the Plan? Communication Challenges in K-12 Education During the Pandemic
Just a little over a year ago, elementary and secondary education teachers and students were beginning a new year and a new semester, energized from their break and ready to conquer the traditions of a spring semester that would include field trips, standardized tests, and graduation. Unfortunately, COVID-19 had different…
Mental Health in Academia During the COVID Pandemic
The Spring of 2020 was a period of stress and uncertainty for most humans. Staff, faculty, and students in higher education were no exception. Colleges and universities across the United States were forced to act (sometimes swiftly, sometimes with extreme reluctance) as on-ground, face-to-face coursework and advising became untenable. With…