This article is reprinted, with author and publication permission, from September/October 2022 issue of The Criminologist. 

I wasn’t sure anyone would show up. My students had worked for six weeks to prepare a pop-up exhibit event showcasing their archival research projects on Georgia’s carceral history. In groups of four or five, my 44 students in Criminal Punishment & Society at the University of Georgia (UGA) prepared eight exhibits that told multi-layered stories of incarceration, convict leasing, probation/parole, fines and fees, boot camps, and life on death row spanning the late 19th to the early 21st centuries. The students worked in collaboration with university archivists to cull through multiple collections housed at the UGA Special Collections Library. They located and interpreted archival documents and objects, including media, and carefully crafted overview and caption texts to help visitors engage with big questions about how and why people have been punished by Georgia’s carceral state. During our final exam period for spring semester 2022 we set up our tables, put out our signage in the hallway of the UGA Special Collections Library, and crossed our fingers that at least some of the friends, colleagues, and community members we’d invited would come.

And they did. About 30 minutes into our event I scanned the room and smiled. I saw my students interacting enthusiastically with diverse members of our university and local communities. Guests included faculty and students, of course, but also the former head of our local public defender’s office, our county’s current district attorney, a former probation officer from New York, a friend of mine who spend 25 years locked up in Georgia prisons, and many others, including local activists involved in bail reform efforts and death penalty abolition. One attendee was delighted to see that an exhibit featured a letter he’d written decades ago as part of criminal justice reform efforts in southwest Georgia. My students left their final exam period feeling accomplished and wowed by the conversations they’d had about their work and guests’ real-world experience with their topics. All told, it was one of the most fulfilling teaching experiences of my career. In this article, I describe and reflect on my initial experiences implementing archives-based learning in undergraduate courses focused on criminal justice topics.

What is archives-based learning?

I designed this course after participating in UGA’s Special Collections Library Faculty Fellows Program that provides instructors with supported exploration of archives-based learning as a high impact learning practice. As a fellow, I collaborated with UGA archivists with the aim of including an archives-focused approach to the pedagogy and course design of a new or existing course. The program builds on the work of TeachArchives.org, a resource born of a three-year partnership between archivists and faculty in Brooklyn, New York to pioneer an approach to teaching in the archives. There are many models for incorporating archival materials into the classroom, including one-time encounters and semester-long engagement. Teaching with the archives includes directed, hands-on activities based on specific learning objectives, thoughtful selection of documents/objects, and small group activities. It is considered a high-impact educational practice because it teaches research skills, creates a common intellectual experience, and requires collaboration.

My approach to archives-based learning in two courses

So far, I’ve implemented archives-based learning in two of my courses: Juvenile Delinquency and Criminal Punishment and Society. Both are upper-division undergraduate elective courses, largely comprised of sociology and criminal justice majors. In Juvenile Delinquency, we visited the Special Collections Library twice during the semester, once near the beginning of the term and once later on. In the first encounter, students were assigned to groups and examined sets of archival documents and media clips that relate to the early juvenile court in Georgia from 1908 to the 1950s. Example documents included one of 100 original copies of a 1908 bill to establish juvenile courts in Georgia and a 1939 report describing subsequent reforms. I drew media clips largely from newsreel footage from the 1950s, including judges discussing juvenile court practices, youth sharing their experiences in juvenile training schools, and parents encouraging more community involvement in preventing delinquency. For the second visit, I curated several sets of documents and media clips from the “get tough” era of the 1980s and 1990s. Topics included boot camps touted by Georgia Governor Zell Miller in the 1990s, a movement to raise the age for the death penalty in Georgia to 18, and the 1998 settlement agreement between the state of Georgia and the Department of Justice to address suboptimal conditions in Georgia’s Youth Development Centers. Example media clips for the second visit included a segment of a documentary on boot camps and a two-part investigation by an Atlanta news station about Youth Development Centers. To assess students’ learning, I assigned reflection essays following each encounter that prompted students to articulate connections between the archival materials they worked with and course content (e.g., readings, class discussions, etc.). For Criminal Punishment and Society I used a much more intensive model. For the final six weeks of the semester, I moved all class meetings to the UGA Special Collections Library. I curated eight sets of archival documents, objects, and media clips that related to Georgia’s carceral history from the late 19th to early 21st century. Students were assigned to groups of four or five to work together on creating a pop-up exhibit. Unlike the two-encounter model I used for Juvenile Delinquency, students were required to search for additional archival materials beyond those that I provided. Students were guided by archivists in searching the archives as well writing captions and overview text for their exhibits. To chronicle and reflect on their learning throughout the project, students were responsible for writing blog posts describing their work as it unfolded over the six weeks. Their efforts culminated in the popup exhibit event that I described in the introduction to this article. Regardless of the model, implementing archives-based learning requires a great deal of preparatory work. From my experience, the process of locating, evaluating, and selecting archival materials for each course required many hours in the archives reading room. I enjoyed the research process a great deal, yet in both cases it took more time that I had anticipated. Of course, now that I’ve done this work once it will be far easier to implement future iterations of these courses with little additional time on the front-end. It’s also important to prepare students for encountering difficult language and topics in archival materials, especially in courses related to crime and criminal justice. For example, students in my courses regularly grappled with offensive language pertaining to race and sexual identity. I not only gave “trigger warnings,” but also provided space for students to take breaks or to discuss their reactions to offensive material in class, individually with me or one of the archivists, and in their writing, depending on how they felt most comfortable.

Impact on student learning and community engagement

Themes from my students’ reflection essays in both courses mirror findings from evaluations of the TeachingArchives.org project: working hands-on with the archives can be “revelatory,” working in small groups generates camaraderie, and intensive interaction with archival materials makes course content more relevant. Students in my courses remarked on how the visceral experience of touching archival objects and documents, as well as hearing and seeing first-hand accounts in archival media clips, brought course concepts to life for them in powerful ways. Students expressed that working with primary sources allowed them to apply course material to the real life events and people that generated the documents, objects, and clips they handled. Students also indicated that engaging with archival materials helped them understand and contemplate the historical context of our present moment more fully, especially in comprehending how policies related to criminal punishment and juvenile justice are developed, implemented, critiqued, and experienced by real people over time. Most notably, students in my Criminal Punishment and Society course indicated that working so intensively in small groups to create their exhibits helped them appreciate the value of group work for the first time. More than one student remarked that this course was the best group project experience they have had in college. Multiple students expressed that they made real friendships in their groups; for some this was the first time they had made friends through a college course. Many students stated that the small group work helped them consider others’ points of view on the same material and appreciate the benefits of learning with and from their peers.

Closing thoughts

My experiences in implementing archives-based learning have been fulfilling and I highly recommend this approach. It is timeintensive on the front-end, but there are a variety of formats that can fit just about any course, from one-time events to full semester engagement. TeachArchives.org is a wonderful resource with example exercises that can be adapted. Students have overwhelmingly endorsed it as a highly impactful learning experience. And, as our public pop-up exhibit event showed, archives-based learning can engage the broader campus and community in vital conversations about our shared past, present, and possibilities for change.

About the Author

Sarah Shannon’s research focuses on systems of criminal punishment and their effects on social life. Her interdisciplinary research has been published in top journals in several fields including sociology, criminology, public health, social work, and geography.

Sarah is also an award-winning teacher, having received recognition for excellence in undergraduate instruction, research mentoring, creative teaching, and service-learning. She proudly facilitates UGA’s first-ever Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program course in partnership with the Clarke County Jail.

As a publicly engaged scholar, Sarah’s research has been cited in several high profile media outlets including The New York Times, The Economist,  and the Washington Post. Prior to her graduate work, Sarah worked in the non-profit sector. As a result, she cares about doing research that matters for academics, policy makers, and ordinary citizens.

From Whence We Came

At some point, we realized that a classroom could be an interactive environment for learning, and that students should be more centered. We could still lay out our learning objectives and share from our content expertise, but the classroom itself would be their place to shine, not ours. Our time and efforts shifted from preparing our lectures to strategizing lesson plans that would engage students in working towards those learning outcomes. In a way, we were drawing the maps but they were driving the cars.

The importance of this student-centered approach to teaching became more apparent with research on trauma and trauma-informed classrooms. We realized that trauma affected students’ brains and their very DNA. We needed to not further traumatize students who were taking our classes, and we needed to remove racial violence from our curriculum, an essential consideration beyond the scope of this piece but hopefully something you are already mindful of. 

For example, avoid teaching about race differences through a deficits-only model that makes students of color experience trauma so that white students can experience learning. One common case of this in the classroom is the so-called “privilege walk” exercise, which typically leaves students physically sorted, with those who have darker complexion literally at the back of the room when you are done. That exercise is likely traumatic to Black students and other students of color, who already know they will end up in the back, and do not appreciate their bodies being used to model that disadvantage yet again so that white students can learn something that day which they have lived their whole lives. There are other class exercises, beyond the scope of this article, that should be revised and reviewed. The bottom line on this? We must remove racial violence from the curriculum and minimize the extent to which we further traumatize our students.

Trauma-informed teaching places relationships at the center of our job as educators. There are several frameworks and sets of principles on how to do this.

• Perry, Bruce D. 2009. “Examining Child Maltreatment Through a Neurodevelopmental Lens: Clinical Applications of the Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics.” Journal of Loss and Trauma 12:240–255.
• Walkley, Meg and Cox, Tory L. 2013. “Building Trauma-Informed Schools and Communities.” Children & Schools 35(2):123–126.
• Australian Childhood Foundation. 2010. “Making SPACE for Learning: Trauma Informed Practice in Schools.”

The Multiplying Connections Model (Perry 2009; Walkley and Cox 2013) says that school has five tasks: stay “Calm,” be “Attuned” and “Present” while remaining “Predictable” as possible in an otherwise unpredictable world, and basically “Don’t let students’ emotions determine your own. Their acronym is CAPPD.

The Australian Childhood Foundation’s model (2010) has SPACE as an acronym, which summarizes their take on the five basic principles of trauma-informed classrooms. Their approach includes a lot of practical suggestions, such as, “Provide impromptu fun experiences which are not defined as a reward” because playfulness is a resource for students experiencing trauma.

The popular “Compassionate Teaching” model (Wolpow et al. 2009) offers thorough overviews on building trauma-informed learning environments.

Researchers at Boston University (Atallah et al 2019) have published findings that support the benefits of trauma-informed learning environments, welcoming and inclusive classroom environments, in which educators attend to students’ social and emotional needs, led to improved academic outcomes.

• Atallah, Devin, Koslouski, Jessica, Perkins, Kesha N., Marsico, Christine, and Porche, Michelle. 2019. “An Evaluation of the Trauma and Learning Policy Initiative’s (TLPI) Inquiry‐Based Process: Year Three.” BU Wheelock College of Education & Human Development.

Where We Are Now

And now here we are in the present, and our classrooms have a decidedly uncertain future. Some faculty are going with face-to-face (F2F) instruction. Some are teaching synchronously online or asynchronously-only; others are trying to offer or a bit of each. Some educators are teaching “HyFlex” which means they are going to be doing every single option simultaneously.

And through whatever medium one is teaching, something essential might be lost. We are planning, and getting training on how to lecture in this time. In doing this we risk reverting to that era in which we would talk and they would write down what we say.

Take a step back outside of the classroom and scan the globe for a moment. Perhaps now more than ever, we recognize the presence of racial trauma, poverty trauma, and natural disaster (pandemic) trauma. Now, as much as ever, our classrooms must be trauma-informed spaces that are student-centered.

We do not need to reinvent this wheel. We just need to remember that it’s a really important wheel, and keep it in the forefront of our planning. Since we all have been traumatized to some extent by recent events, acknowledging that burdens are not equally shared in our society, our hearts should naturally go in this direction anyway, towards creating trauma-informed classrooms, wherever and whatever those classrooms may look like.

How to be trauma-informed

It is not a quick and easy thing to be trauma-informed. Trauma is an experience, which means that it is a response to a situation or event, not the situation or event itself. Not all students experience an event or situation the same, because students have different resources and baseline stressors to begin with, and therefore trauma differs among them. Having a trauma-informed classroom is thus about listening and centering the actual students you have in your classroom. It is about communication, trust, and relationships, which means you will have to build and maintain this as you go.

Here are some broad, trauma-informed teaching strategies that should work across disciplines, drawn in part from the following references.

• Carello, Janice and Butler, Lisa D. 2014. “Potentially Perilous Pedagogies: Teaching Trauma is Not the Same as Trauma-Informed Teaching.” Journal of Trauma & Dissociation 15(2):153–168.
• Downey, Laurel. 2013. “Calmer Classrooms: A Guide to Working With Traumatised Children.” Melbourne, Victoria, Australia: State of Victoria, Child Safety Commissioner, & Queensland, Australia: State of Queensland, Department of Education, Training and Employment.
• Wolpow, Ray, Johnson, Mona M., Hertel, Ron, and Kincaid, Susan O. 2009. “The Heart of Learning and Teaching: Compassion, Resiliency, and Academic Success.” Olympia: Washington State Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) Compassionate Schools.

Strategy #1: Empower your students

Empowerment is an ongoing process through which those who do not have an equal allocation of resources gain increasing access to resources. In the classroom, you can offer choices to students about how they will participate and meet learning objectives. By handing over some controls, you can help students feel like not everything in their life is out of their control. This can be very motivating for students, helping them beyond your class.

Strategy #2: Check in with students

Make it a ground rule in your classroom that students’ emotional safety is important to you. And it should be, because it is necessary for learning. Pay attention to your students so that you will notice when something is different, and then reach out. You cannot know what is going on in any student’s mind or life, but you know what you observe, and so that is what you share. For example, you might say, “I noticed that you were late this week, and you are not usually late.” If that does not lead to an explanation, follow it with, “How are you?” This lets your students know that they are not invisible and that they matter, which can help them beyond your class.

Strategy #3: Avoid idealizing trauma in your content

Avoid idealizing trauma narratives in subject content. Make sure your lecture content does not romanticize trauma. What this does is that it skips the healing process, showing only the end points of the tragic event and the triumphant survivorship. This can serve to inhibit coping and healing for students, who need more freedom to express real lived experiences and pain, as appropriate and if it is related to your course content.

Strategy #4: Identify social supports

Make sure you are aware of institutional peer supports and mentor supports available to your students, and how to connect students to these resources. If possible, be a conduit of mentoring connections yourself. I keep in touch with former students for the sole purpose of connecting them with current students, a practice I highly recommend. Few things are as useful to a current student struggling as an outreach from a former student, now ten years out and living the dream the current student hopes to reach. I find that former students welcome the chance to support current students in this way, even during a pandemic. If you have never done this before, you could begin by reaching out to a few former students now and asking if they would be willing to communicate with a current student who has similar career aspirations. In my experience, I have never had one decline this invitation, and it can be a form of meaningful social support for your current students in need, a connection that, after you make it, does not involve you.

In the last few months, higher education institutions have faced the challenge of moving in-person coursework to various online platforms in response to COVID-19. During this unprecedented time, a graduate level course at the University of Minnesota called “Teaching Sociology” launched a project to evaluate how instructors were handling the transition. The graduate students administered a survey to the Sociology department’s instructors and teaching assistants and issued a final report highlighting broad trends and making recommendations for the department to consider as the crisis continues and planning for the fall begins. Given how widespread these issues and challenges are, we thought it might be useful to share some of those ideas here on TSP, with particular focus on the experience of teaching assistants.

The survey found that, much like their instructors, nearly all TAs experienced an increased workload with the transition online. This increased workload was due to both technological learning curves and increased overall time demands. In addition to the extra emails, students expected TAs to respond more quickly and have increased availability outside of already extended office hours. Yet perhaps most salient is the proportion of TAs who noted an increase in emotional labor. TA’s provided anecdotes of dealing with students’ panic and anxiety over the rapid transition online and students’ upheaval in their personal lives. They also reported being on the end of increased student frustration and emotional outburst. In a more extreme case, one TA noted that they had received aggressive emails from students, but many more reported students’ frustrations being communicated directly.Much like their instructors, nearly all TAs experienced an increased workload with the transition online due to both technological learning curves and increased overall time demands.

While the survey was meant to provide reflections on the rapid transition to online teaching, the findings suggest some important considerations regarding the roles of and challenges faced by teaching assistants during unsettled times. Borrowing from the literature on workplace harassment, we find that individuals in low- to mid-level supervisory positions, such as TAships, often experience such challenges in their roles.

TA weekly hours worked pre- and during COVID, Spring 2020 

The literature on workplace harassment suggests that, unfortunately, backlash against low and mid-level supervisors is not uncommon. Although many would view the authority of a supervisor as providing a protective measure from harassment, research suggests that it provokes backlash from subordinates. As a result, workers in supervisory roles are more likely to experience harassment, and that likelihood increases even more if they are female. 

In contrast, in the United States, people in higher supervisory positions such as an executive or department head are less likely to experience sexual harassment. Given that women in low- or mid-level supervisory positions are often on career tracks for these higher level positions, it is somewhat surprising that they are the most likely to experience workplace harassment.

While this literature focuses on women and sexual harassment in the workplace, these frameworks are useful for understanding the harassment faced by others in low-level supervisory positions, such as TAships. TAs may receive more “blowback” from undergraduates who hesitate to make demands or express frustration with professors, and this backlash is likely to fall more heavily on TAs who are women and/or people of color.

Because TAs often have a lot of responsibility but relatively little power, our findings suggest that instructors consider the following recommendations: 

1. In designing remote courses, reconsider assignments and expectations for students and TAs. This may require giving TAs ample time to deal with technological challenges, as well as additional training in how to provide tech support to students.
2. Both instructors and TAs reported a significant increase in extensions and accommodations. Consider creating a shared document so that TAs may better manage a range of deadlines and accommodations.
3. Establish and reinforce norms and expectations for respectful communications with students throughout the semester. 
4. Recognize and discuss responsibilities around emotional labor. Discuss which student comments or emails should go directly to the instructor and which should be handled by the TA.
5. Put explicit email and office response hours in the syllabus to help manage and bound TA work hours.

Works Cited

Olle Folke, Johanna Rickne, Seiki Tanaka, and Yasuka Tateishi. 2020. “Sexual Harassment of Women Leaders.” Daedalus 149(1): 180-197. 

Heather McLaughlin, Christopher Uggen, and Amy Blackstone. 2012. “Sexual Harassment, workplace Authority, and the Paradox of Power.” American Sociological Review 77(4):1-23.

This article originally appeared on The Conversation on May 14, 2020 and has been republished under a Creative Commons license.

At Troy University in Alabama, students went online to help a county with a high infant mortality rate in the state of Georgia to analyze health disparities and develop solutions.

At Cornell University, where I teach, law students are providing legal services online to death-row inmates in Tanzania and children and young farmworkers in upstate New York.

At five state universities in the U.S. heartland, students are helping Michigan towns create government websites.

These are all examples of “e-service learning” – that is, service learning that takes place online. Service learning refers to a wide range of student experiences meant to help a community organization, local government or business.

I am an education researcher and – along with my colleague Yue Li – I am investigating the best ways to engage students in e-service learning, both here in the U.S. and around the world.

Even though colleges and universities have shut down their campuses due to COVID-19, e-service learning shows how college students can still do their volunteerism in the virtual world. Students need not be physically present to help support local government, local nonprofits and vulnerable individuals like farmworkers, all of whom have a greater need for the help of volunteers due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Vast benefits

Service learning is not meant only to help community organizations, governmental agencies and businesses. It’s also meant to advance the student’s individual academic goals.

A key part of service learning is for students to reflect on the service they actually do and how whatever they are studying – whether it be health, law or the environment – relates to the real world. Reflection also helps students clarify their personal values and gain a sense of civic responsibility.

Better outcomes

Compared to peers who didn’t do service learning in college, graduates who did participate in service learning report higher levels of civic-mindedness. That is to say, they are more likely to work with others to achieve public goals.

For community organizations, the benefits of having college students help
with their work are vast. Students can offer companionship for elderly clients, become role models for high school students or simply serve as an extra hand to tackle a nonprofit’s back-burner project.

Research applied

Through e-service learning, communities can gain access to the latest university research. For instance, residents of Gracias Lempira, Honduras, and Rohne Village, India, used engineering research to build electricity-free water purification systems. And in Louisville, Kentucky, students from several universities created models to help residents decide where to plant trees to cut down on air pollution.

Each partnership has unique benefits. For instance, an official at an international climate action group – Team 54 Project International – remarked on how a Cornell University student played a key role in gathering information for a tree-planting guide. The guide will be used to help plant trees in Serbia that are suited for the region. The guide will also serve as a template for similar tree-planting projects around the world.

Is virtual the same?

Can students still have a meaningful service learning experience in cyberspace?

A study of business marketing students shows that students who engaged in online service learning gained the same skills, such as the ability to work well with others and understand cultural and racial differences, as those who worked alongside their partners in person.

Back in 2013, some university scholars predicted that online technologies would disrupt in-person university teaching as it was known, including service learning.

What I have found is instead of disrupting in-person teaching, e-service learning has enhanced it. It does this by offering opportunities for any student and any nonprofit with an internet connection to form a partnership on short notice. E-service learning has also added new opportunities for busy students to help NGOs overseas, U.S. nonprofits and local governments in other states. Students help with everything from disaster planning to food waste and hunger issues.

Ever since colleges and universities have been forced to move their instruction online due to COVID-19, critics have worried about whether or not they’re doing a good job. But as schools continue to teach online for the summer and possibly even the fall, similar attention should also be paid – in my view – to how well they are engaging students in service learning online.

Especially with employees working from home due to social distancing, e-service learning may prove itself as one of the most effective ways to prepare students to solve the kinds of problems they will encounter once they start their careers.

[Like what you’ve read? Want more? Sign up for The Conversation’s daily newsletter.]

Marianne E. Krasny, Professor of Environmental Education and Civic Ecology, Cornell University

Are you exhausted? Zoomed out? As we say in critical incident stress management (CISM), “You are having a normal response to an abnormal situation.” This reflection is considering the faculty or administrator perspective on our current interpersonal reality. The student perspective is a separate writeup.

How could you have attended the same number of meetings in Normal World B.C. (Before COVID-19) and your schedule wasn’t nearly this exhausting? This is a matter that potentially affects only those of us privileged enough to be able to do at least two things: (1) continue doing our paid jobs, and yet (2) stay home and safe. For those of us in this virtual boat, many are realizing how attending the same number of meetings as in a usual week is way way way more exhausting when they happen via a video conferencing platform such as Zoom. There are many reasons, and here are three:

1. Perceptual mismatch

When you’re in a meeting, like back when we did that sort of thing together in the same space, you’d get a “read of the room.” It’s in our nature to do this. You’d scan the room, passively attending to details like, how are people feeling? What’s the mood or the vibe here today? Do folks seem to be on the same page? This is natural. In a video conference though? You are trying to read 25 rooms. You are. It’s in your nature. And you’re trying to do this while, ironically, ignoring the room you are literally in. That is not how perception works, which is the process through which we attach meaning to our sensory input in order to understand the social world. You’re trying to read all the rooms up on that screen, while ignoring the sensory information coming at you from within the room in which you are physically located, and that’s before you even engage with anybody. Speaking of the rest of the people:

2. Interpersonal intensity

When you’re in a room in Normal World B.C., you are not trying to maintain continuous eye contact with 25 people for an hour. In person, you can be in a group in shared space, completely engaged, attentive and present, and you’re still not maintaining eye contact with every single person at the same time. In a video conference, even looking down at a relevant piece of paper can be perceived as you checking out, no longer actively listening, or some other indicator assumed to be a lack of effort. 

3. High vulnerability and intimacy

While reading all the rooms and ignoring your own, and doing your best to maintain eye contact with everyone in a group continuously, you are also letting people read YOUR room. Your room right now is probably inside or outside the place you presently call home. That’s a level of vulnerability and intimacy greater than you signed up for when you began in this position, right? You didn’t plan on letting these people into your living room or your bedroom.

There’s Science Behind This!

The psychological and mental health effects of shifting nearly all of our interpersonal interactions into video conferencing is yet unstudied. What I’ve written in this piece is based on what we know to date about how the brain does its job. 

For more information on the perceptual burden you might be experiencing, look first at the process of “unconscious inference” known as perception itself. As we take in sensory information, through the process of sensation, our brain has to work with that input to produce something for us to understand and to which we then respond, through the process of perception. Reading 25 rooms while ignoring the sensory input from the very room you are in, makes this entire meaning-making process inherently more complex and likely burdensome. This is a traditional, bottom-up explanation of perception. 

• Brascamp, Jan, Philipp Sterzer, Randolph Blake, and Tomas Knapen. 2018. “Multistable Perception and the Role of the Frontoparietal Cortex in Perceptual Inference.” Annual Review of Psychology, 69:77-103.

Another perspective on perception is one of top-down processing, which “occurs when people’s expectations, emotions, and bodies affect how they see the world” (Reiner, 2019:267). This explanation is one of embodied perception, considering sensation and perception as not linear and not separate from our physical selves. 

• Riener, Cedar. 2019. “Approaches and Debates on Top-Down Perceptual Processing.” Teaching of Psychology, 46(3):267–272.

Whether you view processing as top-down or bottom up, you will find explanations of your present state of exhaustion. Then recognize that making eye contact is one of the earliest forms of social communication we learn in our lives. This primal social role is made more central when we’re in video conferences that make most other social communication harder to gauge. We might feel the need to maintain eye contact more than what we would normally do, given this restriction of the medium, and this would likely contribute to our cumulative exhaustion.

• Mansour, Hassan, and Gustav Kuhn 2019. “Studying ‘natural’ Eye Movements in an ‘Unnatural’ Social Environment: The Influence of Social Activity, Framing, and Sub-clinical Traits on Gaze Aversion.” Journal of Experimental Psychology, 72(8):1913-1925.

What else?

Of course, there are more than three reasons why you might be feeling exhausted. The runners up include blurring of boundaries that can lead to you working well into the evenings and weekends when you never did that before. You might not be the cause of those boundaries blurring – especially when your boss expects you to respond at all hours, but you might find that you need to draw a line more firmly around your off time. You’re also suddenly some kind of movie producer to some extent, which probably isn’t within your skillset, so that’s tiring as you try to excel at something you’ve possibly never even planned to try. And none of this even considers the exhaustion and psychache we all are feeling to varying degrees as we interpret the current global pandemic, with concerns for the future of society and worry for the people we love within it. How could you not be exhausted right now?

If you are reading this and you have any authority in this world, please cut folks some slack. If your organization can continue to be fully functional online? Cool. If you’re a boss, shorten the meetings. If you are an educator, lean towards fewer assignments and lessened demands. Shorten the meetings and classes. The exhaustion you are feeling makes sense, and it is universal. Please take care of junior faculty, graduate students, and the support staff whom you are probably realizing are working more than they should be.

In this unprecedented time of suddenly teaching courses online that were designed to be taught on campus, and as we look ahead to the upcoming semester, we are now solidly in the realm of online teaching and learning. Neither you nor your students signed up for this. No matter what you chose to do early on in the response to COVID-19, what are you going to do looking ahead? What have you learned that can help you decide? Are you going to teach synchronously or asynchronously? What’s better for your students? What’s better for you? 

Teaching synchronously involves holding “live” sessions that generally allow interactions in real time. Teaching asynchronously means you are probably producing little movies of what you wish you could be teaching in the in-person classroom environment where we all thought our classes would be taking place, and you upload these little movies for students to view on their own schedule. Acknowledging that there are strongly-held beliefs about the superiority of the method on each side of this debate, let’s walk through the key strengths and drawbacks of each option.

What’s so great about teaching synchronously?

This category of online learning allows students to see and interact with one another and with you, to give and receive real-time feedback on their ideas, to brainstorm and collaborate with peers, to ask questions of you as a lesson is being shared, and to be reminded that we are community members, separated physically but not in spirit. With real solidarity, synchronous classes can remind all of us that we are not alone even as we negotiate our changed landscape amidst the novelty that is physical isolation.

You can be creative in nurturing a sense of community in your synchronous classroom. You are a team, on a shared mission. You are in this together. Making eye contact and having conversations at your regularly scheduled class times is priceless as a preventative measure for mental health outcomes, and for increasing engagement with the course materials. Whether students are in your class to complete requirements of a major, or to earn elective credits or specialty skills and knowledge, in the synchronous online classroom you can readily help students remember why they registered for your course to begin with, which can be very grounding. 

So the benefits of teaching “live” include improved communication efficiency and clarity, increased sense of community, fostering solidarity with and among your students who might deeply value the peer support and shared experience of being together for your class. 

What is good about teaching asynchronously?

The most popular reason for choosing this option for your teaching is flexibility regarding when work is done. You can make your little lecture movies whenever you have the time and space to do so, recognizing that your own obligations have likely increased for now as well, so this flexibility can be invaluable. Also, of course, your students can watch those recordings at their convenience. Students’ life circumstances have likely changed. They did not plan to be where they physically are right now while they are completing your course. They might be sharing technology and not have unlimited access to it. They might be across the globe in an incompatible time zone. They might not want to let you and their entire class into the space where they are living right now. This unprecedented social intimacy may have unknown effects on their emotional well-being, and an asynchronous class lets them receive lecture information without that intimate reciprocity of audio and/or video from the place that’s currently home to them.

Asynchronous classes have pedagogical benefits too. They allow students to literally “pause” your class when they are confused or need a break, something only possible in their dreams for in-person and synchronous online classes, which go at a pace not set by them at all. Also, the technology requirements to take in an asynchronous class are lower, and this is therefore more accessible to more students. Watching or downloading a video can happen on the most basic internet-capable devices. Asynchronous lectures can even be mailed on DVDs, or transcribed and printed out with captioned graphics as needed. They can also be closed captioned for accessibility. 

What have you learned so far teaching under these conditions?

You need to set up mental scales of your own, to weigh out and determine what really matters to you, and what is best for you and for your students. I’ve spoken with many individual faculty members at several universities while consulting on this topic, and in every conversation, we’ve decided the best option is to offer some combination of both synchronous and asynchronous offerings in a class. This is not necessarily ideal or superior. It’s just one way of trying to maximize the benefits of both options, while using each to cover the shortcomings in the other. Perhaps thinking through this example will help you refine your own plan as we look ahead to more of this sort of course design, of teaching classes online that were slated to have taken place in person.

An example of “doing both”

Suppose you were scheduled to teach your class twice a week, Mondays and Wednesdays, 10:00 am – 11:15 am local time. For this example, you can now meet synchronously (live) Mondays and Wednesdays at 10 am local time, for about 30 minutes. Keep it briefer to minimize the fatigue that results from too much continuous video conferencing, for them and for you. After revisiting your course’s learning objectives and determining what’s most essential, cover the associated lecture topics live, interactively. Remain, or reclaim if you’ve steered apart, the community that you were before everything shifted online. Invite your students to your live classes assuring them of both your accompaniment and your realization that they likely have new burdens and expectations. Use some simple measure of classroom participation (i.e. three short questions that you introduce throughout the 30 minute class, and that can be answered typing on a smart phone); offer them some various live office hours each week, and teach your class. Give them whatever is most important for your course.

What about those students who cannot make it to the live classes? There are valid reasons. If at all possible, do not expect them to share the reason with you. Asking them to justify why they cannot attend your class online, when they had not planned to be an online student right now, is a bit unfair. Trust your students when they say they cannot make it to your synchronous class. Their reasons may include time zone difference, lack of technology, no free space in their home, no quiet space, less time to be a student because of shifted family responsibilities such as caregiving, etc. Some are working jobs to make up for parents’ lost wages now. Some are homeless because student housing was their solution for where to live right now. For students who have never had an online class before, they might have anxiety about how it all works. There are many reasons why one might not be present for synchronous classes.

The solution for them is simple. Record those 30 minute live classes, and make them available to those who cannot attend at the regularly scheduled class time. Make sure they can complete the same simple measure of classroom participation in a way that is no more or less taxing whether one is live or one is watching the video later. Make sure you follow FERPA regulations and basic copyright laws for recordings, and that you only make public your own face and your own thoughts. You can also restrict access to these videos with passwords, time-limits and other means depending on your platform. Check with your institution for these details. 

Which option is better for you and your students?

That is the question we have answered on the fly, and may be reconsidering as we look ahead to plan future semesters, and only you can answer. I am in favor of the “doing both” option as in the example above. I have had the most success with, as have faculty I’ve helped figure some things out. As the saying goes, your mileage may vary. No matter the option you go with, do your best to be truly present with your students, and to let them see that, either as they make eye contact with you themselves, or otherwise when they see you offering your accompaniment as they view the recording later. If you are choosing to go strictly asynchronous, do what you can to connect with your students and to allow them to share the experience of your class with one another. One pro tip: Talk to the camera, not to your screen, to convey eye contact. It is worth practicing this skill.

You are probably doing great. If possible, consider synchronous classes such as in the example, with a recording offering a comparable experience for the students who cannot get to the live class. If you offer no synchronous classes, try to have some optional synchronous time in general, whether that’s office hours or something else. You’re reaching out through the physical distance between us, to show them that you care about their learning and their struggles. 

If you are personally juggling too many unforeseeable stressors, or you need to do exclusively asynchronous instruction for whatever other personal reasons, that is valid, My hope is that you find nothing but institutional support for you doing the best that you can. If you are struggling with the fatigue that comes from too many video conferences, all while trying to hold your concerns about the world and your loved ones in check, please hang in there and be kind to yourself. You are not alone either.

Previously we posted “Using TSP to Teach Online.” This week we’re featuring content from our partner and community pages. In addition to producing in-house content, The Society Pages is an online hub for blogs written and curated by other social scientists. We can’t feature them all here, but you can find the full list at the bottom of our homepage.

“Sociological Images” is designed to encourage people to exercise and develop their sociological imagination by presenting brief discussions of compelling and timely imagery that spans the breadth of sociological inquiry.

• Check out a recent guest post, “Social Inequality, Medical Fears, and Pandemics” showing data on American’s health fears. 
• You can also find course guides and collections for instructors.

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This article is reposted with edits from an original post made 3/11/2020

Erika Sanborne is a TSP Graduate Board member who has received various awards for teaching and often serves as a teaching & technology consultant for faculty and graduate instructors. Her research interests include the life course, race, and religion. Her favorite course to teach is statistics.

Many of us are a week or two into teaching a suddenly-online course that we had designed to teach in person. Having taught about 50 undergraduate class sections in person, and about 50 undergraduate class sections online, I am duly familiar with both options. To be clear, when I have taught the same subject online and on campus even during the same semester, they are very different courses. Yet here we are with this current situation, so let’s deal with it as best we can. In this write-up, I’m inviting you into “round 2” following all the big changes you have made in the past few weeks to get to this moment.

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As instructors move their courses online, we at The Society Pages want to help out by offering a guide to our site. We have lots of sociological content that can be used in teaching, from new research coming out of journals to podcast interviews with sociologists. We strive to make our content clear, concise, and public-facing — perfect for undergraduates! 

What kind of content do we have? (and how can you use it to teach?)

“There’s Research on That!” – In this blog, we curate sociological research that speaks to things that are happening in the world.

• Have students read “#SayHerName and Black Women’s Experiences with Police” for an overview of research on Black women’s experiences with police, including distrust of police and the challenges that come with motherhood. Then, ask them to respond with a short post about the racialized and gendered challenges that lie ahead in developing police-community trust.

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This resource is the final project for “Race and Racism in the U.S.” The course is designed to explore how race structures contemporary issues in the United States. The course focuses on historical and contemporary race issues to demonstrate that race is a constructed system of privilege, power, and inequality embedded in everyday life. Using sociological theories and methods, students learn to locate claims about race in society by examining media, news, television, and other fields of public discussion.  

This final project reflects students’ ability to assess the dominant social narratives of race in the United States. Students use secondary sources and critical content analysis to uncover what people think and feel about race.

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