Risa P. Gorelick, Ph.D.
I began teaching college writing courses over two decades ago. I have written multiple Philosophy of Teaching statements, all of which mention “writing as a process.” Many incorporate my dissertation research on service-learning connections to the writing classroom using the works of Adler-Kassner, Cooks, Waters, Deans, and Flower with educational theorist Parker Palmer’s Models of Community (Therapeutic, Civic, Marketing, and Truth) and a focus on feminists’ Ethics of Care. I have worked at various levels and a variety of institutions, and I see myself as a professor who does what I can to meet students where they are to help them become better writers, clearer thinkers, and careful readers.
While I primarily teach required courses to students who may or may not wish to be in my classes, by the end of the course, students primarily see me as an advocate who assists them with writing drafts to get to the kernel that allows them to shine. I have created careful syllabi for a variety of courses (first-year writing, developmental writing, literature, oral communications, technical writing, and senior seminars) with clearly mapped out course goals, learning objectives, assignments, and assessments.
However, when a global pandemic hit and the world—and our universities—went into lockdown, what seemed to matter most was instructors’ flexibility to meet students’ needs while assisting students to achieve course goals and learning objectives.
At first, I naively thought we would be home for two weeks—enough for those who were sick to get better and for the virus to go away (or at least become dormant)—and then we would return from our experimental synchronous video classes able to look back and probably laugh about them. Instead, those two weeks turned into multiple semesters, then a return to face-to-face with mask and vaccination mandates to virtually starting the semester and returning to in-person in a world that was still hurting and virus variants that have continued to change and impact our lives and our students’ lives in unimaginable ways. So far, there has been far more tears than laughter as we navigate a new normal and await a post-COVID world. In this world, the old teaching philosophies need to be adapted and reimagined, just like the pedagogies and practices they describe.
While I still advocate for writing as a process, the ethic of care has helped me navigate my way through pandemic teaching. I was forced to rethink what the end-goal is to teaching writing. I want students to communicate clearly, but I also want students to live in a community that Palmer writes about focused on caring about individuals and each other. As I always have, I try to create a safe space for students to explore with words and research new technologies in our diverse and changing world in an effort to reach Palmer’s community of truth. To achieve this, my classroom has often operated as a workshop, but during COVID-times, I found myself giving more time in class to allow students to draft and work through the cobwebs. Echoing the work of Mina Shaughnessy, Peter Elbow, Donald Murray, Mike Rose, and Carol Gilligan, it seems even more essential for us to get to know—and like—our students, and to find innovative projects from essays, speeches, podcasts, and other media for them to express themselves and grow as writers. If they’re experiencing pain and a few extra days to work through a draft will help them, then I stagger deadlines that allows them to meet course goals without stressing over a due date. Sure, some less organized students may take advantage of this flexibility, but I have learned that I cannot control everything (this is a hard lesson for me and one I still work on), and I find that focusing on kindness in the classroom community allows students to better achieve learning outcomes. Such empathy can also assist with course and program assessment.
I love learning from my students. Indeed, my students have taught me a lot over the years, including especially important lessons in the past two years. When the lockdown began, I had a class of Honors HUM 102 students I had taught in Honors HUM 101 that Fall, so we had already established a caring community. During the first two weeks of lockdown, students were cautiously optimistic with cameras on and lively class discussions. However, after they moved out of the dorms indicating we were not returning to in-person meetings in Spring 2020, it was easy to see the stress studying from home was causing them, compounded by the freedom that had been taken away from them. HUM 102 walks students through the whole research process of a 10+ page project—from finding a research question, researching the topic, writing a literature review, and presenting a final documented essay with an e-poster presentation. After one student gave his final presentation on his research project, he sent an email that apologized for the quality of his project, but said he couldn’t focus as he had lost multiple family members in the past few weeks due to COVID. I contacted the Dean of Students to find the student some counseling and help him navigate rescheduling exams in other courses, so he had time to grieve and regroup. His paper, while not up to his standards and not what he considered his best work, was much better than most could have produced under those circumstances, and he credited our class’ community and the therapeutic discussions we had throughout that year for the writing he was able to produce.
My other class was a Developmental Writing course where most students were international students—many of whom had arrived in the United States for the first time less than two months before the lockdown and found flights back to their home countries before airports closed. They showed up to synchronous class meetings in multiple time zones and wanted to know how I was doing after reading that New Jersey was in the epicenter of the pandemic and, at the time, COVID wasn’t so bad in their home countries.
I encouraged virtual office hours and, while I did not teach that summer, I created weekly virtual check-ins through the summer of 2020 for those who needed a place to connect and talk. One international student, who lived with family friends after the dorms closed, went to stay with family in Philadelphia after the semester ended as she could not fly back to India because of the travel restrictions; she never missed a check-in. When travel restrictions were lifted, she returned to India under strict quarantine procedures where she was then bussed hours away to a farm where she had to quarantine by herself in a room with only a bed, a Wi-Fi password with spotty connectivity, and meals which she had to eat alone. She finally returned to her parents’ house, rejoined the weekly check-in, and told us her story by reading passages from the journal she began writing in our class. She confided that her journal writing helped her maintain her sanity; her powerful words showed how much she had learned from the class and how many writing issues she had overcome in the process of creating her narrative.
I keep looking for silver linings to this pandemic that took so much from so many. Perhaps I (and others) needed a gentle reminder to guide the next generation of writers by returning to teaching kindness along with writing as a process in a creative, welcoming space where diverse learners can brainstorm, draft, write, revise, share, and grow both as individuals and as a writing community. We must all advocate for students’ health while also striking a balance between holding them accountable for their work and meeting their needs as humans. As I begin each new semester, I look forward to working with the next group of students—and previous students from past terms in new courses—to make sense of our world through writing.
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Dr. Risa P. Gorelick 