Stop calling this Remote Teaching, this is Crisis Teaching.
Designers can model an empathetic design process for learning now and in the future.
I write this on my 25th day of being “sheltered in place”, in my 4th week of “remote teaching” university Design courses and 3rd week of assisting my first grader and preschooler with their “remote learning”. As a department chair, a professor, a mom, a person, I’ve been through a range of planning — from the jokes about how maybe we maybe should stock up on food and toilet paper, to the small idea we thought this was a just two-week temporary online strategy, to actually the rest of the semester is online, and now, to be honest, we’re in the unknown. Missing from the vast majority of the emergency online teaching strategies, meetings, and articles passed around the web on how to best use Zoom and Canvas and this app and that app, is the huge glaring fact that this is not just remote teaching — this is teaching during a time of crisis. For many people like myself, we aren’t just remote-crisis teaching, it’s also remote-crisis learning, remote-crisis working, remote-crisis socializing, remote-crisis everything. This crisis is global, this crisis is national, this crisis is local, this crisis is personal. This crisis is far beyond anything we’ve seen before. To try to pretend we can simply teach (or learn, or work) online as if we were in “normal times” is in itself a crisis.
Misplaced concerns
Everyone grieves in their own way, and everyone processes experience in their own ways. Sometimes all we can do is all we know, for many reasons we choose to ignore things or focus on things others don’t see. So I understand some of what I’ve seen, but from my perspective, I’ve seen many misplaced concerns in academia. There’s those that are carrying on as if nothing has changed — expecting mandatory on time attendance in video conference classes, expecting students to have professional grade art materials wherever they have landed, and to fully produce the same projects proposed pre-pandemic. Harshly focusing concerns on keeping the exact same expectations and deliverables ignores that fact that for many, our conditions are no longer even recognizable from the start of the semester. Logistically there are students whose Internet connections (or lack of) are not stable, or are living in different time zones, sometimes with three generations of family members, or completely alone, or maybe in quarantine themselves, or taking care of sick relatives. These concerns do not consider that for many students, they’ve become so paralyzed with anxiety worrying that they might get sick, that their parents will get sick, their parents were health care workers on the front lines, their parents lost jobs, they lost jobs, they have to keep going to their jobs to be able to pay rent, they can’t pay rent, they can’t go home, they have to go home, that even just getting up for online class is sometimes an accomplishment itself. Trying to teach the same class, in the same way, with the same conversation, is not what is happening right now.
On the other end of the spectrum, I’ve heard from some students who, on top of missing their friends, roommates, crushes, and classmates, they are also mourning the loss of their classes because their professors have seemingly abandoned the course. “Have you heard from this professor? We only got 1 email and I don’t know how we’re supposed to finish the class” a student asked. It’s true there are many potential reasons for this — some do not have the same technological experience to shift stacks of papers to the cloud over night, or for a variety of reasons feel violated or suspicious of Zoom being recorded or shared. But I’ve also seen examples of simply ending the semester early, emailing a final essay prompt and calling it a day, and going weeks between any contact with students. You can find any number of articles and tips, from the academic to the meme, that emphasizes the importance of keeping routines during this time. My first grader needs her morning circle and daily plan to keep a sense of normalcy, despite not being in normal times. Our university students also need their routines for structure, and for connection. This isn’t a time to take a headcount to make sure everyone is back on the bus after a field trip; this is a time to connect, to check in on mental and physical safety, to see how people are doing, and what support they need.
I acknowledge that while some have checked out, there are also many professors out there who themselves are sick, are managing families, and coping in the same way as our students. I’m privileged to currently be healthy and have a spouse to entertain our kids while I hold my classes and office hours. And of course, these examples are not true of everyone. I share these observations to express that this is neither the time to carry on as planned or to check out and cancel class. After all, we are teachers, we are professors, we are mentors, we are essential workers. And while we aren’t on the physical front lines in hospitals and grocery stores, I see our need to be on the front lines of caring for the well being of our students.
Designers Thinkers and Haters need to live their Buzzwords
Many designers and design educators seem to either love, or love to hate, “design thinking”. You could insert a variety of other catchphrases like human-centered design, user-centered design, design empathy, design ethnography, and so on. They’re buzzwords that we love to use and love to criticize. At the heart of all these approaches is the idea that the designer should focus on the human, on the user, and their experience — understanding it, empathizing with it and designing for it. Right now as design educators (or as any kind of educator) our users’ world has been turned upside down, squashed, twisted, stretched, and slammed into a tiny isolated box they aren’t allowed out of for an unknown amount of time.
If ever there was a time when we need to lead by example, using pedagogy as a design process — it’s now. Focusing our discussions on best practices for Canvas grade books and how to dress for your Zoom class misses the mark on the first step in any design process — identifying the problem through empathy. The problem is not recording lectures or counting hours of instruction for accreditation, but the obvious problem that the world is in a global pandemic. I can not help but think of the numerous studies in K-12 education that link having dependable food and shelter to academic success. When basic needs are met, when students feel safe, they succeed. Despite our students being sheltered in place right now (or not as are the growing number of homeless students) their basic needs of community, classmates, classrooms, socializing, libraries, labs, and more are gone. If we start with empathy and go through a design thinking exercise to understand our students we’d see grief, anxiety, depression, loneliness, uncertainty. To ignore all this and carry on, teaches our students to become designers who will ignore the true needs of problems that lie ahead. If we want our students to become empathetic successful designers, we need empathy for them, and with them, now.
I often hear from recent alums that they quickly feel burnt out after entering the industry. Our always-on culture demands they “work” around the clock. While the current remote working/ teaching/ learning/ living crisis has highlighted the facade of work-life balance (particularly for those with families) the reality is, these lines have been getting fuzzier and fuzzier in recent years to keep up with the industry and cultural demands. Over the past decade, as I saw this increase in work demands and burn out, I began teaching life skills, mindfulness, and self-care as part of the design process to try to better prepare students for life after graduation. Do we really want to keep producing young designers to hop on the always-on-high-demand-production-treadmill? As we reflect on the many ways this global pandemic might change us for the better, perhaps now is the time to re-think how we educate future designers to truly care about the well being of humanity. Let’s teach designers to care for themselves, their co-workers, their industry, and of course those who they design for. We can start this by modeling caring for our students’ well being right now in this crisis.
Systems Now
I teach a course in systems thinking for sustainable design. Sometimes it takes students an entire semester to wrap their head around systems thinking. Intro design courses often focus too heavily on posters, books, websites or objects that it can be hard for students to see the connections between fonts on a cereal box, the factory that mass-produced the flakes inside and the laws that subsidize the corn for production. In this current crisis, the problems in our systems couldn’t be more apparent. Healthcare, education, service workers, government regulation, food production, commerce, economics are all crumbling before our eyes as we watch the impacts this virus has had on all of our interlocking systems. And of course, race, class, gender, geography, socioeconomic status are deeply interwoven into all of these, and should not be ignored. If we’re looking for real-world examples to design for as we meet in our Zoom classrooms — designs’ intersection into any, and all of these systems, seems a fruitful place to start.
I often use a diagram by Donella Meadows showing places to intervene on a system. Small changes don’t tip the scale nearly as much as something like a paradigm shift. One product choosing to produce their product with less plastic will not create the same impact as a law that limits plastic use, or mass behavior change to live with different values and outcomes. In recent weeks, I keep finding myself thinking about where we are on this scale right now, about what we will all learn from this, and how much the scale might tip to better our planet, better our societies, and better ourselves. We all know our way of living is not sustainable, how can we as designers use this time to tip the scales?
Lesson planning
As a professor, I’m planning the rest of my classes for this semester with more flexibility and scenarios than ever before, anticipating that assignments could change at a moment’s notice, while keeping the structure of working together in community. As a department chair, I’m thinking ahead to how we will continue to teach online throughout the summer and possibly future semesters, while also trying to find new ways to connect with students. As a senior faculty member, I’ve been part of conversations on rethinking the structure of the college in light of the certain, but unknown amount of, budget cuts ahead. As a researcher, I’m thinking about the potential for paradigm shifts as structures collapse and new systems potentially emerge. As a mom assisting 1st-grade remote learning (while entertaining a preschooler), I’m taking things one day at a time — being OK if we don’t get to every lesson, trying to remain positive while making time to process emotions and questions. As a friend, I’m reaching out, answering texts and emails and calls. As a person, I’m taking the time to reflect, to keep lists of positive outcomes, to find new ways to create and connect that fulfill me. There are no longer any clear divides in work-life balance — we are living with both “home” everything and “remote” everything. These lesson plans and life plans are all intertwined.
So, I do not want to attend a Zoom webinar on finding my ideal remote job and I don’t want any more emails about optimizing my online class. My students are in crisis. The day of our first “remote class” together — I had changed the assignment that was originally due to simply — how are you? I begin my remote-crisis classes with a check-in on how we are — sharing things from our spaces, what we’re eating, wearing, listening to, doing. I empathize, I share, I don’t pretend to know the answers. My dog and kids have made appearances in my remote-crisis Zoom classroom, as have my students’ cats and dogs and roommates and parents. I make a point to keep our regularly scheduled class as best we can to help keep routines. Our conversations have pivoted to how to survive, how to thrive, how to connect, what to do and make when the world is unknown. And now, a few weeks into our remote-crisis class, we’ll look at how designers can look intersectionality at the systems hit by this pandemic. How we might redesign our interactions, our workflows, our priorities, our systems once we get back out of our homes? After all, it’s our students who will be the ones who pick up the pieces from this mess and rebuild the future.
