Ode to a Lecture – Or, Teaching Milwaukee’s Open Housing Marches

Last week, I was forced to admit something: My students want me to lecture. They like it when I stand up and tell them things while they sit back and listen.

That feels sacrilegious to say, but it also feels true.
​For the past nine weeks, my colleague and I have been trying to craft an active, student-centered, place-based learning experience for our high school learners. Learners who, for one reason or another, have not passed social studies and are therefore in danger of not graduating. We know that virtual schooling during the pandemic was hard for many of them, but we also know that the problems with social studies in most high schools stretch much farther back than March 2019.

In his book Lies My Teacher Told Me (first published in 1995), sociologist James Loewen systematically showed the public how the standard history curriculum is often only loosely connected to historical fact. While his content analysis of textbooks was groundbreaking, the argument itself was not: people of color have been questioning the truth of history curriculum and the role it plays in maintaining white supremacy for far longer. For example, Carter G. Woodson wrote The Miseducation of the Negro in 1933. In it, he argued that the lies of omission in schooling paint Africans and African Americans as “human being[s] of the lower order, unable to subject passion to reason, and therefore useful only when made the hewer of wood and the drawer of water for others” (p. 34). These dehumanizing lies served as the “perfect device” for controlling and subjugating African Americans. Similarly, in his 1963 “Talk to Teachers,” James Baldwin argued that the “bad faith,” “cruelty,” “brainwashing,” and “mythology” perpetuated by schools was nothing short of a “criminal conspiracy to destroy [the Black child]” (para. 19).

What Baldwin, Woodson, Loewen and so many others have been saying is that the myth-making that passes for history in America’s classrooms too often serves not as an introduction to the historical record nor as an invitation to inquire about our social world but rather as an elaborate justification of the racialized and racist social structure we live in.

No wonder, the group of mostly Brown and Black girls we teach on Wednesdays is failing social studies.

Now, I’m not saying anything about the specific teachers that my Wednesday students have encountered at their high school. I don’t know what happens in their classrooms. I’ve never spent any time in these classrooms. But I am saying that within our system of schooling in the United States, the social studies have served as one of the primary vehicles for passing on dominant narratives about the United States, narratives that likely run in direct opposition to what my Wednesday students’ lived experiences tell them.

Added on top of this curricular problem is the instructional problem we find in a lot of high school social studies classrooms: the ‘sage on the stage,’ where the teacher knows everything and students are passive receptacles waiting to be filled with names and dates to be regurgitated later on a test. Brazilian educator Paulo Freire called this the “banking” method of education, and he argued in his 1968 book Pedagogy of the Oppressed that it is a fundamentally dehumanizing process:

The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them. The capability of banking education to minimize or annul the students’ creative power…serves the interests of the oppressors, who care neither to have the world revealed nor to see it transformed (p. 73).

Again, I’m not saying that the teachers in my Wednesday students’ school engage in banking. I have no way of knowing that. But I do know that our current testing regime in the US is built upon this idea of students as empty vessels waiting for instructional communiqués, which they are expected to spit back out onto endless high-stakes tests.

In listening to these critiques of both curriculum and instruction—critiques that are especially common in the social studies—it becomes understandable why the students in our Explore MKE course may have checked out of past versions of social studies. This is why my co-teacher and I are so determined not to recreate those conditions during our weekly two hours with the students. We are trying to create a learning space that invites our students into historical and social inquiry, that incites curiosity, and that helps the students see themselves in history and the social sciences.

Which is why my students’ rapt attention to my lecture last week felt so wrong.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying I wasn’t interesting. (I was definitely interesting.) I’m just wondering why a moment of instruction that felt a little too much like what we’re trying not to do held their attention for far longer than the student-driven inquiry we had tried to facilitate for the hour before.

See, for the hour before my lecture on Milwaukee’s civil rights history, Candance and I had struggled to fully engage our students. We had prodded and brainstormed, coaxed and questioned, trying to get our students to identify something (anything!) in Milwaukee they wanted to learn more about and that could guide their final ‘project’—in quotes because all that project entails is putting a single pin on an interactive map of Milwaukee with some kind of explanation. While a handful of students ran with the task, most did not. “I don’t know anything about Milwaukee,” Tanya said. “There’s nothing interesting in this city,” Mayte said. “What about Jeffrey Dahmer?” Ana said. So Candance and I slowly moved around the room, working one-on-one with students in order to help them think through their lives in Milwaukee and the things that held their curiosity. Meanwhile, all those other students not deep in conversation with us were… FaceTiming friends at the grocery store. Playing CandyCrush. Folding origami. Teasing one another about their crushes. Napping.

Eventually, we made our way to every student, and eventually, every student found something that piqued their interest, but it felt like a slog to get there. And it took a lot of self-control from me and Candance not to police and manage how the students spent their time. After all, that’s not why we are here. Ultimately, we agreed that the “off-task” behaviors ended up providing a cognitive break for students, which in turn provided a generative space for them to sit with the task at hand. But wow—getting to that point was hard. We thought that giving students power over what we researched and experienced in our remaining time together would be inherently engaging, but it wasn’t. It was a task met with reluctance and, if we’re being honest, resistance.

That’s why when it was time to move onto the “schoolish” part of our session—where we would learn about Milwaukee’s Open Housing Marches—I was nervous. I had spent hours over the past few days trying to figure out how to provide this historical content in a meaningful and relevant way, but in the end I wound up with my version of a lecture. Not a standing-at-a-podium-and-droning-on-monotonously kind of lecture, but a lecture nonetheless. It would be interactive and feature imperfectly drawn maps and timelines and strategically placed audio clips, but it was still, essentially, a lecture.

But here’s the rub: They loved it. They were so engaged—more engaged, it seemed than during the past hour and a half of student-driven inquiry. And in the moment, I was reminded of what my pre-service teachers (my undergrad students) tell me every semester. They tell me that they can’t get their students to do inquiry or active learning or creative projects. They tell me that their students are so much better behaved and engaged when they stick to a traditional instructional script. They tell me their students ‘can’t handle’ inquiry. They tell me their students whine when they are asked to think. They tell me it’s just so much easier to give a lecture and assign some questions. As I looked out at 25 young women, eyes glued to me and my messy map of Milwaukee, I worried that maybe my undergrads were right and that maybe I have been wrong all these years about what good instruction looks like.

But in that moment, I told myself what I tell my undergraduate students when they recount their failed interactive lessons or the chaos that ensued when high school students were asked to engage in independent research. I reminded myself that thinking is hard. It’s much harder than what schools typically ask students to do. Consuming information and spitting it back out is so much easier than designing and conducting an inquiry; it’s so much easier than navigating the peer relationships of cooperative learning or the physical demands of experiential learning. What’s more, schools give students very few opportunities to practice these harder skills because they are too busy prepping students for standardized tests. Of course, our K12 students prefer the easier path, but with practice and persistence, they will come to love the vibrancy of real intellectual work more.

All of this is true. But I realized in that moment that something else important is going on, too.

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Learning involves gathering information—encountering it, processing it, making meaning out of it. Sometimes that information is most meaningful when encountered through students’ own questions and inquiries. Sometimes that information is most meaningful when unexpectedly revealed through a book or a movie or some other creative source. Sometimes that information is most meaningful when it blooms out of lived experience. Sometimes that information is most meaningful when it intersects with a skill to be practiced or acquired. And sometimes that information is most meaningful when it comes from someone you like or trust or respect. In other words, there are a lot of ways we gather information, and there are a lot of ways we learn. But what matters most across all of these is that what is learned is meaningful and relevant and true. And Milwaukee’s civil rights history (the topic of my lecture), when told honestly and completely, is all of those things.

As I outlined the route of marchers on the night of August 28, 1967, I asked if anyone knew why Milwaukee was called the Selma of the North. “I’ve seen the movie Selma!” Cara said. “That’s when MLK marched across the bridge.” I pointed to the 16th Street Bridge on our Milwaukee map. “This is where the marches in Milwaukee started. This bridge. And they went on for 200 nights.”

Milwaukee’s Open Housing Marches were a youth-led movement, organized by the NAACP Youth Council in response to lived experience with Milwaukee’s housing segregation. When I showed pictures of Youth Council members, Aaliyah noticed that they were probably the same age as her and her classmates. What would have been their peers marched nearly four miles from Milwaukee’s North Side to Koszciusko Park on the South Side. The marchers had chosen this route specifically because it was called in Milwaukee “the quickest way from Africa to Poland,” a crass joke about the deep racial segregation in Milwaukee’s housing. As we went over the history of housing segregation in Milwaukee—redlining and highway construction, restrictive covenants, and white violence—students talked over each other to say that Milwaukee was still segregated. We remembered that we, a class split pretty evenly between Black and Latinx students, had not spent any time in one another’s neighborhoods, a fact we were regularly reminded of on our field trips. I also reminded them of their nervousness the first time we went exploring around St. Joan, which Jade said was because they didn’t belong to the neighborhood. As I talked, they jumped in with connections that made it clear that this history was still the world they lived in.

The lecture covered a lot: the wealth and vitality of Milwaukee’s Black neighborhoods before they were destroyed, the role of Father Groppi, how demographics have changed in the city, the federal Fair Housing Act, the 200 nights of marches organized by Black Lives Matter protestors this past year, the role youth play in current protest movements. We were learning history, and we were using history to make sense of the city we live in now. Yes, I was giving a lecture, but that lecture was proving to be a powerful way of encountering our city’s history together. And our collective meaning-making was changing how we understood Milwaukee in real-time.

On the first night of marching, the few hundred youth marchers were met halfway across the bridge by an angry white mob. That mob of thousands of white folks threw bottles at the marchers and carried signs saying “White Power;” they stood on cars and broke streetlights and wielded bats. That mob even scared the police, marchers later remembered, who begged Father Groppi to turn around and lead his youth back to their neighborhood. When I showed images of that mob, raging just outside the gorgeous Polish basilica we’d visited a few weeks earlier, Sheree raised her hand. “But my old social studies teacher told me that racism like that didn’t exist in Milwaukee. It was a Southern thing, not a Northern thing. Is that true?” The pictures of white crowds carrying swastikas and wearing KKK uniforms answered that question for her.

That afternoon, my students told me that they genuinely didn’t know that Milwaukee was an important city in the Civil Rights Movement. They told me that they genuinely didn’t know that the Civil Rights Movement happened in the North, too—angry mobs and retaliating police and all. They didn’t know that all around us was hallowed historical ground.

And that, I think, is what made that lecture so meaningful. It was the right method to introduce them to a slice of history that had been hidden from them, and it allowed us to make connections and ask questions together. I had information to share that I hoped would help them see their city in new ways. It’s not that they were empty receptacles waiting to be filled; it’s that I wanted to share what I know in the hopes that it would inspire them to ask more questions. I wanted them to meet their city anew, and they were grateful for the introduction.

What mattered most wasn’t how they encountered this history; what mattered most was that they were getting to encounter it all.

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Dr. Gibson has given permission to have her reflections about this ongoing work with Dr. Doerr-Stevens and the students at St. Joan Antida shared from her blog The Present Tense through the Marquette Educator. Each week, we will share a post from Dr. Gibson about this ongoing journey. Please check back to read more about this exciting partnership and transformative learning process.

Teaching and Learning Virtually

Holly Hinton, Ed. ’22 and her mother, LouAnn Hinton.

Holly Hinton, Class of 2022, in the College of Education, is majoring in Secondary Education and Biology. This year, Holly has had the unique opportunity to observe a veteran science teacher, her mother, LouAnn, as she taught 7^th and 8^th grade science and religion to her students virtually at St. John of the Cross Parish School in Western Springs, IL.

We wanted to learn a little more about the experience that Holly had this year as she was virtually learning to teach while her mother was virtually teaching in the room next door. Here is what Holly had to say:

What was it like initially to find yourself at home with your mom teaching in the next room?

Having both of us home was definitely a big adjustment, but it was also a really unique experience to be home together while we were doing our work. We got to hang out during our breaks, so I got to see her a lot more. I was able to see how she interacts with and guides her class through discussions and learning, which was a great learning experience for me as a future teacher. I also got to help her create lab demonstration videos!

What did you learn from your mom about teaching?

One thing I learned was that teachers work SO hard for their students. My mom works late into the night grading papers, planning lessons, and going the extra mile to make sure her students have a great experience in her class. Watching how much she cares and puts into her teaching makes me appreciate my own teachers so much more.

How did you help one another with your teaching and learning?

It was fun to be home with my mom this semester because I got to share a lot about what I was learning in my education classes and she could explain how what I was learning related to her real-life experiences in her classroom. It was cool to hear some insight from someone who had been through it herself. I was able to help her, too! Going completely online meant that my mom had to use a lot of new technology she had never used before. I was able to guide her through that as well as help her create videos of labs for the class to view from home. 

Any specific good stories come to mind?

Not necessarily a “good” story, but we both ended up getting COVID-19 together during all of this! We were able to comfort and console each other through it, and quarantine together away from the rest of the family so it wasn’t so lonely. And, since we are both science teachers, we were interested in learning as much as we could about viruses, how our immune systems work, and how diseases like COVID-19 spread.

What’s one blessing you found in being at home teaching with your mom in the next room?

It allowed us to get closer, enjoy our new puppies together, and learn from each other!

Ms. Haugen’s 1st Period Class

Lily Haugen, Class of 2023, is majoring in Secondary Education and English, with a minor in Theater Arts. During the fall 2020 semester, Lily, was enrolled in EDUC 2001: Teaching Practice 1: Instructional Design and Teaching Models with Dr. Terry Burant. This class is one of the newly launched redesigned courses in Marquette’s recently redesigned teacher education program. As the name of the course implies, students practiced designing and teaching lessons using the various teaching models they learned in class.

Lily quickly realized that it helped her to have actual “students” to teach in these practice sessions and she reached out to her friend bubble, the people she spent time with during fall semester. She asked if they were free on a Sunday evening and would they be willing to be her students in a 20-minute lesson about how to annotate a novel. They agreed!

Ms. Haugen with “students” from her 1st Period Class

Lily shared that after filming the lesson, “they told me that they had so much fun participating and playing along” and they even admitted to having learned something from the lesson and would be using some annotation tips the next time they had a reading for class.

Lily relied on the same group of friends when she used the “tea party method” to introduce characters from a novel to students. During filming, her friends got into and stayed in character, referring to Lily as “Ms. Haugen” and they eventually changed their group chat to “Ms. Haugen’s 1^st Period,” a name they still use to describe their group.

Dr. Burant asked Lily to reflect on what she learned from teaching her peers and friends instead of teaching in a field placement. Lily explained:

As a freshman, my first field placement, was in a kindergarten classroom. Even though I was only there once a week, I developed a strong bond with the students. In a similar way, even though I was teaching my friends who were pretending to be my students, I felt us grow closer and strengthen our bond through teaching.

The thing that stuck with me the most was how all my friends got to see me doing what I am passionate about. They saw how important teaching is to me and I could feel their respect and admiration for me and the work I was doing. My friends come from a variety of academic backgrounds with our common thread being theatre, so it was really satisfying to let them into the world of teaching and show them what I do. Now not only do they now understand how important teaching is to me, but they also care more about teaching and see how useful it is in any field. We had a tight knit bond that only got stronger after doing these lessons.”

Here are few things that Ms. Haugen’s “students” had to say about the experience:

“Being a different kind of teacher, I learned how to adapt to different situations being thrown at you. I also learned the importance of listening and cooperation from both parties. It is a very important skill I believe to be able to talk AND listen. Students can be pretty smart” -Will

“I learned the importance of adaptability while teaching” -Giorgia

“I learned what a simile was” -Will

“I learned all the different styles teaching can take form in, and every activity was unique and still reinforced concepts that I learned previously (even if I did forget about them) in a new way to keep our group engaged.”- Sam

“I learned how teachers find fun ways to educate but still keep their students engaged” -Piper

“Since I am going into speech pathology, I definitely appreciated the different skills you used to keep us engaged and how you modeled what you wanted us to be doing. I will carry that into my own work!” –Giorgia

Advocating for School Counselors

This past fall, students enrolled in Noreen Siddiqui’s EDUC 4000 course were asked to take on a semester-long research project exploring a topic related to education and then performing an act of advocacy to inform others. Student projects could range from letters to websites to PSA to podcasts, such as Roy Bowler’s focusing on school counseling.

My name is Roy Bowler. I am a senior from New York City, majoring in secondary education and journalism.

This was an assignment that we completed throughout the course of the semester. I saw that we had to advocate for something in American education. I knew about a lot of the some of the issues in American education including those of inequality, but I wanted to do something that I had not heard about before. So, I did some research and saw that there was a huge lack and need for school counselors. The ratio recommended by America School Counselor Association of 250 students to 1 counselor was not even close to being met in most of America’s schools. Even schools that I had attended did not meet the ratio, and these were all great schools. It was also an issue I had never even heard about, so I thought it would be a great topic to explore. 

Throughout the semester we compiled research and data. I really liked how we did the project step by step. It forced you not to procrastinate, and you received feedback after each step that you could apply to the final submission. As we came to the final step of the project, I saw that we had to take all the individual steps and compile the information into a project where we actually advocated for our issue of choice. Being a journalism major as well, and having taken a podcasting class, I figured a great way to advocate would be to make a podcast. I reached out to some people and received tremendous help from Dr. Karisse Callender, who organized my interviews with Dr. Alexandra Kriofske Mainella and grad students Max Moderski and Kennidy Summers. They did a great job explaining the issues to me from an actual counselor’s point of view. I also felt it would be best to let them advocate. They did a great job on that, too. 

My favorite part was definitely interviewing. It helped that the subjects were so knowledgeable and passionate about the need for more school counselors. I appreciated their insight and their ability to advocate. The most difficult part was probably putting the podcast together and deciding what fit where. I had to cut some stuff because if I did not the podcast would have been too long. Though, the fact that we completed steps of this project throughout the course of the semester alleviated a lot of the stress that would come with a huge project like this. 

I really enjoyed having such a practical assignment. While we did the normal class stuff, like readings and discussions, we also did our own research throughout the semester and became experts on a topic that we can help advocate for during our times as educators. I appreciated the freedom that we were given by being able to pick any topic we’d like and advocate for it in any way we’d like. I know some of my classmates created social media pages and websites where they advocated for issues like the need for culturally and linguistically diverse advocates in special education and the decreasing the number of standardized tests students are required to take. 

I think as a teacher, I will try to advocate for more school counselors. It really made me interested in the profession. As I progress my own education, I may even try to take some counseling courses. If I am placed in a school that has a shortage of school counselors, I could try to take on the role with my students as best as I can. 

Leading by Example – A True Embodiment of Being the Difference

By Kathryn Rochford

screenshot of MUBB’s tweet from Jan. 5, 2021. https://twitter.com/MarquetteMBB/status/1346631266851020800

Wednesday, January 6, 2021 is a day that will live in the history books. We as a country witnessed a ghastly display of chaos, a lack of proper leadership, and unnecessary use of violence to attempt to overturn a peaceful transfer of power from one president to the next. There was headline after headline discussing the events, and it seemed it was all any news source could talk about.

However, buried underneath the flood of articles written about events in Washington, D.C., there was one headline that caught my eye in a powerful way. It was a description of the Marquette men’s basketball team and their choice to wear Black Lives Matter shirts and black uniforms on the night of the 5^th to stand in solidarity with Jacob Blake, the man shot in Kenosha last August. They wanted to stand against the announcement that the officer who shot Blake would face no charges regarding the shooting and to remind their fans that “…just because racial and social injustice hasn’t received as much attention recently, doesn’t mean the need to fight against it has gone away.”

In reading this article and in the tweet that the team put out, I had tears in my eyes. We as a university pride ourselves on advocating for social justice issues and for standing up for what is right. In a day where so much went wrong, I held so much immense respect for the team for leading the way and showcasing the very ideal of Marquette which is to “Be the Difference.” Where a lack of proper leadership was shown yesterday, I was able to reflect on how grateful I am that I attend a university that prides itself on instructing its students to care for others, to advocate for social justice issues, and more importantly to do what we can as individuals to “Be the Difference.”

Our basketball team took a stand Tuesday night and helped us to refocus on the need to educate and advocate for social justice issues. The past few months have taught us that there is always a need to improve and to do better for each person around us. In continuing our education, both formally and informally, I can only begin to imagine the positive impact that this generation of Marquette graduates will have on the world. Our Marquette education will provide us the strength to speak up when injustice is evident, to creatively find solutions to problems at hand, and most importantly to recognize the need to care for the whole person, using the Jesuit concept of cura personalis.

In times like this, I can still feel the power and solidarity I felt when I was in a packed Fiserv Forum cheering on our basketball team, all the while chanting with my classmates “We are Marquette.” I am proud to be a Marquette student, and I can’t wait for us all to be together again in that arena, cheering on a team who was ready to show the world an example of true leadership and advocacy. We are stronger together, and most importantly, we are Marquette.

Pandemic Teaching Week 13: Turbulence

By Jody Jessup-Anger, Ph.D.

Thursday was scheduled to be the last of our face-to-face meetings of the semester. If I am honest, I had doubts that we would get there. Ultimately, we didn’t. Early in the week, Eric developed a nagging cough. By mid-week, nagging progressed to persistent, and what started as annoying quickly became worrisome. We discussed, he left to get tested, I started cancelling.

First a text to our bubble to apologize for anything we may have exposed them to through the kids on the playground. Then a call to each kid’s school to explain their impending absence and find out how to zoom in. Finally, an email to my class explaining the need to move their presentations online. Eric went into isolation. The kids and I went into quarantine. Apologies abounded. We waited. I tried to get work done. Meeting. Meeting. Meeting. The kids were not alright. Deeply annoyed about missing school and worried about their dad, they started to bicker and act out.

As I assessed what to do, I thought about the students in my classes. They dealt with this all semester. Reassurance seemed to be the balm that helped. Glennon Doyle, in her latest book, Untamed¸ discusses that our job as parents is not to protect our kids from hurt and disappointment, but rather to demonstrate how to survive it. She uses the analogy of parent as flight attendant when a plane hits turbulence. In moments of intense turbulence, we all look to the flight attendants for reassurance. If they seem okay, it seems okay. Deep breath.

A friend dropped off homemade bread. Carbs assuage worry. Would anyone like some bread? We are okay. It’s all going to be okay. Day two. Doughnuts arrive on our steps in the morning. Would anyone like a doughnut? How about some water? My students rocked their presentations. The kids survived their zoom classes. More meetings. Still annoyed and anxious, but grateful for our community, we settled in for the night. Overnight, Eric got the news he is Covid negative. The flight landed. We feel lucky and grateful. It’s all good. As you disembark, please remember to wear your mask, and continue to social distance.

Dr. Jessup-Anger is an Associate Professor and the Coordinator of the Student Affairs in Higher Education program in the College of Education.

Pandemic Teaching Week 12: It’s all going to be okay, right?

By Jody Jessup-Anger, Ph.D.

We are in the final stretch of the semester. I typically love this time of year because students begin to own their expertise. One way in which they do so is through an exercise in my student development theory class called ‘Theory in our Day-to-Day Lives.’ Students will bring examples of interactions with students, supervisors or others, and we apply theory to the situation, looking at it from different angles to arrive at a complex analysis. The exercise has been harder this semester. Fewer examples are brought forth; less theory is applied. Obviously, personal connection is a missing element.

Perhaps we can blame our virtual existence – students are less connected to their offices, less connected to undergraduate students, and less connected to each other. It takes a bit of vulnerability to offer up a story for us to pick at, and students aren’t quite ready to do that yet. I also think something deeper might be at play in their dampened engagement. Students are anxious about the state of the colleges and universities and the state of Marquette in particular. For graduate students, there is an uneasy awareness that if Marquette is transforming and enacting austerity measures, it may affect their work and career trajectories. For undergraduates, the anxiety lies in assumptions they are making in the absence of clear communication.

Last week I had the privilege of conducting a focus group with first-generation undergraduate students. The stated purpose was to understand barriers they have faced that might impede their success. The students immediately delved into worries about how they will be affected by the announced budget and personnel cuts. They surmised that the cuts are an indication of a university tightening its belt and shared apprehensions about what that might mean for their financial aid. Even though the university has made no mention of cutting financial aid to students, the students reported that, absent reassurance by the institution, they are making assumptions about what lies ahead for them, and it’s not good. Students need reassurance that they are going to be okay, that they add value to the institution, and that their futures remain bright. These messages are harder to deliver, and harder to believe, during pandemic times.

Dr. Jessup-Anger is an Associate Professor and the Coordinator of the Student Affairs in Higher Education program in the College of Education.

Launching the Marquette Teachers Teach Series: A source for sharing teaching materials online

By: Terry Burant, Ph.D.

Here we are in November of 2020 and the pandemic that is gripping our city, our nation, and our world is only getting worse, reminding us that we need to continue to remain at a distance from one another for the foreseeable future. I don’t know about you, but as an educator, staying away from my students and my colleagues wasn’t what I had in mind when I chose this profession years ago! Not being in a classroom; not visiting Marquette students in schools; not hearing the voices of our student teachers as they crowd into SC 112 for their weekly seminar, sharing their stories of their experiences; and not having my office feel like a busy train station with students and colleagues coming in and out has made this one of the strangest semesters ever.

As the Director of Teacher Education, one of the hardest things for me to accept was realizing that our field experiences would not occur in their typical fashion this year. After a long summer of planning for contingencies, through ingenuity, creativity, and collaboration, our faculty developed a variety of alternatives for field experiences including viewing videos of teaching; participating in supervised virtual tutoring and service learning; engaging in simulations; developing curriculum; and practicing teaching methods and models and filming them and critiquing their videos with peers. As a result, many of our students have created excellent instructional materials that deserve to be shared and used!

As we near the end of the semester, I’d like to invite our students, and our alumni teachers to contribute work to a new section on our College of Education website called “Marquette Teachers Teach Series.” This site features instructional videos and materials developed by students in our classes and made available for parents, tutors, and teachers to use as they teach from home, teach virtually, or teach back in classrooms.

We are excited to not only showcase curriculum materials from our students and alumni, but to also stand beside teachers and parents who are working to provide the best education possible for their own students. These instructional materials will be available to the community at large, whether that’s here in Milwaukee or anyone who accesses our website.

We know that our students miss being in the field, and we also know that the K-12 students and teachers in Milwaukee miss them. It is our hope that through this new series, we can continue to reach out to our community and make a difference in this challenging time.

Please take a moment to visit our site where you will find directions for uploading your materials for consideration! Thank you!

Pandemic Teaching Week 7: The Benefit of Having a Garage Code

By Jody Jessup-Anger, Ph.D.

My Monday typically starts with an early morning run; this week was no exception. The quiet exertion helps me clear my head and mentally prepare for the week. In the fall, I particularly appreciate the cool temperatures and sunrise that greets me as I plod along. I was about a mile into this Monday’s run when an alarm bell hit my consciousness. A car drove by me and slowed, sped up, and then slowed again. It seemed too early for a visitor looking for an address. The car hit the brake lights as it crossed a street in front of me and waited, so I turned away from it. The car made a U-turn and followed my new path, passing me again and then slowing. Sensing that I might be in danger, I felt my body tense and my pace quicken. I quickly made a safety plan, switching direction again and heading into what I consider the heart of our neighborhood. Grateful for my location, I counted at least a half dozen houses in my immediate vicinity where could knock on the door at 6:00 am, and a friend would answer without hesitation. A bit further ahead was another house with garage that had easy street access and a push button opener I was reasonably confident I knew the code to. As I weighed my options, the car passed me again, slowed, and then took off, perhaps it really was on the wrong street, or, it had grown bored harassing a middle-age jogger who kept changing direction. Regardless, I was relieved.

As I continued to run, certainly more awake and alert, I felt overwhelming gratitude for my community. The experience sharpened the reality that there are numerous people I can turn to in a time of need. People know me, acknowledge me, and are willing to help me. Among neighbors there is an easy trust that has built up as we encounter one another on the sidewalk, at school functions, and during neighborhood activities. My friends’ friends become my friends and my circle widens.

The students in my classes don’t seem to be as connected this semester. The easy banter that I typically interrupt to start class and that punctuates the break is virtually non-existent. Students seem to be struggling more academically and socially. Earlier this week, a few of my learning community research partners and I discussed how Covid-19 is creating relationship-starved students. One colleague shared how her main interaction with students involves reassuring them that they are okay. In prepping for some professional development sessions, we determined that this year is all about focusing on students’ needs for safety and belonging and that we might have to let go of some higher order goals. We need to be sure that students have a garage code. They need a place to feel safe. They need to know that someone at the university has their back during this lonely and anxiety-filled time.

Dr. Jessup-Anger is an Associate Professor and the Coordinator of the Student Affairs in Higher Education program in the College of Education.

Pandemic teaching week 5: Silver Linings

By Jody Jessup-Anger, Ph.D.

This week was heavy and full of malaise. Students are stressed. They are working hard; they care about racial justice; they are supporting undergraduate students who are also working hard and care about racial justice. They are having difficulty managing their myriad responsibilities. They are run down, and they are getting sick, which means they cannot be in class.

If there are a few silver linings to be gleaned from pandemic teaching, the first is the capacity for flexibility. About two weeks before the start of the semester, most classrooms were equipped with cameras that enable instructors to stream and/or record their class sessions through our synchronous learning platform, MS TEAMS. With Covid exposure, student illness, and other difficulties keeping students away from campus, I have had up to five students at a time joining us through MS TEAMS. These students have the capacity to raise their hands, speak into the room (the disembodied voice), or type comments into the platform. The first thing I learned about navigating students in person and online is the impossibility of managing everything. This week I designated one of my in-person students as the ‘chat monitor,’ meaning she would keep an eye on the TEAMS chat and let me know if a student had typed a comment or raised a hand. This strategy worked well and kept the flow of the class moving at a better pace than when I was constantly checking the computer. I am getting better at using Teams and can envision using it in my courses after the pandemic ends. Could it be true that the pandemic is making me a better teacher?

The second silver lining of pandemic teaching is my new love for the hybrid model of teaching and learning. Having taught classes face-to-face for over 13 years and online in an asynchronous fashion (no real-time interaction, rather, self-paced modules) for the past 6, hybrid teaching – where I meet with students for an allotted period of time and then they do online, self-paced modules, was new to me. This semester, I had to split one of my classes into two sections and allot half the typical face-to-face time to each section to accommodate for social distancing. To remedy the lost class time, I created online modules for discussion. These modules have deepened students’ engagement with the material more than I ever could have imagined. Five weeks in, students are grasping and integrating readings more than they have in other semesters. Quiet students have other avenues for channeling their thoughts, and those thoughts are smart. Although the modules are a bit more work for me to monitor, I am hopeful that the deeper engagement leads to better outcomes for students (and clearer writing, since they are writing constantly). I am toying with the idea of continuing hybrid teaching into the future.

The final silver lining of pandemic teaching is the ease with which I can check in with students without needing to be on campus. Since students are stressed, run down, and sick, my office hours are filling quickly. I am getting the sense that some students just want to be in community. Today, following the example of lovely department chair (who I have mentioned before and am so grateful for), I set up periodic optional check-ins and invited all students to participate via MS Teams. I am not sure if they will work but I am grateful for having the capacity to try them. And, I am hoping it will help to alleviate some of the malaise students are feeling.

Dr. Jessup-Anger is an Associate Professor and the Coordinator of the Student Affairs in Higher Education program in the College of Education.