A new level of Block Plan flexibility: Teaching under a tent
Plus, what some liberal arts schools are planning for Pandemic Spring
Good morning, and happy Wednesday. On this pre-pandemic date in 2018, Colorado College alumni were enjoying the final day of Homecoming. (Homecoming events were virtual this year.)
Today, some professors explain what it’s like to teach outdoors. We also rounded up some spring semester plans at liberal arts colleges across the country.
➡️ICYMI: On Monday, our resident microbiologist Phoebe Lostroh gave her weekly forecast for El Paso County. She also explained COVID-19 “superspreader” events.
✉️In Your Inbox: We read all of those emails so you don’t have to. Here’s what you missed:
Oct. 26 is the last day to register to vote in Colorado. Check your voter registration status here.
Last Friday, a CC student living off-campus tested positive for COVID-19. This is the third positive case reported in students living off-campus.
On Monday, a CC faculty member tested positive for COVID-19. Two staff members and one student who the faculty member came in contact with are in quarantine.
After wastewater testing revealed a small concentration of viral particles in Mathias Hall, follow-up testing showed no evidence of a COVID-19 outbreak in the dorm.
The Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College will reopen with limited capacity in the next few weeks.
Tent teaching has come to Colorado College. Is it here to stay?
For some, classes this semester have been more ‘in-tents’ than they may have initially expected. (Spare us your groans. We couldn’t help ourselves.)
If you’ve been on campus recently, you’ll notice some new decor: large white tents set up across campus as outdoor classrooms. After scientists raised concerns about how poor ventilation could impact coronavirus transmission, Colorado College joined other higher-ed institutions embracing the outdoors in efforts to hold in-person classes. Amherst College in Massachusetts has tents on campus, and Rice University in Texas purchased five open-sided circus tents in addition to four other tent-like structures.
“It wasn’t like there was some kind of proclamation that came down: ‘we shall have tents.’ It was just this kind of thing like, ‘what about tents?’” English Department Chair Steve Hayward, who also directs the Journalism Institute, told The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project. “I think that there’s a way in which that really appealed to a lot of people’s safety concerns, but also to one’s imagination.”
During Quarantine Spring, Hayward saw an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education how other institutions were embracing tent-ative classrooms. Then in July, when he was a correspondent for this newsletter, he helped us write a brief about more tent use. Though he didn’t use a tent himself, Hayward helped solidify teaching in tents as an option for other professors. As chair of the English department, he said he felt a responsibility to make sure that professors were able to teach how they wanted to as safely as possible.
“You know, some of the windows in Armstrong don’t open. ... They don’t ever open,” Hayward said. “And I was thinking that if I had to teach in there, I’d rather do it outside. It was part of what motivated my tent advocacy.” Hayward added that Registrar Phil Apodaca and CC Facilities were the true players who made tent teaching happen.
☀️ Rain or Shine: The Block must go on
During a stroll around campus, you might wander past a couple of different classes taking advantage of the outdoor learning. In a tent on the west side of Tutt Science Center, Director of Bluegrass Keith Reed has been giving individual music lessons and meeting with small student groups, including the CC Bluegrass Ensemble. At tables set up underneath the Fishbowl, chemistry students practice problems on whiteboards with professor Sally Meyer.
According to Reed and Meyer, teaching outside certainly has its perks. Though Colorado weather can be notoriously temperamental, professors teaching outside this block say the weather has been mostly cooperative. Plus, the extra air circulation provides a way for students to meet face-to-face outside of stuffy classrooms.
“It’s actually been nicer than inside because facilities puts these whiteboards up everyday for me,” Meyer told The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project. “When you’re inside, [students] don’t necessarily have a whiteboard next to their table.”
For Reed, the transition to teaching outdoors was relatively easy. Their instruments, including fiddles and banjos, are portable, and if students need to reference past work, they’re able to play recordings from their phones. A bonus of practicing outdoors is that students seem to sing louder, Reed said.
“When students perform outdoors, they for whatever reason … sing louder, and they’re not as timid,” Reed told The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project.
While the outdoor environment provided benefits for some musicians, some chemists faced a bit more difficulty. The day Meyer decided to try to do an experiment with her class, Mother Nature interfered.
“I looked at the weather and it was supposed to be beautiful, sunny,” Meyer said. “But then there was so much smoke that day.”
Then wind caused its own problems, knocking over whiteboards so much that Lisa Hughes, who teaches in the English and Comparative Literature departments, said it almost became a game for students. In addition to wrecking havoc on whiteboards, loud wind also made hearing more difficult. Hughes worked with Accessibility Resources to get masks with a clear plastic piece over the mouth for her class to make it easier to read lips. The Audiovisual Department also gave her a headset and microphone to amplify her voice.
“I felt like I worked at Old Navy or something,” Hughes told The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project. “I kept saying into the microphone, ‘We need more shirts in aisle seven.’”
💻Creating an equitable learning environment in a new space
The timing of the Block 1 quarantines also presented a challenge for tent classes. Hughes’ CC100 literature class only spent one week together in the tent, minus the two Loomis residents who got quarantined within the first few days.
“We had what I thought was really one wonderful week in the tent,” Hughes said. “Then everybody else got quarantined anyhow, so we ended up going remote.”
The two students in locked-down Loomis struggled with not being able to physically be in the class as everyone else bonded in person. Hughes said one of the students told her that she felt like she was behind and couldn’t ever catch up.
The possibility of leaving some students behind has led a few professors to question the fairness of having in-person classes for some students while others have no choice but to take them online.
Environmental Studies Associate Director Eric Perramond, who also teaches in the Southwest Studies department, was originally set to teach in a tent for his Block 2 class, a first-year writing seminar about the Southwest. Concerns about equity ultimately changed his mind.
“It did not seem fair to me since half of my class was on campus, and the other half of the first-years were sent home,” Perramond wrote in an email. “As a firm believer in inclusive and equal education and pedagogy ... I simply thought it important (and right, inclusive) to not create two separate learning experiences, for first-years remaining on campus versus those who were asked to go home because of COVID-19.”
To compromise, Perramond switched his class to Flex delivery and offered in-person office hours with masks and social distancing once a week for his students still on campus.
Hayward also noted there are plenty of students who don’t want to attend in-person classes right now, regardless of if they were in a tent. The college has to extend equity to students with anxieties about the pandemic too, he said.
“You have to put them first. … I want everyone to feel that they’re in a safe, nurturing classroom space,” Hayward said. “And where we are right now, I don’t think that the in-person instruction, from my perspective, is something that we can do.”
Reduced density and delayed starts: Liberal arts colleges start to plan for spring semester
Colorado College has announced they intend to release a decision this month about the spring semester and who can return to campus. As we prepare for the announcement, we rounded up what some other liberal arts colleges are planning for spring:
Bowdoin College is starting the spring semester around three weeks later than last year. Spring vacation is also shortened from 17 days in 2020 to five days in 2021.
Grinnell College is staggering the number of students allowed on campus for spring semester. First-years are invited back for Spring Term 1, which begins Feb. 1, and second and fourth-year students are allowed to return for Spring Term 2. The college is also offering an optional summer term “to meet academic needs that arise.”
Middlebury College is planning to conduct J-Term classes remotely from Jan. 19 to Feb. 12. Students will return to campus for spring semester Feb. 24–25, and classes will begin March 1. The college canceled spring break and Senior Week.
Rhodes College is allowing some students to return to campus in the spring. The college will offer a combination of in-person and remote courses. Students are not allowed to travel, except for approved activities. “Single rooms will be the norm,” President Marjorie Hass wrote. She added that the college has additional spaces reserved for isolation and quarantine.
St. Olaf College will offer Interim, a month-long period in January where students can take a class, participate in an internship, or pursue independent study or research, online. Students will have a two-week break and then they will return to campus for spring semester. In a college-wide survey, 79% of faculty, 87% of staff, and 60% of students said they preferred this plan.
Swarthmore College is planning to invite juniors and seniors to live on campus in the spring. The majority of spring semester classes will still be remote, even for students living on campus. First-year or sophomore students who struggle to learn remotely because of personal circumstances can apply for housing exceptions.
Wellesley College will bring juniors and seniors back to campus in the spring, as well as first-year or sophomore international students who weren’t able to enter the country this fall. All students living on campus will have a single room.
About the CC COVID-19 Reporting Project
The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project is created by Colorado College student journalists Miriam Brown, Arielle Gordon, and Isabel Hicks, in partnership with The Catalyst, Colorado College’s student newspaper. Work by Phoebe Lostroh, Associate Professor of Molecular Biology at CC and National Science Foundation Program Director in Genetic Mechanisms, Molecular and Cellular Biosciences, will appear from time to time, as will infographics by Colorado College students Rana Abdu, Aleesa Chua, Sara Dixon, Jia Mei, and Lindsey Smith.
The project seeks to provide frequent updates about CC and other higher education institutions during the pandemic by providing original reporting, analysis, interviews with campus leaders, and context about what state and national headlines mean for the CC community.
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