DL 246

Preparing for the Storm

Published: May 16, 2020 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome to Digitally Literate, issue 246. Your go-to source for insightful content on education, technology, and the digital landscape.

🔖 Key Takeaways

Trauma-Informed Teaching Benefits All: Strategies designed for students who have experienced trauma help all students academically and emotionally
Human First, Professor Second: Course design must acknowledge pain, dislocation, uncertainty, and trauma now central to all our lives
Values-Centered Planning Framework: Moving from coping to planning requires pedagogy at the center, not as an afterthought
Know the Risks Before Reopening: Detailed infection risk assessment essential for taskforces planning face-to-face return
Open Education Meets Social Justice: Removing barriers is complex—"participatory parity" as the aim needs nuanced examination

Hi all, welcome to issue 246 of Digitally Literate.

This week I hosted the NCTE Twitter chat with Robyn Seglem on Literacy in Digital Times. You can read the archive of this chat here.

I also helped post the following:

Trauma informed teaching during COVID-19: What the virus has taken from us and how we get it back - Kathleen Pennyway on how to center students' needs, and help them deal with traumas such as violence, home instability, and poverty.
Beyond teachers as healers: Teachers, students, and reciprocal care in traumatic times - Elizabeth Dutro on the need to consider trauma in our classrooms as teachers, students, and families face the emotional, financial, and physical devastations and anxieties of COVID-19.
Finding your literacy sweet spot - Salena Davis on how we can help students with these literacy challenges as they navigate their own trauma.

📺 Watch

Trauma-Informed Teaching Strategies

When teachers use strategies tailored to children who have experienced trauma, all students reap the emotional and academic benefits.

The pandemic has made trauma-informed approaches not a specialization but a baseline requirement. Every student now carries some version of collective trauma that shapes their capacity to learn.

📚 Read

Human First, Professor Second

Cathy Davidson detailing the key mindset as we begin to think about learning environments in the fall:

We need to be human first, professor second. We need to design as humans for humans in a global crisis. We need to design our courses with the awareness of pain, dislocation, uncertainty, and trauma now central to all our lives. It's a lot to ask. It is the one and only essential as we design our courses for this disrupted fall.

Values-Centered Instructional Planning

Robin DeRosa on the need to be guided by a consistent, mission-aligned framework as we move from coping to planning for the fall and beyond:

What is missing from most of the remote teaching contingency planning is a framework for helping the people inside institutions understand and make decisions about pedagogy from inside the pandemic's evolving reality. Pedagogy is not an ancillary or optional part of conversations about remote teaching. Pedagogy is the category that describes how we teach. For that reason, whether we foreground it or not, pedagogy is a key part of how our learners understand and assess their experience at our institutions during this crisis.

The Risks - Know Them - Avoid Them

As you begin to make plans to go back out in public…or ease social distancing…please read this.

This is especially helpful for those that sit on taskforces developing plans to move to face-to-face in the fall. Understanding transmission dynamics—indoor versus outdoor, duration of exposure, ventilation—provides the foundation for meaningful safety planning.

The Storm We Can't See

A look at the coming/current economic fallout:

Universities are forfeiting room and board fees, lucrative spring sports seasons and the elective surgeries at teaching hospitals that balance their budgets. Many—if not all—colleges and universities will probably have to nix the fall semester. Across the country, it's easy to imagine that the nation's 4,000 colleges and universities might require a $200 billion bailout just to finish out the calendar year.

Sarah Lambert and Laura Czerniewicz guest edited a special themed issue on open education and social justice.

While open education has traditionally been about increasing access, it has become clear that removing barriers is complex and that "participatory parity" as the aim of socially just education needs a nuanced examination.

🔨 Do

Strategies for Engagement Beyond Zoom

These strategies are not meant to take the place of deeper learning. That kind of learning is generally better when done with a mix of asynchronous and synchronous conversations and discussions.

These are not Zoom-specific…it's just what most of you are using. The goal is engagement that serves learning, not engagement for its own sake.

🤔 Consider

When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, "Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping."

Fred Rogers

Rogers' reminder to look for helpers resonates as we prepare for an uncertain fall. The helpers are the teachers designing trauma-informed courses, the administrators centering pedagogy over logistics, the researchers connecting open education to social justice. In the storm we can't see, the helpers make the path visible.

When Will This Be Over? Sesame Workshop's Tips For Parenting During A Pandemic can help.

Previous: DL 245 • Next: DL 247 • Archive: 📧 Newsletter

🌱 Connected Concepts:

Pedagogy — Trauma-informed teaching, values-centered planning, human-first course design
Education Technology — Fall planning uncertainty, remote teaching contingency, engagement strategies
Digital Wellbeing — Teacher and student trauma, reciprocal care, compassion in crisis
Open Educational Resources — Open education and social justice, participatory parity
Future of Work — Higher ed economic crisis, institutional survival planning