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This conversation is with the author of the chapter “Learning About Learning: Students’ Insights From a Pandemic Year” in our new co-edited book, Recentering Learning: Complexity, Resilience and Adaptability in Higher Education (JHU Press, 2024). The book (in paper and ebook form) is available for order from JHU Press and on Amazon.
Sherry Lee Linkon is a professor of English at Georgetown University. “Learning About Learning” was written with three students who took courses online with Linkon during the 2020–21 academic year. Sophie Grabiec is a managing editor at Elon University. Isabel McHenry graduated from Georgetown University in 2024. Lillian Nagengast is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Texas at Austin.
Q: What main themes of your chapter would you like readers to take away and bring back to their institutions and organizations?
A: So much of the discussion about education during the pandemic has focused either on how faculty adapted to online teaching or how online learning harmed students. But several of my students had commented on how taking classes online had changed their sense of how they learn—in part just by getting them thinking about learning itself.
Many habits and approaches that they took for granted were disrupted that year, and while many students struggled with that disruption, for some, the change prompted new awareness of learning as a social process.
For example, Isabel noticed how much she had relied on informal, even accidental interactions, like chats with other students in the hallway before class, and that, in turn, made discussions in Zoom feel more formal. Sophie noticed and gained appreciation for slower, more reflective approaches in her pandemic courses, and like Isabel, she recognized how online learning required more intentional approaches to student interactions.
Q: What are potential opportunities and levers to recenter learning at research-intensive colleges and universities?
A: For me, the key lesson from writing this article is that students can benefit from experiences that disrupt their habits and assumptions. Pandemic adaptations in pedagogy enabled students and faculty alike to notice patterns they had not been aware of before. Better yet, as these students testify, changes can create opportunities for students to take more ownership of their own learning.
Lillian’s story illustrates this well. As a graduate student tuned in to early discussions about pandemic learning loss, she looked for ways to be more proactive as a learner, especially about metacognitive strategies. This enabled her to emerge from the pandemic as a more confident learner, because the success of her intentionality highlighted her own agency as a student.
Obviously, we shouldn’t hope for another pandemic to enable that kind of recognition. While I don’t think we should disrupt teaching just to get students to pay attention to how they learn, Isabel’s, Lillian’s and Sophie’s reflections encourage me to be brave about trying new things. They also reinforce the value of actively inviting students to notice and think about new experiences as opportunities to think about how they are learning, not just what they are learning.
Q: How might the rapid evolution of generative AI impact the work of recentering learning?
A: AI is certainly disruptive! It also underscores another lesson I’ve taken from writing this article: Talking with students about their experiences with anything that disrupts their learning can help us figure out how to use it effectively.
In my SoTL work, I’ve usually asked students about what works for them or about how they worked through something difficult. With AI, I’m asking more open-ended questions but also focusing on more specific practices.
With AI, that means asking students to experiment with ways of using it and then—and this is the key—talking seriously with them about how it worked, both for the immediate task and for future work. I think this is a slight twist on students as partners: Instead of students as partners in teaching, I’m engaging them as partners in learning. We’re figuring out AI together, and I may be learning more from this than they are.
