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This conversation is with the authors of the chapter “Everything Is Different but Nothing Is New: The Missed Opportunity for Reform in the Wake of COVID-19” 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 Amazon.
Kashema Hutchinson is an adjunct lecturer at CUNY LaGuardia Community College. Sujung Kim is a research associate at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Adashima Oyo is the executive director of the Futures Initiative and an adjunct faculty member at NYU and Brooklyn College, City University of New York. Katina Rogers is the founder and principal of Inkcap Consulting.
Q: What main themes of your chapter would you like readers to take away and bring back to their institutions and organizations?
A: We would like readers to come away with a sense of critical hope—a clear-eyed recognition of the many problems endemic to our universities and the challenges that educators and learners face, but also a sense of the vibrant possibilities that are constantly taking root under our feet. Our chapter asks why long-term structural change has proven so difficult, particularly given how quickly universities made sweeping changes as the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded in spring of 2020. That disruption created an opportunity for university leaders to rebuild educational structures with greater equity and access at the fore—but instead, most institutions went back to the status quo.
We found this lack of meaningful structural change to be disappointing, but we remain inspired by the ways that faculty, students and staff supported one another in a moment of crisis, and we would like to see that mentality folded into the core of university values. Our chapter aims to help people find ways to move between acts of individual agency—teaching practices, mentorship strategies, things we can do right now—and broader acts of structural change. We have each been struck by the power of holistic relationship-building and care in higher education, and we would like to see that approach made more feasible through supportive labor structures at all levels of the university.
Q: What are potential opportunities and levers to recenter learning within research-intensive colleges and universities?
A: The first step toward recentering learning is refocusing on individual students. This was a common theme in the case studies our chapter explored: Sujung Kim writes about the power of fostering a sense of belonging among international students. Adashima Oyo writes about the ways she invited students to talk about how the pandemic was affecting them, turning her classrooms into sites of inquiry regarding mental health support, food insecurity, family health and more. Kashema Hutchinson writes of her work co-directing the CUNY Peer Leaders program and the persistent focus within that space of making space for students to breathe and reminding them that they matter. None of this is groundbreaking. It takes hard work, care and patience. It requires faculty and staff to trust students, to see and hear them. We need universities to do a better job recognizing and rewarding this work, which so often is shouldered by minoritized members of the university community.
Recentering learning also requires a shift in perspective—from one that emphasizes expertise to one that acknowledges and welcomes uncertainty. Many of us pursued graduate education in the first place because of a spark of curiosity. Recentering learning means finding that spark again, delighting in the things we do not yet know and showing that side of ourselves to students. Of course, administrative practices need to support this shift as well; in particular, promotion and tenure guidelines must reward both classroom teaching and individual mentorship as highly as they reward research productivity. In many ways public universities have an advantage in making this shift, since their institutional missions tend to support broad and equitable learning. We just need practices and reward structures to catch up and align with these missions.
Q: How might the rapid evolution of generative AI impact the work of recentering learning?
A: We see generative AI as a new literacy that will be an important area of critical engagement for the humanities. Teaching students to navigate this rapidly developing set of technologies means offering them a critical lens with which to understand the shifting terrain.
Asking interesting questions is the first step to meaningful engagement, just as it would be with any new technology. Instead of focusing on when AI is or is not allowed in the classroom, we’d love to see instructors helping students push into more complex terrain: What are the areas where generative AI can support our work? How can it be used subversively? What are the sociocultural, environmental and economic impacts? These are deeply humanistic questions that we hope can lead us collectively into more interesting and productive spaces when it comes to AI. What AI can never do is replace human interaction, trust and care. No matter what tools, platforms and technologies we use and study, relationships must remain central.