So many of our colleagues have discussed, advised, and reflected on the expectations, limits, and ongoing concerns of emergency remote teaching. Because of this, it hasn’t felt particularly useful to write new posts on teaching in the times of COVID-19. Instead, we collated some of the many sources that have come out in recent weeks to guide, reflect, and inform the ways we teach at this moment and how it will inform our pedagogies in the future.
Guidance and Advice
Samantha Cutrara, “Pandemic History Teaching” Series. Imagining a New “We” with Dr Samantha Cutrara/YouTube. 25 March 2020 – present (ongoing).
In this video playlist, Cutrara posts short interviews with historians and educators in History to talk through how each are approaching teaching during COVID-19. It is also available as a podcast!
Andrea Eidinger and Mary Chaktsiris, “Doing an OK Job: Navigating Teaching in the Age of COVID-19.” University Affairs/Affaires Universitaires. 16 March 2020.
In an earlier post, Chaktsiris encouraged historians to “pivot” in light of the abrupt shift online. Here, she joins Eidinger to outline advice and resources to get yourself, and the students in your classes, through as best as you can.
Alan MacEachern and William J Turkel, “A Time for Research Distancing.” Active History. 31 March 2020.
“Historical research is never strictly about accessing everything we need, but about accessing what we can, and stopping when time, resources, and the availability of sources tells us to.” MacEachern and Turkel do well to focus on Masters students’ research shifts over the summer, but especially remind readers of the digital means of doing research available to us.
Denis McKim, “Canadian History After COVID-19.” Borealia: A Group Blog on Early Canadian History. 20 April 2020.
McKim highlights the historiographical ramifications that COVID-19 could have on Canadian historians. In some incredibly interesting, comparative ways, he discusses some possible trends and themes that scholarship after COVID-19 may well explore.
Ian Milligan, “Emergency Remote Teaching: A Post Secondary Reality Check.” Active History. 20 March 2020.
Thinking through this shift as “emergency remote teaching,” Milligan strives to re-frame what we are doing as a response to a rapidly changing situation. Indeed, professors—tenured and sessional alike—are trying to do the best they can to support students to finish the term.
Reflections
Laura Madokoro, “Listening During a Pandemic, and beyond.” Active History. 2 April 2020.
Madokoro revisits Julie Cruikshank’s Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination (UBC Press, 2005). She asks questions around hearing, listening, and responsibility in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The COVID 19 Chroniclers. 17 March 2020 – present (ongoing).
Andrea Eidinger, Margaret Lehman, Brittany Luby, Krista McCracken, Carolyn Podruchny, and Sarah York-Bertram responded to Gilly Carr’s call to members of the Women in Academia Support Network to write diary entries about their experiences in the current moment. This Canadian counterpart of Carr’s original call to discuss personal and professional experiences, as well as reflections, on being historians during COVID-19.
Donald Wright, “Reading Canadian History in Isolation.” Active History. 15 April 2020.
Wright compiles a list of colleagues’ current readings. These are the books getting them through this current moment.
Resources
Sean Carleton, Andrea Eidinger, and Carolyn Podruchny, “Learning from Past Pandemics: Resources on the 1918-1919 Influenza Epidemic in Canada.” Unwritten Histories/Active History. 15 April 2020.
This resource guide compiles available sources (some of them highlighted in this post) on the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic.
Magda Fahrni and Esyllt Jones, “What Difference Does a Century Make? Pandemic Responses to Influenza and COVID-19.” NiCHE: Network in Canadian History and Environment. 1 April 2020.
Fahrni and Jones brilliantly link select threads from the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic to the current COVID-19 crisis. Together, they are particularly focused on public health directives, precarious employment, and equality.
Thomas Peace, “Bringing the Flu into the Classroom.” Active History. 16 March 2020.
Peace shares a replicable assignment on the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic, using our present moment to teach about the past. A primary document assignment, it guides students to compare London, Ontario newspapers and death registers to learn about its impact.