In my work as a sociology instructor and learning strategist, students are figured as partners as we recover from the pandemic and navigate a post-pandemic world. For many, the pandemic created and exacerbated mental health challenges, with the impact of illness falling disproportionally on the most marginalized. In taking the (post-) pandemic world as an object for study, my students and I have been able to co-analyze knowledge production and co-discover what our experiences underscore about how power operates in society. Through critical reflection, students have been invited to share their learning, challenges, and victories. I have modeled this reflection by sharing my own mental-health challenges living with anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder. In partnership, our creation of a repository of stories has been a powerful tool for students to express themselves and create community; they have reported that sharing has made them feel less isolated and more supported and hopeful. Image description: Three people, representative of learners, are in the foreground and facing terrain depicting a kaleidoscope of shapes and colours symbolizing the (mental health) complexities of navigating the pandemic and a post-pandemic world. A compass with bulbous offshoots reminiscent of coronavirus’ spike proteins is depicted in the top left corner of the image, thus further evoking the challenges of this navigation. The learners are joined by a branch with leaves, and this budding connection signifies how such challenges can be faced “head on” through community and partnership.
Cachia, Chris. (2023). In S. Slates & A. Cook-Sather (Eds.) How can students-as-partners work address challenges to student, faculty, and staff mental health and well-being? (225). International Journal for Students as Partners, 7(2). https://doi.org/10.15173/ijsap.v7i2.5597
Description: Online discussions are a cornerstone of remote learning as they promote active participation and allow for interaction amongst students and between students and faculty (Baglione & Nastanski, 2007), therefore fostering relationship. Indeed, interaction has been highlighted as one of the key factors in determining both faculty and student satisfaction with online learning (Martín-Rodríguez et al., 2015), while “relational humanity” has been figured, particularly within the online learning environment, as “an integral part of the faculty-student relationship” (Eadens & Eadens, 2021, p. 277). Nonetheless, a core challenge for online teaching and learning is the fashioning “of opportunities, structures and formats that increase meaningful interaction” (Joyner, 2012, p. 35) and relationship (Smoyer et al., 2020). Without intentional course design, online discussions tend to focus only on lower-level discourse (Christopher, Thomas, & Tallent-Runnels, 2004, p. 170). As such, structured anchors and frameworks for discussion and reflection must be implemented to increase levels of discourse, interaction, and relationship. Biographical disruption is here offered as one such anchor that, by its personal nature, fosters reflection, interaction, and community. A term first coined by Bury (1982) to describe chronic illness as an embodied break with the experience of everyday life, biographical disruption considers the knowledge that underpins one’s experiences. The following strategy captures how biographical disruption may be implemented as an anchor for (shared) reflection in the online learning environment, including reflection on both content and the online learning process itself. This anchor, coupled with the DEAL framework for critical reflection (Ash & Clayton, 2009), has been utilized as part of an engaging, integral, and powerful opportunity for student discussion and reflection. Aside from implementation related to threaded discussion posts, biographical disruption may be utilized as an anchor for individual reflections shared only with select individuals (such as faculty and/or specific peers) and collected as part of a student’s individual learning portfolio.
Cachia, C. (2023). Implement “Biographical Disruption” as an Anchor for Critical Reflection in Online Learning. In deNoyelles, A., Bauer, S., & Wyatt, S. (Eds.), Teaching Online Pedagogical Repository. Orlando, FL: University of Central Florida Center for Distributed Learning.
Focusing on shared inquiry, my experience of partnership with students is alchemical. This alchemy is here represented by the book and its symbols for gold (the sun) and the philosopher’s stone (those shapes signify the four classical elements: earth, air, fire, and water). Partnership is alchemical as it involves the communion of ideas that create an empyreal-like whole greater than the sum of its (celestial) parts. This communion is symbolized through the depiction of the cosmos. Antonio Gramsci (1971) refers to formal education as part of a nexus of institutions that maintain hegemony; he distinguishes between the traditional intelligentsia that upholds power and an organic class who, through culture, articulate the experiences of the masses. The cosmos unfolds before the learners in the foreground, who represent knowledge from below (or the organic class traditionally dispossessed in the classroom). Critical pedagogy, first espoused by Paulo Freire, grows from Gramsci; it develops students’ understanding of hegemony and their abilities to take constructive action. The surveilling eyes are confronted by the learners to symbolize partnership as an act of defiance against hegemonic classroom structures. Efforts to discover the philosopher’s stone were known as the Magnum Opus or “Great Work”; in my experience, partnership is the great work constituting authentic learning.