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Designing a Pathway Through Our Post-Pandemic Teaching Challenges

This Research Note was originally published August 2024 adapted from remarks delivered at the Teaching Excellence Awards Ceremony in May 2024 by Debora VanNijnatten, academic director, Teaching Excellence and Innovation.

When I was preparing to teach my courses in the 2022-23 academic year, I was relieved that pandemic restrictions were over and we were back fully in-person. As an instructor, I was convinced that I could hit the ground running and all would be well – because we would be back in a physical classroom, brimming (I expected) with live reactions, compelling conversation and teachable moments. 
I was wrong. In fact, all term I had the distinct impression that I was off-kilter vis-à-vis the students in my classes, more so in my large first-year class but also in my senior undergraduate classes. I noticed that the material I was using wasn’t landing; the exercises that I used in class weren’t working in the same way to engage students or reinforce their learning of assigned materials; and students were doing worse than they had before the pandemic on assessments. Many students weren’t showing up at all.
One might assume that such experiences are merely symptomatic of this post-pandemic era in which we find ourselves. The COVID-19 education disruption has been described by UNESCO as a “generational catastrophe” (UNESCO 2023). After two years of moving back and forth from virtual to in-person instruction, of doing schoolwork in isolation, and of operating under a pared-back set of standards and structures (Malesic 2022), our students are coming to us with less substantive preparation, less experience in terms of actively engaging with the material and with their peers, and less confidence expressing themselves. 
Laurier’s Kelly Gallagher-Mackay and colleagues (2023) have shown in a recent report for the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO) that Grade 12 students’ grades increased dramatically during the pandemic and more of them were accepted into university. At the same time, however, students’ special educational needs also increased. Reinforcing the messages from these findings (i.e., students entering university are increasingly underprepared), other observers are highlighting students’ lack of skills in terms of managing their courseload, conducting themselves in a professional manner, and even learning independently (McGraw Hill 2023; Napierala et al, 2022; Wong 2022). And looming in the background are the widening ‘opportunity gaps’ in the educational system, due to inequities along the lines of race, language and economic situation (Hall 2023; Shukla et al. 2022). 
Certainly, the academic legacies of the pandemic are here to stay, and we cannot assume, as Huish (2022) notes, that students entering university with high grades “are just ready to go.” We have some backfilling and upskilling to do – and I hear from colleagues across Laurier and at other institutions that they are having to integrate more fundamental academic skills into their courses.
However, I don’t think that the pandemic explains everything we are seeing in our classrooms. In fact, there are multiple forces that have been brewing for some time and are now combining to create complex, multilayered teaching challenges. After a year as Academic Director of Teaching Excellence and Innovation (TEI), learning from the TEI team and hearing the concerns of faculty and staff colleagues across the institution, I would make three observations about the teaching context at Laurier that should figure into how we support the teaching mission of the university over the coming years.

Our Changing Student Body

The first observation is that our student body has changed, and now has a more complex set of incentives, skills and life experiences that they bring with them into the classroom.
Let me list a few attributes that we are seeing at Laurier and other postsecondary institutions, as supported by recent survey data. To begin, students display a noticeable instrumentalism in attitudes towards the role that education plays in their lives. Successive years of survey data from the Canadian University Survey Consortium show that the primary reason students apply to university is to get a job and gain upward mobility. The actual learning experience is decidedly secondary.
In addition, we have all noted a growing level of apathy on the part of many students in our classes and it is very hard to engage them (Robinson 2022). Education researchers believe this is rooted in the fact that our students – after living through economic insecurity, watching rising social unrest and fearing for their future in a climate-impacted world – are experiencing disconnection and hopelessness (Watermark 2023). The Center for Collegiate Mental Health in the U.S., a network of over 750 college and university counselling centers, finds that academic distress is “much higher” now and that students are experiencing “difficulty staying motivated in class” (2022). Similarly, a 2022 HEQCO survey of Ontario first-year students found that, for more than 70 percent of respondents, a lack of motivation was the main challenge to academic success in their first year after high school (Napierala et al. 2022).
Add to this the clearly documented reduction in students’ attention span due to social media and smartphones (Ainur Aivaz 2022; Ward et al. 2017), and you can see how the situation is shaping up.
Moreover, we need to address the fact that so-called ‘non-traditional’ students – student demographics that have “previously been underserved by, or under-represented, in the university sector” (Glauser 2018)
  • now make up the largest portion of our student body. In the 2023 CUSC Middle Years Survey of 12,000 students at 44 universities:
  • 39% of respondents reported belonging to a visible minority; 
  • 6% self-identified as Indigenous; 
  • 40% identified as having a disability (25% of which was mental health-related):
  • 13% were first-generation students with neither parent having obtained postsecondary education; 
  • 31% were 22 years of age or older; and 
  • 60% were employed (40% of those working 11-20 hours per week). 
Such findings point to an incredibly diverse student population, and it is not clear that we have fully come to terms with these complex human beings who are our students. We need to devote time and expend resources to figure out how to reach them. This diversity will obviously inform the kinds of teaching approaches, course designs and assessments we use. 

The Stroppy, Stressful Teaching Context

The second observation is that, at the same time our student body has become more complex, and so too has the teaching context we face. In fact, the dynamics confronting us now – which emanate largely from exogenous forces – are layering, one atop another, in a way that might seem unmanageable from a course design and classroom management perspective. 
We are all aware of the rise of polarization in social and political spheres across the country that is having a chilling effect on classroom discussions and making it difficult for the university to create safe and nurturing spaces where students can engage directly with each other and their professors to challenge ideas and hierarchies and be ‘constructively disruptive’. When paired with the lack of motivation and engagement noted above, this reinforces silence in the classroom or – worse – the dominance of just a few stroppy (i.e., argumentative) voices. 
Related to this is the movement away from science-based (and even fact-based) reasoning, and a marked shift in the public’s perception of the value of higher education (Gecker 2024; Leger 2023). Anti-intellectualism is growing in our broader society (Hiebert 2023), and this means that we have students who are being asked to value and internalize what we are teaching them (FYI, I teach courses in climate change policy) yet go home to family and friends who may view our work quite skeptically. How should we help our students navigate this? How do we demonstrate the value proposition of what we are teaching in universities?
In addition, the advent of generative AI and other emerging transformative technologies is changing many of the calculations on which faculty base their course design, particularly in terms of how to judge whether learning is occurring. Faculty find themselves re-evaluating established understandings of “academic integrity”; by reviewing their pedagogical approaches and teaching practices, particularly with regards to assessment; and trying to find a balance between acknowledging that we need to train students to use generative AI properly (because we know they are using it anyway, and will likely need to use it in their post-university career) yet also mitigate its use so that higher order learning is not short-circuited. This balance looks different for every faculty member and for every course, and it takes considerable thought and work.
Finally, the public education system is, I think it is fair to say, undergoing considerable churning as the pandemic highlighted and exacerbated gaps in student academic skills and achievement. The NGO People for Education (2022) argued that “a perfect storm of stress” had engulfed public education during the pandemic, resulting in staff shortages, a lack of mental health supports, widening achievement gaps and inequalities among students, with these legacies not yet addressed since restrictions were ended (Gallagher-Mackay and Corso 2022; Bennet 2023).
For faculty, navigating the resulting instructional climate – underprepared and disengaged students, fraught classroom discussions, and worries about academic integrity – is stressful, to say the least. 

Tackling Difficult and Multi-Layered Teaching Challenges

Third, the teaching challenges we face require synergistic approaches and tools that allow us to address them in a professional, coordinated and collegial fashion. These are not yet fully in place.
Professional educational developers can support faculty in addressing the difficult and multi-layered teaching challenges facing them. Faculty cannot just focus on singular teaching challenges one-at-a-time – student engagement in the classroom, for example – because our teaching challenges are interlinked in various ways across engagement, EDI, accessibility and mental health issues, the use of generative AI tools and so on. Nor will we ever have enough resources to provide adequate, individualized student supports. Instead, we need to focus on the ways that we construct our courses, the teaching practices we adopt, and the ways that we think about assessment. Educational developers can help us to design a pathway through these difficult and multi-layered teaching challenges. 
Indeed, professional educational development in the post-secondary context has perhaps never been more critical and must be recognized as a core function of the university – and resourced as such. Teaching support units act as ‘nodes’ within university networks that draw teaching and student-facing resources together with the most recent research to develop strategies that respond to diverse modes of student learning and innovative instructional techniques (Moffat 2024).
Moreover, teaching the nontraditional student and confronting external forces that can mix into a toxic brew in our classrooms requires a high level of administrative coordination and collaboration. We cannot properly support our full-time and part-time faculty as well as graduate student instructors if we are not actively sharing information and resources amongst ourselves and developing projects together which directly target our core teaching and learning concerns. We need to bring the faculty and student support sides together.
In this respect, we can take cues from what is happening across shared service units at Laurier. We have a lot to learn from staff colleagues who are reaching out across units – the Library, Accessible Learning, Writing Services, the Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, the Office of Indigenous Initiatives, Experiential Learning and Career Development, all our Faculty offices and Teaching Excellence and Innovation – and creating interactive channels to strategize about such things as how to introduce first-year students to appropriate practices for generative AI use and how to create ‘braver spaces’ to discuss sensitive topics and raise awareness. 
Finally, faculty can learn from each other and create more spaces and opportunities to share teaching strategies, at the university, faculty and program levels. While we take great pleasure in celebrating our Donald F. Morgenson Teaching Excellence Award recipients at Laurier, there are many, many faculty across Laurier who are using high-impact teaching practices as well as applied and experiential learning to get students engaged and foster deeper learning, to pull students out of their apathy and towards discovering meaning in their learning. Our colleagues are developing innovative assignments and exercises to extend learning, and are building diversity, equity and inclusion principles into how courses are designed and how interactions occur with students. Sharing our teaching experiences helps us to feel like we are not alone as we try to serve our nontraditional students, overcome politicized and polarized classroom dynamics, and confront generative AI. 

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