Back to campus in a COVID-19 World

Update 2020 | Vol 38
Feature

Student leaders Brendan Whittle (Students’ Union), Mike Meleka (Residence Don),
Meaghan Hymers (Students’ Union), and Carter Watkinson (Students’ Union) model
the new look at SJU, where face masks are mandatory. 

 

The return to campus was more than a little different for St. Jerome’s University students this year. At a time when smiles are masked and gatherings are not possible, it may have seemed challenging to convey the warm welcome and build the strong connections that make St. Jerome’s University special. But the restraints imposed by COVID-19 have also offered new opportunities for staff, faculty, and students to show care, build resiliency, and strengthen community.

Acting Director of Student Affairs John Arnou knew that upper-year student leaders would be central to preserving the St. Jerome’s community and spirit. Student leaders take on a wide range of community-building tasks at SJU, including planning and running student activities and charity drives, acting as residence dons, serving as student ministers, and helping to recruit new students. A critical piece of ensuring continuity in their roles was keeping the student leadership program on track.

“They have the creativity. They have the ideas,” says Arnou. “The question was: how can we support what they’re doing and the ideas they’re bringing to us, while recognizing that community and student life at SJU will look different in the year ahead?”

Student leaders usually spend two and a half weeks in an intensive on-campus training program. In August, that training happened online, which, Arnou discovered, opened up the leadership program to students who might not have been able to spend those extra weeks on campus. It also presented some challenges in shifting the learning and training to virtual settings on a very tight timeline.

This year’s cohort of student leaders have made the most of their status as digital natives — members of a generation that grew up with the Internet. They have worked hard to create new, virtual meeting places for all students using tools such as online meetups, virtual movie nights, and games, while building in flexibility to respond to student needs on and off campus as they evolve. Their work has also supported student connectivity in residence.

SJU’s Student Affairs has aimed to find continuity in service and a balance between safety and togetherness for the 90 students living in residence, despite some public common areas being closed this term. Each student is able to retreat to a private residence room, arranged around smaller common areas, called pods, restricted to groups of about 10 students. Students who share a pod create a family unit of sorts, so students can bond with their floor mates.

The pandemic has also transformed how Student Affairs delivers services in ways that increase equity and access for many students. Academic advising now takes place virtually — a big advantage for out-of-town and international students. These changes are part of the ongoing assessment of services that are required as the world’s circumstances evolve daily.

“We plan and pivot based on the information we have, and what we are hearing from students,” adds Arnou.

While Student Affairs spent the summer getting ready to welcome students to the St. Jerome’s University family in person or online, faculty were preparing to welcome students to their new virtual classrooms.

Online courses have been part of higher education for more than a decade, but under normal conditions, says Interim Vice President Academic and Dean, Cristina Vanin, they can take as long as a year to prepare and involve trained specialists to develop.

These are not normal conditions. As is the case at most other Canadian universities, St. Jerome’s University staff and faculty face the challenges of balancing work and life during the pandemic: home might be the office, daycare, and schoolroom all at the same time. In the space of a few months, faculty put in long hours adapting their classes to online learning spaces and practices.

“Along with thinking about the content and learning outcomes of courses,” Vanin notes, “online instruction introduces a range of new technical issues and the need to find new ways to interact with students.”

Apart from the obvious challenges of building community and engagement, digital course design involves choosing and moving to appropriate digital platforms, locating digital copies of assigned texts, and securing copyright permissions for digital formats. To help faculty adapt, St. Jerome’s University had the help of two co-op students as Online Learning Assistants. Library staff also shifted their support for instructors to a variety of virtual options, including finding digital versions of the texts they would have put on reserve in the past.

“I’ve been so impressed with faculty and staff throughout this experience,” says Vanin. “They’ve been flexible, patient, tolerant, understanding. It really shows their commitment to wanting to do the best they can for our students.”

Examples of this commitment are plentiful at SJU. In the Department of Sexuality, Marriage, and Family Studies, Assistant Professor Denise Whitehead collaborated with Lecturer Carm De Santis last spring to redevelop their department’s introductory course, SMF 101, on Relationships and Families. The course usually attracts a diverse group of up to 200 students from a wide range of disciplines across campus. Among their first tasks: imagining new kinds of assignments and modes of assessment.

“There’s no way to control the environment,” Whitehead points out. “Any exam is potentially open book.” So, Whitehead and DeSantis designed weekly open-book quizzes and an online book club for participation grades, during the spring term. As a capstone assignment, students interviewed a family member or friend about a family or relationship experience and connected their analysis to course content.

Whitehead sees some advantages to the online model. “This situation forced us to move away from multiple choice exams to assessments that were more thoughtful and reflective,” she says. “Students were able to take asynchronous courses from the other side of the world and, perhaps most significant in an introductory course on family and relationships, she notes, “the online format allowed greater discussion about sensitive topics.”

At the Centre for Responsible Citizenship, international programs are on hold. But Service Learning Program Coordinator Michelle Metzger and Department of English Lecturer Sylvia Terzian have reimagined and redesigned the Encounter KW program: a service learning course that usually takes students out of the classroom and into the community to study issues such as food justice in Waterloo Region.

Service learning, Metzger explains, is built on four pillars of personal development. Students reflect on their purpose and values, extend their sense of community and equity, build resiliency through relationships and encounters that might bring some discomfort, and develop habits of critical reflection. To reimagine the course for an online environment, Metzger explains, they focused on the self-reflection and self-awareness pieces. The program will bring in guest speakers from local organizations, and Terzian has developed a wide reading list on the subject of food and community to expose students to diversity of thinking.

“It’s innovative in the sense that we’re approaching the development of a course from a very heart-centred place — with academic rigour, but with learning outcomes that are focused on the whole person,” says Metzger.

“These values are really foundational to the mission of our University. How we teach them has always changed from year to year, depending on the students in the program. St. Jerome’s has traditions that we honour, but we’re also very creative. We’ve always been fluid.”

Whatever new teaching practices or student services might come from this experience, the pandemic has reaffirmed the value and importance of physical togetherness for the St. Jerome’s University community. For Vanin, the lesson that teachers have drawn from this experience so far is “how important face-to-face teaching really is.” Whitehead, too, looks forward to a time when everyone can return to campus. “It’s teaching into the void. We miss eye-to-eye contact,” she says.

Arnou agrees. “We’ve really come to realize how much our staff and faculty, as well as students, value face-to-face community. That’s something we lean on. It’s a big part of the SJU experience.”

For now, the St. Jerome’s University community is finding different ways to grow and connect. “We’ve learned that we can pivot and adapt when the unexpected happens,” says Arnou.

“St. Jerome’s has come together in difficult times in the past. We can do it again.”

 

“We’ve learned that we can pivot and adapt when the unexpected happens.”

-John Arnou, Interim Director,
Student Affairs