Elizabeth Markovits/Amber Douglas: Pandemic innovation at Mount Holyoke College

The main gate of Mount Holyoke College, in the college-rich Connecticut River Valley.

From The New England Board of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

Students choose small liberal arts colleges for the learning that unfolds when they are deeply immersed in intellectual collaboration with faculty and with one another. The photos that festoon our promotional materials aren’t mere marketing—we spend a lot of time with one another in close quarters. Faculty and staff are truly invested in student success, working creatively to develop exceptional experiences for our students.

Students themselves collaborate deeply both inside and outside classroom environments, facilitated by a high-density, residential campus. We do this work with the goal of helping the next generation develop the critical thinking and communication skills they need to excel for the rest of their lives—skills that seem more important with each passing day.

So how is that model going to work now when the name of the game is social distancing?

While at times, the challenge of delivering the educational experience for which we are known has seemed insurmountable, on our campus, a practical, flexible new model has begun to emerge—one built around a clear understanding of exactly who our students are, the issues they’ll face this fall, and the near certainty that the college will need to meet a wide range of different learning contexts. We call it flexible immersive teaching—FIT.

Like other institutions, we hope to return to campus this fall with students in residence. But we already know that not every student will be able to join us in person, whether because of immigration and travel issues or because of health and safety considerations. Like many of our colleagues at other liberal arts colleges, we’ve never been comfortable with the models known as “hybrid” or “hy-flex” learning, and the plans to offer a mixture of in-person and online course options are problematic for us.

Creating distinct paths through the curriculum raises significant concerns around diversity and inclusion. Depending on how students are selected or elect to return to campus in the fall, Hy-Flex models, characterized by offering the students a choice of asynchronous, online learning or real-time synchronous sessions, may reify pathways that fall along social classifications like race and class, exacerbating divisions already deepened by current health and political crises.

Offering a subset of online courses to remote students may mean institutions lose one of their greatest strengths: offering community members the opportunity to learn from one another across difference. Diverse perspectives are essential to learning, now more than ever. We fear that distinct communities, now separated by the pandemic, will result in differentiated learning experiences that undermine the sense of community that so many of us strive to create on campus. We must meet students where they are, in flexible modes, in order to stay true to our mission of inclusive excellence.

On our campus, as we worked through these issues, we listened deeply to faculty, staff and student concerns, including representatives from each of these constituencies in our planning groups. Rather than forging ahead to get back to normal as soon as possible, we listened first. We heard a yearning to return to the sense of intellectual excitement that marks the liberal arts experience—the shared discovery of new authors and conceptual frameworks to help make sense of the world around us as it changes as breakneck speed, the close collaboration between students on an art exhibit for a class, performing choral music for the community, introducing students to robotics workshops in our MakerSpace—but also a concern that workloads were doubling and tripling at a time when faculty had lost childcare, research opportunities and a sense of physical safety in the world.

We heard the need to come up with a model that will allow us to get as many students as possible back on campus—offering students more equal learning contexts and preserving staff jobs—but also a need to protect the health and safety of our community. We also heard from our students that there was significant cognitive drain when they had to switch between so many courses and tools in the emergency remote period.

As we looked at our options, FIT emerged as the best model. We are working to get as many students back into residence as health guidelines and immigration controls will allow. Meanwhile, our curriculum will be designed to work fully in digital formats, accessible to students residing on campus and around the world. However, this is not traditional online teaching, which was designed for working adults to access on their own time and own pace. Instead, we want students to come together in real time to collaborate with one another and faculty, using technology in smart ways to close the distance required by the pandemic.

Our curriculum centers on accessible, robust, active learning to recreate the immersive experience. With the FIT model, we can offer students a rigorous program of intellectually engaged work, collaboration with one another, and direct access to a faculty deeply invested in their success, no matter where they are. As we construct something entirely new, student success and faculty development must be more tightly intertwined than ever.

Mount Holyoke’s FIT model at a glance:

• Delivered online to maximize student and faculty accessibility

• Emphasis on real-time interaction to ensure immersive experience and inclusion for all students Modular semester: two 7.5-week modules to allow students and faculty to focus more deeply on each course

• Classes take place between 8 a.m. and 10:30 p.m. to accommodate students abroad.

This is a radical change—and it’s not easy. In our case, we have already upended a great deal of how we normally operate.

In May, our faculty voted to adopt a modular system of two 7.5-week modules per semester. Taking the traditional 4-5 courses at the same time in these new formats, in environments marked by home distractions or 12-hour time differences, represents a huge additional cognitive load for students and we are too committed to their success to set them up for an unnecessary additional burden.

We’re using a broader expanse of hours in a day—from 8 a.m. to 10:30 p.m.—to ensure that students who live abroad can access our curriculum and to improve social distancing on campus. The modular semester with a reimagined daily schedule allows for students to elect individualized pathways in concert with their learning environments, but always in community with their fellow students.

Within the FIT model, these structural changes are married with innovative pedagogical practices that will enable faculty to respond to the emergent changes and events that affect student learning, fostering resiliency and continued growth and learning in our students. The adaptability of this approach allows us to be responsive to the uncertainty to come, whether in response to COVID, the upcoming national election or whatever else comes our way. The fall, indeed the coming academic year, cannot be business as usual. To act as if things have not changed sets students and faculty alike for disappointment and frustration.

We are also making significant investments in educational technology and asking everyone on campus to learn new tools and work with new materials. Reimagining classes in digital formats means re-designing from the ground up in many cases, putting the learning goals at the center, rather than a demand to be in-person. For example, if we can’t all be together in person or work together without masks and physical distance, what does it mean to grow as a lab scientist? As a violist in an orchestra? As an actor in a theater program? As a new student learning a language for the first time? We have been inspired and encouraged by our faculty when listening to their ideas and have made investments in the technology tools to facilitate these innovations. These changes require significant commitments from faculty and staff, who are postponing other plans and working through nights and weekends to redesign courses. But we view this level of radical change as absolutely necessary in order to preserve our commitment to the success of each and every student who has chosen Mount Holyoke.

In higher education, we’ve all known that disruptive change is ongoing and inevitable, even if only a year ago, few of us would have anticipated that a global pandemic would be the catalyst. Some colleges and universities will not survive this crisis. Among those that do survive, how will their core principles be affected? Which will endure, which will change and which will be jettisoned entirely?

We believe those that emerge with their principles intact are best prepared to lead in the future. At Mount Holyoke, we know exactly what makes our model special, and we’re undertaking the hard, sometimes painful, work of preserving it, even as the modes of delivery have changed dramatically.

Ultimately, we’re doing exactly what we work so hard to prepare students to do in the world long after they graduate: Be flexible, be resilient and stay true to their principles.

Elizabeth Markovits is director of the Teaching & Learning Initiative and a professor of politics at Mount Holyoke College, in South Hadley, Mass. Amber Douglas is dean of studies and associate professor of psychology at Mount Holyoke.

Eva Paus: Celebrating international education while closing borders?

The Williston Library at Mount Holyoke College, in South Hadley, Mass.

Via The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

In 2018, as in the past 17 years, the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Department of Education have designated one week in the fall “to celebrate the benefits of international education and exchanges worldwide.” With this year’s International Education Week upon us, Nov. 12-18, we must ask which international education benefits we are celebrating. The very policies of this administration negate the value of engagement across cultural difference with an open mind and of wanting to understand other countries and cultures.

Over the summer, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the administration’s travel ban for citizens from several predominantly Muslim countries. At the beginning of October, reputable media outlets reported on discussions in the White House about denying visas to all students from China, a proposal that has—fortunately—not materialized. And throughout this year, we have witnessed escalating rhetoric and action about preventing Central Americans from crossing the border into the U.S.

What does the celebration of international education mean, when minds and borders are closing and international students from select countries are excluded categorically?

Many people who oppose these policies highlight the harm done to the opportunities for international students or the economic costs to this country. What they tend to ignore are the benefits for U.S. students, indeed for all students, of international student diversity on their campus.

As the founding director of a global studies center at a liberal arts college, Mount Holyoke College, in South Hadley, Mass., I have spent the past 14 years working with my colleagues across the college to “internationalize” the education of all our students, through many different initiatives on and off campus. One of them has been to increase the number of international students at the college. Today, nearly 30 percent of our students come from outside the U.S.

When thinking of international education, most people think of U.S. students studying abroad, where they immerse themselves in a new culture and encounter and reflect upon beliefs and values that are different from their own and wrestle with their assumptions about how the world works. Studying or interning abroad is always mind-broadening and, often, transformative for life. But only around 10 percent of U.S. undergraduates study abroad; and, of those, over 60 percent are abroad for eight weeks or less.

So what about the other 90 percent?

There are many opportunities to learn about other countries and cultures on a U.S. campus, e.g., learning a foreign language or participating in internationally focused classes. A particularly powerful venue for cross-cultural learning is personal engagement with students from other countries.

When students from Miami and Shanghai share a dorm room, they get to know the opinions, traditions and quirks of each other, and they will never think about each other’s country in the same abstract way. When a Muslim student from Cairo partners with a Christian student from Omaha in a class project on family values and religion, their collaboration will likely lead to a profound examination of their understanding of each other’s religion and their own. And the students from Seattle and Mexico City who are on the same rowing team are bound to break down stereotypes, as “the other” becomes real and often a friend.

This fall, 30 percent of the incoming class at my college live with a student from a country different from their own. When they hear a disparaging statement about the totality of the people from their roommate’s country, they will not fall for it because they come to know their roommate as a fellow human being. And they may well speak up and challenge such statements. And when my upper-level economics seminar looks like a mini-U.N. assembly, students will learn about perspectives on the subject matter they did not know existed.

The next time when students from a particular country are singled out for possible denial of visa entry into the U.S., let us not only argue against such actions on the basis of the economic benefits that international students bring to this country. (To be sure, these are substantial. In 2016-17, international students at U.S. colleges and universities contributed $36.9 billion to the U.S. economy and supported more than 450,000 jobs.) But in the current climate of growing xenophobia, the international education benefits of international student diversity on our campuses is at least as important.

Sustained interaction with students from other countries—in the classroom, in residence halls and community—opens minds, challenges all students to understand and empathize with individuals who are different from them and to learn to communicate across difference. This ability to engage effectively across difference is key for successful careers, citizenship and ultimately world peace. That’s what international education is about.

Eva Paus is the Carol Hoffmann Collins Director of the McCulloch Center for Global Initiatives and professor of economics at Mount Holyoke College.

Where they really like quilters

"Ghost Pockets," (mixed fabrics, including denim, cotton, polyester and synthetic wool),  by Mary Lee Bendolph, in her show  "Piece Together: The Quilts of Mary Lee Bendolph"  through May 27, at  the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, South Hadley, Mass. The museum says that Bendolph has made more than 150 quilts in her lifetime, "adapting traditional African-American designs to create beautiful and functional works of art that have been featured in Hallmark cards and American postage stamps.''

There's long been a deep interest in folk crafts in Mount Holyoke's region of western Massachusetts.

Wintry scene in South Hadley.

South Hadley, in  the long stretch of the Connecticut River Valley nicknamed "the Pioneer Valley'' by marketing people, hosts Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley High School, Pioneer Valley Performing Arts Charter Public School and the Berkshire Hills Music Academy. Mount Holyoke College is a member of the famous Five College Consortium in the Pioneer Valley, along with Smith, Amherst and Hampshire colleges and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Frank Carini: Mass. author traces personal history to discover America

Lauret Savoy signing books at the Providence Athenaeum.

via ecori.org

Not far from the building where she teaches environmental studies and geology at Mount Holyoke College, Lauret Savoy once had these three hurtful words yelled at her as she attempted to cross a busy crosswalk: “Nigger, go home.”

It’s not uncommon, even today, for Savoy, a woman of mixed heritage, and other people of color to be on the receiving end of similar words of hate in the neighborhood that surrounds this liberal-arts college in South Hadley, Mass. That doesn’t make this western Massachusetts town unique.

Born in the early 1960s, Savoy grew up knowing racism, even if she didn’t recognize it as a young girl. During a recent discussion about her latest book, held at the Providence Athenaeum, she shared a story, long ago burned into memory, from her childhood.

When she was 7, Savoy’s family moved across the country, from California to Washington, D.C. Along the way, the young girl collected postcards to document her adventure. At one particular stop, Savoy recalled taking her “selected treasures to the cashier.” The cashier ignored her until there was no one else to be helped. When the 7-year-old reached out to pay, the cashier made sure not to touch the tiny, brown hand.

“When you experience racism, contempt, as a 7-year-old, you don’t know what it really means,” Savoy said. “But your foundation is rattled.”

Her new book, Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape, is a response to her foundation being rattled. The book traces her Native-, African- and Euro-American ancestry across the United States in the hope of learning what her extended family experienced.

Savoy’s father, a “fair-skinned” man who died when she was young, introduced her to few relatives and spoke little about growing up in a segregated city. Her mother, a “dark-skinned” woman, was reluctant to share information about her experiences working as an Army nurse during World War II.

“I grew up not knowing where my parents came from or about the generations before them,” Savoy said. “I wanted to find my home. I needed to know, or I would continue to feel the emptiness I grew up with.”

The Leverett, Mass., resident is a self-described “Earth historian” who enjoys investigating the contours of the land to examine how the past helped shape the present. “Trace” combines cultural history, Savoy’s personal history and geography to tell a story about race in the United States. The book explores the way landscapes feature both broad national dialogue and voices that have been silenced by dominant culture.

Savoy said the book helped her answer questions that had “haunted me over time.” “We have quite a searing national history, and that past lives with us still,” she said.

During the March 11 discussion of “Trace,” Savoy read, beautifully, from a few chapters. She recounted the checkered history of Washington, D.C., reminding the packed room in the Providence Athenaeum that the country’s first president chose a location for the nation’s capital that would perpetuate slavery. For many years, she noted, a slave market was a common sight in the political center of this new “land of the free.”

“Washington wanted the capital near his plantation in Virginia,” said Savoy, noting that the White House was built on a tobacco plantation. “It had to be where slavery remained unmolested.”

She spoke about the things her childhood textbooks taught her about America — Native Americans, although in her books they were called Indians, for example, were useless, and blacks were once slaves. As a child, she wondered, “Will I be a slave?”

After the race riots of 1968, Savoy, then a young girl, wondered, “Should I also hate?”

Savoy noted that before 1963 the names of some 200 places in the United States contained the word “nigger.” The offensive name still lingers in places today — for example, the family hunting camp of Rick Perry, the former governor of Texas who ran for president in 2012 and 2016, is called “Niggerhead.” Visit the U.S. Bureau of Geographic Names Web site to find others.

Christina Bevilacqua, the Providence Athenaeum’s director of public engagement, bought “Trace” on a whim during a visit to New York City in December. She described Savoy’s book as a memoir, an explication of geographical history of the American landscape, and a personal excavation of the histories that have been erased from that landscape. She said it’s written by a geologist, but reads like something written by a poet.

After reading it, she reached out to Savoy to ask her to speak at the Athenaeum.

“I was especially happy to be able to present Lauret in our lineup ... she’s writing about a dimension of the national conversation on race that I haven't seen in any of the many incisive books and articles examining this national moment, namely the way that the history of race can be literally traced in the land,” Bevilacqua told the audience. “By the end of the book, I was seeing the world around me in a different way.”

A teacher, earth scientist, writer, photographer and pilot, Savoy’s courses at Mount Holyoke College explore the stories told of the American land’s origins, and the stories told of people on this land. The author of several other books, Savoy is a past winner of Mount Holyoke College’s Distinguished Teaching Award, has held fellowships from the Smithsonian Institution and Yale University, and is a fellow of the Geological Society of America.

Frank Carini is editor of ecoRI News.