Johnson:
My name is Beth Johnson. I am a professor of geology at the University
of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, Fox Cities Campus. It is an exceptionally long
name for a school. We are the branch campus of the University of
Wisconsin, Oshkosh.
Charbonneau:
What courses are you currently teaching, or will you be offering in the
fall?
Johnson:
My campus focuses on associates degrees, so we do 100 and 200 level
classes. The geology courses that I offer in the fall are Geology 102:
Earth a Dynamic Planet, Geology/Geography 113: Landscapes of North
America, which is a national parks class, Geology/Geography 174, which
is a disasters class.
In the spring I offer Geology 109: Evolution of the Earth, Geology 150:
Environmental Geology, and then my lone 200 level class is Geology 200:
Earth's Changing Climate. If you are wondering why I was hesitating on
those, the numbers and names have changed. I still must stop and think
about them.
Charbonneau:
What will your teaching apparatus be when you return in the fall?
Johnson:
According to my understanding, we are going to be doing things the way
that we had done in the 2021-2022 academic year, which was back to
normal except for masking. Those courses which were online courses prior
to the pandemic would be online. Those courses that would be face to
face prior to the pandemic, we are going to be face to face in that
year.
If someone had a very compelling reason they needed to do otherwise,
they could talk to the provost, but we were back to our normal model of
teaching. Unless we have significant changes here in Northeast
Wisconsin, I assume that I will be back to face to face.
Charbonneau:
Laboratory sections and fieldwork components of your programs would be
back to normal as well?
Johnson:
I assume everything will be the same in this upcoming academic year too.
I have not heard anything to the contrary yet.
Charbonneau:
Do you have a vaccine requirement as well for students and staff?
Johnson:
As far as masking, we have not been told if we are going to have to go
back to masking this fall. We did keep masks until March 20th of 2022,
so we had them for most of last academic year. After that, it was
personal choice for the instructors, staff, and students. I can honestly
say that most of us did shed them as soon as we could because it is just
so hard to teach and project and speak clearly in a mask to the point
where myself and several of my colleagues, we have developed jaw
problems that we are still dealing with because when you are focusing on
really emphasizing and getting that diction and being able to project to
the back of the room through a mask, what you do is your jaw
unconsciously migrates forward. If you do that, then your teeth do not
come together like they normally do. They start striking each other. So,
I am still dealing with that.
To my knowledge we are not masking though if the pandemic numbers
significantly ramp up, that is something that the emergency committee
will be revisiting, and we have been told that, as far as vaccinations
are concerned, the state of Wisconsin does not allow us to mandate
vaccinations. It is strongly encouraged, but there are no requirements
for it yet.
Having said that, a lot of the faculty and staff that I do work with, we
were so excited to get vaccinated. It was funny because we were joking
that when we were kids, we would do anything to avoid getting a shot.
Now as adults, we were begging for them. In fact, if I pivoted with my
camera and showed you my refrigerator, you would still be able to see
the “I got my COVID vaccine” stickers that they gave us. I have them on
my fridge.
Charbonneau:
Did you completely shut down your doors and go to virtual learning for
the remainder of 2020?
Johnson:
Yes. So, one thing to keep in mind about the University of Wisconsin
system is there are 26 campuses. You have UW Milwaukee. The big one that
everybody knows of for football is UW Madison. Then my campus is UW
Oshkosh, Fox Cities. The date that the World Health Organization
declared the pandemic was March 11th, 2020. I know that specifically
because like I said, I was teaching a disasters class at that time.
I had to start the class with that actual disaster. They had released
the information about 30 minutes before I had to start teaching. Now, in
the days leading up to March 11, Milwaukee was the first school that was
reporting cases for COVID. By March 10th, they announced that they were
closing. They were going to have to go online. We all thought it was
going to be temporary at that point.
I do remember the next morning, March 11th, I was standing outside my
office, and I was talking to a couple of other faculty members. We were
talking about Milwaukee shutting down and going online. We had heard by
that point that Madison and La Crosse were considering similar measures.
And since Madison is the flagship campus of the system, we knew that if
Madison pulled that trigger, that we were all going down.
Sure enough, Madison and La Crosse made that decision, as well as Stout
by the next morning. One of my students pulled out their phone and said:
“Hey, there is a message from the university,” and I pulled out my phone
and sure enough, that is when we got the news that classes were going to
be cancelled the following week because that week of Saint Patrick's
Day, that was our last week before going on spring break. The week that
followed was spring break.
We went back to teaching online on March 30th. We thought it was just
going to be for a couple of weeks. I know a lot of us were making
contingency plans about, well maybe I can get through all my lectures
online and then when we come back to face to face, I will just take the
lecture time and we will just do a bunch of the lab activities. So, we
were calling that the “Concept Boot Camp.” But then, after a couple of
weeks, the vice chancellor told us that no, we are going to be online
for the rest of the semester.
Charbonneau:
How long were you continuing that online program before you had students
return in person in any capacity? When did they start coming back into
the classroom setting?
Johnson:
We did online for the rest of the spring 2020 semester. Any summer
courses were being done online and then we did not have any students
returning to a hybridized format until the fall of 2020. I would like to
point out none of us were allowed on the campus from the moment
that...Let me back that up. The week after we had decided to close,
they cancelled classes because everyone needed time to prepare. You know
everybody, all the students were just worried and not sure what was
going on. We took that week of Saint Patrick's Day and our planned
spring break and those were the two weeks to prepare for the faculty. We
went online starting on the 30th of March.
Once fall 2020 came, that was what at my campus we called the “Hybrid
Year.” My campus was particularly good at letting us choose the
instruction format that would work best for our own class discipline and
personal needs. I know a lot of my colleagues who teach at other
universities, they were just told you are teaching online, face to face,
or not given choice. But my campus specifically gave us a choice, which
is remarkably interesting because I do not know that they had as many
choices as the main campus. But we used to be an independent two-year
campus before the merger in fall of 2019. We are accustomed to a certain
amount of independence. Our administrators just came back to us and said
you pick the mode that is best for you. You do not have to justify it.
You do not have to bring a doctor's note. Just pick your mode.
We had four options. We could teach all face to face, and for some
disciplines you really cannot get around that. We could teach all
online. Or we could do one of two hybrid models. The two hybrid models
in my campus's terminology were hi-flex and modified tutorial. With
hi-flex we defined that as the professor was in the classroom every day
they were being filmed and the students could choose if they wanted to
come to the classroom or if they wanted to participate online at home.
Modified tutorial is the opposite end of that. The professor chose when
they would be teaching online and when they would teach face to face.
For all my lab classes for that year, I chose modify tutorial and I did
asynchronous online lecture videos. I had one weekly meeting a week so I
could go over the main ideas and students could ask questions. Then we
could do the labs face to face. The provost ordered that we could not
have complete lab sections. What we had to do was take our lab classes,
split them into two groups, and then alternate when each group would
come to the lab.
People were terribly upset about that because they were thinking, “I
must cut down the number of lab topics that I am going to teach.” For
some programs, for example, nursing programs where there are specific
things that you must cover, that was a very big concern.
I do not want to say I cheated, but I cheated because the way that my
lab classes are set-up is I have two lectures a week, a Tuesday lecture,
and a Thursday lecture, and then a lab period on Tuesday afternoon or
Thursday afternoon, depending which class it is. What I did was I had
all those asynchronous lecture videos the students could watch whenever
they wanted to. I took one of the lecture periods and I used that for
weekly meetings. Then the other lecture period that became my second lab
period. So, Group A would come to the afternoon lab for one week and
they did minerals. Group B would come to one of those morning labs
periods, that extra lecture period, and they would do igneous rocks.
Then the next week, I would teach those same two labs, but I would
switch which group came. That way I got to do all my lab topics and
still follow the provost's order that we did not have too many people
in the room so we could maintain some sort of social distancing.
Charbonneau:
What platforms were you using for your online courses?
Johnson:
Interestingly, the semester before the pandemic started, my campus had
switched to Canvas for our LMS. That was extraordinarily difficult
because we were still learning how to use Canvas and then we had to
learn how to use Canvas teaching online. I am not joking when I say that
it seems like a lot of people at my campus hit the wall at about the
Friday of the first week back. I have talked to several people, and we
all say the same thing. That is when we hit the wall. I was picking out
where exactly I was going to throw my computer through the wall that
day. I am not exaggerating one bit.
We were using Canvas for our LMS and so as much course content as I
could I was putting through there because the students already had
access to that. Now this was incredibly important that I put as much
content through Canvas because I have many international students,
particularly from China. A lot of those students chose to go home at the
start of the pandemic because if you will recall, so many flights were
cancelled. We were wondering, are we still going to allow flights to
some of these countries that had extremely high numbers for COVID? These
students were terrified of being trapped in a foreign country for God
knows how long. I do not blame them one bit. I needed to minimize the
number of platforms that I used so that it was something that could make
it through their government's censors. If you will recall, the
government of China, they do censor certain websites. I needed to make
sure that these international students could still access the course
material.
Now for web communication like this, at the time my campus was using
Collaborate Ultra. That was something that we had linked up to Canvas. I
did all my web meetings there. We do not use Collaborate Ultra anymore.
We had a contract with them through the end of spring of 2021. Then we
contracted with Zoom, so starting in fall of 2021, we contracted with
Zoom, and we have been using that since.
Collaborate Ultra has its quirks. But one thing I really loved about
Collaborate Ultra was the reactions, because this was a platform that
was not set up for business meetings, it was set up for class meetings.
What I could do is I could have the list of attendance or participants,
excuse me, open on the right side and then if you have done teaching,
you know during this time, then you know that a lot of students would
keep their web cameras off because they did not have the bandwidth. They
were still in their PJ's, who knows. If I asked questions like: “Does
anybody have any questions?” All I see is this sea of black squares.
Nobody, just like in the classroom, nobody wanted to be the one to raise
their hand.
I started using those reactions at the bottom of the screen, and these
were much better than the ones that Zoom has I would like to point out.
There was a green for agree, red for disagree, and then there was a
smiley face and an angry face. Also, there was a confused face. What I
would do is I would say: “Does anybody have any questions?” If I just
got that lack of feedback, that could be because somebody does not want
to be the first one to raise their hand. Or it could be because they do
not have any questions.
I would say, ok, if you do not have any questions, then go ahead and
click that green agree button at the bottom of your screen. If you do
have questions and you do not want to move on, then click the red button
and then I will just look at the participant list. That way there was
some interaction, but the students did not necessarily have to unmute
their mics if they did not want to, or if they are just like, no, I get
it, we can move on.
I still say I you know because there are reactions on Zoom, they are not
as good. What is annoying is some of them you must click to turn on and
then click to turn off again, whereas with Collaborate Ultra, you just
clicked it and then after about 10 seconds it would go off.
As far as other material I was using at least our platform material, at
that time many of the textbook companies offered that we could use all
their course materials for free. The stuff we would normally have to pay
to get a course package for, suddenly they are all free. We had quizzes,
exams, and lecture notes I could have used. There were ways to submit
assignments. I worked with Pearson and McGraw Hill. Those were the two
companies I think at the time.
We were able to integrate links to those into Canvas. I just started
using their quizzes, their exams. I did have my own lecture notes that I
would film these asynchronous videos for students. It was a blessing to
have those.
Two years before the pandemic I had been forced to teach a section of an
online class. It is the same class that I teach face to face. One of my
colleagues in my old department, before the merger, had created an
online course of this in spring 2018. My campus said you will teach an
online section of that, because they were just trying to force somebody
else to pay that part of my salary for that semester. I had to go
through some online training then, but it was not much. When I did get
that online section in 2018, I was a TA at that point. It was not that I
was creating any new content, I was just basically monitoring it.
Fast forward two years to the start of the pandemic, I was teaching that
same class. I would like to point out, except at that time in 2018 and
this semester in spring of 2020, I do not teach disasters in the spring.
It was just a coincidence those two times because there were a couple of
hiccups with the curriculum, they needed to take out a class that I
would normally teach, my climate change class. They had to just put a
section of disasters in there as a place filler. It was just pure luck
that the one course that I had some online experience teaching was one
that I was teaching. I started using all those materials because I saved
them. Those are materials that I could import into Canvas though, so
everything was still going through Canvas. That was the one class that I
did not have to worry as much about.
Charbonneau:
What level of virtual integration are you still using in your classroom?
Johnson:
Before the pandemic, I was not a big person for online submission
because I am always thinking about the country kids that do not have
good access to the internet because I was one of those country kids.
Also, the people who cannot afford to have the internet at home, or
their only access to a computer is on campus. Before the pandemic I was
very much about paper submission.
But at the start of the pandemic, I remembered something that one of my
former department chairs was famous for. He was famous for his paperless
office. He did everything online. Part of that was so then he would not
have these random piles of paper lying around, but part of it was
because then everything is being submitted the same way.
That is what I started doing. Once we got into the fall 2020 semester,
what I wanted more than anything was just a streamlined, you turn in all
your assignments to the same place. I created online submission for
everything. Term papers, lab activities, quizzes, anything they will do
in my class they are going to be submitting through Canvas. I still use
that because I went through a lot of work to put those things together.
I am going to use them for as long as I can.
You would not think that you could turn in lab activities online. It is
beautiful. It really is, because what I did was, I turned to the
submission for all those lab activities into quizzes. If they had to
calculate something, I chose the type of quiz question where you could
type in a number. Then I knew if they got the number right, then they
did the calculation right. Some questions could easily be put in a
multiple-choice format, or a matching format. Those are easy. Those
where you would have to draw on a map or create a data chart, you can
still do that in a quiz. People do not realize that because in Canvas
there is a type of quiz question where you can do a file upload.
What I would do is I would say: “Draw it in on the map in your lab
manual. Take a picture of that image and then upload that to that
question in the quiz in Canvas.” So, then everything is all right there
in the quiz. Most of the questions are set to auto grade, which means my
grading life is so much simpler. Then those questions like a file upload
or an essay or something like that, then I can go through and grade
those manually.
That was one of the pieces of advice that I had heard in a training
session because in those two weeks before March 30th when we are all
learning how to teach online, there were so many workshops through
professional organizations, so many through my university, they were
doing a few. There was a teaching online conference I could get into.
There were times when I was doing three or four of those workshops a day
because I had a lot to learn to catch up with teaching online.
One of the most important pieces of information that I learned was auto
grade everything. It takes so long to create these online submissions,
and that is what people outside of education just do not get. They are
looking at their kids at home and trying to learn online. They say: “Oh,
the teachers are sitting there doing nothing. They are just filing their
nails, or we do not need to pay them that much because they are not
doing anything.” Bullshit. It is a bunch of total bullshit, because it
takes three to four times longer for me to create these things online to
give the students the ability to submit from anywhere, as it would if I
were to be able to write this assignment and have them turned it into me
by paper.
I worked extremely hard and exceptionally long to be able to create
those online submissions. I am going to use as many of them as I can.
Now that I have had this year 2021-2022 academic year, going back to
“normal”, we are still masked, I will not call that completely normal,
there are some things where I am just like, ok, I really do not need to
do those discussion posts now because my students are in the lab
together talking to each other. They are in the class talking to each
other. Some of the activities I created as an opportunity for them to
interact with other people in the class, there are some of those I can
let go of now.
But there are a few of them that I created that took the place of a
field trip because I was not allowed to do field trips again until fall
of 2021. I really like that virtual field trip exercise and now I am
looking forward to using that as kind of a pre-field trip so they can
start learning about the kind of things and observations they need to be
making when they are in the field. Then we can go on our face-to-face
field trip later in the semester.
Charbonneau:
What have you noticed have been the changes in terms of recruitment and
retention of your students?
Johnson:
We really took an enrollment hit. It was not in fall of 2020 when we
took that enrollment it. You would think that would be the one where
people would be holding off thinking: “Well online learning in spring of
20 was so hard. I am going to wait till the pandemic's over.”
No, in the 2020-2021 academic year, our enrollments were close to what
they were pre-pandemic. We have been having some declining enrollments
for a few years in part because of declining birth rates in the state.
Also, in part because of the merger that I talked about before. But you
know, they were not as bad.
We saw a big enrollment drop starting in fall of 2021. We thought we
were going to see more people come back because it is more face-to-face.
There is less ambiguity. If they have had these bad experiences with
online learning, well now we have all these face-to-face options. No,
the enrollments were lower.
Charbonneau:
What strategies are you trying to increase enrollment?
Johnson:
This is a tricky area because, as I alluded to, my campus and another
original let me back up. My campus used to be an independent two-year
campus in the system. We were the University of Wisconsin-Fox Valley.
Then because of a restructuring and merger that finished in 2019, my
two-year campus and another two-year campus at Fond du Lac, we merged
with the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, which was a four-year
comprehensive university in the area. That is what happened to all
thirteen of the two-year campuses in the state. In that merger, we were
all merged with one four-year campus or another.
Our biggest complaints since then are a bit of student poaching on the
part of the main campus at Oshkosh. Just prior to the merger, they were
experiencing some enrollment hits, so they lowered their admission
standards to attract more students. Then that is when we saw students
from my campus and Fond du Lac start going to Oshkosh a lot sooner
because normally, they would have started at one of our campuses, got
some college experience under their belts, helped to improve their GPA,
and then they would have transferred. But now, they did not have to
wait. We have been fighting with the Oshkosh campus for three years now
to market us differently because the way that Oshkosh's mindset is, is
that, well if we market for UW Oshkosh, that will help all three
campuses and the people at Fox and Fond du Lac are like no, because you
are not even saying that they have any options. You are just saying
University of Wisconsin Oshkosh and you are not saying Fox Cities or
Fond du Lac.
We have been fighting, and I do mean fighting, with the administration
to start specifically marketing our campus, or the Fond du Lac campus.
To let people know that they do have this high-quality, low-cost
education right in their backyards. There is a little of that. I have
seen a couple of billboards around the Fox Cities area where I am
teaching, but not the way that I see Oshkosh stuff. We are still
fighting that. I know that on social media that I have recently seen
some early preview opportunities for my campus. So those sorts of things
are being shared through our campus social media. I have not seen
anything so specific as a commercial saying, come to UWO Fox Cities so I
hesitate to say that we have been able to do anything different from our
marketing strategies because right now we are still fighting just to get
individual marketing and that has been going on since before the
pandemic.
Charbonneau:
What happened to your faculty in terms of the number of faculty prior
during and post pandemic?
Johnson:
Oh God, we got gutted. We got gutted and part of this stemming back to
that merger. There were a lot of things leading up to the pandemic that
were just picking things off. When I started at my campus in fall of
2011, we were an independent campus in the UW system. We were UW-Fox
Valley. We were one of 13 to your state campuses collectively known as
the UW Colleges. We had shared governance, a shared curriculum, shared
departments. My department was spread out over 13 campuses around the
state.
It was either the end of 2015 or the beginning of 2016 they announced
what is called “regionalization” and what we did is we regionalized
these 13 two-year campuses. We had the Northeast region which was the
one that I was part of. Then three or four of these two-year campuses
would share a dean, share an associate Dean, share IT resources. We were
barely given an opportunity to make that work.
Then there was an article released by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
There had been some backroom dealing with the legislature and the
legislature was going to be cutting $250 million from the University of
Wisconsin system, and that was the start of the merger. I bring this
into context because we had many people that when the pandemic came on
top of that, they just hit their limit.
Additionally, because of this $250 million budget cut, different
schools had to take different tactics to try to reduce their
expenditures. On my campus, we took all our licks early, we just made
the cuts that we did, and we were not doing too badly. Then the final
death knell came. But Oshkosh was still dealing with their financial
issues. In the spring of 2020, while all this pandemic stuff is going
on, Oshkosh announced that they would have a buyout opportunity for
people to take early retirement.
In that one effort, we lost eight tenured faculty at my campus. Now I
would like to point out that we only had about 30 or 35 tenured faculty
to begin with. To lose 8 in one shot was big. Then remember, we were
just barely merged with Oshkosh. We are still feeling out of the
departments. Some departments said yes, we want to replace that with
another tenure line. Some departments were just like: “Nope, we do not
want to offer those courses at Fox anymore.” Some departments were in a:
“Let us wait and see” mode and let us put some adjuncts in there. We are
still trying to recover from some of that.
Then also, we have seen many staff either completely leaving the system
or they are transitioning to the Oshkosh campus because there are better
jobs and more money working at that campus than working at a small
two-year campus. It has been hard to keep some of those people, and it
is frustrating because the people at the Oshkosh campus do not
understand how understaffed and underpaid, we were before. It has only
gotten worse.
Charbonneau:
Was your departmental budget significantly impacted by the pandemic?
Johnson:
Interestingly, no, because my academic budget for my program was
separate from the budget at the Oshkosh campus. I am the one and only
geology professor at my campus, my budget is exceedingly small. I do not
want to comment about the impact of the geology department on the main
campus just because I do not know enough about it, and I want to be
fair.
Charbonneau:
What were the skill gaps you noticed in the students because of the
pandemic?
Johnson:
One of the biggest things I have been beating my head against is not
geoscience skill per se. It is a writing skill. My students will not
cite their sources to save their lives. That is an important thing for
me, as I take academic integrity very seriously. We have an entire
assignment in my geology classes dedicated to siting with MLA versus
APA. They have a print copy versus an electronic copy. Paraphrasing
versus a direct quote. We have this huge assignment. I have been doing
it for years, even before the pandemic. Now I cannot get my students to
cite their sources. If it is something they are putting in their own
words. It is to the point where I could have turned in about 75% of my
students last year for academic misconduct.
They were plagiarizing because they were not citing their sources and I
am on the academic actions committee so that would have been a lot of
work for us, but that is how bad it was. I am just looking at them going
come on people. You did the assignment. You were working with the
director of the writing center on the assignment. It is in the
assignment that you must cite your sources even when you put them in
your own words. I emphasize this on more than one occasion in the class,
in writing, on Canvas. Why are you not doing this?
I do a lot of writing in my classes because it does not matter what
discipline you are in; you still need to be able to communicate your
ideas and why your research, why your idea, why your invention is new
and revolutionary. Make sure that you get the credit and explain what it
is all about.
Charbonneau:
What geoscience professional skills do you try to emphasize in your
courses?
Johnson:
Well remember that I teach mostly introductory classes, so most of my
students are not going to be science majors. Communication, obviously,
is going to be a huge one that I emphasize. Observation.
I am always begging my students, do not just rely on what somebody is
telling you that it is, see yourself. Even if you are not a trained
scientist, there are still things about it that you can notice. Like wow
this mineral feels heavy for its size, and it is not excessively big.
So, observation. Also, calculation. I get a lot of students coming to my
classes that are just like, oh, I cannot do above 3rd grade math, and I
just look at them and say good because we are not going to be doing
fancy math in this class. It is an intro class. Making sure they have
the confidence to do a back-of-the-envelope calculation using these
non-calculus math skills. I would say those are the biggest things. Also
being critical of their sources.
One of my classes is a climate change seminar. Obviously, that is a very
controversial topic in some circles. I am working with them not only to
try to get information from these very dense scientific articles but be
able to communicate it in such a way that they are not hiding behind the
jargon, but anybody walking down the street can understand what they are
talking about because that is one of the biggest problems that we are
dealing with, with this anti climate science faction that we have in our
society. They do not understand what is going on because people are not
explaining it to them in straight talk. That would be another skill that
I focus on.
Charbonneau:
Did your school implement any changes or put any different rules in
place to help push students along? What were some of the accommodations
made to help the students during the pandemic?
Johnson:
One thing that we did was we instituted a pass-fail option. If students
were worried that they were not going to get above a C on a particular
course, they could request that their grade just be recorded as pass or
fail. We also extended the withdrawal deadline to the very last day of
classes. That way, if students were willing to try it and just gut it
out, and they just got to the very end, and they still could not
succeed, then they could withdraw, and it would not negatively impact
their GPA.
Charbonneau:
Were these changes only temporary?
Johnson:
Yes, just for the spring 2020 semester, I believe.
Charbonneau:
In your current position, are you doing any of your own research?
Johnson:
Sort of. This is some of the fun that I get to have been one of those
people from the former UW Colleges because when it comes to requirements
for professional activity and service, I am still judged based on the
rules under which I was hired for the UW Colleges. My colleagues in my
department at Oshkosh do a lot more research than I do.
Having said that, at my campus there has always been the encouragement
to do research. Since we are a campus that focuses on being a teaching
emphasis institution, most of us do research that is related to the
quality of teaching. That was always the case before, and there is still
a lot of that now.
I have two research projects going on, and my department does not
necessarily look fondly on them because they are really investigating
more of the people who do science rather than discovering some new
mineral or describing some new dinosaurs or anything like that. One of
them, I just started at the beginning of the summer. I am looking at
people who work at two-year colleges, teaching geoscience. I am looking
at their intrinsic and extrinsic motivations to see if they do tend to
correspond with a particular gender, or another.
But then I was also chosen for a program unique to Wisconsin, called the
Wisconsin Teaching Fellows and Scholars program. It is a cohort that
works together over a year to do scholarship of teaching and learning
research. This year's emphasis happens to be on social justice. It has
been interesting trying to learn how to incorporate things like social
justice into a science classroom where we like to pride ourselves as
remaining outside of that fray.
I got chosen for it in December of 2021 then we had our first workshop
this year on May 31st. We have had two weeklong workshops so far this
summer and we have another meeting coming up on August 1st. I was just
talking with some of my cohort people yesterday because we all must turn
in IRBs. We were chatting with each other, getting ideas for: “Well
where can I go to find this supply?” or “I do not know how to answer
this question on the IRB application.” So those are the two projects
that I have gotten going on.
I will say that my department is incredibly happy that I am doing the
second one. They scratch their heads at me with the first one. I had had
the idea for the first one for a long time, but I could not do anything
about it.
The first one on the geoscience instructor at 2-year schools, I had had
the idea to work on that in fall of 2020. The reason that I can be so
specific about that is because I applied for faculty development funding
from the university and the deadline for that is always December 1st.
The first time I applied for it in 2020, I did not get it.
I decided in fall of 2021 that I was going to give it one more try
because I had really done a rush job the first time. I am going to do it
right this time and if I do not get it, then it was not because I did a
bad job. It just was something else. The second time I applied, it got
so that was that.
I had the idea even prior to that, but I did not know how to implement
it. I participated in things like NSF workshops. I was supposed to do a
face-to-face workshop on that in summer of 2020, but then because of the
pandemic that workshop got put online and so I did that online.
I did not have any stuff that I was working on where I would have needed
access to lab equipment or samples or anything like that. That is one of
the virtues of the kind of research I do, the kind that is prized at a
campus like mine. We can do this kind of research without having to have
a sabbatical. We can do this kind of research for extraordinarily little
money or in my case no money.
Some of my colleagues had cancelled field work or could not get into
campus to access their labs. They were more significantly impacted than
I was.
I did have one of those panic days, though. At first when they had told
us we were all going to go online, the faculty and staff were told we
would still have access to the campus. The first week, the week of Saint
Patrick's Day and the reason that I know that is so specifically my
birthday, is the day after Saint Patrick's Day, so it was my birthday
week. I was still trying to go into my office because I was trying to
maintain at least a little sense of normalcy. I also worked better in my
office at that time. I was not accustomed to having the internet at
home. In fact, I did not get the internet in my house until Thursday,
March 12th.
Because you remember that conversation, I told you where me and my
colleagues were saying: “Oh, God. If Madison pulls that trigger, we are
all going down.” One of the conversations I was having was I had never
had the internet in my house up to that point. I had been an extremely
poor graduate student for a long time. I grew up in the country prior to
that where you could not get the Internet at the time. I was talking to
my colleague and saying: “Oh, I wonder if I should get the internet put
in my house, but I do not know if we are going to need it. We may still
stay in class.” She looked at me and she said: “You need to make that
phone call to get the internet appointment now, because once Madison
makes that announcement, everybody is going to be scrambling to get it.”
Fortunately, I listened to her. But at the time, I was still accustomed
to working in my office. I was trying to go in there, and that lasted a
day and a half. Then, the chancellor announced that by the end of that
week, nobody was going to be allowed on the campuses except emergency
personnel.
We had also been told by campus people that the university was buying a
Clorox 360 disinfecting machine and they were going to go room by room
and spray things to make sure that everything was disinfected. I started
thinking about that and I realized, oh my God, I have a number of very
delicate maps that are still lying out in the lab. I have a lot of
samples that are on these open shelves in the lab that are things like
halite, which would dissolve. In the case of halite, you are licking it
to test it. I do not need them to lick disinfectant. I made this panic
trip to the campus, and I only had a couple of hours that I could do
this. I was desperately trying to put everything away, or at least
undercover, that I thought would be affected by these sprays.
We were getting highly creative about some of the things that I was
putting on those shelves to try to cover the ones that I was afraid we
are going to dissolve and trying to get everything from my office that I
thought I was going to need to be able to teach online for the rest of
the semester. packing everything up into the back of my car. Even things
like these stuffed fossil animals because those are great to teach with
and cheaper than educational models.
That was one thing my campus gave me early on. Thank God they had bought
the science faculty some portable document cameras. They have a USB port
you plug in on your computer. Thank God. I could not have taught online
the way that I did without that. I used it extensively.
Hysterically, another thing that all of us were desperate to get were
our office chairs. I did not think to take it on that day when I was so
frantic. It did not come about ’til a couple of weeks later because we
all thought this was just going to last a couple of weeks. We all were
making do with straight backed chairs and kitchen tables. After a while
you are sitting six, seven, eight hours a day like that, you start
getting the most horrible back pain.
Only five people on campus were allowed access, and one was the
administrative assistant. She was the one that we were supposed to go to
if we had forgotten anything. We would have to contact her and navigate
her to where it was in your office or in the classroom. Then she would
get it, put it on a lab cart, and park the lab cart just outside the
front door. Then she would stand on the inside of the front door
waiting. So that way she could see you get it. She knew that, for
example, if there was anything valuable, she knew that it was not being
stolen. I had to contact her about some other things that I needed. I
mentioned lower back pain and what I would not give to have my office
chair. She responded with: “Well, why don't you take yours? Everybody
else has been asking me to get theirs for them.”
When I showed up that day to get those things from the lab cart, she had
my office chair parked right next to it, and I was so happy I did not
care if I had to have the wheels sticking out of the windows. It was
going in my car. Then she packed a bag of candy. That is the thing that
Jenean is famous for at our campus, is she always has these jars of
candy in her office because sometimes the faculty and staff get a little
hangry. She will just push and jar of candy towards us. When she was
preparing those lab carts of our stuff for us, she would tuck in a bag
of candy, and you would not know about it until you got home. It was
this wonderful surprise. We nominated her for an award later in the fall
of 2020. More than one person nominated Jenean for this and every single
one of us mentioned the candy. I am still sitting in that office chair.
Charbonneau:
What new opportunities became available to you during the pandemic that
you did not have before?
Johnson:
I learned so much about teaching online during the pandemic. Some of the
things I had learned in that online training I had received, prior to
teaching the online class in 2018. There were so many opportunities
through professional organizations like Geological Society of America,
National Association of Geoscience Teachers. AGI (American Geosciences
Institute) did one or two of them, through various textbook companies to
not only teach us how to teach online, but here is this website where
you can go to do virtual field trips. This is how you can use virtual
microscope and teach students how to identify X, Y, and Z.
That was just a wealth of information, a lot of which I am still using.
Even though I was in when the pandemic happened, I was an associate
professor. I recently got promoted. I had a masters in Earth science
education before this, so I had some training and education. But it is
good to have a bit of a refresher. I just wish it would have been a
better way to get that refresher. Can you repeat the question just so I
can think about it?
Charbonneau:
Yes, what opportunities became available to you during the pandemic?
Johnson:
I learned a new way of teaching a new way of submission. Meeting some of
my students more about where they are living in terms of technology and
how they are accustomed to experiencing some of the information, so that
is always a good thing to learn.
One of those resources benefited me just yesterday. One of the things
that I learned about were these massive open online courses that you
could take through the University of Alberta in Canada for free. These
are free online courses. I learned about them at that time, and I
thought, wow, these courses, they sound cool. They are free. They are
online. Some of them were about paleontology. So that is exactly right
up my alley. But I was so busy at the time, I could not do anything
about it.
This summer, I had many hard things going on in my life, and I decided
to take the summer and play a game with myself. It is the
Mini–Adventure Bingo game. I created this little bingo card of all
these things that I had been telling myself, “Oh, I will do that
someday.” I just never got around to it because I was so busy. Well,
this summer I decided I was going to do some of them. One of them was to
learn something new. I thought about those online courses, and I am
like, I am going to take one. I am going to go back to school. I am
going to take one of these courses and I just finished it yesterday.
That was a good thing, because now that I have learned as much as I have
about online courses, I got to experience an online course from the
student perspective. Although it was a particularly good course, there
were a couple of things that I am looking forward to doing. I would have
done that differently.
Charbonneau:
If you could go back in time and give yourself like a piece of advice to
pre-pandemic Beth, what would you tell her, if you had to do it all over
again?
Johnson:
It is going to take longer than you think. There is no getting around
that one. I knew the enormity of the task that was ahead of me, and I
still underestimated how long it was going to take. But it also reminded
me of something that I had been told many years ago when I first started
teaching.
You only must be five minutes ahead of your students. In an ideal world
we have all our lessons finished at the start of the semester and we
have gotten everything laid out and it is perfect, but we are only ever
about five minutes ahead of our students. I would just remind myself,
just like I had to learn when I was first starting out, it is ok. If you
are five minutes ahead of your students, you are still five minutes
ahead.
Then I would remind myself you are wearing your headset, do not swear. I
am a very tall person and the leg space under my desk in my office is
not big enough for my legs. When I would be doing those online lectures
with my students or those web meetings, I just had to warn them at the
beginning of the semester that it was going to happen. I was going to do
something like bang my knee on the edge of the desk. I would forget that
I was wearing my headset and I would swear, so if I did that, it was not
directed at them that they should just laugh and move on. But it is
going to happen. Indeed, it did happen with every one of my classes. It
hurt too.
Charbonneau:
What is your biggest takeaway now that you have had this experience?
What should you do to navigate further obstacles and setbacks that you
might encounter in your career?
Johnson:
In one respect, I do not think that I have stopped teaching according to
the pandemic. It is hard to be looking back at that and say that you
know, I have gone back to normal because I still have everything set-up
in my class that if we had to go online in a hurry again like we did in
2020, that I could do it.
My students would not be confused about where to turn things in or
confused about where to find any information. The only thing that I
would have to do is to put the lecture videos back in. That is it.
Everything else I am still doing in that way that I set-up in fall of
2020 after I had had all of these, the benefit of all these programs.
There is still just part of me since the pandemic is still ongoing,
since we are seeing an upswing of cases in my area, there is part of me
that is not convinced that we are going to have a completely normal fall
semester. If that is the case, I need to be ready to be able to make
that change. That is one thing that I have made sure to reassure all my
students in these last few semesters is that everything is designed and
that the only change that I would have to make is to plug the lecture
videos back in. They already know where to find that information.
That was one of the biggest things that I was worried about in spring of
2020 when all this is going on. My students were used to handing things
in on paper, and there was confusion about: “Where would I find this
information? How am I going to access this quiz? What is the deadline
for this?” With those weekly meetings I was doing for them I would share
my screen for the Canvas page. I would talk them through: “OK to find
this week's quiz, we are going to go over here to the menu on the left
and down to quizzes. You are going to click that,” and I would just go
through the entire process all the time, week after week after week. To
make sure that they always knew where to find this information.
Now I guess I can say it has changed how I go about the first day of
classes. Before the pandemic, you would spend the first day of classes
just going over the syllabus and the course expectations. I still do
that on the first day, but now I am teaching them how to navigate
Canvas: “And this is where you are going to find your quizzes, and this
is where you are going to find this assignment, and here is the calendar
so you can see where everything is due.” So that way if we had to go
online in a hurry again. It would not be as big of an uphill battle.
I am not entirely convinced that it might not happen again at some
point, and all those recorded lectures that I made, I made sure when I
was making them to make them out of equality as best I could that I
could use them again, and I have. When we were able to return to going
to conferences, I took a week to go to one conference and I just put
those videos back in. That way I did not have to cancel the class.
Because I had scheduled that in from the very beginning of the semester,
I could get away with doing it.
I will say I remember as far telling my students that it would all be
ok, I remember it was spring 2021 that first day of classes, because
this was my environmental geology class and I only teach that in the
spring. I had sent out all these messages that our first-class meeting
was going to be a web meeting. I still had a full third of the class
show up to the classroom. It was just by luck that I was on campus
because I had a face-to-face lab in the afternoon.
I was rushing around and trying to be able to set up a web camera in the
classroom where I would normally be having this class because I had a
third of the class there. I wanted to make sure that they got all this
first day information. There was not enough time to send them home. Only
some of them had a phone or a computer with them so that they could
follow along with that. I was doing that whole first lecture/web
meeting, sitting at the computer in the classroom and talking to that so
the people who were online could see me, but the students said it showed
up were off to the right and I would occasionally just refer to them. We
got through it. Then I reminded them of the importance of checking those
announcements.
I just remember looking at them saying, you know, do not worry. If I can
get through a mass shooting, then you can get through this. All my
students just went (face drop). Because I do not know if they just think
that I am chained in the basement all the time, that I do not have a
life outside of school because you think about it when you run into one
of your teachers in the grocery store and you are just like: “Oh my God,
you have a life?”
They never thought of me as, you know, having a life outside of that
university that you know I had gone through some shit in my time, and I
have. We did have a mass shooting at my graduate school when I was at
Northern Illinois University, and it was in my department. I gave them
the bare bones about that. I am like if I can get through that, we all
can get through this. There were a few people that told me later that
they were shocked that I said that. But it made them feel more confident
and comfortable.
Some of the greatest lessons that I think the faculty and the students
had out of all of this is to remind ourselves to be a little more human.
That it is not about being on a stage and going: “You will do this!” all
the time. That sometimes it is more important just to step back and
remember that we are all human.
Charbonneau:
Do you want to add anything else or are you content with ending it
there?
Johnson:
I am content to leave it there. The only thing that I can think about
saying is just I am always going to regret those holes in the gradebook
from the spring of 2020. There were several students in all my classes,
all our classes are across the campus, that they were in our classes,
and they were doing well, or at least well enough, and then March 11th
came. That was the last time I ever got to see them.
For some of them they either did not have the resources at home, or they
had to start working more hours because they were in essential
professions, or they just gave up, but for a lot of them the last days
that I ever got to see them were March 11th for my disastrous class and
March 12th for my 109 and 150 classes, because that was the last day, I
got to see them face-to-face.
Even with all the changes we were trying to make to give them the
pass-fail option, the late withdrawal, and so on. There were many of
them that just never contacted back. It is like they were swallowed up
into a big hole on those dates and I never got to see them again. Those
are things that I will always regret because those are students that I
could have reached otherwise.
