Kraft:
My name is Kaatje Kraft, although I tend to also use my published name,
Kaatje van der Hoeven Kraft is to add to the length of it all. I work at
Whatcom Community College, and I am a tenured geology professor.
Charbonneau:
Perfect. How long have you been there?
Kraft:
Since 2014.
Charbonneau:
What are you currently teaching?
Kraft:
We offer an array of introductory geoscience courses. We have intro to
Earth science, intro to physical geology, physical geology, which is a
major’s version of the intro to physical geology, environmental geology,
natural disasters, [and] intro to oceanography. I am sure I am
forgetting something, but those are some of the meat and potatoes ones.
Charbonneau:
In March 2020 when the pandemic hit and was at its peak and everything
shifted, did you go to fully remote learning?
Kraft:
We are on the quarter system. March 2020 was toward the end of our
winter quarter, the last two weeks of the quarter. We had to suddenly
pivot to everything being online. That was sort of a little wonky
because it was sort of had been traditional sort of face-to-face classes
and then essentially suddenly everything was online.
So that was a bit of a mess. Faculty had the option of just ending the
quarter, rather than continuing online to just end it if they wanted to
and give students the grades that they had at that point. They gave us a
lot of flexibility in that period.
I remember that I was of course thinking like: “Oh, but anytime now we
will go back to everything being normal.” Then they gave us an extra
week over spring break between our winter and spring quarters when
typically, we only get one week. We got two weeks to prepare for being
fully online, and they asked us to be fully online but asynchronous
because a lot of our students did not necessarily have access to
computers or the internet. [They] just were not prepared to be able to
take classes online. [They] just did not have the infrastructure.
A lot of them were managing a home [and] work. A lot of our students
are the kind of students that were suddenly now the essential workers in
our society that suddenly shifted to everybody being home and ordering
groceries and food being delivered.
Our student hours suddenly became much less predictable as well. So,
they asked for everything to be asynchronous. We had to recreate courses
from scratch to be asynchronous online courses.
Charbonneau:
When you went online, how long was it before you returned to the
classroom? When did students start having the option to come back in
person to take courses?
Kraft:
I am in the science and engineering department, so I am not in the
geology department because [I am] the only full-time faculty member in
the geology program. My program is part of a department. When you ask
about department, do you mean geology program specifically or the larger
department that I am in?
Charbonneau:
For you specifically, when did you have students able to come back into
the classroom?
Kraft:
We first started offering opportunities for students to come back into
the classroom in the fall of 2020.
Is that right? No, it was this past fall. So, fall of 2021. Time is
suddenly very wonky in the age of a pandemic.
Charbonneau:
No worries. Do you normally do laboratory sections and field work for
geology?
Kraft:
All our classes are fully integrated in terms of lecture and lab are all
integrated together. There is not like a separate lab section from a
lecture course. A lot of our face-to-face classes have been hybrids. A
lot of lecture type material has been done online and then coming
together to kind of do more of sort of that traditional lab activity,
engaging activity sort of stuff.
We have been doing field trips and we started having the opportunity for
students to optionally meet with us as early as winter of 2021. It was
not required, so students still had online alternatives. But if they
wanted to meet with us in the field, they had to transport themselves.
But we did do sort of field stuff in a face-to-face context.
Charbonneau:
What were you using to like to post your content or what programs are
you using?
Kraft:
Our LMS was Canvas. Then of course there are other resources to support
that like YouTube and things like that, but the main thing was Canvas.
Charbonneau:
Are you still offering a remote or blended learning model for students
or is it all back to being fully in person the way it was before?
Kraft:
We are totally blended. The natural disasters class that I ended up
creating as an asynchronous online class has become incredibly popular
with our students and fills up every quarter.
We are really struggling with this idea that students are saying that
they want face to face or [the] administrations pushing hard for us to
have fully face to face. But what they are signing up for first is our
fully online classes. Then our sort of hybrid blended [or] partially
online, partially in person, are then filling up next. The fully face to
face ones are really struggling to fill. While we are trying to offer
some of those, I had to cancel a fully face to face class because we
only had seven students sign up for it.
Charbonneau:
For your courses that are blended what is the ratio of how often
students are coming in person versus being online for those?
Kraft:
It tends to be that they come in about once a week, either for two or
three hours, depending on the class and the instructor.
Charbonneau:
When you come back in the fall, what are the COVID restrictions that are
going to be in place? Do students have to wear masks? Is there a social
distancing?
Kraft:
Those are great questions. We are still waiting to hear from the
administration. Assuming it was the same as the spring, there really
were no restrictions other than students are required to attest to
having been vaccinated. They do not need to provide proof of
vaccination, but they need to attest that they are vaccinated. All
faculty, staff, all employees of the college are required to be
vaccinated.
That is, it. I mean I know personally I have asked students [and] I
have requested that they wear masks in the classroom, but I am not
allowed to require it.
Charbonneau:
What level of virtual integration have you incorporated into your
instruction and teaching? What virtual programs are you using for
communication or have incorporated into your instructional design?
Kraft:
I have both in-person office hours and Zoom office hours, so I provide
both options. I do have an assignment where students are required to
meet with me one-on-one. I now have that as partially in-person,
partially virtual, so students can choose depending on the day of the
week or whether I will be on campus or not.
Even if I am on campus, you can still choose to Zoom with me instead. It
is like that. Providing both options. So, I am more of a blended
approach to some of those required one-on-one meetings.
I have in all my classes now; I now have recordings of all the lecture
videos. Now pretty much I do not lecture in my class. I give them the
opportunity to ask questions and talk through the content that they, in
theory, are supposed to go through before we meet for the in-person
class. Then we start engaging in the activities for the class itself. I
have been pushing more of that flipped modeled classroom.
I have also a lot of alternatives now. If students are sick or something
else comes up and they cannot come to class, they can do an all-online
lab alternative, they can do an online field trip alternative. So, a lot
of additional resources and supplements that are all online were not
created before the pandemic.
Charbonneau:
What strategies have you used to recruit and retain students and kind of
help push them to that finish line?
Kraft:
It is a good question, and it is one that I do not know if I have a
great answer for, in that sort of recruitment and recruitment aspects of
students tends to fall to sort of other departments at the college
because it is not something we necessarily do at the department level.
In terms of retention, we were getting the message from the
administration that it was important to be flexible. That is something
that certainly I have worked hard on with my colleagues, and we have
talked about sort of what does it mean to be flexible, how do we
accommodate students to have more options, and being able to be more
flexible with the realities that they are facing? So, that is some of
the discussion.
For me personally, I have ended up eliminating penalties for late
submissions. While there are still deadlines for things, students do not
need to produce an excuse for why they cannot hand something in on time.
If they cannot get it in on time, then they still need to do it. But
they can do it later.
Which sometimes [helps] them, but for some students it becomes a
bigger challenge. This is one of those things I am really struggling
with in terms of how much flexibility is too much flexibility. But
again, these are kinds of conversations that are happening at the
discipline level, at the department level, [and] at the college level.
In terms of other aspects of retention, there has been a lot of efforts
to do support for faculty in terms of professional growth, in terms of
how to use LMS more effectively, how to design courses more effectively,
how to engage students, you know good pedagogy, but also shifting to
that conversation of what does that mean for online pedagogy? Certainly,
in the wake of George Floyd killing, there is a lot more discussions
around what do we mean by equity? How do we make sure that our
curriculum has more equitable practices?
But also thinking about how we diversify our curriculum. How do we start
thinking about different approaches to thinking about the racist
structures that exist within how we teach or what we are teaching? Those
certainly also come into play in terms of talking about what we mean by
retention and who we are retaining and how do we make sure that we
support those students that are staying?
One of the greatest concerns at that institutional level is that the
people we lost the most are our students of color and those with
disabilities. As a faculty at a community college, where our primary
mission is to be an open enrollment institution, we are failing in that
regard. So, that is something that has been troubling.
The pandemic certainly contributed to it. It became just one more thing
that, in our institution, has not really done a great job in bringing
them back.
Charbonneau:
Are you having professional developments, weekly, or monthly meetings
where you are seeing some of those things implemented or is that
something you expect to see in the future?
Kraft:
Early in the pandemic there was a there was some great support
structures in place. They reassigned some faculty to become support for
Canvas. There was one assigned to each division. Within the STEM
division, we had a person that was our go to person. If we had
questions, she held weekly office hours where sometimes we would all
just gather and zoom, just because it was a chance to kind of see other
people when we were all kind of working in isolation, but it was also a
chance to learn tips and learn what other people were doing.
There was a lot of support early on. There was some support over the
summer for helping us shift to more hybrid classes when they were
between the summer of 2020 and the summer 2021. You could get paid to
show up to office hours over the summer to start developing your class
as a hybrid class, recognizing that hybrid is different than online. All
these different pivots.
There were some support structures in place and professional development
around that. Like I said, we had our instructional designer kind of
produce a model of sort of surviving. Like how do you just survive being
online, striving to do better, thriving? The idea of a step model
through lenses of, you know, just general organizational structure,
through equity structures, through disability, [and] resource
services. Multiple different lenses and thinking about all those
different ways that you can really support your structure, your
students, through the way that you structure your course.
They did kind of one on ones. We had faculty workshops throughout the
year to support faculty. There were many different professional
developments happening to support faculty through some of those
different transitions.
We went from one support person per division to then one person. Now I
do not even know if that person has that position. There is no longer a
point person to support you with Canvas. This general expectation is you
are now competent in Canvas; therefore, we do not support you anymore.
They are always the IT support that has existed prior, but it is
understaffed.
For students they did shift to suddenly having an online one room check
in. If you had questions about anything, you just go to the one Zoom
room and there would be different people there from different
departments, like financial aid, enrollment registration, and advising
to be able to handle a student’s question and then they would put them
into a breakout room. The same thing we have, a student support tutoring
center. They are the same thing, a Zoom room where somebody could show
up and say: “I need help with this” and there will be a bunch of tutors
waiting around to help anybody that showed up.
Then they just put them into a breakout room with somebody else. They
tried to minimize it, but there was still that barrier of do I know how
to use Zoom, do I feel comfortable using Zoom? That was a bigger
challenge. But yes, they did try to minimize the number of places people
needed to go [and that] students needed to go to be able to ask
questions and get support.
Charbonneau:
Did you see that people were leaving the institution because of the
pandemic? Did the number of staff and faculty stay consistent
throughout? What did you see change in terms of numbers?
Kraft:
I think in terms of faculty things overall were steady. I think part of
that is faculty do not necessarily have as many options in terms of
moving elsewhere. You are a bit more places bound. Of course, once you
start teaching online then that starts to shift a little. Although, we
are now having serious enrollment declines and so we are starting to see
faculty lose their positions.
The staff we have had a lot of staff turnover, although I do not know if
that was necessarily pandemic related so much as that the weaknesses,
cracks, and challenges that exist within our institution started to
really reveal themselves during the pandemic.
Staff have a lot of other options. They have skill sets that allow them
to be employed in other places and many of them chose to go to some of
those other places. I feel like that some of that is a little bit more a
function of some of the internal politics that are happening on our own
campus. But it was because the pandemic revealed some of those issues
more acutely.
Charbonneau:
What about your departmental budget for this upcoming school year? Have
you noticed that your budget has changed?
Kraft:
That is one thing that we are struggling with is that now that we do
offer online courses that we did not offer before. We have a little bit
more of a need for support staff in helping us with lab kits [and]
preparation for some of these online classes that we did not need before
the pandemic.
Certainly, because our budget is very much tied to student enrollment,
we are seeing cuts in budgets. We keep pushing for getting better
support for student workers, and the institution has not really been
supporting that need. So, we have been struggling with that in terms of
getting enough.
So far, we have been successful in making that work. We have been doing
some creative ways of making that work that I do not know if they are
sustainable over a long time.
Charbonneau:
What did you notice were the skill gaps or knowledge loss that students
had due to the pandemic?
Kraft:
I guess to a certain extent I would push back a little bit on that
statement just in the sense that it is not so much that there were
students who were not learning some of the same things they would have
been learning before. They were not developing some of the skills they
would have been learning before, but they were then learning new things
that they would not have learned previously, and skills that they did
not necessarily get pushed on before were now developing.
It is sort of one of those things where students started to get better
at, for those students that were successful now, that is a big caveat,
because there a lot of students that just were not successful dropped
out.
That is one of our greatest challenges is we have just lost a huge
number of students to the pandemic that may never come back. But for
those that persisted, they learned a lot about how to manage their time
and how to be able to work effectively in spaces that are not
necessarily really being able to be more.
I have asked students what skills they think they have developed and
which ones they think that they would like to be able to work on, and it
shifted during the pandemic toward the things that they felt like they
worked. They were getting better at time management, better at being
creative because they had to come up with solutions when they were not
able to get into immediate response from me when they are working
asynchronously. They are working at 11:00 at night, and I am answering
their questions at 7:00 in the morning.
Now it is that idea of teamwork and working collaboratively are the
things that they were really missing during the pandemic that they now
are trying to get to rebuild some of those skills. Loneliness was really
a big variable. Not being able to have peers to interact with. It is
sort of that they are recognizing the value of being back in the
classroom with that idea that they are learning how to interact with
other humans, that they lost a little bit and the value of that, that
that helps them learn. But with that then also comes the challenge of
not necessarily doing what is best for them.
I do think that certainly there is something to be said for the how well
they are comprehending the content is a little bit harder to gauge. My
assessment methods are still tapping into what they are learning, and I
see a wide range of that learning. It is harder to get a sense of, damn
I do not know, more of a gut sense, which I recognize is not an
assessment method.
Like when students have questions when you are in the classroom, it is
easier to have some of that back and forth to grab a manipulatable and
be able to like to help them further deepen their understanding. Whereas
when a student has a question online, I can answer it, but I do not know
how well they are then comprehending my response. It is enough for them
to be able to move forward in the curriculum, but is it getting that
same level of comprehension? And that is a piece that I do not think my
assessment is effective enough to be able to really gauge, but I get
more of that gut sense when I am with them one-on-one. I do not get that
as much of a sense when it is asynchronous online.
Charbonneau:
Now that you are having students return to the classroom, some blended,
some online, what are you doing to address this teamwork and these
communication skills you want to help facilitate them grow?
Kraft:
Certainly, it is a lot easier in the classroom. Anytime you have an
opportunity where you are meeting with students in some capacity,
whether it is even in some sort of asynchronous online space, then you
can have students talking to each other engaging with each other.
In the online asynchronous I have tried to do things where I have a
modified jigsaw activity. Students are assigned a particular topic. So,
like the flood topic, each student is assigned a particular flood and
six students are assigned to one flood type. Then they must read or
listen to a passage. Then there is a Wiki page that they co-edit. Each
person “arrives at the room,” it is done asynchronously because it is an
asynchronous class, answers one question, and the next question kind of
builds on the previous one. The idea is that they are creating a page
that then their peers will look at and be able to understand to help
them answer other follow up questions about all the flood types, not
just the one that they studied specifically. That is sort of one of my
ways of trying to get them to have a collaborative sense, even though it
is done asynchronously.
It is interesting that when I first started doing it, that approach,
students hated that. They were not huge fans of it. They are like: “Oh,
I would have to wait around for other people,” and part of it is that
now I have learned some of my messaging has changed to make sure
students’ kind of understand they need some patience, and that different
people are going to work at different paces. The most recent time that I
did it was the first time I really had a lot of students say: “Oh this
really felt like I was collaborating with other students,” so it is sort
of the students who are choosing now to be online rather than be in a
face to face environment are finding that those types of opportunities
are more appreciated than they were back when students had no choices,
if that makes sense.
So, it is sort of that like trying to find ways to get students to
collaborate, even in an asynchronous world is tricky. It is much easier
when they are in a face-to-face. In face to face, I am regularly active
with doing things like course-based undergraduate research experiences
to get them to engage in collaborative team-based experiences.
Charbonneau:
What are the professional skills you try to have obtain upon completing
your program?
Kraft:
Because we are in a transferring situation, we do not really have a
geoscience degree. We do get geoscience majors, but the only classes
they really need to take for that major are two geology classes with us.
One of which we only offer once every other year. So, most of the
classes they are taking are all the other the math, the chemistry,
physics, all those other sorts of intro level classes.
One of the biggest things is trying to keep them engaged in just
remembering why they are interested in geosciences. Some of that is
trying to make sure that I invite former students back to attend field
trips that I am running with another class that particularly during the
pandemic, they did not get a chance to do that face to face. Then they
can serve in at a capacity and help them keep their pulse on the
geoscience world while they are taking all those other prerequisites. I
recognize that it is not necessarily a larger skill set, but it is one
of my motivations to help them maintain motivation, which I think is
critical and being able to persist through the degree path.
I think some of the things we really try to emphasize are field based
skills, observation versus interpretation. Collecting, interpreting, and
reading maps, some of the basic geoscience skills. But some of those
social skills are also critical. Effective communication-they get both
from our courses but also from their broader coursework that they take
as well.
Being able to work in teams, but part of that by bringing them back as
in sort of a TA capacity also gives them sort of some leadership skills
as well as the ability to sort of effectively take complex information
and convey that. So, like thinking about their science communication
skills, how do you take complex information and convey it to an audience
that is a non-expert. Which is also why I am a huge fan of doing the
course based undergraduate research experiences. Those are things I try
to make sure get done in those major's classes.
That gives them more experience of being able to read scientific
literature. Being able to collect data, being able to effectively
communicate it, working in teams, all those sorts of both soft skills
and geoscience specific skills, they managed to touch on all those
things.
Charbonneau:
What kind of changes did you make to help students complete the courses
they need to complete?
Kraft:
I think the biggest caveat was that they allowed us to run some classes
with small numbers so that we could still offer those classes that they
needed for their major degree pathway. But we did not necessarily
provide alternatives or other options.
When we had two weeks remaining in the quarter, they said if you want to
end at 10 weeks instead of 12 weeks, you could do that. I do not think
anybody I know who was teaching majors did that though. That was more
for people that were sort of teaching some of the humanities classes and
where maybe it was sort of students had to write a final paper, but if
they already written at least another paper, they were sort of like,
that is good enough kind of thing.
Charbonneau:
Have there have there been any changes to the requirements for students
to complete your program or have those requirements all stayed the same?
Kraft:
Everything stayed the same.
Charbonneau:
Were you doing any of your own research at the time or do you currently
do work or your own research?
Kraft:
I do. It is not an expectation of my job. It is sort of one of those I
do for fun or masochism, depending on the day. I had an NSF grant that
started that was funded in October of 2019, so pretty much right before
the pandemic. We did not start it until the winter of 2020 instead of
when we really started to take off with the grant. Then everything went
to hell in a handbasket quickly.
Managing a grant through the pandemic has been a little tricky. Although
you know in some ways it was part of the grant was a faculty learning
community and having that learning community through the pandemic. These
courses are based on undergraduate research experiences and supporting
faculty were developing CUREs for their own courses. So, a lot of
faculties were putting off what their plans were because they did not
want to do it while they were teaching online. So, it delayed some of
that, but it also helped us have opportunities to build the community
more deeply.
It gave us suddenly the idea of meeting on Zoom became a lot more
palatable. I had been using Zoom for a long time before the pandemic,
just because I had been collaborating with people across the country.
But for a lot of our faculty, that was sort of something new to them.
So, being able to suddenly have more flexibility in meeting, it was
easier to find meeting times during the pandemic. Now it is harder
because everybody is much busier and has more restrictions in their
class schedules and things like that. There have been some advantages
and disadvantages in trying to do that work through the pandemic.
I do not know if I would say I had extra time because of course I was
busy recreating my courses for different modalities. When I was thinking
about it, people were talking about how they suddenly had all the time
to make bread or whatever. I was like, who are these people? I do not
have time for that!
The grant and the research are all around people cause my research is
geoscience education as opposed to geology specifically that made it so
that people were more available, which was kind of the upside of that
sort of aspect of the grant. But yes, other aspects of implementation
were much harder.
Charbonneau:
This strategy you mentioned of utilizing Zoom meetings to make it easier
to connect with people. Do you see that will remain in play?
Kraft:
Our administration is pushing back on that a little bit because they
want to try and require everybody to be on our campus. But personally,
if I am going to run a meeting, I am planning to try to always be able
to offer some form of a hybrid option. We have already had some meetings
where we have had in person, some people in person, and some people on
Zoom, Zooming into the meeting. There are spaces on campus for smaller
meetings where that works well.
It will be interesting to try and do something like that. In which case
I might just do it as a Zoom meeting, even though we are on campus. I do
not know. It is one of those things I need to figure out moving forward.
But I do think that it makes it easier for people in terms of balancing
their work life balance to be able to still have a little bit more
flexibility with their work and their life.
Charbonneau:
What new opportunities did you see that became available to you during
the pandemic that you did not have before?
Kraft:
I read that question and I have been thinking about it. From a research
standpoint, I do not know if I can identify any just because it has been
hard converting all my classes. I have now converted all my classes from
fully face to face to fully online, asynchronous, to partially
asynchronous, to synchronous online, to hybrid.
I have now basically created every modality with the classes that I
offer. That aspect has been exhausting and very time-consuming. From the
standpoint of that, the pandemic has afforded me the opportunity to
create more modalities which allows me to be more flexible for my
students. I think it has been a big benefit to come out of the pandemic.
I had a student in my oceanography class this last spring who had some
health issues at the beginning of the quarter, so she could not come to
class. So, I was able to give her alternative online assignments. She
was in class one day and then end up having a death in the family and
had to go to Hawaii for the rest of the quarter and she still passed the
class because I had all these online alternatives because I already
created them, [which] gave me that flexibility to allow her to still
be successful in the class.
It was a lot of work. I am not going to lie, right? But I feel like that
is the future in some ways of education, and students will have a
greater expectation for greater flexibility. The fact that I have those
resources now available makes it easier to be able to create those
opportunities for my students.
But from a research standpoint, I do not think I was that deeply
impacted. Again, my research is a secondary thing, not the primary thing
I do. It is not that I did not create more opportunity. I did create
more work for myself through research, but it was not necessarily
because of or despite the pandemic, it just kept rolling along.
People would e-mail [and] reach out to me and say: “Hey, do you are
you interested in being involved in this or me reaching out to somebody
else?” and say: “Hey, I have this idea, do you want to get involved in
this?”
One of the most recent grants I just recently received was because GSA
was held in person, I was there in person, and I ended up having an
impromptu conversation with a colleague that then ultimately led to a
grant. That is one of those things that we missed during the pandemic.
In theory, that could have identified things that I missed because I did
not get to have some of those informal [get togethers], some of those
conferences that ended up being entirely online.
But it is not like I would have had time for them anyway, because I was
already dealing with other grants. It is hard to say what I might have
missed, but I do not know if I could specifically say there is anything
that came out of it because of that.
Going back to what you talked about in terms of mental health, there is
also a lot to be said for many students who have struggled with mental
health. That was one of the most challenging pieces of being in the
pandemic and being home working from home alone and seeing students
emotionally struggling, having mental health breakdowns and issues, and
really getting a sense of that and feeling just so helpless about it.
Then you are home alone, and you do not have that ability to process it
with your peers and step into the office of somebody and say: “Hey, can
you talk to the student?” That was really a challenge and so we have
lost students because of that. Not coming back both because of economic
decisions and I think also mental health decisions.
Charbonneau:
What piece of advice would you give yourself or somebody entering a
similar field of work to you?
Kraft:
Give yourself grace. This is hard work, and it is not going to all
happen at once. If you are giving your students grace while you give
yourself grace and recognizing that means that you may not necessarily
do all the things you wanted to do right away, but that is ok. It does
not all need to happen right away.
Ask for help. Find a support network. Use resources where they are
available to make sure that you make the most of your peer network.
Charbonneau:
What is your biggest take away for when you encounter obstacles in the
future in how you would handle or address them?
Kraft:
I think flexibility being ready to sort of pivot, oh the magical word
pivot. Just being ready to be flexible. What are the most important
things and what can you let go of? I am going to think that sort of one
of those big takeaways are prioritizing.
