By Alison Lay Cranston, OSU-Cascades
In the spring of 2020, I was I was not yet a faculty member, but my work was dramatically impacted nonetheless. At the time, I was primarily instructing contract-based outdoor educational and wilderness medicine courses, and I was suddenly out of work. One by one, my contracts were cancelled, and I found myself reeling, unsure of my next move. Instead of throwing my hands up, I sprung to action, researching alternative job options. Because of my past experience in wildland fire work, I was able to find a job at the Central Oregon Interagency Wildland Fire Dispatch Center. This was quite the pivot for me, but it kept me afloat during the COVID lockdown and helped me realize that a little adaptability and creativity, in the face of adversity, goes a long way.
When I began my career in university education in Spring 2022, students were still adjusting to the return to in-person learning and I found that there had been a fundamental shift for them. Students needed more flexibility and adaptability from instructors. Many of my colleagues were discussing strategies to balance academic rigor with the need to provide more flexibility to our students.
According to Inara Scott, the Senior Associate Dean of the College of Business, resilient teaching is all about being able to anticipate disruption, so that you are not blind sighted by major events, whether they be external (e.g., the COVID-19 lockdown) or internal (e.g., a family emergency). Resilient teaching is the ultimate form of adaptability in educational pedagogy – it plans for the inevitability of disruption (Scott, 2024).
In my second term of teaching, I had an extended out-of-state family emergency, which spurred another pivot – I had to move all of my courses to online instruction over Zoom. This internal disruption forced me to be adaptable in my use of technology and leverage past experience with remote facilitation. I moved my lectures to Zoom, conducted class discussions and activities in breakout rooms, proctored exams online using Canvas, and facilitated guest speaker class visits with my colleagues’ support. While this was unanticipated, and thus not planned for in advance, I nonetheless learned about how to structure courses with built-in flexibility, to anticipate future disturbance.
When the campus shut down at the beginning of this term due to inclement weather, the pivot to remote instruction was easier and more natural for me. This external disruption was a reminder to continue to increase resiliency through the adaptability of pedagogical techniques. In the book Intentional Tech, Derek Bruff emphasizes the importance of using multiple modalities in teaching (2019). Essentially, he reports, research has found that students learn better through a combination of the use of words, images, videos, audio, interactive activities, etc. This also extends to assessment types – students often perform better through the use of multimodal assignments (Bruff, 2019). With an increase in educational technology tools, the use of multimodal instruction and assessment is adaptable to either in-person or online learning.
We often ask our students to be adaptable in the face of challenge and adversity and we, as instructors can do the same, not only in our instruction but also in how we support and challenge our students. Disruption will likely become the rule, not the exception, and an increase in adaptability is necessary to prepare our students for their future careers and lives.
References
Scott, I. (2024, February 14). Resilient Teaching. In C. Kahn (Moderator), Resilient Teaching Faculty Learning Community [online learning community workshop], online.
Bruff, D. (2019). Multimodal Assignments. Intentional tech: Principles to guide the use of educational technology in college teaching (pp. 109-142). West Virginia University Press.
About the Author: Alison Lay Cranston is an Instructor in Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences at OSU-Cascades. Her research interests are in ecological restoration and recreation monitoring. Outside of academia, she enjoys all forms of outdoor recreation and going to aerial silks classes.
Editor’s Note: This is part of a series of guest posts about resilience and teaching strategies by members of the Winter ’24 Resilient Teaching Faculty Learning Community facilitated by the Center for Teaching and Learning. The opinions expressed in guest posts are solely those of the authors.
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