Designing a pathway through our post-pandemic teaching challenges 

When I was preparing to teach my courses in the 2022-23 academic year, I was relieved that pandemic restrictions were over and we were back fully in-person. As an instructor, I was convinced that I could hit the ground running and all would be well – because we would be back in a physical classroom, brimming (I expected) with live reactions, compelling conversation and teachable moments.  

I was wrong. In fact, all term I had the distinct impression that I was off-kilter vis-à-vis the students in my classes, more so in my large first-year class but also in my senior undergraduate classes. I noticed that the material I was using wasn’t landing; the exercises that I used in class weren’t working in the same way to engage students or reinforce their learning of assigned materials; and students were doing worse than they had before the pandemic on assessments. Many students weren’t even showing up to class. 

One might assume that such experiences are merely symptomatic of the post-pandemic era. The COVID-19 education disruption has been described by UNESCO as a “generational catastrophe.”  After two years of moving back and forth from virtual to in-person instruction, of doing schoolwork in isolation, and of operating under a pared-back set of standards and structures, our students are coming to us with less substantive preparation, less experience in terms of actively engaging with the material and with their peers, and less confidence expressing themselves.  

Indeed, Wilfrid Laurier University’s Kelly Gallagher-Mackay and colleagues have shown in a recent report for the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario that Grade 12 students’ grades increased dramatically during the pandemic and more of them were accepted into university. At the same time, however, students’ special educational needs also increased. Reinforcing the messages from these findings (i.e., a lot more underprepared students going to university), other observers are highlighting students’ lack of skills in terms of managing their courseload, conducting themselves in a professional manner and even learning independently.  

Certainly, the academic legacies of the pandemic are here to stay, and we cannot assume, as Robert Huish notes, that students entering university with high grades “are just ready to go.” We have some backfilling and upskilling to do – and I hear from colleagues across my own university and at other institutions that they are having to integrate more basic skills training into their courses. 

However, I don’t think that the pandemic explains everything we are seeing in our classrooms. In fact, there are multiple forces that have been brewing for some time, and are now combining to create complex, multilayered teaching challenges.  

Our changing student body 

The first observation is that our student body has changed, and students now have a more complex set of incentives, skills and life experiences that they bring with them into the classroom. 

To begin, students display a noticeable instrumentalism in attitudes towards the role that education plays in their lives. Successive years of survey data from the Canadian University Survey Consortium shows that the primary reason students apply to university is to get a job and gain upward mobility. The actual learning experience is decidedly secondary. 

In addition, we have all noted a growing level of apathy on the part of many students in our classes and it is very hard to engage them. Education researchers believe this is rooted in the fact that our students – after experiencing economic insecurity, watching rising social unrest and fearing for their future in a climate-impacted world – are experiencing disconnection and hopelessness. The Center for Collegiate Mental Health in the U.S. finds that academic distress is “much higher” now, and that students are experiencing “difficulty staying motivated in class.”  Similarly, a 2022 HEQCO survey of Ontario first-year students found that, for more than 70 per cent of respondents, a lack of motivation was the main challenge to academic success in their first year after high school. 

Add to this the clearly documented reduction in students’ attention span due to social media and smartphones, and you can see how the situation is shaping up. 

Moreover, we need to address the fact that so-called “non-traditional” students – student demographics that have “previously been underserved by, or under-represented, in the university sector” – now make up the largest portion of our student body. In the 2023 CUSC Middle Years Survey of 12,000 students at 44 universities, 39 per cent of respondents reported belonging to a visible minority; six per cent self-identified as Indigenous; 40 per cent identified as having a disability (25 per cent of which was mental health-related), 13 per cent were first-generation students with neither parent having obtained postsecondary education; 31 per cent were 22 years or age or older; and 60 per cent were employed (40 per cent of those working 11-20 hours per week). Such findings point to an incredibly diverse student population. 

It is not clear that we have fully come to terms with these complex human beings that are our students, and we need to devote time and expend resources in figuring out how to reach them. This diversity will obviously inform the kinds of teaching approaches, course designs and assessments we use.  

The stroppy, stressful teaching context 

The second observation is that at the same time our student body has become more complex, so too has the teaching context we face. In fact, the dynamics confronting us now – which emanate largely from external forces – are layering, one atop another, in a way that might seem unmanageable from a course design and classroom management perspective.  

We are all aware of the rise of polarization in social and political spheres across the country that is having a chilling effect on classroom discussions and making it difficult for the university to create safe and nurturing spaces for students to become engaged, vocal, active, and even “constructively disruptive.”  When paired with the lack of motivation and engagement noted above, this reinforces silence in the classroom or – worse – the dominance of just a few stroppy (i.e., argumentative) voices.  

Related to this is the movement away from science-based (and even fact-based) reasoning and a marked shift in the public’s perception of the value of higher education. Anti-intellectualism is growing in our broader society, and this means that we have students who are being asked to value and internalize what we are teaching them yet go home to family and friends who may view our work quite skeptically. How should we help our students navigate this? 

In addition, the advent of Generative AI and other emerging transformative technologies is changing many of the calculations on which faculty base their course design, particularly how to judge whether learning is occurring. Faculty find themselves re-evaluating established understandings of “academic integrity”; reviewing their pedagogical approaches and teaching practices, particularly as regards assessment; and trying to find a balance between acknowledging that we need to train students to use GenAI properly yet also mitigate its use so that the learning process is not short-circuited. This balance looks different for every faculty member and for every course, and it requires considerable thought and work. 

Finally, the public education system is, I think it is fair to say, undergoing considerable churn as the pandemic highlighted gaps in student academic skills and achievement. The nongovernmental advocate People for Education argued that “a perfect storm of stress” had engulfed public education during the pandemic, resulting in staff shortages, a lack of mental health support, widening achievement gaps and inequalities among students, with these legacies not yet addressed since restrictions were ended. 

For faculty, navigating the resulting instructional climate – underprepared and unengaged students, fraught classroom discussions and worries about academic integrity – is stressful, to say the least.  

Tackling difficult and multi-layered teaching challenges 

Third, the teaching challenges we face require synergistic approaches and tools that allow us to address them in a professional, coordinated and collegial fashion. I would argue that these are not yet fully in place in most universities. 

Faculty cannot just focus on singular teaching challenges one-at-a-time – student engagement in the classroom, for example – because our teaching challenges are interlinked in various ways across engagement, EDI, accessibility and mental health issues, the use of GenAI tools and so on. Nor will we ever have enough resources to provide adequate, individualized student support. Instead, we need to focus on the ways in which we construct our courses, the teaching practices we adopt, and how we think about assessment. And it is our educational developers that can help us to design a pathway through these difficult and multi-layered teaching challenges.  

Indeed, professional educational development in the postsecondary context has perhaps never been more critical and must be recognized as a core function of the university – and resourced as such. Teaching support units act as nodes within university networks that draw teaching and student-facing resources together with the most recent research to develop strategies that respond to diverse modes of student learning and innovative instructional techniques.  

Moreover, teaching the nontraditional student and confronting external forces that can mix into a toxic brew in our classrooms requires a high level of administrative coordination and collaboration. We cannot properly support our full-time and part-time faculty as well as graduate student instructors if we are not actively sharing information and resources amongst ourselves and developing projects together which directly target our core teaching and learning concerns. We need to bring the faculty and student support/experience sides together. 

At  Laurier for example, we can learn a lot from staff colleagues in shared service units who are reaching out across the library, accessible learning services, the writing centre, the office of equity, diversity and inclusion, all our faculty offices and teaching & learning – and creating interactive channels to strategize about such things as how to introduce first-year students to appropriate practices for GenAI use and how to create braver spaces to discuss sensitive topics and raise awareness.  

Finally, faculty can learn from each other and create more spaces and opportunities to share teaching strategies, at the university, faculty and program levels. While we take great pleasure in celebrating our teaching excellence award winners at Laurier, there are many, many faculty that are using high-impact teaching practices as well as applied and experiential learning to get students engaged and foster deeper learning, to pull students out of their apathy and towards discovering meaning in their learning. Our colleagues are developing innovative assignments and exercises to extend learning, and are building diversity, equity and inclusion principles into how courses are designed and how interactions occur with students. Sharing our teaching experiences helps us to feel like we are not alone as we try to serve our nontraditional students, overcome politicized and polarized classroom dynamics and confront GenAI.