Designed for Learning

Beyond the Pandemic: The Power of Resilient Learning

• Notre Dame Learning • Season 1 • Episode 3

Share episode

Instructors everywhere responded to the COVID-19 pandemic with new ideas and strategies for teaching students. Georgetown University’s Maggie Debelius is the co-editor of a new book of essays highlighting this work with the intention of helping colleges and universities become more resilient centers of learning.

Here, Maggie joins host Jim Lang to discuss the book, titled Recentering Learning: Complexity, Resilience, and Adaptability in Higher Education, and explore how higher education should evolve in our post-pandemic, AI era.

Key Topics Discussed:

  • Where the idea for Recentering Learning came from
  • The undeniable power of residential experiences, but the moments of beauty brought about by remote learning in the midst of the pandemic’s disruption
  • The ongoing importance of resilience to meet future challenges
  • Why Maggie and her co-editors made sure Recentering Learning features contributions from staff and students as well as faculty
  • What institutional responses to the pandemic say about higher ed’s ability to adapt in the long term when there is no immediate crisis to contend with
  • How the prevalence of generative AI makes the central premise of the book—that is, the need to recenter what makes for good learning—even more urgent
  • Maggie’s advice for recentering learning for both individual faculty and institutions more broadly, including by prioritizing relationship-building

Guest Bio: Maggie Debelius is the senior director of faculty initiatives at the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS) at Georgetown University, where she also serves as a professor of English and of learning, design, and technology. With Joshua Kim and Edward Maloney, she is co-editor of the essay collection Recentering Learning: Complexity, Resilience, and Adaptability in Higher Education, published in December 2024 by Johns Hopkins University Press. She holds a Ph.D. in English from Princeton University and an M.A. from Georgetown.

Resource Mentioned:

Designed for Learning is hosted by Jim Lang, a professor of the practice in Notre Dame Learning’s Kaneb Center for Teaching Excellence and the author of several influential books on teaching. The podcast is produced by Notre Dame Learning’s Office of Digital Learning. For more, visit learning.nd.edu. You can also follow Notre Dame Learning on LinkedIn.

(whimsical instrumental music)[DR. JAMES LANG] Welcome to 'Designed for Learning,' a podcast from Notre Dame Learning. I'm your host, Jim Lang.(upbeat instrumental music) Today we'll discuss the question of how higher education should evolve in our post-pandemic artificial intelligence era. In the book, co-edited by today's guest, the editors chart a historical arc spurred by the pandemic. The pandemic disrupted everything. We responded with new ideas and strategies to teach students. And as the pandemic receded, it seemed like higher education was going to move in some interesting new directions. But the pull back to more traditional forms of education was strong, and change has not happened as quickly as we might have imagined. So, what happened? And should we consider what happened a good or a bad thing? To help us think through that question, I'm joined today by Maggie Debelius, who is the Senior Director of Faculty Initiatives at the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship at Georgetown University. She is also a teaching professor in the English Department, and a professor and director of graduate studies for the MA program in learning, design, and technology. She's the author of, 'So What Are You Going to Do With That? Finding Careers Outside of Academia,' which was published in 2014 by the University of Chicago Press, as well as numerous articles on writing pedagogy and faculty development. She holds a PhD in English from Princeton University, and an MA from Georgetown. So, Maggie, welcome, especially, to a fellow English PhD.[DR. MAGGIE DEBELIUS] Thanks, Jim. I'm glad to be here.[DR. JAMES LANG] Okay, so, you're the co-editors of a new book titled, 'Recentering Learning Complexity, Resilience, and Adaptability in Higher Education,' which was published in December Johns Hopkins University Press. So, let's start by having you share the basic premise of the book, and how it came together with your two co-editors, Josh Kim and Eddie Maloney.[DR. MAGGIE DEBELIUS] Great, thanks. Well, Jim, like so many colleagues at Centers for Teaching and Learning, Eddie, Josh, and I were just slammed at the beginning of the pandemic. We really had to kick into overdrive. And I had so many friends who were like learning to make sourdough bread or teaching themselves to knit, or other things like that, but for me, it was it was one of the busiest times of my career. And so, there wasn't really a lot of time for quiet contemplation about what we were doing. We were just trying to help faculty make this emergency switch to remote teaching, and just working long hours to do it. But we did make a little bit of time to reach out to colleagues at other universities and to try to learn from their experience, and just trade best practices things that were working, on different campuses. And so, that was really the germ of the book. After the dust settled, we really thought, hey, we need to document some of this really intense work that happened in, certainly, in the beginning of the pandemic. But even well into the second or third year of the pandemic, we were still doing that work. And so, what it boiled down to for us was that, we really believe that a serious investment in teaching and learning is the only way for universities to build resilience, and to prepare for future interruptions. And we knew there would be more interruptions. And so, we were able to gather together this group of really brilliant people and try to learn from what they did during that switch to remote teaching, and distill some lessons.[DR. JAMES LANG] So, how soon after the pandemic started, after the remote, sort of emergency switch to remote teaching and learning, how early did you start making that call out to other colleagues to ask them,'What are you doing?' How long was the process of actually putting the whole thing together?[DR. MAGGIE DEBELIUS] So, the calls to colleagues started, I mean, for me almost immediately. You know, we, like so many campuses, sent students home in March of 2020, and then we tried to get people up and running, for the rest of that spring semester. So, I started reaching out to colleagues at Wake Forest, Josh's at Dartmouth, so people who I'd worked with before, to try to figure out what they were doing. So, those sort of scattered calls happened in the spring and throughout the summer, we were running course design institutes, and many other universities were running sort of similar models. But the idea for the book really didn't come together until the fall semester at the very early stages. Like the spring and the summer, was just too full of work to even think about publishing something.[DR. JAMES LANG] It's amazing even in fall you were able to think about a book possibly because you're right, That was that was a difficult time. And even into the fall, and into the next year, it was hard to think about. I think, actually for myself, I actually had a book come out in the fall in October of that year, and I could barely concentrate on that. And it took me several years actually to get into the mindset of developing a new idea for a project. So, it's amazing you were able to do that, even starting in the fall. So, I wanna talk about something that you wrote in the introduction, which describes how something I mentioned in the introduction to the podcast, which is that, there was this big disruption and then we thought it was gonna change everything, but then there was this push backwards toward more, when we got back on campus and many people were just like, thank goodness. We're back on campus, we can go back to our traditional ways. So, here's how you described it in the introduction,"In the relief and joy of returning to in-person classes and residential life, it can be forgotten how much beauty was co-created by learners and educators in the shared efforts to build educational resilience." And so, I noticed two things in there. First of all, there is joy in in-person residential experiences at a college, and even in forms of traditional education. But there's also then opportunities that come, and good things happen in that moment of disruptions. Will you talk a little bit about both those things?[DR. MAGGIE DEBELIUS] Sure. Yeah. So, there really is something magical about the residential college experience. It's not the only way to learn, for sure, but there's definitely a power in it that many of us, I think, took for granted before we lost it. But then with the pivot to remote teaching, we learned something else. And that was that we could harness some of that magic, even after we made the shift. And it looked different. One of my students actually wrote this beautiful graphic novel called,'Things Are Different Now,' about the switch to remote teaching. Her name is Claire Reed, and I highly recommend it. It's on the CNDLS website. But things are different now, but was still, learning was still happening. And the pandemic, the shut down, our residence halls or dining halls, it shut down labs, it shut down big sports, so much of what goes on in the university couldn't happen. But we kept teaching and students kept learning. And there was just something really beautiful in our ability to keep that central function alive. And that's really our central argument. That universities need to make those investments in teaching and learning in order to prepare for the next big interruption. And I hope it's not another pandemic, but it might be. It'll certainly be climate emergencies, as we saw in the LA fires recently. A lot of colleges in California had to close their campuses. Last fall when the hurricanes hit the southeast, the social unrests like the Gaza protests, many universities had to move online. And we don't know what the impact of a new presidential administration is gonna be on higher ed, but we know that there are gonna be interruptions. So, we just need to build that resilience, and be prepared to adapt and to keep learning going.[DR. JAMES LANG] Yeah, I love that idea. There's beauty in struggle. And I think also the fact that there's beauty in also people coming together on a shared cause. And I think that's probably part of what helps get that sense of something good happened here. And the book really brings that out cause you see everyone, and you know, there's probably, I don't know, 20, 30 authors across all the essays, and they're all working together on the same idea of, how do we now take that and push it forward, to make positive change and also make sure that we're ready for the next, right? As you point out, that might be wildfires, it could be stuff in the new administration. So, all those things can be the next disruptions, right?[DR. MAGGIE DEBELIUS] Absolutely. Yeah, for me, it was a different edited collection. I've been part of other edited collections before, but this felt like more of a community collective effort, because we got all the authors together over Zoom a couple of times and had a chance to talk.[DR. JAMES LANG] Everyone? All of them?(Dr. Lang laughs)[DR. MAGGIE DEBELIUS] I mean, not everybody could come to every Zoom meeting. You know, other edited collections, I've done my piece and other people have done their piece and that's been great, but there hasn't been much talk back between or among authors. So, it was the widespread availability of Zoom. That was another another thing that was made possible.[DR. JAMES LANG] You know, I absolutely recommend that to people who are interested in doing edit collections. That's a fantastic idea just from a writing perspective, or like a publishing perspective. So they can understand what everyone's doing and how there's shared commitment to the subject matter. That's wonderful. So, actually, now I'm gonna ask a question about the actual contributors themselves, cause you make a point about this, actually, in the book's introduction, that most of your contributors are actually not in traditional tenure track faculty positions. A few had professor in their titles, but most of them did not. So, you mentioned this in the book's introduction. So, why was it important to mention?[DR. MAGGIE DEBELIUS] Well, I have learned over the course of my long career that teaching really isn't something that just happens between a professor and her students. Like, there used to be that old hub and spoke model, where the professor was the hub and all the students were the spokes, but it doesn't happen like that anymore, or it shouldn't. Instead, we have a network of people who make learning and innovation happen at our universities. So, we have staff from libraries, teaching centers, digital learning professionals, writing centers, I started my own career in writing centers. Academic resource centers, career centers, counseling centers, all of these folks came together during the pandemic to support, our students and to make teaching and learning continue. And that network is how we got through. And I learned so much from my colleagues across the university in different offices. So, it wouldn't make any sense to write a book without them. I mean, we were all in this together. So, we had to be together in the book.[DR. JAMES LANG] Yeah, that's great. And actually, I wanna highlight the fact that there were a couple of student voices in the collection. And in one particular, there was, I think in one's essay, it features three students, one was an undergraduate, and I think a couple were graduate students. Is that what it was, yeah.[DR. MAGGIE DEBELIUS] Yeah.[DR. JAMES LANG] And so, those are really enlightening to read. Especially for me, the undergraduate one, because that student started in the fall of the pandemic, and I had a daughter who had the same situation. And it was a really, really terrible experience for her in some ways, because all the little things that were happening around, like even getting food and not being able to make friends in the same way, all this stuff was really, really difficult. And you hear that in her essay. She's sort of lamenting the fact that she didn't have those experiences. So, I'm curious to know, for you as an editor or a reader, when you read those essays, what do you think we should learn from them? What did you learn from them? What should the readers learn from hearing the student voices from the collection?[DR. MAGGIE DEBELIUS] No, I will say, Jim, that I am also the parent of a kid who had his freshman year in the pandemic, so this is personal as well as professional for me. But it was essential to us that we have student voices in the collection. So, we have undergraduate and graduate voices in the essay that you mentioned, there are a few other chapters that are written with graduate students. So, they are part of that network of learning and collective learning that happened during the pandemic. And if anything, I feel even more committed to students as partners work. I've published with my students in the past, but now it feels even more urgent. So, certainly, the pandemic experience, we needed to know what students were going through in order to be able to teach them. Before we could assume, I have taught 18 to 21 year olds at Georgetown for 23 years now. And they change a little bit over the years, but I basically know what their dorms look like, or that they have food from the cafeteria, or that many of them have internships on the hill, or like, I know the drill. But everything was different, and I didn't know what they were going through. There were students who had, like parents lost jobs, people died, there were awful things happening. But then there were students who weren't going through those experiences and we needed to hear from them. And I think that it's, it's only going to become more urgent with something like AI, I have to talk to my students about it. You know, like they are introducing me to uses of AI that I don't know about. So, it's always been important to hear from our students and have them be part of that network of learning, but as time goes by, it feels even more urgent.[DR. JAMES LANG] Yeah, it's a really good point, the fact that what they were going through was so unusual. Like, our expectations or previous experiences just didn't pan out. And I think about the fact that I had two children who had gone to college before that daughter, and the advice I used to give to them about like, for example, finding friends and socializing, it just didn't work. You know, I'd say,'You have to have meals with people,' and she was like,'We are not allowed to do that.'(laughs) Right? So, we had to hear their voices to understand truly what they were going through.[DR. MAGGIE DEBELIUS] Absolutely. Yeah, and in the case of my own son, when he was a freshman, he pledged a fraternity. And I had some hesitation about that. I know that sometimes there can be some pretty risky behavior in Greek life. But it turned out to be the thing that kept him anchored to his campus, and made him wanna go back when it was safe to return. So, even though I've spent my career in higher ed, I feel like mom's advice was actually pretty outdated, but you know.[DR. JAMES LANG] Yeah.[DR. MAGGIE DEBELIUS] Right decision for him. And it turned out to be a good thing.[DR. JAMES LANG] Yeah, yeah. So, I'm gonna push very gently back at one thing you say in the introduction. And very gently, cause I'm a nice guy.(Dr. Lang laughs) But also cause I'm not sure about it actually. You say something in the introduction about, we learned during the pandemic that actually this myth that we have about higher education moves slowly, you can't adapt, we saw that happen actually, so we don't have to believe that anymore. But I'm wondering though if we came back so quickly in more traditional forms, does that actually contradict with that idea? So, like, can we adapt? I mean, you can think about in that relationship now to artificial intelligence too, like how well are we adapting? I don't know, what's your take on it?[DR. MAGGIE DEBELIUS] Yeah, I mean, you raise a good point. We have returned to a lot of the way things were and that's becoming even more true in hindsight. But there are also a lot of things that have changed pretty significantly that I think we can hang on to. So, you know, I've certainly, had students over the past few semesters who, for very good reasons, have not been able to be physically present in class, whether it was an illness or I had a student whose grandmother was dying, and wanted to go home and spend a little time with her before she had to say goodbye. And so, she was able to Zoom into class. And not every professor allows that. It's at the discretion of the individual faculty member at Georgetown. But that's not anything we could have ever done before. Classrooms weren't set up like that and I wasn't tech savvy enough to make it work. And my relationships that I've built with colleagues across the university, different staff members in different offices, those are so much stronger. And so, now if I have a student in distress, I know exactly who to call, and I know what resources are available in a way that I didn't before. So, in some ways, the change has not stuck. But in other ways, I see faculty who I think are doing a different relationship building with their students, than they did before the pandemic. Something like sending out a pre-course survey. That was a pretty, it happened before the pandemic, but it was not widespread at Georgetown. But now, most faculty members I work with send out a pre-course survey, try to get to know their students before they meet them in the physical classroom. So, I think that, some changes have taken hold.[DR. JAMES LANG] No, you're right, actually. As you're saying these things, I'm realizing even for myself, I'm much more aware now of what might be going on in my students' lives, that might have impacted their ability to come to class or to get something in on time. And no question about that. That has been a big attitude shift among faculty. And you can actually see it in their literature as well, in books like Kate Denial's'Pedagogy of Kindness.' And to these books, you are really focused on this notion that we did learn a lot about our students, as there is stuff we didn't even know before. It was out there, we just didn't, we weren't interested in it.(Dr. Lang laughs) We didn't ask about it. And I think most people, you're right, now are much more aware of this. They find ways to help students engage with the materials or with the class, that they maybe wouldn't have done before. They would have just said, that student is just not a good student, or they're not coming to class, I'm gonna just not worry about that. That's not my problem. I think we're much more aware now, we can help with these problems, right? And that is, you're right, that's a big change, I think, across much of higher education. So, let's talk a little bit about, I raised the specter of artificial intelligence a few minutes ago. So let's talk about that a little bit. So, I know how books work, and they take a long time to produce, and the production and all that, but the timelines are long. So, and we talked about the fact that the initial, the reason for having the book come to existence was the pandemic. At the same time, in the introduction, you do mention that artificial intelligence has arrived. So, clearly, you were writing that after that had happened. And so, the book's essays though probably are, they're not really focused so much on that. But I'm curious now to see how you see recentering learning happening now. Like, how do we have to recenter learning now in 2025 and beyond?[DR. MAGGIE DEBELIUS] Excellent question. I really think that the widespread availability of generative AI, actually makes the central premise of the book even more urgent. That we need even more to double down on evidence-based teaching. And for me, AI at its best gives me the opportunity to talk more openly with learning about learning with my students. You know, to really be much more mindful of the fact that this is why we're doing this assignment. This is what I hope you get out of it. Because if I don't do that, then of course, they'll be tempted to just use ChatGPT. But to be able to have an honest conversation about the goals, and what we know about learning. I was having a conversation yesterday with my students about metacognition, and how the research shows that metacognition just increases learning in so many ways. And it can only, you only need to take a couple of minutes, but it really pays off. And we talked about how, if students wanna use ChatGPT to to write their reflections on their paper, then they can do that, but I think it's a huge waste. You're denying yourself the opportunity. To think about who you are and what matters to you, and just outsourcing it to AI completely defeats the purpose of the assignment. But I know that the emergence of AI has really refocused some instructor energy on trying to detect inappropriate use, and worries about cheating. And that's a reality, especially for people who are teaching large classes. I don't wanna dismiss that, but what I'm really hoping is that we can actually just engage in some ongoing conversations, with our students about how learning works and how they can develop, some of those important critical thinking and digital literacy skills that they are gonna need in an AI world. So, I'm hoping that it really strengthens those student-faculty partnerships instead of erode to them.[DR. JAMES LANG] I mean, to a certain extent, we could sort of, the model that you described being created in pandemic, which is people coming together from across the campus actually to address the pandemic, that could be a model for what we do with AI as well, right? I think faculty members are sort of me against the AI and the student, right? In terms of like, are they doing the actual work that I've assigned to them? And maybe we need to open up that conversation as well to learning theorists, and psychologists, and people who'll help us understand what impact this is gonna have on people's learning or in your performance outcomes, all that stuff, as well as other people on campus, academic integrity offices, as well as even like residential for, I mean, all those folks can have a role to play in helping people understand what role this thing has in our futures going forward.[DR. MAGGIE DEBELIUS] I agree. Absolutely.[DR. JAMES LANG] So, I'm a small teaching guy, so I have to like ask for some things that I takeaway stuff here. To think a little bit about the potential audiences for your book. And so, I wanna think about how we always start, right? How do we start recentering learning on a campus? And I invite you to think about this both in terms of like a campus, but also like an individual and instructor. And I know that the book's audiences are multiple, and you want the book to reach people who are administrators and staff and faculty. So, let's think a little bit about how do we start recentering learning, first, maybe at an institutional level, but also the faculty member. What can they do initially to just start this process?[DR. MAGGIE DEBELIUS] Absolutely. So, I'm gonna start micro, and then we can get a little bit more.[DR. JAMES LANG] Yeah, okay. You can, absolutely.[DR. MAGGIE DEBELIUS] So, at the level of an individual faculty member, reach out to your Center for Teaching and Learning. If you're not already a customer, these people are here to help you. My colleagues in teaching centers around the country are wonderful people. I know them. I can tell you that they really wanna help and they have some ideas that can actually make your life easier, your teaching a much more pleasurable experience. And as you know, the small teaching guide, like they don't have to be hard. There are some small tweaks that you can make that will make your lives better, your students' lives better. Invest in your teaching now before disaster strikes. And it'll make your life better in the short term cause teaching will just be more fun, but in the long term, when another interruption happens, you will have built that relationship and you'll have some of those skills at your disposal. So, that's my, my number one piece of.[DR. JAMES LANG] I agree, that's a good idea(crosstalk)[DR. MAGGIE DEBELIUS] Advice, yeah. That's something we can all enact. And then at the institutional level, I will say the more that institutions can do to sort of build networks before disaster strikes, like we're really siloed as institutions and the pandemic forced us to break down a few of those silos, but I already see it sliding back the other way. We are all super busy in our individual offices, but if there are ways that we can, my dream is like to have a secondment program, where I could trade some teaching and learning staff with, like send some of the teaching and learning people over to the library for two months, or send some of the library people over to the career center or, we all have expertise. And I don't wanna pretend like anybody can do any job, but getting to know what other people do can really, I think, pay off in the long run, and again, help us prepare to be adaptable and resilient. And then my last piece of advice, this is something that does not need a big institutional initiative. Again, this can be done at the level of individuals, but prioritize relationships. Our relationships with our students that really took a different form during the pandemic, we need those more than ever. And as you mentioned, there has been some great research in this, certainly Kate Denial's book, but I'm also thinking of Peter Felten and Leo Lambert's'Relationship-Rich Education,' or Dan Porterfield's new book. We know how much this matters. And so, being able to build relationships with our students, and with our colleagues across the university, that is what is gonna be our best hope for facing inevitable changes.[DR. JAMES LANG] So, I love that idea of having to sort of, people coming from different offices and coming in for a couple months or two. I love that idea. Actually, you should cross institutions as well, right? You can spend a month at another teaching center and then you send someone over to that, That's a great idea. You should write that up.[DR. MAGGIE DEBELIUS] I'm on it.(Dr. Debelius laughs)[DR. JAMES LANG] You write it up. And I'll bring you back on the podcast. How about that?[DR. MAGGIE DEBELIUS] That sounds great. You know, we talk a lot about preparing our students for uncertainty, and like, they're gonna be working in jobs that haven't been invented yet, and so we need to prepare them for the unknown. I think that we need to do the same thing with our institutions. Like, we don't know what's coming, so we need to invest in strategies that will help us prepare for a really uncertain future.[DR. JAMES LANG] Thanks very much, Maggie. It's been great to talk to you, and thanks for the great book you all put together.[DR. MAGGIE DEBELIUS] Thank you.[DR. JAMES LANG] 'Designed for Learning' is a production of Notre Dame Learning, at the University of Notre Dame. For more, visit our website at learning.nd.edu.