Gravitational Slingshot

Coronavirus challenge presents an opportunity to make education more accessible, inclusive, and effective for the long haul

By Dean Jonathan Massey

Don’t go back to normal.” Among coronavirus slogans and “ memes, this one describes the ethos motivating me as we chart a new path for teaching and learning at Taubman College. Since mid-March — in Michigan, earlier or later for some of you — our lives have been far from normal. Here is what I’m thinking as we adapt to the pandemic and look ahead to an as-yet-undetermined future.

Residential education based on face-to-face teaching is glorious, but it has limitations and drawbacks. Embodied, personalized, and sociable, it is also demanding, prescriptive, and costly. What works well for some students disadvantages others, filtering out a diversity of talent based on factors such as ability and socioeconomic status.

These attributes are especially pronounced in professional programs. The cost, credit hour requirements, inflexible curriculum, and contact hour expectations of architectural education, in particular, can be disproportionate to the benefits, particularly for learners from traditionally underrepresented groups. The pedagogy and culture of the design studio represent the best and the worst of faceto-face education: intimate, intense, communal, synthetic, creative … and excessive, wasteful, exhausting, and at times exploitive.

It’s a trope of space thrillers that when your damaged spaceship is drifting toward the black hole, you use the last ounces of fuel to set a gravity-assist course that will propel you forward onto a new trajectory. In adapting to the challenges of our traumatic present and unknown future, I’m looking to these gravitational slingshots for inspiration.

I aim to address challenges of the pandemic by accelerating equity innovation: academic innovation that supports diversity, equity, and inclusion by making education accessible to a broader range of learners. Online instruction disadvantages some students; the digital divide is real. But so does on-campus residential instruction, which all too often forces learners with diverse needs and preferences into a single pathway through a one-size-fits-all education geared toward the most privileged. Let’s prioritize adaptations that can improve residential education after the plague has passed. This is the work of building the discipline we deserve, rather than perpetuating the one we’ve inherited from forebears with circumstances, demographics, and values different from ours. This is how we will mobilize a diversity of talent to address complex problems such as climate change, the focus of our cover story.

At Taubman College, faculty, students, and staff have stepped up under extraordinary pressure, making the transition from face-to-face instruction in a closely knit residential community to teaching and learning at a distance using file sharing, email, and, yes, Zoom. They have adeptly migrated annual events such as Career Fair, admitted student preview days, and student exhibitions into virtual platforms. Thanks to their dedication and skill, the abrupt adjustment to emergency remote teaching is working — for now. But it’s a far cry from true online instruction, which is intentional, supported, and planned along distinctive pathways.

Looking ahead to a year or more of adaptively triggered social distancing, we expect in-person instruction to be limited in size, density, duration, and frequency. We plan to complement whatever face-to-face work public health measures allow with methods from online instruction. We are not going back to normal. Beyond the next year or two is an as-yet-undetermined new normal, in learning and in life, to be planned and designed. Our goal is to move from emergency remote instruction to resilient teaching. Resilient teaching combines the greatest strengths of face-to-face education, like access to specialized facilities and a lively academic community, with those of online instruction, such as the flexibility to teach or learn where and when you are best able, balanced with your caregiving responsibilities, your part-time job, your sleep or sports schedule, and the accommodations for your disability. It sustains the imaginative discovery and peer-to-peer exchanges that enrich the design studio, but discards the all-nighters, all-consuming schedule, and unsustainable costs.

Resilient teaching methods equip us for the stresses of a pandemic, a natural disaster, or any disruptive event, even as they improve the instructional baseline in good times. If we handle the coronavirus challenge right, we will combine residential and online methods to make education more accessible, inclusive, and effective for the long haul. That’s the slingshot whereby this black swan, or black hole, can accelerate us onto a better course.

The virtual world explored in studios (bottom right) became a reality in March when COVID-19 forced online adaptations of all Taubman College activities, including classes, reviews, admitted student preview weekends, and Career Fair.