The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has required faculty and students to adapt to an unprecedented challenge and rapidly transition from traditional face-to-face instruction to distance learning formats through virtual classrooms. While most campuses trained faculty to ensure quality and maintenance of the curriculum through virtual classrooms, less consideration has been given to training students, who face equal challenges in adapting to this abrupt change in the delivery of the curriculum. Few approaches have been developed for students to facilitate their involuntary transition to virtual classrooms and maintenance of appropriate online learning behaviours and etiquette. Presented here are a series of propositions to help to maintain and enhance the quality of college student engagement and activity in the virtual classroom. These guidelines are from one example of the State University of New York public educational system perspective, at the pandemic’s epicentre, while serving a diverse student population. Initiating a meaningful dialogue between faculty, who are engaged in efforts to cope and adapt to the pandemic, may prove useful in re-envisioning and re-designing future curriculum. This may facilitate future discussions on creating best practices guidelines for asynchronous/synchronous virtual classrooms post the pandemic. The present rapid communication suggests a framework for faculty to develop such guidelines to address the current gap in the literature.
In the present article, I explore how urban youth use narrating for self-presentation as they relate to diverse contexts and audiences. Diverse narrative genres employed in this study were used as a socio-cognitive tool for looking into enactments ofrelational complexity— a skill of adjusting one’s communications to audiences and contexts. Thirteen adolescents were asked to narrate about the most important aspects of their lives, using two different genres and addressing two different audiences. I explored youth’s systematically varied use of psychological state expressions, as they navigated through different genres and audiences. As adolescents narrate either about the negative experiences or for the imagined peer audience, their narrating involves more cognitive than affective expressions. This indicates that systematic changes take place in narrating as a socio-cognitive process when there is a need for more intense work around issues, either to figure out what is happening, or to try to present oneself in the best light to salient others.
This article explores how different socioeconomic circumstances shape adolescents’ sense-making about fairness and their capacity to relate to different actors in a social situation, including injustice. The study involved 40 adolescents (M = 17.2), recruited from contrasting socioeconomic backgrounds of New York City. Narrative as a sense-making tool was used as the data collection/production and analysis approach. Youth’s narratives (n = 160) were elicited as responses to a vignette they read, depicting an ambiguous social situation in which occurrences of deception and exclusion have occurred. Participants were invited to retell the story from three perspectives, that of the self, object, and subject of injustice and for three different audiences, the implicit audience, a friend, and a school official. Youth from less privileged backgrounds showed greater flexibility in adjusting their experience, knowledge, and communicative styles to different others they addressed. They were better at enacting the thoughts, feelings, and intentions of both the culprit and the victim of exclusion. In addition, these young people narrated more directly about injustice, addressing deception and exclusion more explicitly. Acknowledging the detrimental effects of the socioeconomic (and political) challenges that many adolescents experience—especially the underrepresented—this work emphasizes the sociocognitive advantages that youth growing up in adversity may acquire. This skill of adjusting one’s ways of knowing and being to different others is an important asset. However, the study is framed and interpreted in ways that do not romanticize the reality of the material and psychological challenges that may bestow this epistemic advantage on underserved youth.
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