The World Is the Classroom

LAST SUMMER AS the entire country, right down to the UP community itself, grappled with the ramifications of racial injustice, as the COVID-19 death toll continued to rise, as communities in the North Atlantic braced for the most active hurricane season on record, just weeks before hundreds of fires across the West would turn the sky red, communication studies professor Vail Fletcher and biology professor Tara Prestholdt started rethinking their curriculum.

They’d been awarded an Ignite Grant to create an educational program centered on environmental stewardship, but focusing on that issue alone no longer felt quite right. “After COVID, it didn’t seem appropriate,” says Prestholdt, “but we wanted to keep the momentum going. Black Lives Matter, COVID, and climate change are interwoven concerns. How do we help students make sense of the chaos?”

Their answer: lean in to all of it with all the interdisciplinary brainpower a liberal arts university can offer.

Together with Ruth Dittrich, assistant professor of economics, and Laurie Dizney, assistant professor of biology, they created a brand-new class, Imagining Our Futures: Making Sense of COVID-19, Black Lives Matter, and Climate Change. Launching in the fall semester, the class would harness the energy and expertise of almost two dozen University of Portland faculty members across four of the five schools and a multitude of disciplines to help students better understand the complex, interconnected nature of the three biggest challenges facing us today and for years to come. Asynchronous, massively interdisciplinary, and, of course, fully online, nothing like it had ever been done at UP before. By the time the 12 weeks were over, everyone, even the professors, learned more from each other than they ever thought they would.

“We saw this as a pivotal chance to have a class that’s responsive to the cultural moment and the fragility and vulnerability of the students, faculty, and staff,” says Fletcher. “We wanted to respond to the sense of uncertainty that we all have and need to talk about more. These are deeply entrenched, big, global—and local—problems that will affect us for the rest of our lives, and we need to start thinking about solving them regardless of what your major is or what your career is.”

The response from students was breathtaking, with more than 220 signing up for the class. “It was exactly what I wanted,” says Ryn Marcel ’22, who’s majoring in biology and theology. “As much as any of my other classes could pull in aspects of climate change, COVID, and Black Lives Matter, what I really wanted was a class, an academic setting, to bring all of that together. I didn’t want our current experience tangential to what I’m learning in school; I wanted school to center around what’s happening in our world today.”

Of course, untangling the complexities of these issues requires looking at them through many different lenses. How does racial injustice affect the economic resources of a com- munity? How do economic resources impact how people feed themselves? How does their diet impact their environment? How does their diet and environment impact their health? And how does all of that relate to their odds of contracting and surviving COVID-19?

Faculty from the departments of psychology, biology, business, mathematics, engineering, economics, environmental studies, communication studies, international languages and cultures, theology, philosophy, and more—the collective brainpower of an entire university—came together to shed light on some of the most pressing problems facing our world so maybe students can find their way toward some answers. Isn’t that what education is all about?

“It was a challenge to do something that would appeal to students of different majors and different stages of their academic career,” says Louisa Egan Brad, assistant professor of psychological sciences. “But I loved the idea of a really broad interdisciplinary class that was focused on current events. As crazy as 2020 has been, it’s a gift to students and faculty to use our academics to address the issues. As professors, we can’t help but put our own fields into how we interpret things, so it’s been an outlet for us.”

Each week in the semester featured recorded presentations and a list of required reading from two professors, and no two weeks were the same. When it was her turn, Kali Abel, adjunct professor of environmental studies, took the class on a virtual journey abroad to Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, and Nicaragua—places where she had contacts through her environmental work. “I knew there were so many stories internationally that I had access to, and the best way to talk about these issues, in a way that brings hope and a different perspective, is to let those people tell their own stories,” she says. In some cases, it took three months to get the recorded interviews because there was no WiFi in the remote villages. Some of the Cuban speakers were so fearful of government retribution they had to use a pseudonym and disguise their voices. But hearing about the issues, directly from young people living in places you usually only read about, brought the connections closer to home.

It’s exactly what Jack Clark ’22, an environmental studies major and biology minor, had hoped to get from the class— informed perspectives from different disciplines. “I already had a good understanding of the functionality of climate change, but the class gave me insight into how it affects people across the globe,” he says. “It’s given me more of the humanities side and the human-impact side of climate change. In the case of Dr. Abel’s session, hearing people from all over the Global South talk about how COVID and police brutality have affected them, seeing the actual people in these different places, has been really helpful for me. Seeing how COVID intersects with racial justice—it’s not something that my major has addressed.”

The students are learning from each other as well, mainly through forums where they have to post their thoughts on that week’s subject matter.

“I’ve taken a lot of sociology and communications classes, so a lot of the social science stuff makes sense to me,” says Sophie Downing ’22, who is majoring in organizational communication and English and minoring in social justice. “But I know almost nothing about environmental sciences. In the forums you’ll get students who will say, ‘I’ve taken three classes on this, and here’s what I’m thinking.’ Getting to use them for their knowledge is good for everyone.”

The students weren’t the only ones learning. Because the class was asynchronous, meaning the presentations were recorded and could be watched anytime, the professors were tuning in as well. “A lot of us were watching each other’s lectures, which is great, because you get to see different teaching styles and topics and hear their thoughts, and you don’t get to do that usually,” says Brad.

Abel says the class has sparked conversations among faculty about building out new courses or even collaborating in the future. “Some professors I never met, who watched my session and I watched theirs, have reached out and said, ‘Let’s team-teach a course.’ That’s so cool to me. It’s not just an opportunity for students, it was an opportunity for faculty to say, ‘OK, let’s reform how we educate and take part in this conversation.’”

Fletcher says that although the format of the class is a big departure from UP’s small, in-person instruction, it shows that one size doesn’t fit all. The class couldn’t have worked this well any other way. “We wanted to teach this class, but we wanted this class to teach us too,” she says. “We wanted to learn from the students and the students to learn from each other, but then because of the format, it became a faculty development thing too. I learned more from my colleagues and the students than I ever have before.”

Still, gaining a better understanding of the issues plaguing the world today doesn’t make it any easier to live with them. The most common question the professors received from students: What do I do now?

Fletcher says as much as the class needs a “Part 2: How to Be an Activist,” there’s no pat answer to that question. Instead, seeking the answer is an ongoing journey that will unfold over the rest of our lives. “It’s about helping the students understand the long road ahead and what to take with them,” she says. “Everyone’s answer is different. For someone in nursing, this might eventually show up in interpersonal relations with their patients. Some sort of racial justice tension might arise, and they may think, ‘Oh this is my actionable moment. I can communicate to the doctor or my colleagues how we can do better.’”

Abel also saw the class as an opportunity. “We’re planting the seed to keep going, keep learning, keep being uncomfortable, and that’s the start of reimagining the future.”

The class was such a success that plans are in the works to offer it again next year.

—Danielle Centoni