How do I build community in my Zoom classrooms? How do I honour the trauma my students have experienced this year, collectively and individually? How do I burn-to-the-ground the lab class I had carefully and recently built in the before-times, in order to create something better for an at home experience?

These are the questions I have struggled with, and these are the questions I cannot yet fully answer. When asked if I would take on teaching a laboratory course during a pandemic, I immediately agreed, simply because I know our students need lab courses. At the time, the fall term was unknown. (We knew we would be partially online, possibly partially face-to-face.) Like most of us, my primary goal when designing this course was to create a highly flexible experience that could be accessible to students under various stages of quarantine, in different areas of the world, in different time zones, and with the understanding that any of us could become sick or be required to care for sick household members at any time.

My fundamental goal academically is to create a safe place for students to explore science, practice scientific principles, and build confidence in their abilities as budding scientists. To do this work in a home-lab environment requires building community in my classrooms. I have enough experience working with young adults to know that this sometimes happens best when I purposefully get out of the way. I start each class early and arrive “late” to give students the gift of unscripted in-between moments they would normally have while sitting in a lecture hall, waiting for class to start. I offer unscripted activities (colouring pages or origami) and play music while students are waiting (and I’m making coffee). The term is just starting, but this simple act has given them ownership of that time and space. They have shared recipes, built chat rooms, and formed study groups on their own. I count these as steps towards what I hope will become an active thriving learning space over the next few weeks. 

Within the space of the first week, we have also addressed the trauma experienced by all of us. I invited students to share stories by annotating over a map of the world. We honoured the disappointment for a lab experience that they will not get. (As one example, there was a student who was really hoping to gain experience with PCR and gel electrophoresis.) This week we will explore this further by asking questions about a pencil. When we ask different members of the academy what questions they have about a pencil, we get widely different questions. Personally, I want to know what wood the pencil is made of. I can answer this in the lab – the techniques to do this are familiar to me – which is possibly why I ask that specific question. But to be honest, that’s pretty boring. If I take the pencil and walk down Main Mall to Physics, we have physicists who are world experts in graphite – and have recently used graphene as a superconductor. They would ask amazing brilliant questions that I wouldn’t think of. My colleagues in history may ask about the development of the current pencil since it’s invention in Napoleon Bonaparte’s army. A poet may ask what words are trapped inside that pencil, waiting to get out. The point of this exercise is to recognize that asking profoundly diverse questions is what makes membership in this academy important. The exact techniques each of us know are minor things. I can show a student how to do PCR in one afternoon. (And I will invite them to come by the lab next year, if they choose, and I will do just that.) The part that is exciting is asking the questions. And in our case, asking the questions specifically so that they can be soundly addressed with scientific methods. To further address the specific nature of this term,  I offer extra flexibility with due dates, as needed. I have delivered supplies to students quarantining because of a delayed return to Canada. My promise to myself and to my students is to be accessible and to help problem solve as dynamic needs arise. 

The excitement of a new possibility in education is not lost by the frantic nature of this exact moment. I know we can build classes and courses that can be better – or only possible – in an at-home learning environment. This principle has driven me forward. What can we do at home that we could not do in a face-to-face lab? In what ways can this experience be not merely adequate, but better, in a home learning environment? There are certainly massive things we have lost this year as educators and learners, but it’s possible that we have the opportunity to engineer equal amounts of gain.