seminar online vs in person.
Seminar is at the core of Hutchins. We talk. We discuss. We debate. We prove. We facilitate. Throughout the four years of my Hutchins Experience, the seminars I experienced were vastly different. In the Spring of 2020, my sophomore year, we went online halfway through the semester due to COVID. Here I discuss the change in me and the change in Hutchins as we migrated to online seminar, as well as back to in person come Fall 2021.
date. Fall 2018 (in-person)
class. LIBS 101
title. Notes from Seminar/Daily Writing
I started Hutchins the same way most other students do, looking for the detailed instructions on what I was supposed to do, how I was supposed to act, how many times I was required to speak. I was looking for the rigid structure of high school. I would not find it. Professor Ianthe started us off with Daily Writing prompts to start our conversations. From there, she let us take over. This free reign and free will was at first very anxiety inducing, but we grew to love being able to facilitate our own discussions without fear of not meeting strict standards.
date. Spring 2019 (in person)
class. LIBS 102
title. Seminar Notes 4/8
In the next semester, I started taking my own notes during active seminar. This let me come back to the ideas we discussed and reflect on my own thoughts as well as the thoughts of my classmates. You can see the doodles I did to stay focused during discussion, but that does not detract from the main points, themes, and questions that were raised about that week's reading. My engagement and personal drive is increased here, as compared to the Daily Writing from Fall 2018.
date. Fall 2019 (in person)
class. LIBS 201
title. Class Notes 9/25
Fall 2019 was when I started having very detailed prep-notes that I set up to have a built in portion of class notes. Instead of writing in my notebook, I found that I could be more abstract with a blank piece of paper. That coupled with keeping all my notes in one place brought me to adding my class notes to the rest of my classwork. These notes are much more detailed than my ones before. I was incredibly engaged in discussion and keeping track of each point someone made. I simply did not want to miss out on the ideas people were bringing forward.
date. Spring 2020 (half in person, half online)
class. LIBS 202
title. Class Notes/Class Discussion 2/18
The trend continues into early Spring 2020. My notes are longer, and spread out over two pages. These notes are pre-pandemic though. Despite my engagement in this example, I stopped taking notes altogether when we went online. Mostly this was because my professor stopped meeting as a seminar. We only read on our own and then submitted our papers. There were no zoom classes for this class once we went virtual. It is no wonder then that I have a really hard time remembering the books we read after March 2020 for this class. We did not discuss them at all.
distracted vs engaged.
My seminar skills became incredibly rusty over the next six months. I finally got to participate in seminar again during Fall 2020. These notes are lost to time and distance from home, but they are not nearly as thorough as what I used to do. Nevertheless, I did take notes, they were just full of distractions. Online seminar was jolty, disconnected, and short. Zoom fatigue was real and staying for a two hour forty minute class over a screen proved to be something teachers and students alike had a hard time stomaching. Finally, after 17 months away from campus, I got to be in person in Fall of 2021.
date. Fall 2021 (first in-person)
class. LIBS 320B
title. Leading Seminar with Jenna 9/23
Seminar notes became full scale operations again in LIBS 320B. My notes were thorough and dynamic. The biggest difference to being in person was that we were able to be engaged AND we were able to take turns leading seminar. I was paired with Jenna in my class to lead on 9/23 from two texts. The plans with results are seen to the left. Our goal was to be active, moving, and changing throughout our seminar class. After sitting and staring at screens from seminar for over a year, we wanted to be dynamic again. I think we accpomplished that with great success.
screened-in vs out-and-about.
Hutchins was rewritten when we went online. For a program that prided itself on small persona classes that fostered active discussion we sure were put into virtual boxes miles apart. The COVID-19 pandemic showed that seminar is incredibly valuable in maintaining connections and providing a way to have healthy discourse. Being ripped away from that and then reintroduced showed that to Hutchins staff and Hutchins students. My own journey through that indicated that my ability to stay on track is stronger than I originally thought. We are a resilient crew of Hutchins folks. While I never wish fully online school to be the norm or to be thrust upon those that do not wish it, I am grateful for the online and in person experiences that I got.