How Loss Teaches: Beyond “Pandemic Pedagogy”

Abstract

This Final Thought challenges two assumptions in commentary on teaching and learning amid the COVID-19 pandemic: (1) that the compassionate teaching strategies used to help students learn amid the pandemic inherently undercut academic standards and (2) that these teaching strategies weren’t previously needed, during the so-called “normal time” that preceded the pandemic. By contrast, this essay argues that educators have and will always teach students whose learning is disrupted by trauma, loss, and grief. The essay advocates that educators tune learner-centered teaching strategies to the effects of loss. Doing so, we might teach and learn more effectively, without compromising our or our learners’ humanity.