In this month’s blog, Anna MacNeill reflects on the impact of the Covid19 pandemic on university students
The COVID-19 pandemic tore a hole through the fabric of our lives in March 2020 when I was just over halfway through the second year of my three-year undergraduate degree. For most of us, the initial reaction was to rejoice at the idea of a small break believing the university would be closed for perhaps two weeks. For me, I was never back on university campus until I graduated in September 2021, a year and a half later. In other words, I completed the entire second half of my degree on my laptop, sitting on the floor in my bedroom. It has taken me a long time to even begin to process just how much of the educational experience I was robbed of.
The classroom structure is a sacred space for free-flowing ingenuity and imaginative thought. Often, there are few arenas in our lifetime which offer such freedom of thought and expression as we learn through the contributions and experiences of others, and offer that same thing in return. Any well-intentioned and unrestricted classroom environment will be led by educational methodologies that encourage participation and creativity and that foster a democratic space where learning is continuous and collaborative. It’s the best way to learn anything, until that fateful day in March 2020. All my memorable moments of learning and creative expression I experienced in college happened in small classrooms, not in lecture halls. It’s the most powerful mode of study. Then, it was taken from us.
Completely contrasted with this collaborative space I speak of, is the year and a half I, and many others, spent removed from this learning environment. Whilst it was repeatedly touted that the online Teams and Zoom spaces were an easy and convenient replacement, the experience was in no way comparable to that of an in-person class. Classrooms around campus were swapped for the spaces where people slept every night, and the houses where, for some people, childcare and housework were added pressures.
As my home became the container for the second half of my degree, my days would center around seeing tiny, pixelated images of people on a laptop screen with fellow students confined to their own domestic spaces, obscured through a camera lens. I tried to remember the name of others in my class and couldn’t, thrown into this sea of digital boxes, the capacity to build friendships became near impossible.
It’s hard to quantify what is lost when the real life inter-personal connection between peers in a learning environment is denied – the communication that exists in a group of people who are all in a room for the same reason and out of the same interests. The interactions we built through eye-contact, body language and the way in which conversation ebbs and flows was lost when we are forced to communicate through the awkward and muffled lens of a webcam. Confined in our tiny boxes on a screen, we were divided.
To rub salt in the wound of this monotonous experience, some lecturers appeared to set the same expectations and level of participation that they would expect from an in-person class. This didn’t work for me rather I sat there, day after day, as group leaders urged a quiet class of people to speak up and be involved. And while I understand the difficulty of this position for the educator, how you can expect people to feel supported to contribute to what is supposed to be a group experience, when in actuality they are alone, often in their bedroom or juggling other responsibilities they enjoyed escaping from as part of their college experience.
The pandemic is now mostly behind us, universities are back to normal and students, young and old, have returned to face-to-face learning. But is it worth remembering the thousands who didn’t get to finish their journey on campus. I got to graduate in person, with no guests invited and with no campus reception. Others graduated online and within the same four walls where they finished their studies. I know that our loss is not comparable to the much greater losses others experienced because of Covid19. But they were not insignificant either. As universities are again buzzing with activity, spare a thought for those of us whose ultimate experience was very different.
Anna MacNeill
Photo by Gabriel Benois on Unsplash
Department of Adult and Community Education Maynooth 