Faculty member and alum Dr. Savanna Love ’10 featured in new collection of social science research into pandemic teaching

by Sydney Koch ’22

Flexibility and transition defined all aspects of life during the pandemic, but schools experienced unique challenges when social distancing forced teachers to unexpectedly convert their in-person programming to virtual experiences. Dr. Savanna Love ’10, a visiting assistant professor in RMC’s Department of Education, recounted her own experiences in remote instruction in several contributions to a new book on pandemic learning entitled COVID-19 and the Classroom: How Schools Navigated the Great Disruption.

“Our staple here at Randolph-Macon is one-on-one connections between students and professors,” Love said. She emphasized the difficulty teachers and students faced maintaining those connections with the new physical, technological, and emotional demands associated with distance learning.

In the early days of the pandemic, just as schools began their virtual transitions, one of Love’s former graduate school colleagues, Dr. David Marshall, reached out to discuss classroom life in the “new normal.” Love had previously worked with Marshall, an assistant professor of educational research at Auburn University, on research related to different methods of providing feedback to students. For that research, Marshall submitted feedback to students in various mediums, including written, audio, and video comments.

“What we found,” Love explained, “was that students really enjoyed the video feedback.” Those insights got them thinking about opportunities for enhanced student-teacher interactions in virtual spaces. They started making plans to talk to teachers about how their pedagogies had been impacted, for better and worse, by the pandemic. Less than a month after a national state of emergency was declared, the pair sent out their first survey to a handful of colleagues.

“We sent the surveys out to people we already knew in the teaching world and let it snowball,” said Love. As the pandemic progressed, their data collection expanded as more teachers completed the survey. Two follow-up surveys were sent out: one mid-pandemic, and another as schools started to reopen to in-person learning. Marshall and Love were overwhelmed with the response, sparking Marshall’s idea to produce a publication that invited various teachers to share their pandemic teaching experiences through different chapters. That vision resulted in the publication of COVID-19 and the Classroom: How Schools Navigated the Great Disruption with Lexington Books, a Rowman & Littlefield imprint, in February 2022.

The publisher describes the book as a work of social science with a two-fold vision: to present research about the first year of pandemic learning while also serving as a history book documenting the experience of what it was like to teach from March 2020 through the next academic year.

“Our survey work became one of the chapters,” explained Love. “The interviews that we did became another, and I also suggested we add a section on a teacher preparation program.” Love’s contributions are reflected in three different chapters of the book, one alongside her colleague Dr. Diana M. Yesbeck, associate professor of education at Randolph-Macon.

Once a Jacket, Always a Jacket

After collecting various perspectives from teachers across the country, Love examined how her alma mater adapted to fit the unique teaching and learning needs required for online learning.

“Randolph-Macon has offered a lot of flexibility to faculty members, which lets us respond to our own level of comfort and needs as well as those of our students,” she said. It was this same level of care that drew Love back to Randolph-Macon after graduate school.

“I went to grad school saying my dream would be to teach at Randolph-Macon,” Love said. “As an alum of the school and connected through volleyball, I always knew this was home for me.”

As a student-athlete, Love was given the opportunity to coach, initially sparking her interest in teaching. “At some point, I connected coaching and liking to work with younger kids,” explained Love. This initial passion connected to her love for writing and literature, resulting in an undergraduate degree with a major in English and a minor in secondary education. These roots, plus her research and data collection background from graduate school, aided Love in her ability to contribute to a publication.

Moving Forward

Today, Randolph-Macon has students fully back in person as the world begins to reopen. While this semester has been relatively smooth, Love admits the transition back to in-person learning was also a challenge. “This past fall was a lot,” she said. “People didn’t remember how to be students, things like having to allow 15 minutes to get from point A to point B. It’s not just clicking to another window and starting a meeting. So this transition has been difficult, too.”

Love suggests that although the pandemic was a stressful time, it reinforced the importance of teacher and student support, as well as the importance of education programs in preparing future teachers. She believes the teachers who experienced it will be better equipped to adapt to unexpected changes, though we must recognize the enormous strains they faced both then and now.

“Survey results … offered a sober but important reminder that teachers are also human beings who have lives and obligations beyond their professional role including caring for their own children,” she and three others co-wrote in the book’s first chapter. “By better understanding their experiences and heeding their recommendations, we hope that schools might be better prepared for future emergencies and provide better support for teachers and students in an online setting.”

 

 

Sydney Koch ’22 is an RMC senior from Raleigh, North Carolina. As a student-athlete studying English, Sydney has found an ability to juggle her passions of volleyball and writing throughout her college experience.