College During the Pandemic: Final Assignment

Project goals

What does the COVID-19 pandemic mean for college right now? The goal of this project is to deploy your budding sociological perspective to think about this issue.

What to do to work on the project

1. No later than October 12 (and preferably sooner) start a journal/log in which you jot reflections on how the pandemic is affecting how you are engaging in and experiencing college. Write a little something at least once a week through the end of November. You’ll be using those reflections to complete this project.
2. Watch Hungry to Learn, a documentary from Soledad O’Brien Productions about campus food insecurity. 84 minutes. Do this before Thanksgiving. As you watch it, make notes about how you feel during the film, what aspects of your college life it makes you think about, and how it connects to any readings you’ve done in class. We’ll have a class discussion about the doc the week after Thanksgiving.
3. Read these things:

• “Educators Need to Employ Radical Compassion during COVID-19” by Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve
• “Remotely Coping: How are Students Faring during the COVID-19 Pandemic?” by Tanya Rouleau Whitworth, Katherine Cyr, and Anthony Paik
• College Made Them Feel Equal. The Virus Exposed How Unequal Their Lives Are.

4. Connect with at least 2 classmates or friends — at Temple or enrolled elsewhere in college — and interview them about how they are experiencing college right now. If you want to speak with someone you don’t know, check out the spreadsheet of volunteers linked in the #projects channel on Slack.You can do this on a schedule of your choosing. Take notes on what they say, since it will become data for your paper. Here are some examples of questions you might ask: (1) What is your view of how your college or university is responding to the pandemic? How included/excluded do you feel in the response? Why? (2) How has the pandemic affected your living arrangements? Your family? Your job? (3) What stresses and stressed behaviors have you felt or exhibited while going to college during the pandemic?(4) What has helped you focus on your college education during the pandemic?

Writing up the project paper

1. Start a Medium blog that will serve as your project paper. Remember you can begin it and leave it unpublished as you work on it. Be sure to tag it with the class hashtag #TempleSocEd.
2. Consider the overarching question:What does the COVID-19 pandemic mean for college right now? Then consider these more specific questions: What have been the opportunities and challenges created by the pandemic, how does that affect what you are doing and learning in college, and what do you think that means for the rest of your college education ?
3. Craft a response (minimum 750 words) that draws on the data you’ve assembled from the activities above. Everything you did- from your own reflections to your notes on the film and readings, to the notes you took on the interviews you conducted- all of this constitutes your data. Be prepared to document how you collected it.
4. You might start by outlining your answer- you might want to begin by offering your conclusion, and then talking about how you reached it. Be sure to describe your data and methods — how many reflections did you write, who did you speak with (and how), what did you read, etc. Then reflect on what you learned, and whenever possible relate your lessons to the readings you did for this project and for the class more broadly.
5. For examples of how to write this up, take a look at these solid examples from the midterm project: Example 1, Example 2, Example 3.
6. Be sure your blog is posted no later than the deadline assigned in the class Schedule.