This interview features the author of the “Learning About Learning: Students Insights From a Pandemic Year” chapter in our new co-edited book, Relearning: Complexity, Resilience and Adaptability in higher education (JHU Press, 2024). The book (in paper and ebook form) is available to order from JHU Press and Amazon.
Sherry Lee Linkon is a professor of English at Georgetown University. The book “Learning About Learning” was written by three students taking online courses at Lincoln during the 2020–21 academic year. Sophie Grabiec is managing editor at Elon University. Isabel McHenry graduated from Georgetown University in 2024. Lillian Nagengast is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Texas at Austin.
Q: What are the main themes of your chapter that you would like students to take away and take back to their institutions and organizations?
A: Many discussions about education in times of violence focus on how faculty have adapted to online teaching or how online learning is harming students. But several of my students have commented on how online learning has changed the way they think about learning—in part by making them think about learning themselves.
Many of the habits and methods they took for granted were disrupted that year, and while many students struggled with that disruption, for others, the change sparked a new awareness of learning as a social process.
For example, Isabel realized how much she relied on informal interactions, even accidental ones, like conversations with other students in the hallway before class, and that, made conversations on Zoom feel structured. Sophie realized and gained an appreciation for slower, more thoughtful approaches to her epidemiologic studies, and like Isabel, she saw how online learning needed ways to benefit from student interaction.
Q: What are the potential opportunities and foundations for recent studies at colleges and universities that require research?
A: For me, the important lesson in writing this article is that students can benefit from experiences that disrupt their habits and thinking. Epidemic practice in pedagogy has enabled students and teachers alike to recognize patterns they were previously unaware of. Even better, as these students attest, the changes can create opportunities for students to take more ownership of their learning.
Lillian’s story illustrates this well. As a graduate student watching early discussions about the learning loss epidemic, she looked for ways to be more active as a reader, especially through cognitive strategies. This enabled him to emerge from the crisis as a self-confident student, because the success of his mission highlighted his agency as a student.
Obviously, we should not rely on another epidemic to enable such recognition. While I don’t think we should disrupt teaching just to make students pay attention to how they learn, Isabel, Lillian and Sophie’s thinking inspires me to be brave enough to try new things. They also reinforce the importance of actively inviting students to notice and think about new information as opportunities to think about. How they learn, not just what they are studying.
Q: How might the rapid emergence of generative AI impact the field of post-learning?
A: The AI ​​is certainly disturbing! It also underscores another lesson I took away from writing this article: Talking to students about their experiences with anything that interferes with their learning can help us see how to use it more effectively.
In my SoTL work, I often ask students about what works for them or how they worked through something difficult. With AI, I ask more open-ended questions but also focus on specific actions.
With AI, that means asking students to explore ways to use it and—and this is key—talking to them seriously about how it worked, in immediate work and in future work. I think this is a small change for students as partners: Instead of students as partners in teaching, I involve them as partners in learning. We’re discovering AI together, and I’m probably learning more from this than they are.
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