It was 1:55 am in New York, almost 3 in the afternoon Beijing time. I sat alone in a dimly lit hotel lobby with my computer, waiting for my students to join me online in our seminar. I had to be in the hotel lobby since it was in the middle of the night in New York, and my family—including my 3-year-old—were sleeping in the room. The outbreak of the coronavirus caught us abroad and due to travel restrictions going in and out of Beijing, we have been on the road for the last three weeks, from university to university, meeting collaborators and giving seminars and colloquia.
In a few minutes after I opened the Zoom session, students started to join in. The class is a graduate seminar titled Foundations of Cognitive Science, exploring the topics of language and concept acquisition. The seminar is mostly intended for graduate students, but quite a number of enthusiastic undergraduate students are joining the class as well. Students came prepared even though this was only the first class: they had to do three pieces of readings and wrote a response paper about the readings—discussing their analysis of the readings, things they found interesting about the papers, or questions that they have. I wanted students to do this because this class is a discussion class. Instead of the professor giving lectures, students and I discuss, argue, question, and think together to understand the issues at hand. But we cannot have an informed discussion if we do not have common grounds, so everyone had to read the papers and thought for themselves prior to the class meeting.
In the week prior to the start of the class, my TA and I experimented with a number of online platforms for holding classes. Given the special nature of our class—that it’s a seminar where students have to actively participate—we found Zoom to be the most suitable platform. Once all students were online, we started with introductions. Other than names and class year, I also asked students to say one random interesting fact about themselves. In my experience teaching, I found this to be a good icebreaker. This is important, since one key to having a good discussion is to have the students to be comfortable with each other. Indeed, during introductions some students shared their situations during this epidemic, for example, one student said she had not come down from her high apartment floor since the beginning of February. Almost all students mentioned how happy they were to have online classes. The epidemic had cut a lot of social interactions, and having classes connected them back to the community of Tsinghua.
After introductions we immediately delved into the issues of language and concept acquisition. Language is considered the pinnacle of human cognition, it is so complex yet acquired easily by every child. How does this happen? Our goal in this class is to understand the science of it: how to formulate the questions? what are the scientific evidence and discoveries that have answered these questions? What are future questions and experiments that the field of cognitive science needs to do? I started by asking students to reflect back on their experience learning a second language, so they can formulate exactly why that learning was hard. Students took turn talking, and surprisingly this went quite smoothly online. I used a Zoom feature called “whiteboard” to write down our thoughts, and invite students to write directly on the board. We also used the chat room to share links and comments. For example, we talked about a whistling language and one student immediately shared an article about it.
Time passed by quickly, and without realizing we had been discussing for almost 3 hours straight without a break! Maybe it was the diverse student body—students came from a range of majors including Psychology, Foreign Language, Linguistics, Chemical Engineering, and Computer Science—or perhaps because everyone had experienced language learning and found the question relevant, or simply because everyone missed discussing together. Whatever the reason was, we had a great discussion. Students came up with critical questions such as “why is it that adults who have more advanced cognition than children are worse in acquiring language?” The answers are about to come in the following weeks. I was worried that having this class online would make it very difficult for a discussion-based class, but it turned out to be much better than I expected.
One of the students logged in online from a hospital bed in Wuhan. She has had fever in the last couple of days, although she was feeling better that day. I told her that she didn’t have to attend the class this week, it would not affect her grade. But she said she was so looking forward to join the class, to be in the discussions, because it would give her a positive energy. Her remarks humbled me and reminded me of the meaning and value of teaching and learning: that it is a community of exchanges. Whether in Beijing or New York, in a hotel lobby or a hospital room, in the middle of the day or in the wee hours of the night, once we get together and exchange our thoughts, we find meanings and connections in learning.
