When we learned that we would be teaching our writing classes remotely, the question that naturally arose was what aspects of class we could replicate in our digital environment. A document could replace a chalkboard, breakout rooms could replace small groups, and a Zoom room, at least conceptually, gives teachers and students the ability to hold lectures. However, we theorize that one thing that would be missing was the university as a place. Besides the fact that the university offers a space outside of the home to work, it also communicates the sense of multi-valenced exchanges of affect and information. Students may be reminded, when walking past other rooms on the way to meet their professor for office hours, for example, that other students are meeting with their professors, and that other professors meet with each other. Seeing other professors meeting with each other, even casually, can be a reminder that professors are in states of learning through peer discourses of their own.
We wanted to remind the students of the university as a place where faculty support each other. We incorporated team teaching, shared video resources, and as most pertains to this paper, three of us, Dr. Paul Cheng, adjunct instructor of writing, Prof. Josh Adachi, adjunct instructor of writing for a little less than a decade - and Dr. Christopher Harris, one of the editors of this volume - shared a single Zoom for a particular office hour per week. Our guidelines for the office hour were that we would all help students with any issues related to writing, but that students could request to have a breakout room with their own professor in cases where the context for the students’ needs were too specific, especially where it pertained to issues of attendance and grades.
Connection to the NCTE’s Principles on Online Writing Instruction
While we did not have the NCTE’s Principles on Online Writing Instruction in mind when we designed the Grand Unified Office Hour (GUOH), it became clear that our plan had clear overlap with many of the principles, primarily in Principles 3 and 4. OWI Principle 3 notes that “appropriate composition teaching/learning strategies should be developed for the unique features of the online instructional environment.” At the same time, Principle 4 says, “Appropriate onsite composition theories, pedagogies, and strategies should be migrated and adapted to the online instructional environment.” As integral to writing instruction in general, it became clear that we needed to find a way to successfully migrate office hours to the online environment, in reflection of Principle 4. However, we quickly realized that Zoom allowed for the ability for not just multiple students to enter a Zoom section, but for multiple instructors to appear as well. In a face-to-face setting, arranging a time for another instructor to appear in class was often difficult as instructors needed to make special accommodations to visit. However, with everyone remote, it became much easier for the other instructors to simply log on to someone else’s session. In this way, the GUOH worked to leverage the expanded remote capabilities of Zoom to bring people together.
Furthermore, under its example of an Effective Practice for Principle 3, the NCTE describes how, “teachers should maximize their use of the online environment for explaining assignments and answering questions, holding small group or whole class meetings, showing examples, responding to student texts, and encouraging student writing in as many forms as may be pertinent to course goals.” By bringing multiple instructors online simultaneously in both classroom and office hour formats, we were able to thus maximize the affordance provided by Zoom. As an example, during the GUOH, students often had two or even three respondents to their essays, with each instructor offering a different insight into the essay. On the other hand, we often worried that the student might be overwhelmed by the multiplicity of opinions, and the other two instructors would often step aside to allow the primary instructor of the student to guide the student through the revision process. In this way, we tried to avoid offering students contradictory advice on their writing.
Most importantly for us, it became clear that Principle 11 of the NCTE 2013 Position Statement on Online Writing Instructions which states that, “[o]nline writing teachers and their institutions should develop personalized and interpersonal online communities to foster student success” was one of our key reasons for implementing the GUOH. One of the main goals of the GUOH was first presented by Prof. Adachi, who argued that remote learning was even more isolating than we could imagine for these students. As Prof. Adachi pointed out, when we began Fall 2021, the students entering into first-year writing had already been on remote learning for the last three months of their senior years due to universal pandemic lockdowns. Basically, these students had missed out on what many would consider key moments of their high school careers such as Senior Prom and, more importantly, graduation. Moreover, for these students entering Fall of 2021, their first day of class was not stepping onto campus, but turning on their computers for an online Zoom session or logging on to Canvas to read about their class and upcoming assignments. In many ways then, college was less of a milestone and more of a continuation of the same remote learning practices they had already engaged in for several months.
While the lack of in-person learning may seem mainly an inconvenience, it should be pointed out that in 2021, 56.8% of the students admitted to Cal State LA were first generation college students. This statistic reflects our university’s goal in serving a historically underrepresented population in college: since 2016, Cal State LA over 50% of the students admitted to Cal State LA have been first generation college students. In addition, Cal State L.A. boasts a student body of nearly 70% Latinx students. Often then, for this particular subset of students, entering college represents a whole host of new difficulties. The main intervention for these students have been with in-person and on-campus services, services that have been absent due to lockdowns. For these students then, not only did they lose their senior years, they also lost many of the formative experiences of their freshman years.
Thus, one of the primary goals of the GUOH was to provide and foster these incoming freshmen with a sense of not just an online writing community composed of their class, but to remind them of the larger university community as a whole. The argument was that simply by seeing other instructors at work and working with them, we could make their first college experience less isolating and less remote, in every sense of the word. In short, one of the larger goals of the Grand Unified Office Hour was to build a campus community.
