It was 1:55am in New York, almost 3:00 in the afternoon Beijing time. I sat alone in a 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 child — were sleeping in the room.
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 reading and write a response about the readings—discussing their analysis of the readings, things they found interesting about the papers, or questions that they have.
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 chose a 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 of 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 back on a lot of social interaction, and having classes connected them back to the Tsinghua community.
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 of learning a second language, so they can formulate exactly why that learning was hard. Students took turns 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 since she hasn't been feeling well in the last couple of days. 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 positive energy.
Her remarks humbled me and reminded me of the meaning and value of teaching and learning: that it is a community of exchange.
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 meaning and connection in learning.
Writer: Stella Christie, tenured Associate Professor at the Department of Psychology, School of Social Sciences
Editor: Guo Lili, John Olbrich
