More than just a variable: COVID-19 and the call to complicate communication education research

Abstract

The coronavirus pandemic brought to light the numerous challenges faced by students that are often not considered in the classroom (e.g., food/housing insecurity, limited Internet access). The rapid transition to online learning shattered the perception that the classroom is independent of greater societal and institutional contexts. Shifting courses online midsemester brought into focus various inequities present in higher education and how they influence students' experiences in the teaching/learning process. To help instructors create more inclusive and equitable classrooms, communication education scholars need to advance interpretive research agendas that center students and instructors' lived experiences and consider the context teaching/learning occurs in.The rapid transition to remote learning due to the coronavirus pandemic highlighted and exacerbated various challenges that today's college students face. Although issues such as food and housing insecurity had been affecting students' abilities to participate in higher education and engage in meaningful learning before the pandemic (Wright et al., 2020), the coronavirus pandemic exacerbated these issues. As institutions ended on-campus employment and closed residence halls, many students returned to homes with limited or no Internet access. Some did not even have homes to go to at all (Goldrick-Rab, 2020). As these students were asking questions about how they could possibly engage in learning during these circumstances, instructors were trying to figure out how they could ensure students achieved learning outcomes regardless of the changes.As students' challenges intensified during the pandemic, the limitations of traditional teaching/learning notions were brought to light. There was a disconnect among calls for instructors to acknowledge the toll the pandemic was taking on students, calls for instructors to be creative about how they approached student learning, and the shared experiences of students who recalled how instructors made learning more challenging for them (e.g., Dreier, 2020). Thus, instructors reinforced normative approaches to teaching/learning that positioned them as knowledge transmitters and students as passive consumers who reproduce content for a grade (Fassett & Warren, 2007). Students have been socialized to this educational system that centers objectivity and quantitative measures of performance (Stommel, 2020), and many communication education scholars have reinforced these normative approaches to education by producing scholarship following the process-product model (Friedrich, 1987). By isolating variables and connecting them to quantitative learning measures without considering how contextual

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