Making Connections During COVID-19

In this past year, there’s been no shortage of challenges in schools. The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed to us a few pre-existing conditions in education—inequities in access and opportunity, the need for reliable broadband Internet access in West Virginia, the complexity and demands of classroom teaching and the necessity of strong and positive relationships with students.

While faced with these difficult demands, educators across West Virginia continued to serve their students and communities. We learned, we Zoomed, we conferenced and we carried on with the life-changing work of teaching and learning, even in the midst of an unprecedented global health crisis.

As I reflect on a year of teaching in the time of COVID-19, I am reminded of the enduring lessons I learned in the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences as an English major, uncertain of my future or career path.

In the late and beloved Professor Tim Adams’ courses, I considered the plums “so sweet and so cold” and “the red wheelbarrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.” He led me to stories I didn’t know a person could tell. Professor Jonathan Burton invited connection to one another and with Shakespeare’s language, a puzzle he helped us unravel and revel in. Professor Jim Harms cleared a path for contemporary poetry, to read and write and, though as terrifying as it was, share. Professor Kirk Hazen taught me the power of language and how it is not only fine, but fascinating, to talk and sound Appalachian. And Professor Ethel Morgan Smith introduced me to the powerful work of the inimitable, forever enduring Toni Morrison, a staple in my own curriculum and doorway to discoveries about race, gender, nation and the human condition.

These are only a few examples of the lasting memories and lessons in the Eberly College. These teachers and scholars taught me to first look inward before outward, to reckon with preconceptions and to aim always for connection—with the works we studied and the ways we engaged with others.

You see, it is these early lessons from the Eberly College that I carry with me each day to my own classroom.

In 2005, I began my teaching career at South Hagerstown High School in Hagerstown, Maryland. Amidst the challenges a first-year teacher faces, I remembered the spark of connection—how building positive, lasting relationships with students was crucial to their success and the success of my classroom. I borrowed from my professors, and I tried as best I could to emulate them. I even taught my Honors English 9 course in a workshop model, and though far off script from the new teacher handbook, my students responded with courage, creativity and enthusiasm. It was this group of students who taught me what it was to be a teacher and reinforced the importance of connection.

As I moved in and out of school calendars, while raising a young family with my husband, Doug Hilliard, a fellow WVU graduate (BSBA Accounting and BSBA Business Management, ’02), I decided to return to teaching in my home state, join the faculty of a new school on the community campus where my children would eventually (and now) attend. Spring Mills High School opened in 2013, and it is here that I have been empowered to do my best teaching—to find creative, innovative ways to connect with my students and connect my students to their learning. Without intentionally seeking connection—to learn our students’ names, experiences, cultures, communities, faiths, families and evolving selves, we erode the opportunity for real connection and deep and meaningful learning.

I have helped lead and organize projects such as a student-built community garden, STEAM fairs at campus schools and poetry workshops for elementary aged students. I’m the co-organizer of our Poetry Out Loud competition, a national recitation contest and day-long celebration of poetry, hosting poets like Hanif Abdurraqib and José Olivarez, thanks to the generous help of poet and fellow WVU alumnus Keegan Lester. Just last year, WVU freshman and Spring Mills High School graduate Rhéa Ming went on to become the 2020 West Virginia Poetry Out Loud champion.

Following the lead of my friend and colleague Jessica Salfia, I have emphasized the exploration of Appalachian literature in my courses, and with her, chaperoned students to the Appalachian Studies Association conference, square dance and all. In partnership with WVU professors Audra Slocum and Sarah Morris, Salfia and I also co-organize the WVELA conference for K-16 teachers as part of our work leading the West Virginia Council of Teachers of English.

I count myself lucky to play some part in these incredible projects, but especially for the ways this work affects my students and students across West Virginia. Each of these endeavors I can trace back to a single source of inspiration: the need and requirement for connection within ourselves, to one another, to language and to story.

In the final months of this enormously challenging school year, there is no greater lesson for my students than the willingness and need for connection—the very lesson I learned as an undergraduate in the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences.

Karla Hilliard (BA English and MA Secondary Education, ’05) is an English and Advanced Placement literature and composition teacher at Spring Mills High School in Martinsburg, West Virginia. She is also co-director of the West Virginia Council of Teachers of English. Hilliard’s work has been recognized with the Arch Coal Teaching Award in 2017 and the National University System Sanford Teacher Award in 2020.