The media coverage of COVID-19 and its impacts on education mainly has centered around K-12 students, and rightfully so, for these are perhaps some of our most vulnerable citizens with their physical, mental, and social development a work in progress. But what coverage has been made about the college student, outside of thinkpieces on missed dreams or dreams deferred, final semesters moved online, athletic achievements perhaps never to be?
In Adam Bessie’s graphic novel, which is part memoir, part opinion piece on the state of American higher education, we take a look at how one community college class deals with a truth more stranger than the fiction they study.
Written by Adam BessieCover by Peter Glanting
Illustrated by Peter GlantingA searingly honest graphic memoir dispatch from a community college professor who cares deeply for his students and family while also combating personal health issues from the frontlines of public education during the pandemic.
Going Remote is a joint production of The Censored Press and Seven Stories Press.
With Peter Glanting’s powerful illustrations, author Adam Bessie, an English professor and graphic essayist, uses the unique historical moment of the COVID-19 pandemic as a catalyst to explore the existing inequalities and student struggles that plague the public education system. This graphic memoir chronicles the reverberations from the onset of the pandemic in 2020 when students and educators left their physical classrooms for remote learning. As a professor at a community college, Bessie shows how despite these challenges, teachers work tirelessly to create a more equitable educational system by responding to mental health issues and student needs.
From the Black Lives Matter protests to fielding distressed emails from students to considering the future of his own career, Going Remote also tells the personal story of Bessie’s cancer diagnosis and treatment during the pandemic. A fusion of memoir, meditation, and scholarship, Going Remote is a powerful account of a crisis moment in educational history demonstrating both personal and societal changes.
English instructor Adam Bessie’s class in the Spring 2020 term at his California community college was titled “The End of the World as we Know It: The Literature of the Apocalypse.”
And halfway through that term, real life eclipsed any sort of story that his students read for class assignments.
The coronavirus, which just two months prior had been a faraway threat in Asia and Europe, came to America and with it came the lockdowns and social interactions reduced to small boxes on a computer or phone screen. Educators of all levels grappling with the questions of how to adapt curriculum to the remote environment, students — particularly those in Bessie’s community college who are not the traditional university student from a privileged background — finding new challenges. The role of the teacher as not just educator, but social safety net, comes into full focus.
“Going Remote” is part memoir of Bessie’s time in the uniquely American institution of a community college, the place with open enrollment that opens doors to anyone and everyone who wants to learn. But more than that, it’s part critical look at this American higher education institution and how it is a microcosm of our larger society. This is Bessie’s background; he’s been writing comics on these issues for many years prior to this “Great Disruption” (what he jokingly calls “Cloud College”) in education. While media covering education in the time of COVID-19 positions teachers as the unsung heroes of society (and rightfully so), Bessie isn’t afraid to diagnose his patient, the community college system, with its own ills: of privilege, of staff stretched thin, of solutions proposed by administration that are more band aid over bullet hole than anything.
And that choice of medical terminology – – terms like diagnosis, patient – – are deliberate. For Bessie himself is a cancer patient, fighting a brain tumor since 2009. January 2020 marks his return to work after 18 months off for treatment, and just as he is preparing to return to his campus (though not for in person teaching) in November 2021, he finds a resurgence of that tumor. He is not just educator, but patient and clinician, trying to solve the larger problems of his world while grappling with his own personal ones. To him, making sense of the world around him on campus gives him a sense of power and agency that the tumor took from him.
Continued belowIn addition to Bessie, we also get to know his family, both blood and classroom. A student with family in China who gives the first sense of the public health crisis to come in a recap of her Skype conversations home. Bessie’s wife, also a teacher facing her own challenges of online instruction and a fight with administration to extend her remote work while her husband undergoes further treatment. The only Black student in Bessie’s class that term who disappears as soon as the pivot to remote begins, one he reflects on as he and his young son attend a George Floyd protest. (He wisely notes in the afterword that the students we meet are either composites of his actual students or have had their names changed for privacy. Nor is his specific school mentioned, only that is in the Bay Area.) These characters are developed at just the right level, having their own identities but still carefully connected to our narrator and protagonist.
There’s so much in the prose to digest in this story that one can forget it is a graphic novel. But in the best of ways, the art of Peter Glanting services that prose well. Panel layouts convey the tone of switching from that in person instruction to remote, becoming looser and freer once everyone becomes reduced to pixels and boxes. It’s a wise commentary on the structure Bessie’s classes end up forced into that truly has no sense of structure at all. Black and white artwork keeps the focus on the story while giving moments the emotional gravitas they deserve, particularly highlighting Bessie’s own existential crisis about his role as educator and education in general. Those moments come across best when we see his face reflected in a computer screen taking different forms: a skeleton, a younger version of himself, a robot ripped right from one of his sci-fi novels. But there’s also the subtle choices in style as well, such as simple shapes for heads and faces, sparse of detail, similar to Herge’s Tintin. In this choice, for those moments we’re taken out of character and have a chance to see ourselves within the story, not necessarily reliving our own COVID-19 experiences, but instead finding new understanding within them.
“Going Remote” ends in November 2021 and Bessie’s return to a very changed campus. Most of the classes are still remote, his own included. Enrollment is down, and several of Bessie’s colleagues left education entirely. As for our educator, he faces a resurgence of his tumor and a new, experimental treatment. The sojourn back to campus had the goal of finding some sort of normalcy, but that’s still nothing but a pipe dream.
The experiments of his life continue, but this time, he doesn’t have the intense search for answers that he had a year and a half ago. Right now, there is just that desire to live, to feel, to learn to be a person again.
Perhaps that is the most important lesson we can take from our time at Cloud College with Professor Bessie. In our choice to live, to be human and in community with other humans again, we can find those answers.
And for the moment, with a future still being written, that is the medicine that we need.
