By Weronika Szymańska
“A classmate of mine even thought this might be an experiment to measure the students’ empathy towards teachers,” comments Austeja Varyte, a second-year Social Science major, enrolled in The Empathic Brain course during the January intensive period, where hopes of unravelling the complexities of neuroscience turned into an uncertainty of receiving credits due to a series of disruptions. Delays in class sessions, cancellations, and issues with the assignments’ execution left many students feeling uncertain about their progress and concerned about completing the course successfully.
Students admit that already before the start of the course they could sense something concerning: “I could not see the class on Canvas on the day it was supposed to start. As a result, the first class was cancelled due to a ‘Canvas screw-up’,” Vartye notes. Such occurrences continued to appear, and she regretfully points out that on some days the lecture did not last even an hour and a half, due to the lecturer’s lateness or cancellation.
The situation caused even more distress owing to the wide interest the course evoked, with many students following the cognitive track fascinated by the topic: “I wanted to take this course already when I applied, because I’ve always been interested in emotions and how that works in the brain. Also, the empathic brain was a really competitive course and I only got in during the add/drop period. I counted myself lucky for getting in,” another second-year Social Science student comments. Furthermore, the students point to the fact that there is a small number of classes within the cognition track itself and owing to that, the dysregulation of one of them appears to be even more impactful. As Vartye mentions, “essentially, it was one of the few classes that mentioned specialisation in neuroimaging devices such as EEG and fMRI [brain imaging techniques],” stressing the opportunities the course offered.
The students became particularly concerned by the lack of structure the class exhibited, with no formal changes introduced by the teacher as to mitigate the effects of the early disruptions. Vartye shares that the lecturer was not reaching out with course updates or alternatives, with less than two weeks left and no grades received. She and her classmates remained considerate of the teacher’s unfortunate situation and understood that unforeseen circumstances, such as the experienced car breakdown or prolonged sickness, have contributed to the disruptions, emphasising the lecturer’s kindness and evident lack of bad intentions. However, when contacting him did not bring sufficient effects and the threat of not receiving course credits appeared, students decided to seek assistance from the Board of Examiners, as well as the Head of Social Sciences Daniel Kontowski.
Despite the challenging character of establishing constructive alterations within such a short time span, Kontowski managed to provide help essential in improving the course’s quality. “In my role, I need to balance students’ expectations with the lecturer’s autonomy. Unfortunately, the lecturer informed the students that he fell sick, so I felt compelled to intervene to ensure that the Learning Outcomes were met,” he says. Teachers Julia Hülsken and Cas Smulders substituted the previous lecturer in the last week of the intensive period, assuring the coverage of the majority of the course content. The assignment deadlines were postponed further to the Spring semester, allowing students to work on them sufficiently. “Hopefully, the solution we arrived at did not create extra work for the impacted students, but also did not further discriminate against them via expectations that became unrealistic as the term progressed,” Kontowski comments.
Students confess that they experienced hardships with starting the new semester while still having to complete assignments from the previous period: “I’m taking four courses and a CP/I in this semester and these deadlines made me fall behind on everything,” one of them admits. Yet they assure that the extensions were always provided and are aware of the inevitability of such a solution.
When asked about the future of the course, Kontowski notes that AUC is actively collaborating with the Faculty of Behavioural and Movement Sciences of the VU, as well as other departments, to ensure the satisfactory quality of the Cognition track courses. “I sympathise with the students who experienced confusion and annoyance in the last edition of The Empathic Brain course. I am doing my best to prevent that from happening again,” he concludes.
The Herring 