Teaching the Arctic in the midst of a pandemic

Five years ago, I was preparing to teach my first Arctic-themed course.

Spring 2020 was a difficult time for many, myself included. I had just come out of hospital quarantine after being one of the first diagnosed COVID-19 patients in my region (I’ve documented this experience here). My university was frantically switching to online teaching. For the first time in my life, I was giving lectures from my kitchen to a sea of black Zoom squares, with only the occasional student face appearing. How could I keep them interested? Why should they even care about permafrost or Indigenous identity when the world around them seemed to be collapsing?

Maybe it was precisely because of that shared sense of collapse that the course became a kind of safe refuge—for both me and, it seemed, for the students. Looking back now, I realize that the way I organized the course reflected the teaching principles I still value most. I shared my own experiences of living and working in the North and Siberia and encouraged students to do the same. I used a wide range of materials to complement academic texts and to make the topics feel more relevant: newspaper articles, cartoons, drawings, film excerpts, and documentary clips. I designed assignments that encouraged students to be creative and to express their emotions.

After the course, one student wrote to tell me it was the first time she had truly engaged with her family’s history of relocation to Siberia. Another shared her thoughts after watching the film Как я провел этим летом (How I Ended This Summer), writing, “Thank you for raising these themes with us.” In moments like those—sitting on my kitchen stool, staring out at an empty street—I felt that we were doing something right, together.

Since then, I’ve continued to engage with Arctic topics in my teaching, perhaps more professionally. But that eagerness for experimentation and emotional exchange—I hope to carry that with me in the future.