Picture this: Inside a bustling mega mall in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, 10 Puget Sound students are trying to get their bearings. Anthropology professor Gareth Barkin has just tasked them with talking to the shoppers—many of whom are locals and don’t speak English—about hijabs, specifically how the religious headscarf has become high-fashion among young, Indonesian Muslims. It’s an unfamiliar topic for the students, who are already outside their comfort zones in a foreign country.

Despite the obstacles to teaching and learning while under COVID-19 quarantine orders, the Puget Sound faculty displayed agile and creative adaptability in the crisis. Some professors kept it old school, sending packages of tools and coursework to students’ homes; others went digital, using platforms such as Google Jamboard and Slack. Most courses used one video platform or another, including the campus’s learning management system, Canvas. Here are just a few examples of ways that faculty members adapted.

Jolie LiBert ’20 was overwhelmed. Home in Flushing, N.Y., for spring break, the Puget Sound senior had moved from one coronavirus epicenter to another. It was mid-March, and virus cases in both Washington and New York were trending sharply upward every day. “I told my mom, ‘I wonder how I can proactively think about this without reading bleak statistics,’” LiBert recalls.

Rachael Shelden ‘12, M.A.T.’13 describes her Puget Sound
journey, from participating in the Honors Program, to
completing her graduate studies in the School of Education,
to working in the Center for Writing, Learning, and Teaching.

Kyra does a deep dive into European history as she describes her summer research project on 16th-century clothing and portraits.

Joe Ewers ’21 looks to cow eyes to answer questions about the causes of neurological diseases