So how do you take a group of USC students to New Orleans if you can’t go to New Orleans? How do you teach ‘immersively’ when a traditional immersive class is off the table?

That was the puzzle facing me at the start of this lockdown, when asked to turn “Bookpacking the Big Easy” - the immersive USC class I lead each year in Louisiana - into a Zoom experience.

In previous years, we’ve been there, on the ground. We’ve ‘bookpacked’ through the region - reading ‘The Awakening’ on the beach in Grand Isle where the novel is set, tracing ‘Interview With The Vampire’ through the back streets of the French Quarter, watching the sun set on Lake Pontchartrain like Binx in ‘The Moviegoer’.

How to replicate this uniquely immersive quality of the ‘Bookpacking’ experience online?

Well, we’ve just emerged from a month of online class, and I have to report that however counter-intuitive it may sound, an immersive experience on Zoom not only works, it can be an absolute joy. It just takes some rethinking.

“I can't express enough what a surprising, fantastic joy this class was to me in quarantine this past month.” - Bree

“Thank you so much for such a phenomenal four weeks! I truly feel that I have learned so much about New Orleans and Southern culture and was immersed to the fullest extent possible without traveling - so, thank you!” - Ashley

I was blessed with a small class size - just ten students - but even so, who could have imagined the sense of intimate and mutual connection we would achieve on this shared screen experience?

My students were located in Chicago, New York, Washington State, and across Northern and Southern California, but deep in conversation about literature or history or politics, our Zoom class felt almost the same as a class in person. The bonds we forged over the month rival those of any previous class I’ve lead, on campus or ‘on the road’.

We met on Zoom for two and half hours every morning, five days a week for four weeks. (That’s fifty hours of seminar time in total, the standard USC rubric for a 4-credit course). In the afternoons I prepared for the following morning’s class, whilst the students cracked on with a wealth of assignments: novels to read, movies to watch, papers to write and a ‘special project’ to research.

The syllabus didn’t change much from previous years, and the premise was the same as for all of my ‘Bookpacker’ classes - to explore regional culture and history through classic and contemporary novels. For New Orleans, that means reading Kate Chopin, Anne Rice, Walker Percy, Ernest J. Gaines, and John Kennedy Toole, and extracting from these inspired texts a sense of people and place.

My challenge was to recreate the visual and sensory experience of a physical visit to New Orleans. That meant bringing together a host of visual resources.

During each morning session on Zoom I shared upward of 50 images - historical sources, and photos I’ve taken on my travels - arranged in a Keynote presentation. Google Maps proved invaluable, especially the 3D functionality of Google maps, spiraling over the landscape like all-seeing gods, and then diving down into Google Streetview, perambulating through the Quarters and Faubourgs of the virtual city. I played YouTube clips, and audio - NPR podcasts, author interviews, songs. (Check out for instance this haunting Randy Newman elegy to the Louisiana floods of 1927).

All this, using Zoom’s invaluable ‘screen share’ function, making possible a fluid transition between exposition and group discussion.

In the afternoons and evenings, we streamed movies on a variety of services (Kanopy, Swank Digital Campus) that are available for students through the USC library system. Movies and documentaries proved a great way to capture the locale and aesthetic of the city, and the character of its people. We watched a slice of Southern Gothic called ‘The Skeleton Key’, and the Sean Penn version of ‘All the King’s Men’. We watched ‘Bolden’, a brilliant experimental biography of the jazz pioneer Charles ‘Buddy’ Bolden, released last year, and four episodes of the HBO drama ‘Treme’, about African American New Orleans rebuilding after Katrina. We consumed and debated Spike Lee’s stunning four-part documentary ‘When the Levees Broke’.

But the highlight of the course was the several occasions when we were joined on Zoom by virtual guests. Each brought their passions and experience and local cultural perspectives into our lockdown lives.

• Scot Craig, a chef who runs three NOLA restaurants, shared his knowledge of Creole cuisine whilst cooking a crawfish étouffée.

• Louis Ford and Lars Edegran, two jazz musicians from Preservation Hall, played a succession of jazz standards for us, and taught us the origins of the New Orleans sound.

• Demond ‘Ali’ Johnson took us on a virtual tour of the Whitney Plantation and talked movingly about the lives of enslaved peoples, and the trauma of Black history into the present.

• Joel Breaux, a Cajun architect born and bred in the bayou, played fiddle and accordion and sang to us in Cajun French.

• Cheylon Woods, director of the Ernest J. Gaines archive, took us on a virtual tour of Pointe Coupee Parish, home of the late author and the setting of his novels.

Several of these guests (Ali, Joel and Cheylon) I’d met on my previous visits to Louisiana. The rest were sourced for this class and sweet-talked into joining us. Some we paid honorariums; most were happy to help gratis. Both the Whitney Plantation and Preservation Hall became involved at an executive level, because the need and potential for this kind of online outreach is apparent into the future, so our approach was welcomed as a useful testing ground.

Coordinating Zoom logins was surprisingly easy - everyone’s on board, it seems, with this new technology. We had problems with two musicians attempting to play together - Zoom tries to mute out on or the other - but minor glitches aside, these sessions proved a joy - the best of immersive learning translated into the virtual world.

“What a fun day in class! Having Joel there was such a treat. I’ll miss these sessions a lot.” - Claudia

Half way through the course, after lengthy sessions discussing issues of race in the history of New Orleans, we found the content of the course taking on a powerful and profound resonance, as the nation spilled onto the streets to protest the murder of George Floyd.

One of my students, in lockdown in New York, traveled to DC. She joined class in the morning, and then protested outside the White House in her afternoons. By that point we were reading ‘A Lesson Before Dying’ - the story of a young Black man on death row in ‘40s Louisiana - and class became a forum in which students of different backgrounds and experiences could explore the issues at the forefront of the national debate. (Zoom’s ‘breakout rooms’ were perfect for this kind of personal and honest inquiry, allowing the students to share and learn from each other in the safety of close conversation).

It was such a privilege for me, as an educator, to be able to offer this kind of mediated experience at such a profound cultural moment.

Towards the end of the course I became aware of one omission. However close our Zoom sessions felt, I missed the one-to-one Student / Professor connection we experience as educators in real life: the conversations on the stairs after class, heading out onto Trousdale Parkway, or (on immersive trips) the conversations I might have with a student strolling through Jackson Square or through the Garden District.

And so, during the final week of the class I built in extra Zoom sessions in the afternoons, for students to clock in with me as they chose. I called these sessions my ‘virtual office hours’ - and almost all the students took up the opportunity, either to discuss their assignments or simply to connect.

I should emphasize again, how blessed I was that the class was so small - just ten students. So much of what I’ve described above worked because of that intimate connection, and (not least) the fact that I could see all the students on screen at the same time. A class size of twenty or thirty would be another proposition entirely.

But our experience worked. At its best, it was transformative. We dug deep into literature and history, philosophy and culture. Bookpacking invites this pan-humanities exploration, this smorgasbord of lived experience.

As an educator keen to explore all new possibilities, I’m awed by the potential in this kind of online learning. And it wouldn’t have been possible without this revolution in connectivity that we’ve all learned to embrace in this time of forced isolation. Zoom really is a game changer.

Preparing for the class took time and energy. Re-configuring an immersive journey into a virtual experience took thought and preparation, and that will surely be true for any class in any discipline.

But there’s an extraordinary opportunity here, to reach all kinds of new audiences, unconstrained by location and physical presence.

The ‘virtual travel’ we practiced in this class is a template for all kinds of immersive experiences. If we can bring the disparate cultures of Louisiana alive on Zoom, what limits are there here in inspiration and potential? As an evangelistic ‘Bookpacker’, I love, of course, the immersive nature of physical travel - but there’s a post-Covid reality here that truly excites me.

So, thank you, Zoom. And thank you to the delightful, committed and talented gang of students who shared with me this virtual bookpacking adventure.

”Thanks for a great Zoom class.” - Whitney

“Thanks so much for your class this May / June. It was truly an awesome experience and I think we are all better for it.” - Aurellia

“Thank you for taking this class despite the circumstances. Even though it was online, it was a joy to be able to attend it and I learnt so much!” - Tania

“I want to thank you for making the past four weeks so special and enjoyable. I've learned so much and have already noticed myself using inspirations from this class in my everyday life.” - Claudia

“Thank you so much for your enthusiasm, energy, and abundance of knowledge on New Orleans!” - Abby