Going Remote: A Teacher's Journey
By Adam Bessie and Illustrated by Peter Glanting
When the pandemic forced education online, community college English professor Adam Bessie saw the lives of vulnerable students unravel. Beyond his frustration with the limits of virtual teaching, Bessie soon faced a personal crisis of his own. Test results showed a potential return of the brain cancer he’d been in remission from for years. Bessie sustains himself with his beloved works of literature and by allying with his colleagues to help students in crisis, redoubling his commitment to community college as a site for social change and betterment. In Going Remote: A Teacher’s Journey, Bessie teams up with illustrator Peter Glanting to offer a graphic account of how he navigated an unprecedented time that taught us all the value of the classroom.
Selected as one of the American Library Association's Best Graphic Novels for Adults from 2023!
Advance Praise for Going Remote: A Teacher’s Journey
“Swells with a determined optimism even while being threaded with dystopian references.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Going Remote is the perfect book for an imperfect moment. It’s a love letter to teaching, a grappling with life-threatening illness, and a rumination on the nature of connection and isolation in the computer age. This is comics at the highest level: beautiful, profound, and full of heart.”
—Justin Hall, Chair, MFA in Comics Program, California College of the Arts, and editor of No Straight Lines: Four Decades of Queer Comics
“An incisive, multifaceted, and profound meditation on survival—in teaching, in learning, in illness, in family, in injustice, and in a present hurtling towards a future on which no one can depend. Going Remote is a foothold for anyone trying to understand not only teaching and the pandemic, but our place in the world as caring human beings.”
—Jay Gillen, author of Educating for Insurgency and The Power in The Room: Radical Education Through Youth Organizing and Employment
