I continue to reflect on Sarah Rose Cavanagh’s piece in The Chronicle this week, especially as it intersects with my own research (a thread from Sarah Rose here for those who hit paywall).
I wrote this short summary of my initial perceptions from interviews with faculty across the country last year as we shifted into COVID-19 mode, and I was struck by how quickly the theme of care emerged. Now that I’m deeper into the data analysis and at a total of 45 interviews, I’m struck by something else, too, but it probably shouldn’t have surprised me.
I’ll refer back to my previous point about the focus of the COVID-19 adaptation* as technical, rational, and logical:
*my shorthand. Basically, all that stuff we did.
Certainly, that was the case for the faculty in my sample (and probably for many people reading this). But what I didn’t expect to hear is that one thing that would have helped faculty in the early stages of the adaptation was to have been granted permission to give grace, to lighten up, to focus on students’ (and their own) well-being and whole selves1.
In the context of my study, that makes complete sense. After all, faculty were immediately inundated with all things technical and rational. Our environments are not renown for prioritizing care; it’s not baked in (same link as above).
We can sit with that for a minute. The pandemic turned our worlds upside-down. People died. A lot of people. Students were thrown into all sorts of upheaval. Why wouldn’t our immediate response be to focus on human care needs? To throw out our plans for regular times in recognition of the demands of these highly irregular times?
Many faculty did that, no doubt, and in my study, those who flexed their fields of action were largely unionized and tenured.
I interpret what I heard under the umbrella of how people make sense of the world. We use cues from the environment (a big, broad category that encompasses not only what we perceive but also the options we perceive to be available to us, with both influenced by all sorts of things beyond ourselves) to figure out our next steps. And when the environment does not center care, it shouldn’t be a surprise that people need to be told, “It’s ok to enact care.” One faculty member put it this way:
I think faculty need permission. And I say that very broadly: Permission to do less; permission to require less of their students. Recognition that we have families at home. That is a different learning environment. Permission to not work at 150% . . . I think showing that empathy and modeling it might then allow people to model it to their students
This information informs my own decision-making as a department chair. I already operate from a human-focused perspective as I described previously, but I’m now also taking a more explicit approach in my communication with colleagues.
For example, in the last third of the term in Spring 2021 after what had been a long slog of a year (all of our F2F classes were moved to remote, and our FT faculty teach 5/5), I implored faculty to lighten up: On themselves and on students. “Good enough” can be good enough. Your “good enough” is already above expectations.
More than one faculty member remarked in their end-of-year evaluation that this message led them to make some different instructional choices to the benefit of everyone involved.
My point, then, is that if our environments aren’t already promoting care as a central value, then we’ll probably want to take measures to be explicit about our expectations. If we want care, let’s show care; further, let’s create the conditions for care to thrive.
The latter point is another problem for another day, a much stickier one given all of the incentives to do the exact opposite.
Meanwhile, I’m also working on a project where participants describe their pedagogy of care and say, “I ask for forgiveness, not permission,” which adds a whole other dimension to this conversation. What does it mean that we need to be less than forthright about our care-driven approaches in the classroom?