Abstract

As we enter our fourth academic year impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, we already see evidence of institutional and cultural forgetting, or at least looking away from, the way this virus has changed our institutional (not to mention personal) lives. For most institutions, there has been a mandated return to normal. Gone are masks, more online accommodations, and reentry testing. And fading, too, are the conversations about the long-lasting impacts of COVID-19 on learning and on the mental health of our students, faculty, and staff.It is clear, by now, that there will be no return to “normal.” It is also clear that normal is often a revised history, or a history of omission, that represents a mythical bygone time that served few and denied many. Bettina Love (2020), a scholar of education theory and practice, reminds us how schools were failing “not only children of color but all children” long before COVID-19, citing the “norm” of high stakes testing, disproportionate expulsion of Black and Brown students, scarcity of teachers of color, school shootings, inadequate funding—the list goes on.Conversations in higher ed have also pointed to the labor disparities present in the “before times” that the pandemic has revealed and reinforced. In a Chronicle opinion piece, Emma Pettit (2020) observes that the global pandemic is only deepening pre-COVID-19 labor inequities for women-identified faculty, and especially women of color. And a study during the pandemic shows increased emotional labor required by BIPOC cisgender men, BIPOC cisgender women, white cisgender women, and gender non-conforming faculty, who work overtime to both help students navigate the challenging terrain of learning during COVID-19 as well as to manage their own emotional response to sometimes untenable working conditions (White Berheide, Carpenter, and Cotter 2022).As we embark on another pandemic-impacted semester, we feel, and carry with us, the weight of prolonged emotional labor. We tend to the emotional and material burdens our students experience, answer for and carry out policies we don't agree with, and scramble to adapt to the ever-changing educational landscape. All the while, even on our worst days, we strive to convey to the students, preservice teachers, and the graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) we teach our commitment to the power and possibility of pedagogical work. On our best days, we see this moment as an opportunity. The pandemic has changed us, and it has laid bare what needs to change in our institutions.We are not interested in a return to normal. Instead, we are committed to a process of learning from COVID-19’s shock to our institutional systems. So we turn to three moments in our respective professional lives that expose and survey the tensions and complexities we dwell within, using this upheaval to spur questions and imaginings toward a new way forward.As a junior writing program administrator (WPA) my primary responsibility is the education, mentorship, and support of GTAs assigned to teach in our first-year writing program. At any given time, I supervise approximately fifty different GTAs, who come to us from a range of concentrations in the MA, MFA, and PhD programs. Each fall, I teach a graduate-level practicum that GTAs take concurrently with their first semester as instructors of record. Historically, the course has served as a place to workshop issues that emerge when teaching for the first time (e.g., strategies for engaging a quiet class, approaches to making commenting and grading more sustainable, responding to problematic student comments, incorporating more multimodal work into the classroom, etc.). In the fall of 2021, though, in the first semester of my institution's return to fully face-to-face instruction, these issues took a backseat, and almost every class focused on the ongoing pandemic, rising cases, sick students, contact tracing, and my institution's changing guidelines for how we should act and respond to this moment.My practicum classroom began to feel eerily similar to the White House briefing rooms I spent the last two years watching on my TV, laptop, and smartphone. I'd walk into the room smiling under my mask and feigning enthusiasm for being there. Sometimes I'd be carrying binders or printed copies of policy memos to read from. I'd grip the podium in front of this group of people who were simultaneously my students and my teaching colleagues, and as soon as I opened it up to the floor, I'd be peppered by questions about the latest emails sent out by upper administration. I tried to appear calm and confident, even enthusiastic at times, and performing this emotional labor was increasingly difficult a year and a half into the pandemic. My answers all felt hollow and rehearsed; they were deeply unsatisfying. “The university would like to remind you that you cannot inform your students if someone in your class tests positive.” “The university assures us that they are working to address the problems you all have observed with contact tracing.” “The university is discouraging moving classes temporarily online.” “The university is asking instructors to do all they can to support students during this time.”Even as I said those words, I recognized my deliberate use of metonymy to obfuscate responsibility for decision making. “The university” functioned as a convenient and effective way to strategically divert responsibility away from the chancellor and provost who were making most of these decisions (under pressure, of course, from our conservative state legislature and the university system board of governors they have appointed). “The university” is a collective. It makes it sound like a group decision. That language feels almost democratic. It also operationalizes the ethos associated with “the university”; these are learned people, after all. Surely they must be making the most well-informed decisions, right? And, of course, I was also using “the university” to distance myself from responsibility, to avoid the recognition of my guilt and my own complicity in echoing, implementing, and policing adherence to these policies, which is, of course, partly my job (or at least how those above me would conceive of my job). Indeed, the role of a WPA as a frontline or middle manager tasked with implementing the will of higher administrators and executives has been theorized before (DeGenaro 2018; Heard 2012; McLeod 2007; Mountfort 2002), and much of this scholarship reflects on an identity crisis experienced by WPAs, a tension between how they see themselves (as politically radical system disrupters) and how others are now seeing them (as system maintainers and institutional apologists). Mountfort specifically discusses how WPAs experience less freedom to represent their private points of view because they are called on to speak publicly for larger collective views.About halfway through the fall 2021 semester, as I explained once again that the official university guidance was that instructors should not move a class online simply because the instructor has been exposed to a confirmed case of COVID-19, I heard one of the GTAs say quietly and out of frustration, “This is bullshit.” And, of course, it was bullshit. It was not a policy born out of the most recent public health guidance nor out of a desire to protect the welfare of students and teachers. It was not a policy concerned with pedagogical effectiveness. It was about optics. The university was focused on maintaining the appearance of normalcy and control. The GTAs knew this, and I knew this.This was, of course, not the first time I had announced policy decisions I knew or felt to be bullshit, but what has made the bullshit different during the COVID-19 pandemic is the stakes. We are now talking about people's health, potentially their lives. These are not just issues of ideological tension and debate anymore. They are foundational matters of safety. And as the research has made clear, these are decisions that will disproportionately affect people of color, poor people, women, those with disabilities, and so many other groups lacking privilege and access at this moment. This is why so many people are experiencing what Smith and Freyd (2014) describe as “institutional betrayal.” And that feeling of betrayal was evident in my practicum course. GTAs articulated feeling disposable and unsafe, like the institution had abandoned its investment in science and research for profit and optics, like all that they had been promised during the early days of the pandemic had been retracted. And I have been a part of that betrayal, and the emotional work of processing that is something I feel I will spend the rest of my career struggling with. I also saw my GTAs struggling with this same sense of complicity because, of course, they found themselves repeating university policies to their students. We've all been interpolated into this; it goes all the way down.Two years later, working with a new group of teachers, I continue trying to figure out what my role is, should be, or might be. This will be yet another cohort that feels betrayed by and disillusioned with the institution, though for slightly different reasons. New crises are continually emerging in higher education, wiping old ones from our memory. And while this cohort continues to be frustrated by the legacies of the institutional response to COVID-19, they have been even more angered by the institutional failure to adequately address the student mental health crises impacting our campus and campuses all across the country. In this new crisis, I find myself once again parroting institutional talking points that are, well, bullshit. “Counseling Services is here to support you during this time.” “The university has partnered with an app-based mental health counseling provider to increase access to mental health support.” “The university has not publicly acknowledged the recent suicides this term because of privacy concerns.” With each of these official communiqués, I feel these teachers losing faith in the institution and me. Is it my job to help repair that crumbling trust? Should I be working to build their trust in me? Maybe these are the questions we should be exploring with our GTAs. What does it mean to work in an institution that has betrayed us? One that continues to betray us? How do we reckon with the memory and experience of that betrayal? How should our work and our responses change in the future? How have COVID-19 and the crises that have followed in its wake helped us see the radical work there is to be done?In the second year of the pandemic, I received a small teaching grant aimed at incorporating multimodality into weekly reflective assessments in one of my courses. I was later asked by the granting office to provide a brief presentation about my work to my faculty colleagues during an optional summer professional development series. As an assistant professor of color in a research-intensive institution, I was both apprehensive to “teach” my more senior colleagues, but also a bit enlivened. So, rather than solely discussing my incorporation of multimodal options into my formative assessment structure, I decided to dive a bit deeper and engage the inequitable roots of many taken-for-granted academic practices, spurred on by Joel Feldman's (2018) book, Grading for Equity. In his quest to remove as much bias as possible from the grading process, Feldman notes how practices like assessing penalties for late work, assigning zeroes for missing assignments, and even marking off points for incorrect answers on formative assessments all contribute to the “education debt” owed to minoritized students (Ladson-Billings 2006). Feldman writes primarily for an audience of K-12 educators, and as a teacher educator myself, I was careful to note in my presentation that incorporating Feldman's strategies was part of my own parallel practice, a term coined by Lowenstein (2009) to describe the work of modeling for preservice teachers the same affective, curricular, and pedagogical approaches that we want them to incorporate in their future classrooms.As I shared these points, and specific ways I incorporate both multimodality and Feldman's equity-driven course policies into my teaching, I noticed a colleague of mine, a cis white woman, in the audience visibly fidgeting, her sighs occasionally punctuating my spoken sentences. When I concluded my brief talk and opened the floor to questions, hers was the first hand in the air. “Let me get this straight,” she said, “in addition to everything else, we're now supposed to have multimodal assessments, and no late penalties, and no zeroes, and not take off points for wrong answers? I have a baby at home, and a husband! How am I supposed to find time to do all of this, plus my research, and be a parent?” I understood her question to be mostly rhetorical, but, a bit embarrassed, I did my best to diffuse her frustration and provide actionable steps. I noted that I use only one catch-all for my formative assessments and that the of late penalties made my grading more as to come in that were for me to with. I once again Feldman's that assigning on those with the to solely on school at our the of students is my best these points to and the room I my and off by the this talk had I began to of my in of the larger of the pandemic, and all of the labor and it has to our collective was a in my and me to Feldman's as well as a of I did away with policies, both because I to up to class if felt even slightly and also because I knew mental health days were more and more for my students. I began to classes with the help of an which with and for each class in I and office every out from the of the pandemic least so I have these policies and have even found myself on making copies of course for students who the time or the to copies for and with students as they in my office so many of the long of the pandemic have them in difficult and with students a for our after yet another at a And while this has all a bit difficult to when I to a future in which COVID-19 to be a I am of the that I and many others are in the so many of us have to our students is in addition to with our own and we have felt to deeply the and of our students, and to to our pedagogical approaches As though I feel a of my during my I cannot help but and with her At what do our in the of to the of these practices, and our own called work, emotional labor of these been coined and by or labor and these all describe a of work associated with mostly in which the emotional is to by those in (2018) notes that this labor is in that it for the of the of in so and in the of and that must be by those with minoritized gender This is, in the of and that even after our work has for women and gender of color, our us with and us as more than of affect by a of the university or at it does feel as though much on the work I on of my students to it What is the to days I the of the work I do as a teacher more often I long for a way out of this How can I less of myself and be an present How might in our present and the between our work and our began fall 2021 at my institution in a a or mask The had just to high as the new through the even the campus a mask the instructor or one of the students was at high or to be classes be to My with a of from teachers in my How do I my students if they are at high they want to out is the on teachers and One into the new semester, the a mask which the university to being the was a it the of our of a mask was followed by another student a at a days of student and One of the students in my to and course said her our university in the and the had the same problems as do she with only masks, I saw of my students spent late in the were not because the of their own They just They were also is the chancellor to a We asked What does it mean to and to respond well, to on our that first I the students to me an me why they the class, their for the semester, and if there was I should that would help me support their new to the university said they felt being in after a senior year of classes in their felt new to the university as they and in for the first of them said they from I to each making a to that too, with and to that we in a time of and They were not this have come less to me early in my it felt felt them in their to a we don't have to away our mental health our our in the of an academic or And I I to for students what I myself, especially in the of about a return to normal and to be work through the students as well as be They began to with each each through and when they see And they few students, who were to our class, because of mental health I sent so many to on students that began to in my and did students at all during the we It was The teachers in my program to me with shared They were losing students to mental health students were more They how to how to They were so I now at the of the fall semester, the of COVID-19 but are mostly We have all more but for and are to even as more of us are that those us well, in the first In a recent Chronicle and to the of to will and will not that and our will not the of a will not the inequities this pandemic has laid and the of that has served as its We a way to and a case that after more than two years of “the and all it required of us, we don't more of We to respond with a they “The pandemic is not a nor should we it as We are through an that we our to higher education on every a more and system in its They an of for a from time in our classes to to students about what does and their learning to to on how we are the of the pandemic and what will us in the They are that the is not something to be to our already it about what can be to for on our our of higher education, and for my own we have found it to time to as the during the pandemic to in the or to for a office about a classroom or it to a sense of our collective work with students. When we come we the faculty in my and I also to what it to and to teaching, at this moment. We concluded that it is for us, as a to the emotional labor required to teach at a time when we see on gender and In the of to and we decided that as a we will We will about teaching We will if only for each the emotional labor required of as a I I will work to that work to the We get of the system we are but we are not can by responding from our own of in our and in our than continue to and through the and this pandemic has required of the that is us for something other than a return to “normal.” us to What does it mean to respond well to our students and to each What does it mean to and emotional What of can we do away our not with clear answers but with more questions, and our to a larger What do we for now, if not a return to in the early days of the pandemic, Love (2020) not only a return to but also that for those who have the privilege and a global crisis is time to to Indeed, this pandemic was in so many it only to use of this time to and respond in ways that are, too, time to to on the tensions we have and to and difficult As our on this has us, these questions are asked and on from across institutions, and is that we might engage in more and work to support that emotional labor and research that new responses to For and for COVID-19 has us of our than to to to and our colleagues, to on that to move in and