Fast-forward two months, to the start of a semester unlike any higher education has seen before.
Imagine you’re a student, juggling excitement about your classes with the fear of attending them in person under the specter of Covid-19.
That’s the premise of an online simulation created by Cait S. Kirby, a doctoral candidate in biology at Vanderbilt University. Users are asked to make a series of decisions that align with what a single day of in-person classes might look like for students this fall. The first choice — whether or not to sleep in — quickly illustrates the effects of a socially distanced campus. Choose to sleep in, and you miss your allotted five minutes in the bathroom. Opt to wake up, and you realize as you’re leaving your dorm that you’ve forgotten your mask.
Kirby’s story is a fiction rooted in reality: More than 60 percent of colleges in The Chronicle‘s fall-reopening tracker plan to resume in-person instruction this fall. The simulation resonated with academics on Twitter, many of whom told Kirby they planned to share her work with colleagues or administrators. Before long, she followed up with a second interactive story, this one told from a faculty member’s point of view. Now she’s planning versions that are told from the perspectives of a graduate student and a contingent faculty member.
The simulations, which Kirby made with the open-source storytelling tool Twine, force users to make a string of tough decisions that illustrate what day-to-day life in academe might look like this fall. The Chronicle spoke with Kirby about how the simulations came to be, the importance of including marginalized perspectives in fall planning, and whether she sees her work as a form of advocacy. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Where did the idea to create a simulation come from?
I’ve been just kind of looking around at folks in the government and in other positions of power that have been making a lot of choices about what we’re going to do, and making what I would consider to be poor choices based on finances and not on safety and actual data. And that concerned me.
Maybe a little over a month ago now, Norm Clark wrote this great piece in Inside Higher Ed about a day in the life of a student in fall 2020. And I read that, and I thought, “Wow, this is hard,” but also, “This doesn’t represent me or most of my friends. This experience is not what it would be like if I were to go into the classroom.”
I’d never completed a Twine story before. In about four hours, actually, I completed that story. I asked a few folks if they would just kind of check it out, and then I tweeted it out. There was no intention for this to really garner any attention at all.
The student simulation is told from the perspective of a Black transgender student who uses a wheelchair. How did you make sure the story accurately reflected that experience?
I didn’t specifically reach out to anyone and ask, “Hey, I’m making this, can you help me out with your particular perspective?” It’s more that I have friends and colleagues who identify as being part of these marginalized groups, and we’ve had conversations — not explicitly about “What do you think fall is going to be like?” but just venting. Like: “Hey, the news today was really overwhelming, and I’m really stressed out because this would be hard for me,” or “I’m really stressed out because one of my students is going to have a really hard time, and that worries me.”
Also, I follow a lot of folks on Twitter and Facebook who fall into these groups — for instance, using the Twitter hashtags #LGBTinSTEM, #DisabledinSTEM, #BlackinSTEM, #BlackInTheIvory, #AcademicAbleism, and #LGBTQ. So as the news has been coming out, I’ve just sort of been identifying with their worry. I just got this feeling that many of these folks that I know are feeling very activated right now. There’s just kind of anxiety pulsing through them, and being forced back onto campus would definitely not help with any of that activation.
Given that I was in the classroom as a student just three years ago, I am still very close to that experience of what it’s like to have to wander around campus, going class to class, in a way that maybe faculty don’t really quite remember. I thought that that was also a really important perspective.
The faculty story offers users the chance to play as an assistant professor from China or an endowed professor with family in Portugal. Why was it so important in both simulations to include marginalized perspectives?
I stutter. It’s really important to me to see representation in media. Oftentimes when there’s a stutterer on screen, they’re the bad guy or they’re the comedy relief. It’s always an intrinsic part of their character. And I don’t think that it’s an intrinsic part of my character. It’s just part of who I am. As the main character of my story, it’s really important that I get to see other main characters that look like me.
Having the main characters of these stories be these marginalized groups is really important to me because I want people to be thinking about these other folks as main characters of their own story. The explicit acknowledgment that the individuals are not white or are not American-born or are not cis, are not able, I think, forces people to acknowledge that there is another main character that doesn’t look just like them.
So much of what higher education will look like this fall is still in flux. How did you imagine the specific scenarios that make up your simulations?
I’ve been keeping up with a lot of the fall-planning options, and there have been so many that have been kind of tossed around on the internet. In reading through those, my mind kind of just went to"What is the worst possible outcome of this?” I think the people who are imagining what fall might look like, and are putting in place these plans, are assuming the best outcome.
I have a very active imagination, so I just sort of let that go. I thought about “What are the things that I’m already worried about, and how can I add a layer of Covid-19 onto it?” When the Trump administration revoked trans health-care protections, I thought, “What would happen if you were on campus and now you’re exposed to Covid-19? Would you even want to go and get a Covid-19 test if you knew that you might get turned away for health care anyway just because of your gender identity?” [In June the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services excluded sexual orientation and gender identity from protections against sex discrimination in health care.]
I also wanted to just put the perspectives on the minds of folks who are making high-level choices about what fall planning looks like. Are there even disabled and trans and Black and other people of color on these committees? Because if not, then you’re missing these crucial objectives that really need to always be considered. I hoped that by kind of imagining the worst case, that people would relate to it and think, “Wow, I missed this perspective. What other perspectives am I missing, too?”
Your student simulation went viral on higher-ed Twitter. What was that like?
I absolutely was not prepared for this to happen. To date it’s gotten nearly 50,000 clicks, which is just an unbelievable number. I was really worried that it was going to get negative attention. I have anecdotally found that when you try to put perspectives that are marginalized out into the world, a lot of times, people don’t take very kindly to that. I remember trying to not check my phone.
What was an unexpected, strange reaction was that quite a few people said that they hadn’t thought about these perspectives before. My immediate response is: “Great. Now you’re thinking about them. I’m happy that I could bring that perspective to the table.” But it makes me really worried that there are folks who are in positions of power who are not thinking about this.
Several faculty members wrote on Twitter that they were sending your simulation to administrators at their institution. Have you heard from any of those administrators?
It’s a really telling answer. I have gotten so much positive feedback from faculty. But I have not gotten any positive feedback from administrators. I don’t know if they have looked at it and they’ve thought about it and it’s changed their perspective, or if they looked at it and it made them uncomfortable and so they pushed back against it.
You followed up your first simulation with another, this one a day in the life of a faculty member. Why did you choose to tell that story?
I hoped that maybe administrators would look at it, to see that faculty have families and that the structures that they’re putting in place might be really great for students, but that they will probably prevent faculty members from interacting with their family members. Thinking about faculty members as humans with whole lives, I think, is crucial for the administrators to find a fall-2020 plan that will actually work.
In the first story, from the student perspective, you had a lot of choices and you kept clicking through, making these choices. That was intentional. I wanted you to feel very overwhelmed by the end by the number of choices. For the faculty version, I wanted it to not have a lot of choice, to sort of simulate what the faculty experience is going to be like. I’m trying to sort of put together a mosaic of different perspectives. And hopefully, if a person plays through all of them, they will get a feel for “Wow, being on campus in the fall is probably not going to be good for anyone.”
Why do you think people responded so strongly to the student simulation?
The way that it’s structured, I think, really taps into people’s emotions. The sheer number of choices that you have to make is just so overwhelming. You begin to really start feeling like what’s happening to the character is happening to you. And I think that feeling of “I’m having to make all these choices, and bad things just keep happening” is a really hard one to shake off. The fact that that story is so short really helps people to stay engaged with the material. It only takes a couple of minutes. Being able to sort of jump into that, feel this activation, and feel this dread, but then be able to remove yourself from it, allows people to be moved by it.
One thing that I can do is tell a story. I think that’s part of it: Storytelling is a really effective way of getting people to change their minds.
Do you see your simulations as advocacy work? How would you classify them?
I would classify them as storytelling with a teaching component. I pretty intentionally made it so that a lot of the story is up to interpretation. I tried not to be too prescriptive with this story. I write that you, as the character, wanted all your classes to be online, but I never tell the person who’s playing that no one should be allowed anywhere near campus.
Some people think that I’m advocating for universities to be canceled entirely, which is totally their interpretation. I like that, because it leads to a lot more discussion. I’ve watched people actually explain to other people the whole point of the game — when you play the game a couple of times, you almost always get the same outcome. The choices that you make have very little impact on the actual story. That’s the point. The only way to win this game is not to play.
I don’t know where advocacy begins and ends. The way that I approach the classroom, and a huge focus in my pedagogy, is inclusion, belonging, and access. I definitely don’t always get that right, but I’m always working hard to be moving in a better direction. That’s how I kind of envision this story being used, as work toward more inclusion, belonging, and access. I definitely plan to keep making stories about what campus will look like, but also other stories using Twine to help people understand what different experiences feel like and what perspectives we are missing out on when we don’t promote inclusion, belonging, and access at every level in higher ed.
