For much of this academic year, the question of a “post-Covid normal” has preoccupied higher education. I hesitate to use “post” as Covid looks to become part of our regular landscape to an undetermined degree. We seem bleakly resigned to that fact in a way that would have horrified us two years ago. What is clear: Our institutions are “returning to normal” — whether or not their constituencies are ready and/or reconciled to it.
Yet the pre-Covid normal was already unsustainable for many faculty and staff members. As much as decision makers chase the idea of “normal operations,” you can’t stir things apart. There is no going “back” to anything, but rather fashioning something different, informed (one hopes, anyway) by the lessons of “pandemic pedagogy.”
As an educational developer and faculty member, I’m already steeped in the larger “what’s next for higher ed?” conversations: What will be the legacy of all the online and hybrid instruction that has occurred during the pandemic? How will in-person learning function, now that many of us view densely packed crowds in lecture halls and common spaces much differently? What effects will the curricular and instructional disruptions of the past two years have on new college students?
And while those are weighty questions, I’ve come to realize that any answers will have to come against the backdrop of still other questions — ones that are less classroom-centric but more urgent nonetheless:
- What will be the effects of long Covid?
- How do we deal with the vast equity and access gaps laid bare by the pandemic?
- How can we balance the needs of the institution and those of its individual constituents?
- What happens if and when we get sick? Like, really sick?
- And how do we do all of the work that needs to be done when faculty and staff capacity seems to be at an all-time low?
Since the “great Covid pivot” of March 2020, I have advocated for flexibility, compassion, and an ethic of care. Like most faculty members, I spent much of academic 2020-21 adjusting to Hy-Flex teaching. The bandwidth it took just to manage my own classes was considerable, but I was also supporting my colleagues and my university in the Hy-Flex arena — troubleshooting classroom tech, training folks on the various digital tools, and becoming the administrator for our university’s Zoom license.
It was … a lot, and I ended the year exhausted and burned out. Then in the summer of 2021 — just when I’d hoped to be able to take a breath and recharge — my own health outlook became unexpectedly complicated, making my advocacy urgently personal as well. Not feeling well, I visited urgent care for what turned out to be a case of walking pneumonia. But I was taken aback when the first question the doctor asked me was, “So, how long have you had your heart murmur?”
I wasn’t aware that I had a heart murmur. A subsequent visit to my regular doctor confirmed it. After that came several more appointments and an echocardiogram and then another test that involved jogging on a treadmill with electrodes taped all over my torso, followed by a couple of hours in an MRI tube. Eventually I found myself in a cardiologist’s office being told I had “hypertrophic obstructive cardiomyopathy.”
It’s a congenital condition in which the walls of my heart are too thick, leading to blood circulating improperly through the organ’s various chambers. In my particular case, my left ventricle wall is enlarged, meaning blood isn’t pumping through the mitral valve as it should, and some of it is “regurgitating” backward through the valve — driving the wrong way on a one-way street, as it were. Now, after 49 years, it was happening to a significant-enough degree to both manifest physical symptoms and be audible with a stethoscope (so we at least solved the mystery of my heart murmur).
My brain struggled to balance, “Am I going to drop dead from cardiac arrest?” with, “When am I going to respond to the 150 emails that arrived today?” Here I was, reading about faculty burnout and advocating for students’ personal struggles, but I didn’t have space to reckon with the same pressures in my own life.
Whether I like it or not, my life is different now as a result of my diagnosis. The choices I make now about what I eat, how I exercise, and how I manage this condition will quite literally shape the rest of my life (as well as determine how long it will be). Likewise, whether we like it or not, higher education is different now, too. How we choose to live our institutional lives at this moment and the values that guide those decisions mean everything for our collective future.
To that end, I offer two key principles that should guide our decision making — especially in the classroom — as we reckon with the lessons of the pandemic and shape our next chapter:
Principle No. 1: Flexible systems, processes, and policies are essential. Remember in March 2020, as we shifted online and decided that rigid deadlines and attendance policies maybe weren’t the hill we wanted to die on any more? Despite the occasional dire prediction, the loosening of those traditional practices did not bring about the pedagogical cataclysm that critics predicted. In fact, all of us — students and faculty and staff members alike — have benefited from an increased flexibility rooted in kindness and compassion.
So why would we go back to the way things were before, having experienced the benefits of this different, more humane approach to work, and in particular to teaching and learning?
I’m not saying we should abolish deadlines, requirements, and policies altogether. But I am most definitely arguing that, if nothing else, Covid-19 showed us that:
- No single attendance policy can effectively deal with the complex health and personal situations of every member of our campus. What would it look like, for example, if we stopped equating a particular number of absences with “successful” or “unsuccessful” learning?
- No single deadline policy will account for the myriad ways in which students might be facing obstacles to demonstrating their learning. What would it look like if we approached assignment due dates in our courses with flexibility built in from the very start?
- And no lockstep approach to teaching modality will adequately match the complicated ways that our classrooms intersect with personal health concerns like we’ve never fully experienced before. What would it look like if we acknowledged that, perhaps, learning will always be hybrid, no matter how we designate courses as “in person” or “online?”
We are preparing ourselves and our institutions (and, thus, our students) for a future whose contours are as yet hard to discern. We will be much better able to meet the demands of that future if we are nimble, responsive, and open-minded, rather than chained to dead ideas and outdated standardized practices.
Principle No. 2: No one is “OK.” It isn’t melodramatic doomsaying to point that out, but rather an honest acknowledgment of our new reality. The pandemic was slow-rolling violence, unfolding across both physical and psychosocial landscapes over the past two years. Many of our students, and many of us, lost loved ones to the pandemic. Many more are experiencing hardship as the physical, spiritual, and economic consequences of the pandemic continue to be felt. A lot of us are experiencing new health problems — some Covid-related, others Covid-adjacent. And others are coping with chronic health concerns that have taken on even more complexity and emotional weight during the pandemic.
As seductive as the “getting back to normal” trope is, we must be careful to not erase the trauma (in its various forms) in blithe assurances that everything is just peachy now that the pandemic is “over.”
It is not an exaggeration to use the word “trauma” here, either. I do so quite intentionally. As Mays Imad has pointed out, the diagnostic definition of trauma is “an event, series of events, or set of circumstances that is experienced by an individual as physically or emotionally harmful or threatening and that has lasting adverse effects on the individual’s functioning and physical, social, emotional, or spiritual well-being.” Two years of pandemic operations have, for nearly everyone in higher education, met at least part of that criteria, as uncertainty, isolation, and loss of meaning are three of the hallmark features of traumatic experiences.
As we move into our uncertain next chapter, we must reject the temptation to erase peoples’ lived experiences in favor of a Potemkin-esque rhetoric about being “back to pre-pandemic operations.” And we can’t ignore those still recovering from various manifestations of trauma.
In the classroom, that means pedagogy aligned with trauma-informed care. In conducting our departmental, committee, and institutional business, that means understanding there will be much different workflows than was the case before and acting with the required degree of empathy and flexibility as a result.
My own experience has shown me how fragile and contingent daily routines really are, and how easy it is for seemingly simple, mundane tasks to become confounding. During these difficult years, many faculty members have benefited from students granting us the same flexibility and grace as we offered to them. Let’s not abandon that mutuality after it’s paid such meaningful dividends.
All of this may seem like a tall order. Given the disruptions since March 2020, it is sorely tempting to eschew complexity and seek simple solutions that evoke the “before times.” But extending flexibility and compassion, and embodying the principles of trauma-informed practice, are not add-ons or extra labor so much as organizing principles that should suffuse everything we do. Campus leaders are fond of using words like “collaborative” and “equitable” to describe their aspirations for how we should operate. It’s more essential than ever to enact those values rather than simply mouth them as empty platitudes.
