The State of Higher Ed- December 2024

 This week I came to the understanding of how deeply I am a Gen-Xer because every time I engaged with one article or comment about the state of HigherEd in the last week all that kept playing in my head was Supersonic’s Closing Time (1998) underneath as an outro. “Closing time, you don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here…Closing time, every new beginning comes from every new beginning’s end.”

All of us in education know that HigherEd is in a state of real crisis. In Canada in particular right now, due to a lack of contingency planning and putting all their eggs in one basket, institutions are left to make decisions and are more often than not making really bad ones. The basket is gone, the eggs are scrambled, and the refrain is “who could have predicted this?” Um everyone, and tons did. So what happens now is that folk who are actually doing innovative and inclusive pedagogy, or supporting inclusive pedagogy are being told by their institutions they don’t have budget for their experience and ideas. Because in a crisis what you want is not innovative and inclusive right, what you want is Ridley Scott’s 1984 Apple Commercial. Rolls eyes.

Folk like me who do accessibility work, inclusion work are often the first to go when cuts happen because inclusion is a lip-service priority for a lot of places and when the red pen comes that is where real commitment shows. I go back to the workshop I facilitated the other week, were folk are still messaging me about having watched the recording and really appreciated me holding space for the hard conversations. That someone was willing to hold space for the fact that there is nothing we trust about academe, and how do we continue to do the work that we do in a system like that.

This lack of trust also trickles down to learners. They have no idea for the most part why they have to do the courses in the way they are assigned, why they have to do the assignments that the courses say are important. We can emphasize it as educators, we can make it clear time and again, but what is more obvious is that for the most part learners have no faith in education, no faith in the outcomes they have been told education will provide. And this becomes most clear at the end of term.

I started writing this at 1am this weekend because my grades are due and I am doing the mile a minute end of term reflection thing professors tend to do at the end of term.

The thing is we can only do so much or meet learners more than halfway, if they cannot or will not for whatever reason meet us the remaining distance. We can be supportive, we can give 1:1 opportunities, we can give days of extra time, we can give resources, but if students do not communicate with the teaching team and just disappear, or never come to class, or only communicate when they realize they are certainly going to fail the course, or they see on the system that they have absolutely failed the course, there is honestly not much the teaching team can do at that point. And I am saying this as someone whose whole life’s work is to try to make courses and learning experiences to be the most accessible and inclusive as possible. A piece of paper from the accessibility office is actually an open invitation to create a relationship with the teaching team. And yes, I know there are many profs who actually don’t want to have conversations with students with accommodations. But the ones who do, the folk like me, flag that early and often in the course and in the way things are designed.

Basically we cannot support folk in a void. And yes it is hard, it is so hard to reach out, to make that first step, and if you are taking courses online that adds a whole other level of needing to create relationships in different ways. But it is this time of year where I reflect on what could be done differently and how we get students who will not say anything to realize they are impacting the very thing they probably would get support on and that in academe time is really important and also weird and also bendy and so talking (early and often) can help with the weird and the bendy. Talking before an assignment is due not days after when the grades are already submitted. Not assuming that college and university will be like high school, and you can’t just hand in all your weeks’ worth of assignments at the same time at the end of the course, and definitely not if you haven’t had a single conversation with your instructor.  Because we can talk to you about scaffolded instruction, and feedback loops, and how doing an end of term assignment dump won’t meet all of those learning goals.

I wonder if the students know that there are tons of profs like me who can’t sleep at night when they see the F’s and incompletes on the spreadsheet and start a series of what if’s and what happened in their heads. Because I like to think that the majority of professors actually go above and beyond to be understanding and flexible for their students. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of John Houseman from The Paper Chase out there trying to create imaginary gauntlets for folk to cross, but I would like to think that in fact those of us who have been doing this for a while know that life happens, but there is honestly only so much we can do especially if we have given so much already.

So what do we do about all of it. Because it is all connected. Institutions deprioritize inclusion, and innovative pedagogy and instead just create larger classroom caps and expect the learning experience to be magically engaging. And then the students in these larger courses are expected to be happy with the learning experience for the tuition they are paying while juggling 2 jobs to pay the tuition, and also support their other life responsibilities. And the students check out, they don’t communicate, they fail the classes, and are expected to repeat them, and pay more money and add more stress. And then the professors the next semester have learners in class who are even more disengaged and jaded because this is the third time they have taken this course and are starting to feel more and more that everything they need to know in class can be found on YouTube. But what they don’t know is that YouTube is strategically feeding them things that are not always facts or truth, and since they have not had time to practice the critical thinking that courses are trying to teach and get them to practice they just believe everything they are told. And the circle continues.

Oh gosh how dark you say, but honestly tell me where I am wrong? Use your critical thinking skills and tell me what is untrue in the above paragraph. What do we do? Give me a checklist they say, I will follow a checklist, tell me what to do on a checklist to make this better. There are no checklists. We are in a course correction. Think of this as “The Great Bell Curving” like The Great Depression but with better fashion. Some of us will make it to the other side of normal, some of us never wanted to be normal in the first place. What will be left is a lot more precarious than what we already feel right now.

Checklists are not going to get us out of this. What we all need right now is a small circle of trusted accomplices, because the big is collapsing around us, what will be left is the small. The folk who send you texts during the day to remind you why you do this work, the people who make you smile. That is what will get you through the next few years. So I would strongly suggest you take this winter break to reflect on who your accomplices are, what communities draw you in and actively include you in practice not just in words (because the educational developers in Canada found that lesson out real well last week).  Find what brings you joy and hold on to it, because 2025 is going to be bumpy, because remember what I said in September thisyear is the year we need to have hard conversations no one wants to have. And you will need peers to support you to say the things that need saying. Inclusive pedagogy is not individual work as much as the system makes it so that you believe it is.

I hope that you do get a break because you deserve it, we all do. And I wish you all a Happy New Year. May 2025 be the year where reflection, trust, and care are put into practice, and that you feel valued and respected.