Interconnectivity

 I am writing this blog in the middle of everything so it may be disjointed, but it is also rather timely considering the topic for this week. Let me give you some context. My cat is having a bad day today and I am of course hovering over him like a fretting parent. My next door neighbours and the landlord’s son upstairs have been having a low-key situation about the trees growing in the yard and today as I was fretting over the cat they came to the door and started knocking like a police officer for a good 3 minutes. We didn’t answer because honestly, there’s other things to deal with in the world at the moment besides tree anger to be fair. I’m also trying to think through an article I am writing and you can probably guess how well that thinking and writing is going today with everything that is going on. I have also been waiting for a new CO detector because my other one died and as a result I haven’t been able to turn on the furnace yet. Luckily it just came so instead of it being 13 degrees in here it is now 20 which is lovely and means I have the ability to type again without frozen fingers.

So that’s kind of a lot I know. It also demonstrates a great point about interconnectivity which is what I wanted to talk about today, but I wanted to frame it more positively. However, it is good to start with the negative to show that even the smallest of things from a late CO delivery to angry tree neighbours can affect any sort of plans you had for the day, productive, restful or otherwise, and that this is super common during the pandemic.

When the pandemic lockdowns started in March I wrote about interconnectivity in relation to fingerprints that we have and leave as educators. On Wednesday I had a day that allowed me to reflect on my interconnectivity. I had a relatively clear schedule on Wednesday in terms of meetings but it was all the other things that transpired that brought this topic home. A series of text messages from colleagues and friends asking for a moment to talk through things or perspective on an issue, which I happily obliged. A message on Twitter from a former colleague asking me great pedagogical reflection questions which I also happily responded to and provided resources for further reading. An email from a former student asking about scope in literature reviews, which I answered; it was so nice to hear about the work they are researching at the moment. There were many more of these instances from Wednesday, from a discussion about teaching dossiers, to an email from the person indexing my monograph (oh the anxiety) spanning different countries, spanning different institutions, that made me think how truly interconnected we all are. 

In this interconnectivity however is the necessity of knowing who exactly to reach out to at any given time. In some instances this is an easy choice. In other instances this is not so clear. For students learning remotely, this knowledge of who to reach out to is not so obvious. It is often a gap, especially in first gen students, and especially now that courses are remote. Students do not readily know who to go to for advice, for resources, and oftentimes they will default to the instructor via email. If you have these resources and links already present and obvious in the course shell of your learning management system that helps but it does not serve to prevent students from emailing you. And frankly “preventing students from emailing” is not what we should be wanting anyway. I have seen so many tweets from faculty across the world telling students to stop emailing, or read the syllabus, or check the course site. I understand why they are saying this in general, they are overwhelmed like we all are, and they can’t keep up. But look at this situation with a different perspective keeping interconnectivity in mind. How do you think a request to stop emailing will be received by the students? Probably in the same way that my police officer knocking neighbours were received this morning. 

All of these decisions, every single one, not to get all butterfly effect on you, have consequences. My neighbours being rude and the CO detector being late caused my whole day to be filled with anxiety which was further piled on to my cat who just needed a nice supportive environment today, not his owner being a stress ball. Telling students, stop emailing, will similarly cause that level of anxiety for them; they now don’t know who to turn to, they now are unsure what to do next or why they should have vested interest in a course or an instructor who does not seem to have vested interest in them. 

Living through a pandemic is hard. Let me say that again: Living through a pandemic is hard. So why would want to actively make it more difficult on someone with your actions, your exclusionary words? And this goes for instructors too; what those higher up do and say have a direct effect on the instructor’s teaching life and overall quality of life as well. Maybe we should just try to be more supportive of each other right now instead of creating barriers and exclusionary practices. Everything is interconnected and our educational environments would be more positive and rewarding ones if we kept that principle in mind. And also if my neighbours should just chill about the tree.