Pedagogical Firsts and Lasts

I write this in the week that is often refer to as the in-between week for instructors. Courses are over and now the waiting for final assessments and exams happens so that they can be reviewed and graded and final marks submitted. I am writing this early in the day because today promises (fingers crossed) to be a sunny day here and I want to maximize my Vitamin D in this in-between weekend.

This in-betweenness is of course something that lingers between the pedagogical firsts and lasts of the semester or term (or quadmester depending on how your institution frames time). That liminal space between firsts and lasts, the time where you open your course and create a welcoming environment for learners that is as easy to navigate as possible, to the lasts where you say goodbye and tell them to keep in touch if they want, seems to carry a lot more weight in a pandemic because of the unknown. There is so much unknown now: What will the fall look like? How many more universities will face the kinds of cuts seen at Laurentian this week? How many of us will get sick? 

What was reinforced this week in review class is in the face of the firsts and lasts and unknowns holding space is so important. Sometimes after all the concepts have been reviewed and all the questions asked you need to have a conversation about where the best Korean food is in Toronto. Sometimes students who have had muted cameras all semester need that very last moment of the very last time we will meet synchronously to say thanks and to unmute their camera and talk about the confidence they now feel they have. We owe the students and ourselves this holding of space. Especially in such socially distanced times. 

I think about all the other firsts, like the first-generation students who are experiencing post-secondary education for the first time but remotely. I wonder what the transition to in-person teaching (if and when that does happen) will feel to them. And it's really that feeling that is important to so much of these firsts and so many of the lasts that we don't ever know are the lasts until they are (like how you don't know it's the last day you will ever have with your cat until it is).

This feeling and the sensory, something that I research and explore in many contexts, is also that something that I have been really pondering this week, especially around sound and silence. The cacophonous sound of students settling in for first class. The increased silence in remote classrooms as instructors and students become more and more tired as the semester goes on. The closing of the virtual door in last class (close session) and the silence that follows.

These ebbs and flows are echoed also in our news cycles where there's often such outcry on social media when something happens (we need playgrounds, how can you fire 100 tenured professors) and then nothing...textual silence. It is not like the inequities that informed these actions have stopped existing, it's just that folk stop typing.

And how do these gaps represent themselves in other ways in academe? I see so many tweets about productivity discussions and how folk have not had the time and all kinds of bandwidth needed to publish this year. Often these discussions of look how productive I have been in this pandemic lack context and positionality. Often they read as humble brags or really really lacking self-awareness of how different types of privilege supports the ability to publish within the systems. This is why flagging your positionality is always important.  

Sometimes productivity is actively erased because of that positionality, as Lee Skallerup-Bessette notes about staff who do research in The Chronicle. I have been pondering this feeling too this week. As someone whose pedagogical first was in a Teaching Assistant role, that then moved to more than a decade of precarious contract teaching, to more recently (the past 3 years) full-time staff roles. How my article publishing first was in 2010 and the next didn't happen until 2019. If you overlay my work experience and publishing on my CV it tells the story. They are interconnected. In the last 2 years I have managed to publish more exactly because of the privilege of the stability of staff roles. I struggle with talking about it because I know others are not in that position. But I also struggle with talking about it for exactly the reasons Lee mentions in her work; my research as a staff member is not valued in the same way as instructor's research is. So my way to work around this silence is that I updated this blog to add my recent publications and workshops and presentations (I am still working out formatting). It is a list of firsts (monograph, edited collection) and hopefully not a list of lasts. 

In that same vein I think about which voices are going to be missing or silenced when doing scoping reviews in the future on any topic. How 2020-2021 is going to be a research gap. The positions and voices not found in publications, or at conferences, are exactly a representation of what the system chooses to value and what the system chooses to gate keep. What is the trickle down effect of these gaps? How compounded will this be going forward? How many firsts are being delayed because of the care work that the person is providing or how many lasts are happening because the system has pushed that individual out? This is not the first time someone has mentioned this and please do not make it the last. 

I am missing the aspects and markers of the academic year on campus as firsts and lasts. First leaves on trees as the semester ends, the last of red leaves on the ground in the fall when semester has recently started. That sensory time keeping has been disrupted. Our senses are the front lines of this pandemic; they experience it all first. Too much visual epistemology through Zoom. So many exclusionary spaces for deaf folk with no captions or poor captions or blind and low-vision folk with COVID charts provided with no alt-text descriptions. So much sensory fear; the anxiety that I feel when I hear a sound around my unit that denotes that someone is possibly too close- presence as danger.  

I know this has been a long meandering post (like my thoughts this week), a post that has touched on many firsts and lasts. Maybe take today to think about how many firsts we experience daily in academe and in our pandemic lives (ICU rates at new high), but also the many lasts that we don't know are lasts until it is too late (I am thinking of all the Laurentian instructors who taught their last class there this week). And for those of you stuck in the in-between (my blog post on in-between) know that I see you and that one day, hopefully soon, this liminality will not be our constant always.