HigherEd's Ouroboros

For the majority of Canada this was the first week back to school for K-16 and there were a lot of moving parts throughout the week. This is a shortish post on something I kept returning to in my thoughts as I was reading your tweets and attending townhalls where people are already exhausted, scared, confused, angry, upset, and all the overlaps of these feelings. And it was a strange (okay maybe a not so strange) coincidence that in a townhall I was in the other day one of the speakers exactly referred to the symbol and imagery that I have been carrying around with me all week to describe what I was seeing. The Ouroboros. 

The symbol of the snake (or sometimes a dragon) eating it's own tail is closely connected to alchemy, the forever return, concepts of interconnectivity. And not to get all My Big Fat Greek Wedding on you but this one is actually Greek, for tail and food. It has had many connections over the centuries, and it certainly resonates a lot with our COVID HigherEd life. 

The Ouroboros works as an image on so many levels here. It directly speaks to the lack of appreciation of the social contract that is causing chaos on campuses, in classrooms, and online with everything from masks to vaccines to other policies that directly impact instructors and students. The interconnectivity of those who share a campus and a classroom has never been more apparent than now. But this situation has also caused an extreme rise in the kinds of in-fighting that destroys communities that need to be built and sustained. Instead of turning to the systems and those who uphold the problematic systems to change what is going on and the risks that everyone is under, the systems have created a perfect storm of pitting the very people who should be working together on this, instructors and students. I can't help but think of Monty Burns from The Simpsons right now with the "excellent" finger tent.  See this gif if you don't know what I am referencing. Who wins when this all eventually goes south, the systems and the institutions who are by and large prioritizing fiscal safety and branding over personal safety. Modality for course engagement and delivery that have long (online asynchronous) and not so long (Hybrid as faux Hyflex) pedagogical research connected to them are being modified in ways that the research doesn't support. Again the research is being ignored and instead systems are trying hard to make those modalities and pedagogies work in a way that is often unethical, non-inclusive, and certainly inaccessible. 

The thing I keep seeing time and again in posts, in the way that instructors and students and staff are speaking in a painfully truthful manner is that there seems to be absolutely no faith left in administrators and institutions from K-16 across North America. Communications are often filled with obfuscatory comms speak. Emails sent out one day are contradicted the next. As I noted to a colleague the other day, for folk in supporting roles in HigherEd at the moment it's like providing support in Jello. Things are simultaneously moving too fast, and not fast enough.

The system is actively causing us to eat ourselves. The very parts that make up the daily function of institutions, the instructors, the students, the staff are being consumed by the stress, the anxiety, and the unknown. The need for healing and bridge building at this point is so large and no one is acknowledging it. We need more trust, we need more community. Instead we are in real life Jenga. And I don't know about you, but my anxiety cannot take the waiting for the one piece to be pulled out that will cause the whole thing to crumble.