Abstract
Becoming a caregiver for two elderly parents in a remote rural area with limited internet access while also teaching online increased the author's awareness of students' challenges and interpersonal needs in online educational modalities. She realized how often students' interpersonal needs, as well as teachers' needs, go unmet in the online classroom. Students' messages may be misread when they are reaching out to teachers in attempt to meet their interpersonal needs through the teacher-student relationship. She argues that online teachers would be wise to rely on William Schutz's Fundamental Interpersonal Relations Orientation to inform their interactions with students. Rather than dismissing students' sometimes clumsily sought or expressed needs, responding to their needs as one human being to another creates relationships that retain and strengthen students' resilience. Vulnerability as a teacher and exploration of our shared “humanness” in all roles within higher education leads to a conclusion that calls for more direct interpersonal contact between teachers and students, not less.
TopCaregiver Teacher: Interpersonal Needs In The Online Classroom
Over a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, after moving my work, teaching, and what felt like my entire life fully online for months, I had to add another new role to my already stretched thin repertoire—caregiver. A caregiver is defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as “a person who provides direct care (as for children, elderly people, or the chronically ill)” (Merriam-Webster, n.d.). Caregiver is a role that cannot be done remotely, it cannot be conducted on screen, it is up close and personal, messy, and around the clock. It requires operating on little sleep, being face to face, and regularly touching other people. In my case, it also required driving long distances back and forth to my parents’ rural home on the other side of the state. Caregiving takes precedence over posting to online forums and grading papers. In a world that had shut itself behind doors and limited social contact for over a year due to the pandemic, my life suddenly called for getting out of my desk chair, being present in person, and struggling to figure out how to continue teaching online while caregiving in a remote location where cell phone reception was spotty and logging into an online class was a luxury.
The National Alliance for Caregiving 2021 Report reveals a 9.5 million increase in the number of family caregivers in the United States between 2015 to 2020 (from 43.5 to 53 million). Family caregivers now encompass more than one in five Americans. These individuals may be caring for elderly parents or family members, young children, siblings, or spouses. Their caregiving may be short-term, but in many cases extends to months or even years. For caregivers over the age of 50, 62% are employed and 61% are working full-time (National Alliance for Caregiving, 2021). The median age of full-time university faculty is now 49 according to the CUPA-HR 2020 report The Aging of the Tenure-Track Faculty in Higher Education. The report also notes that 37% of faculty members are age 55 or older, a significantly higher percentage than the 23% in the regular population (Flaherty, 2020).
In this age range, many adults are required to take on the role of caregiver for an elderly parent or another member of the family while also working as a full-time faculty member. In this chapter, I describe what I learned about teaching from being a caregiver, share a case study of a student caregiver who reached out for connection amid the COVID-19 pandemic, explore the contrast between online instruction based in Fundamental Interpersonal Relations Orientation Theory versus Self-Determination Theory, and discuss practical implications for implementing this new approach for online faculty. I advocate re-evaluating education models which have centered on concepts such as online student self-determination and autonomy to additionally employ an approach that addresses students’ individual “humanness” and varying interpersonal needs for inclusion, control, and affection.
Women stop working to take care of elderly parents or perform other needed household activities more regularly than men (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2021; Germano, 2019; Riley et al., 2021). Research has shown that female faculty typically invest more time, in general, in caregiving for family members and students, and this has been exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic (Alon et al., 2020; Power, 2020; Riley et al., 2021; Scheiber, 2020). As I began to talk with colleagues at my institution, it was surprising how many of them, both women and men, in similar age range were dealing with acting as caregiver in some capacity for one or two elderly parents.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Online Teaching: Teaching a course using technology that allows the instructor and students to engage with course material using a screen while in separate locations.
Schutz’s FIRO Theory: Theory originated by William Schutz in 1966 which states that individuals work to meet three basic interpersonal needs during their interactions with others, including needs for inclusion, control, and affection.
Caregiving: Providing direct tangible care for another individual on a regular or daily basis.
Adult Learning Theory: A group of theories developed specifically around how adults learn.
Interpersonal Needs: The interpersonal needs are inclusion, control, and affection (as described in William Schutz’s Fundamental Interpersonal Relations Orientation Theory).
Digital Divide: Some individuals have more access to technology and internet connection while others do not have equal options to access, creating a gap or divide in technology use.
Connection: Engaging with one another as unique human beings whether face-to-face or in virtual environments using screens.