Enacting Care-Ful Engagement in the (Post)Pandemic Care-Less University

Introduction

The neoliberalization of higher education advocates the delivery of the education ‘product’ with maximum efficiency and drawing on the least resources possible (Hölscher, 2018). This approach has transformed higher education institutions into a “for profit” business, seeking to attract as many students as possible while servicing their needs with the lowest feasible number of staff by relying heavily on sessional academics to deliver teaching and lowering the ratio of academic faculty to support staff (Palmer & Cantrell, 2019). This ‘need’ for labor efficiencies has been exacerbated in pandemic times due to losses in international student revenues which have long propped up the higher education system under current funding regimes (Hurley & Van Dyke, 2020). As a result, in early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic precipitated a crisis in higher education in which educators with limited support and resources were required to make a rapid transition to online delivery to limit community transmission of the virus on campus through reduced physical social interactions (Weeden & Cornwell, 2020). Face-to-face instruction was often replaced with prerecorded lectures and live webinars which resulted in a sharp reduction in student–educator interaction. Some universities provided a short period of transition to shift instruction online (Ebner, 2020) while others transitioned immediately without suspending offerings (Crawford et al., 2020). Some universities even resorted to using previously recorded lectures from faculty who had died years earlier (Kneese, 2021).

This adoption of emergency remote education (Bozkurt & Sharma, 2020a) is distinct from planned online or distance education. Planned online education can be highly effective (Papastergiou, 2009; Hodges et al., 2020), however, the ad hoc nature of emergency remote teaching may not create the conditions needed to effectively support student learning. The disruptions to teaching caused by the COVID-19 response measures and rapid adoption of emergency remote teaching had a significant impact on educators’ abilities to support student engagement (Code et al., 2020) as reflected in university pandemic communiqués dominated by discourses of technical connectivity rather than human connection (Ashfaquzzaman, 2020). Although such utilitarian logics are common in crisis management (Branicki, 2020), a “strong faculty academic human caring presence” to is required to humanize emergency remote teaching, create caring spaces and facilitate engagement (Christopher et al., 2020, p.822). Caring practices are highly contextual and contingent. Some educators took the opportunity to include COVID within curriculum content to enhance and contextualize learning (Hughes et al., 2020) to help students make sense of what they were experiencing while others treated their classes as a respite from the constant presence of COVID (mis)information on social media platforms (Paulsen & Fuller, 2020). Regardless of approach, pandemic pedagogies (Murphy, 2020) foregrounded the resources and interaction required to ensure learners were not only able to survive but thrive (Weeden & Cornwell, 2020).

For students, caring is a key marker of good teaching (Kuh, 2011), with good teachers described as those who care about their discipline, their teaching, and their students and who positively influence student engagement (Anderson, et al., 2020). We would like to believe ourselves to be good teachers under this definition, and certainly strive to be so, but do not consider ourselves to be more ‘good’ or more caring than our colleagues. Instead, using an autoethnographic approach and guided by the principles of care ethics this chapter explores how we, as educators in different career stages and sub-disciplines, struggled to ensure quality and care in our teaching in a time of unprecedented upheaval and change. The COVID-19 pandemic is not the first time that educators have had to adopt emergency remote teaching and it likely will not be the last. Swartz, Gachago and Belford (2018) describe their attempts to provide continuity of learning during campus closures due to student protests through alternative strategies for delivering content, conducting assessment and communicating with students but also in finding different ways to exercise care.