Three Octobers: Motherhood and Pandemic Pedagogy

Three Octobers: Motherhood And Pandemic Pedagogy

Autoethnography is an important tool in feminist scholarship, one that routinely acknowledges the dangers of focusing on corporate and academic female leaders and overlooking the needs of women experiencing poverty (Shafi, 2014, p. 151). I would argue that when academic parents keep the narratives focused on research and service demands, we also dangerously sideline the needs of our students. Guy and Arthur (2020), for example, used their collective autoethnography to make an important call for “our society … to do a better collective job being more mindful and realistic of its expectations of working mothers” (p. 897), but they did not extend this courtesy to our students. They acknowledged that their fellow colleagues “started to be honest about their struggles with remote life, mentioning that they too were struggling with isolation and sadness, feeling disconnected” (p. 895), but they do not mention whether they heard similar confessions from their students after March 2020. Many teachers moved metaphorical mountains to switch their face-to-face classes to online modalities, only to find that students were often not up to the tasks we had set. Undoubtedly, the situation was not the same for all students at different institutions, but, especially for many working students from lower socioeconomic classes, the demands multiplied and quickly became insurmountable.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused many students to be declared “essential workers.” Some of my first-generation students became the primary source of income in families when parents and guardians were laid off. Those who were not working often found themselves sacrificing their own education to prioritize the care and supervision of their younger siblings’ education. Throughout my experiences teaching world literature and parenting in the pandemic, I discovered that the less ability I had to maintain a wall between my personal and professional life—the more honest I was with students about how overwhelmed I was by everything—the more honest they were with me about their own struggles and needs, and the more I could begin to adapt my pedagogy to make my classes more accessible. Thus, my autoethnography’s intention is to consider the ways that my struggles as an academic working mother can help others empathize with students and bring practical changes to our pedagogies.