In a previous post, we three members of the Graduate Student Council of the APA offered general recommendations to all departments about how they can better support their graduate student teachers during the period of transition and uncertainty arising from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. In this follow-up post, we want to highlight some of the positive steps that our own institutions have already taken in support of graduate student teachers, as well as outline some additional avenues for support that we would like to see discussed.
Let us first say something about the successes in our home institutions.
Arianna Falbo’s department, Brown University, has taken a number of steps toward supporting graduate student teachers. The University has developed an emergency Covid-19 relief fund for graduate students facing immediate financial hardships. The University has also encouraged instructors to be as flexible and accommodating as possible with deadlines, final projects, papers, and examinations. The Graduate School is in the process of developing a number of teaching, professional development, proctorships, and other related professional opportunities that graduate students can apply for in order to gain additional summer funding and experience. Furthermore, current graduate students are also eligible to apply for summer fellowships which are intended to help offset financial losses resulting from limited summer employment opportunities, and recently graduated PhDs are eligible to apply for a limited number of postdoctoral teaching fellowships. Brown’s Pre-College Program (Summer@Brown), which traditionally has employed a number of graduate students in the Philosophy Department over the summer as instructors and teaching assistants, has cancelled all in-person classes for (at least) the first half of the summer. However, the directors of this program are actively in conversations with pre-college instructors, many of which are graduate students, to transition some of these courses online. Brown’s Diversity Institute, The Summer Immersion Program in Philosophy (SIPP), has unfortunately been cancelled, but work already done towards this initiative (e.g., organization and review of applications) by graduate students has been financially compensated and recognized. Teaching evaluations are still being collected this semester, however, they have been revised to reflect the transition to online learning, and graduate students who plan on using this feedback for upcoming job applications are encouraged to frame this data in the context of an unprecedented global pandemic. In addition to this, instructors and administrators will not be able to view the evaluations of their teaching assistants. The Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning and Brown’s Digital Learning and Design Team have offered a number of helpful webinars, workshops, and resources for online teaching and learning. This includes a best practices guide for how to implement and create inclusive and accessible online learning environments, and strategies for inclusive asynchronous teaching.
Emma McClure’s institution, the University of Toronto, has worked with the union, CUPE3902, to support the transition to online teaching by providing paid training for course instructors through the Centre for Teaching Support & Innovation and extra pay for teaching assistants performing new duties. The university and the union have also negotiated an improved leave policy that allows for self-report of sickness, paid self-isolation for the immunocompromised, and work relief for caregivers. Graduate students have been further supported by the creation of a COVID-19 emergency grant and mandatory check-ins from dissertation supervisors. In addition to these initiatives at the university level, the Philosophy department has provided unprecedented opportunities for graduate student teaching. Graduate students have always been course instructors, tutorial leaders, and graders for summer courses, but this year, more courses are being offered than ever before. Moreover, many of these offerings are upper-year courses, in areas like continental philosophy, ancient philosophy, and bioethics. Thus, in addition to receiving summer employment, graduate students will have the opportunity to teach seminars in their AOS — improving their CVs and future job prospects. The department has also gone above and beyond to support the transition to online teaching by creating an online version of teaching evaluations (when they had previously been done on paper) and allowing tutorial leaders to opt-in to the system or choose not to participate. Furthermore, throughout the past month, the department administration and staff have continually reached out to students to ease the transition to work from home, offer support for isolation or financial hardship, and continue celebrating student success. The graduate students have also stepped up to create forums for discussion and community, with special recognition owed to Julia Smith and Zain Raza for creating a department Slack, Hamish Russell as GPSU president and CUPE chair, and Michaela Manson for creating a dissertation working group.
Heather Stewart’s institution, Western University, has also implemented some helpful changes. At the university level, Western has offered several online supports to help facilitate the transition to online teaching and learning. As an acknowledgement of the time involved in transitioning instruction to online platforms, the School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies determined that all time needed for training in online instruction and transitioning courses online are to be counted as paid work hours. Given that such hours were not accounted for in contracts signed at the beginning of the term, paid overtime is to be honored for any hours in excess of the original duties specified in graduate teaching contracts. Graduate teaching assistants who fall ill and are thus unable to carry out their duties are able to fill out an absence notice, and still be paid the amount specified in their contract. All of these are important steps in ensuring that graduate students not only retain their expected funding, but that they are financially compensated for the work required to move instruction online. Several options were put in place for students, including the option for pass/fail grades and alternative projects in lieu of final examinations. At the level of the philosophy department, student evaluations for graduate teachers were suspended for the term, and graduate teachers were encouraged to be maximally flexible with granting extensions on assignments (e.g., not giving late penalties to students for assignments submitted past original due dates). Finally, in an effort to offset some of the financial burden associated with lost summer income, as well as provide additional research and professional development opportunities, the Philosophy department created a significant number of graduate research assistantships, made available to both MA and PhD students. While some of the GRAs involve assisting faculty with their research, many of the GRAs provide opportunities for professional development around teaching. For example, there GRAs were created to help create a new “applied epistemology” unit of the introductory philosophy course, to create a new course section on “metaethics and religion,” to assist in the creation of a new graduate seminar in “philosophy and psychiatry,” to revamp the course content for the course on “power, privilege, and oppression,” to update the undergraduate logic course in light of new undergraduate requirements, to aid in the creation of a syllabus for a new course in “Buddhist philosophy,” among others. These newly created GRA opportunities offer much needed financial support, as well as new opportunities to develop skills in course design.
We highlight these successes within our own departments both as an expression of gratitude for the advocacy faculty leadership has already done on our behalf, but also to reinforce that these changes arepossible, and are being taken seriously in some departments. While all of our institutions and departments face new and unique challenges, we offer the successes of our own departments as a model of how some positive changes can be realized in these challenging and unprecedented times.
However, there is, of course, much more to be done, even at those institutions which have taken steps in the right direction. For example, while we have seen a great deal of discussion about how to accommodatestudentswho are placed under special pressure by these trying times (at Biopolitical Philosophy and Philosophers’ Cocoon, among many others), we have seen relatively little discussion about how to accommodate teachers. In our previous recommendations, we mentioned accommodations for graduate student parents and caregivers and support for financially precarious graduate students, but we need to have further conversations about what accommodations would help disabled graduate student instructors, tutorial leaders, and graders. The shift to online teaching means increased time on the computer and sitting stationary at non-ideal work stations, which may pose problems for those of us with vision, joint, or other related problems. Facilitating online teaching and video conferencing may also be difficult for those of us with attention or auditory processing disorders. The isolation from students and colleagues places an added burden on those of us with anxiety and depression, illnesses that are incredibly common in academia and often develop over the course of graduate school. These difficulties may be compounded by the strain of comforting anxious and grieving students, since the switch to online teaching also creates an increase in email contact. Even non-disabled graduate students may suffer from the disorientation of Zoom classes, eye-strain from computer use, or personal or vicarious trauma over the course of the semester.
Furthermore, we should never lose sight of the fact that we are teaching in the midst of a global pandemic. We shouldn’t act as if online instruction and learning will proceed as though things were simply business as usual. We hope that departments and universities will take our recommendations and provide teaching resources, employment opportunities, and funding, but even with these supports, teaching is going to be a more difficult task than ever before. We need to think more than ever about how to provide mental health and self care resources, and of how to ease all the varied vulnerabilities and stressors that will arise over the course of this pandemic. How can we complete our teaching duties while dealing with sudden life changes like a parent or partner losing a job, fear that our loved ones (or we ourselves) have the virus, isolation from family/needed support, grief for dead relatives and friends, or other traumatic events? Even getting groceries or going for a walk have become cognitively demanding and anxious experiences. We need to find ways to acknowledge the fact that when we pile all these life events on top of the already arduous task of running and teaching a class, of course it’s not going to be perfect. Of course we’re going to fail to do everything we want to do, fail to support our students the way they deserve, fail to continue working on all of our many other tasks. And that’s okay.
There’s a pandemic, and we all need to reset our expectations. We need to start discussing institutional accommodations and self-care for teachers, especially disabled graduate students and first time teachers. We need to start asking different questions. How can educational technology be adapted to support teachers, as well as students? What email and contact policies would allow us to avoid burnout? How can we lobby for increased teaching assistant support for disabled instructors and other instructors who are struggling to complete tasks? What problems have we not even begun to discuss?
We hope this is the start of an ongoing conversation that will continue long past the end of lockdown and beyond the end of online-only education.
Arianna Falbo
Arianna Falbo is a PhD student at Brown University, where she is also pursuing a doctoral certificate in Gender and Sexuality Studies. Her research is primarly in epistemology, feminist philosophy, and philosophy of language (and their various intersections), and she is currently working on projects on inquiry as well as epistemic oppression. Arianna is dedicated to making academic philosophy more inclusive and friendly. To this end, she has taught for Corrupt the Youth, an educational outreach program that brings philosophy to students from low-income backgrounds and Title 1 high schools. She also co-founded and helps to organize a MAP chapter at Brown, and this summer she is excited to serve as the graduate director for Brown’s Summer Immersion Program in Philosophy (SIPP).
Emma McClure
Emma McClure is a PhD Candidate at the University of Toronto, they were inspired to write this post by conversations with fellow graduate students and early career scholars: Kayla Wiebe, Lisa McKeown, C. Dalrymple-Fraser, Jessica Wright, Mark Fortney, Joshua Brandt, Howard Williams, and her co-authors on the APA blog post where they originally raised these questions, Arianna Falbo and Heather Stewart.
Heather Stewart
Heather Stewart is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Oklahoma State University. Their research and teaching take an intersectional feminist approach to analyses of medicine, healthcare, digital technologies, and artificial intelligence, with a particular focus on how power, oppression, and privilege shape individual and collective engagement with these institutions and technologies. Their work has been published in several top journals, including The Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, and Perspectives on Psychological Science, among others. Heather’s first book, Microaggressions in Medicine (with Lauren Freeman), was published with Oxford University Press in February of 2024.
