 Welcome to another episode of Domains 21. I'm fortunate enough to be joined by Lisa Galler-Passette and Suzanne McAllen from Georgetown University. Welcome to you both to Domains 21. Thanks so much. Thank you, glad to be here. Thanks for joining us. So we're gonna talk a little bit today and I'm gonna use one of my handy-dandy bumpers because that's how I do, about taking care, effective labor in digital learning and so Lee, I know that you wrote an article for the EDUCAUSE review. I think it was back like in the height of things, March 2020 was at the 26th, they're thereabouts and so you've published this in the midst of basic panic across global higher ed, but in particular US higher ed. And so what are we talking about when we're talking about effective labor? Is there any way we can start with the definition of that and move from there? Sure, yeah, so this comes from the idea of effective or emotional labor. I tend to use them interchangeably. We can get into a semantic debate around it on another time, but it comes from Arleigh Horthchild's book, A Managed Heart. She's a sociologist and she was really interested in the kinds of invisible labor that service workers do. And so she primarily studied flight attendants and how she defined effective labor is the work that needs to be done to manage your own emotions, there's the managed heart in order to instill the proper emotions from the person that you're working with. And I know that we don't like to, especially in academia, we don't like talking about our role and putting it on the same level as people who labor or the service professions, we're above all of that. But at the end of the day, we're all workers, we all labor. And we do perform levels of effective and emotional labor in terms of our interactions with students, in terms of our interactions with faculty, with our own colleagues, with administrators, in terms of just being able to, again, manage our own emotions and emotional reactions in order to ensure the, in order to not ensure, but to encourage the proper emotional reaction or the desired emotional reaction from the person or people that you're engaging or interacting with. Suzanne, do you wanna add something to that? I would just add that I think it's what you mentioned as the management of emotions is really what propelled us into thinking about how this all played out during the pandemic. And I was fortunate enough to start our summer working with Lee co-facilitating a particular faculty development workshop that we were providing as part of our center. And that's where we started chatting and talking about how the management of our emotions were really coming into play and in terms of our work and how we're in our center's response to the pandemic. Yeah. And so it's just, it's been an interesting, I was gonna say, it's been a really interesting journey in terms of, again, from writing that first piece in March to Suzanne and I actually co-authored a piece that came out recently in a peer-reviewed journal. It's in the journal on centers for teaching and learning on this very topic and just how revelatory in a lot of cases it has been for people because we have managed to give language to something that people have been struggling to try to describe why the work we've been doing during COVID-19 and the pandemic in particular, but also even prior to that, why it's been so hard, right? Why is my job? Why am I so exhausted at the end of the day? What is it that is making my job particularly hard? And so to be able to give language to it, I think it's been really a wonderful experience where people have an understanding and say, oh, that's what this is. That's what the kind of work I'm doing. And then to be able to have conversations around it, I think it's been really a meaningful outcome from all of this, for me in any case, even just our conversations is that, as you were saying. Like we were able to have these meaningful conversations when the work got tough, right? When the work got really tough, we had language to be able to articulate it and then to be able to maybe mitigate isn't the right word, but to work through it in a productive way as opposed to it just being there and stuck in it. It's interesting too, because one of the community we're talking with right now and two is predominantly instructional technologists, learning designers in the academic fields. And I think one of the things you both were talking about was this moment of becoming essential services on campus and thinking through what that means. I mean, I'd be interested in hearing like, what does it mean and how does that change the relationship between say folks who work as what I've often called admin faculty versus faculty and some of the dynamics there. Because I was really taken being an admin faculty and working as an instructional technologist at Mary Washington for over a decade. I was really struck by the way you were both able to articulate some of those tensions that exist. And I know a bunch of people listening to this right now can relate as well. So what does it mean to be essential and like how do some of these dynamics play out in your own work? So Zanya you want to take this one first? Yeah, so that's exactly right. We talk about what it meant to all of a sudden become essential in the work of instructional design and educational development, faculty development where as Dander Little and David Green have talked about educational development being in the margins of any sort of educational ecosystem. And all of a sudden we're in the center and the way that we were, our center was being described by the university was that we were essential but we were also shouldering the development of or planning of helping faculty create and design their whole digital environments for the fall semester, fall of 2020. So that was a big shift in terms of our work with faculty and then also again, going back to this concept of management of emotions, then working with faculty in our community, departmental admins, some graduate students and students really thinking about what the emotions were mirrored in our interactions with everybody within our institutional community and then how are we going to, and we were all mirroring this sense of uncertainty. We didn't have all of the answers to all of the questions but we were using our knowledge and expertise to bring what we did know or what we do know to how to address some solutions and possibilities for teaching and learning. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and one of the keystones of teaching and learning centers but even academic technology centers, academicologists and just the underlying ethos of higher education for any of this support is that faculty do not have to avail themselves of it, right? And so we are built for faculty who want to come to us to work with us. The faculty who want to come and talk about pedagogy, the faculty who want to come and talk about the pedagogical value of incorporating new digital tools but all of a sudden now we are engaging with faculty who have never come to the center before and who have never had any interest in it and it's not like the Marine, it's not that the administration was forcing them but they felt forced by the circumstances to come and get this training that they knew they needed but didn't necessarily want and to engage in some pretty, again, this is where the management and the emotional management comes in is that we're talking about a sort of being twice vulnerable for these faculty. So not only you're talking about something as personal as their pedagogy and asking them, nudging them, encouraging them, hoping that they'll take some self-reflection and self-examination on their pedagogy but on top of that you add a layer of anxiety over the technology itself, right? I don't know how to use the technology, what if the technology goes wrong? I don't understand how this even works, right? Let alone how to integrate into my pedagogy I just don't understand how it works. And so you're dealing with faculty who are really vulnerable not just because of the pandemic and the uncertainty but because of what we are asking them to do and requiring them to do which is something that they're really not used to doing in a lot of cases, right? You have the people who are there and ready and able because they've done this kind of work before but then the majority of the people we saw over the summer in particular were people we had never seen before, right? Never engaged with us, probably have never taken a critical look at their own pedagogy, never thought of incorporating technology in any way shape or form beyond perhaps being able to pull their PowerPoint slide up into the classroom setting. And now we're asking them, we'd like you to engage in active learning and also learn how to use Zoom and maybe rethink all of your assessments and, and, and, and, and, and. So it's a really, not only were we becoming essential but essential in doing kinds of work with faculty who were not used to doing that kind of work and sometimes, you know, actively resistant in some cases. And so to be able to, again, manage our own emotions, to be able to sort of be like, okay, so yes, that is one way to teach the class online in a remote setting. Maybe we can explore some other ones. And they all come in with different expectations with different, you know, levels of experience. And so all of that was a much more complicated process than even our usual day-to-day interactions with faculty in the before times when people came because they wanted to as opposed to feeling that they had to if they wanted to survive the fall semester. And I would just add to that that Lee and I are very familiar with resistance in this work. And we're, and we can anticipate it to some extent and we're able to provide responses to faculty, often evidence-based responses about approaches, you know, the act of learning literature that's really just blown up in the last 10 years that we were drawing on lots of different frameworks and evidence-based practices that we're sharing with faculty in a very condensed timeframe, but the resistance that we were seeing was extremely concentrated. So what we're talking about really is a course design workshop. It was a three-day workshop that we did every week last summer. So from May, so like I said, Lee and I did the first week that we offered this particular type of development. We started together in May, and then I think I did my last one the third week in August. So it was continuous, it was relentless, it was really thinking about, it was exciting, you know, I'm reading, you know, A Paradise Built in Hell right now by Rebecca Solnit, and it definitely resonates with what we were going through last summer in terms of developing this community to respond to what felt like a disaster and we're responding in emergency situations, but it was highly concentrated. And I think some of the resistance wasn't just, I don't really feel like changing my teaching practice this semester, it was more, I don't feel like changing my pedagogy, how I use technology, talking to my departmental colleagues in this way, again, going back to the vulnerability of being seen and visible within a Zoom frame and talking about what you do or do not know. So it was very concentrated forms of emotions that we were interacting with on a daily, weekly basis. One of the things you bring up is both the need, which becomes very clear with the moment of the pandemic, but you also talk a bit about the cost. And I'd be interested just maybe to flesh out a little bit like when we're talking about the cost of this effectively, not only for the folks who are supporting faculty, but for the faculty in relationship to that, what has the cost been, or is it a better word, the toll? I don't know, you let me know. Well, I think there's two sides of it. There is a cost and there is a toll, right? The toll is highly personal, right? And everybody dealt with the toll in their own ways. I'm an extrovert and so it was a very different toll on me than some of my introverted colleagues, let's say, that I've spoken with. It was exhausting, right? It was physically, I would be physically tired, even though I'm sitting in exactly the same spot I was sitting in when I was doing all of these, all of these consultations, all of these workshops, all of these programming, I would be physically tired at the end of the day. I would, and mentally and emotionally exhausted, which takes a toll when you're at home and you're also with your family who are also dealing with a pandemic situation. And that there's a toll to be taken on everyone when I'm home and I leave the room and the kids are there and they're like, mom, and I'm like, don't, right? There's no transition. It used to be I could drive home or take public transit home and you'd have 20, 30, 40 minutes as much as we might lament the commute. It was time to shift gears, right? And to sort of let the day go gradually as opposed to just like opening the door and life is there. And so, and that's not uncommon, of course, that's something that we've all had to deal with working from home and our faculty have had to deal with that exact same thing, but it's, you know, the toll was there. I insisted that we take a vacation to go to a beach, socially distanced and all of that. But like, at a certain point, I was like, I just need to get out of our house because I can't and not talk about faculty development and not talk about education technology. What about you? I think absolutely the toll in terms of working at home, we've read a lot about this in the last years has been, especially for those of us who have children at home, Lee has two children, I have two children at home and working with their issues and emotions as well and, you know, I think it's funny now that we meet for lunch in the kitchen and talk about how our Zoom meetings went and we're checking in with each other continuously around that. So I think there's a toll on that, the blurred boundaries of work and home life and self-care and that's been well documented in the past year and I appreciate everybody that writes about this and tweets about this. I think the cost in the workplace has been sort of this, I would say continuation of thinking about what are some of the new ways that we can support faculty? How do we evolve the type of support that we're providing? And I think there's a cost in that, in the sense of weighing whether we continue supporting faculty as we have been doing and having conversations and just being there, we're very visible, we're very present and we're transparent, but to what extent do we need to keep thinking of new ways to provide support? So Lee, does that make sense to you what I'm talking about? This is cost of, I don't feel like we need to innovate right now, I think we need to continue and to sustain the type of support that we're providing and that we've been really affected that in the last year and sustaining that ethos and taking care of each other so that the toll doesn't increase on us, but also let's keep doing what we're doing because it's working well and we're now essential and I think we are visible, but Lee, I'd love to hear what you think about that concept. Yeah, I think you're right. I think it's like, it's a double-edged sword, right? The bar has been raised. We are now way more visible, but the thing that I find interesting is like the type of visibility that we have is that there is still this, which is why I wanna have these conversations and I wanna write about these things because I think that our visibility has been raised. We appear competent, we appear ready, we appear prepared, we appear prepared. There we go. And that, and it really, we don't wanna talk about the challenges and the tolls it has taken because we have to maintain this appearance of readiness, right? And so I think that there's a bit of a cost there of now that we have done so well, we can't fall apart now, right? We can't show any cracks and that hasn't been articulated or clearly stated, but there is this sense that there's not a space yet, not a good space yet for having more in-depth of these conversations to be able to reflect on what has happened, on the toll it has taken on us, on the impact it's having on our center, on our individuals, on our programming, on our institution. And then like you said, and just sit with that for a little while rather than like barreling forward. The cost has been time in a lot of cases, right? The cost has been time. There's no time and there's no space. And those are the kinds of things that I think are needed right now to replenish so that we can continue doing this work and we can continue being effective at what we're doing. So I think that that's been the personal toll and the kind of cost on us collectively. And also to note that it is disproportionately, when we talk about toll, it disproportionately has fallen on women, the research has shown that too, we're doing more work at home, we're doing the emotional labor at home as well as at work. We are doing all of that heavy lifting. And so there's an acknowledgement even of that of the unequal nature of the toll and the work that we have been asked to do both professionally and personally, all of those things taken together. And I'm struck in particular by the idea, Susanna, of like staying within it. Like not as you were saying, Lee, like barreling forward to the next thing now that it's maybe letting up a little bit, let's go back to what we were or move forward to something totally different. And it's interesting because one of the things that I think strikes me about the work you're doing, which is super important is at what point do we know and can we measure is the wrong word, but can we get a sense of like, how that sent recognizing the essential nature of this work, elevating some of the people who were doing it, right? Really finding a way to value within the institution more broadly that time spent and that work done. And I think obviously I want to barrel forward. So I'm part of the problem. So I'm gonna bring it back and say like, like without barreling forward, how does some of that recognition, get not only established, but then celebrated before we start saying, here's the next step, take this on now, right? Here's your next duty. Should you choose to take it? So I'm not sure there's much choice there. It doesn't have to be honest, right? That's the... I think that, so it's important to know that at this point in time, we're still operating without knowing what the fall semester entails. So we are still in this uncertainty zone of waiting and seeing what's ahead for us. But in terms of recognition, we're a very established center. We've candles, the Center for New Designs and Money and Scholarship has been around since 2000. So we're celebrating our 20th anniversary within a pandemic year. So we're fortunate to have lots of tentacles in different committees and different partnerships have cropped up, especially this one weekly meeting that happens with faculty, where we are now seeing as partners in discussing instructional continuity. And we often have a rotating set of colleagues who are there at that meeting to answer questions, field questions from faculty. We're all, now we all go to wait for the announcement of what's happening over the fall. So there are pockets of recognition happening definitely. The more that we're able to be a part, if there are opportunities to be a part of the infrastructure of our university, then there are opportunities for us to then think about how we can have more distributed forms of support going forward and having that recognized as essential to conversations, especially as we're trying to work through what's happening for the fall. Yeah. And I think that that goes generally for higher education, right? It's very siloed, you know, higher education is extraordinarily siloed. Even our own center of new designs for learning and scholarship candles. I always have to think about it. Is we are unique in so far? Yes, we've been around for 20 years. And even then we were ahead of the curve in so far as we are a traditional teaching and learning center, an academic technology unit and the e-learning and online learning unit. So we have instructional designers and education technologists and faculty developers all working together in one center. That's actually not that common at universities. And so, you know, already we're fairly fortunate in terms of the infrastructure of the institution. We're an integrated center, yet still like a traditional teaching and learning center on the margins or academic technology unit on the margins. And I think that this goes for any unit now that is supporting faculty and or students. The pandemic has revealed that we need to be having cross unit conversations about supporting students, educating students, helping students be successful. Our colleagues in student services are also now essential workers and are doing heroic, even more heroic work than they usually do in making sure that our students are okay, even though they're all over the world. And in so many different circumstances and still working really hard to try and build community for the students, a sense of belonging for the students that they're not able to get because we have been entirely remote for the 2021 academic year. So, you know, more integrated overall, like how do we integrate staff into these larger conversations around student success? Where it's not, so where it's happening and you're getting a multiplicity of voices on what our students need to succeed. And I think that the pandemic has really revealed once you take away this, the so-called safety net of campus, particularly for residential campuses. I know this doesn't really apply as much to community colleges or non-residential institutions, but certainly for primarily residential institutions, the faculty in particular have had their eyes open to just how much support the students are receiving on campus and how much that matters to their success in the faculty's classroom and in the faculty's class. Well, that's pretty, I mean, I have to say, thank you both not only for coming here and talking about that, but I just wanna acknowledge your effective labor here on Domain's 21 session. And the fact that you're keeping the conversation around these discussions that, when I did read the articles, the thing that struck me is that these are conversations that are very hard to have in the institution because the institution, like you said, is set up in certain ways, whether you're not working alongside the same people and Candles is a particular group. And I think I saw Eddie Maloney talk about blogs back in 2004 as part of Candles. I mean, it really was a kind of a unique space and a lot of folks didn't have that infrastructure to work from. And watching the work you do and then saying, even we need to slow down, we need to think about what works and stop pretending that this is a year for innovation and taking giant risks. It's a year for healing and figuring out what comes next in some holistic way. So I appreciate the work you're doing, thank you. Thank you. And I think that you're right, these are really hard conversations to have in higher education. We still like to think for some reason that we are rational in higher education, right? We are knowledge workers. And so even didn't say the word, I think I joke that we like, what's the difference between emotional and affective labor? And I said, well, they had to make up a word, they had to come up with affective labor because nobody in higher education wants to talk about emotions, right? Exactly. Except our colleagues in student services where they're all about like the well, socio wellbeing of the students. But elsewhere, right? People don't like to talk about emotions. We don't like to talk about, we are of the knowledge, we are thinkers, we are not feelers, right? And so to really be able to engage in these conversations, there's a gendered nature to it as well, right? Where there's a danger of talking about it, not a danger, but a risk. There is a risk of talking about it as being dismissed as that's a gender thing or a racialized thing. But again, unless we keep talking about it, and I'll keep talking because I know I do. Which you're doing, which is good. Yeah, but it's pushing the conversation forward and giving it legitimacy, right? And working to legitimize it as something that is an important component, it helps us do our work well. It's not always a bad thing, but you still have to recognize it. You have to be able to have a conversation about it. You have to be able to have opportunities to get better at it. It's not something that we're all sort of innately born with that we're like, I'm really good at consultations. So it's like, no, I've taken some time and a lot of practice and most of us have figured it out on our own. And so how can we start moving past just recognizing it and saying, all right, how do we nurture it? How do we grow it? How do we grow this capacity that we now recognize as being so important to us being effective at our jobs and with the ultimate goal of improving student success, right? And that ultimately is everyone's goal, hopefully with an institution. But if we can recognize this element and say, it's not just these bulleted points of very specific technical skills or technical knowledge that you have, but also the socio-emotional skills, right? Soft skills. But let's call it what it is. It's still work, it has a name, affective labor and we can develop it. And so let's think about ways that we want to be able to do that and then again, recognize it, reward it, encourage it and help it thrive and flourish in that way. Rock not rock. Thank you both again for joining us. And we look forward to more. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for the opportunity. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for coming.