 Hello and welcome to the last of our parallel sessions for the day, and I'm joined by Brenna Clark-Gray who is going to talk on let it break or be broken, care, moral stress, and the university. I'm really looking forward to this Brenna, over to you. Thank you, thanks so much and thanks to everyone for coming out for joining at this last session. I know everybody is probably at the end of a stimulating period and looking forward to the keynote. So I hope this will be worth everyone's time. My name is Brenna Clark-Gray, I'm coordinator of educational technologies at Thompson Rivers University, and many of you are probably familiar with the open learning side of Thompson Rivers University. I support the campus side faculty at our institution, which is a slightly different environment, which I'll talk about as I go. I do want to note that I'm an uninvited visitor on to Come Loops Taste Sweat Mac territory within the unceded lands of Sweat Mac Ulu, and I have been shaped by time gratefully spent in Algonquin on a Schnabeg, Wolstuk, and Midma, and Kite lands. And I want to just gesture towards a recent article beyond land acknowledgement in settler institutions, which is an article that I read recently and has really shaped my approach to territorial acknowledgement, particularly shifting my discourse from referring to myself as a guest, which implies relationality that I haven't earned to recognizing that I am an uninvited visitor in these lands. My context beyond where I am, prior to coming into faculty support, I spent nine years as a full-time English instructor at a community college. So I had been a full-time classroom teacher for quite a long time prior to transitioning into a faculty support ed tech role. TRU is a regional university. We have about 600 faculty, somewhere between 500 and 600, depending on the semester. And my role is as a faculty support person working in a ten-year track role. So I support that faculty complement with their digital teaching and learning needs, which obviously is a role that changed quite a lot. I had been in the job for about seven months before the pandemic hit because I have excellent timing. And my role on campus was as the faculty lead on the project to move our face-to-face courses online. And what's interesting about Open Learning versus Thompson Rivers on campus is that campus instructors really had not used a lot of digital tools by and large in their teaching. So only about half of the faculty complement had any familiarity whatsoever with the learning management system or with any other digital tool. And of that group, I would say about half of those folks were only using it really as a content repository. So it was a big transition for everyone. And it continues to be a big transition as we look towards a fall where we're not really sure what's coming next. Anyway, I'm tired. Are you tired? I feel like we're probably all really tired. I like to acknowledge it as often as possible because I think sometimes our institutions expect us to not have effective experiences of this moment. And I have a lot of effective experiences of this moment. So at the beginning of the pandemic, I was so happy to talk about care and I am deeply indebted. At the right at the beginning of the pandemic, just before we transitioned, I was invited into a continuity with care webinar that grew into like a direct message conversation. And there people like Mejha Belly and Autumn Canes have been really integral in supporting and changing and adapting my thinking around care. So on the one hand, I was like intellectually invigorated talking about care in this discipline that I was fresh and new to, but also loved passionately. And at the same time, workload was such that I was really burning out quickly. And my thoughts on care and how care works within the institution and who it serves, they began to change perhaps. And I stopped seeing care as like an unmitigated positive and started to really challenge some of my own assumptions about care and some of the choices that I was making around care. So apologies if anybody was at my e-tug session in any of my BC people last winter, because this tricky truth about care slide they will have seen before, but I'm actually okay with having it on my tombstone. So I'm happy to use it again. I really, I think it's integral that we recognize that our care is strategically useful to the institution. So it's strategically useful to the institution to cultivate care on what I call a micro level. So between individuals, right, faculty support and faculty, faculty and students, those relationships are caring relationships and rooted in care work. And I think a lot about, you know, for last September when a lot of North American schools were looking at whether or not it was going to be fully online or not in the fall, we saw a lot of advertising around this idea of celebrating individual instructors and their efforts. And by that point, I was like eight months into this thing and I saw those celebrations. Like, great, you're celebrating that this instructor cares a lot, but does that instructor get a reduced course load? Do they get smaller classes? Does that faculty support person you're celebrating? Do they have an adequately staffed team? Do they have time to tend to themselves or are they exclusively focused on care? Right? So care is trumpet about, but how much is it supported? And I began to realize that as individuals enact care, the institutional structures get to remain relatively indifferent, right? In many ways, our care for each other can paper over large structural issues and inequalities. But care will fail. So it's celebrated on the micro level within the institution, but it will fail on the macro level when it isn't supported by institutional structures. So for me in my role, it comes back to this idea of whether a support unit is staffed appropriately enough to maintain a level of care that is expected in the labor that they do. Care cannot be extracted in perpetuity. I think many of us are getting to the end of our care extraction rope. And I use that word extracted mindfully. Institutional relationships, university relationships, neoliberal structures are sort of always already extractive. And I think it's easy to think, particularly if we feel our work is in some way vocational, that care is separate from those interactions. And of course it's not. I made this meme last fall and I really love it. So if you're just listening to the chat, we've got the usual guy with two girls meme and the guy is labeled post-secondary institutions. And the woman he's supposed to be paying attention to is named appropriate staffing levels. But the person he's actually paying attention to is a webinar about care. I say this is someone who has given several webinars about care during the course of the pandemic. So I am self-reflexive here. But I do think there's been this shift around our universities recognizing care but wanting it to be an individual problem to solve, right? And so I'm going to come back to that in a second. So my pal, Hannah McGregor, who is a Prof in the Publishing Program at SFU, took to Hook and I, which is a blog that if you don't read, you really must. The tagline is fast feminism, slow academia. And it's all about feminist approaches to academia. And Hannah wrote in Hook and I in her piece, what are we talking about when we talk about care? And I'm going to do the deadly sin and I'm actually going to read you what's on the slide here. We might also ask who does the burden of care fall on? And how might a depoliticized call for empathy be invisibilizing the very real inequalities, the crisis lays bare, particularly the urgency of the many forms of underpaid precarious and often gendered and racialized front line work and care work that has been declared urgent and essential. Is our care being leveraged to ensure that the university maintains its institutional and imaginative force in the midst of this crisis rather than being exposed as a site of neoliberal profiteering? So Hannah and I have these discussions a lot and I took to our group chat and I was like, but what am I supposed to do? Yes, I agree, my care is being extracted. What next? There was this discourse at the... Well, it's happened throughout the pandemic, but it was really active at the beginning of the transition to online that I refer to as the let it break discourse. And it came about, it's this kind of conversation like, if we need to be staffed appropriately, we have to let stuff break so that the institution sees there's a problem so that it comes in and repairs it, brings in the staff we need, for example, right? If the system doesn't work, don't keep patching it, let it break and then it will be fixed. The need will be evident. And I get it. Like, yes, in many cases, that is true. And yet who bears the brunt of that choice to let it break, right? So in my case, as someone who provides faculty support to let it break to cease to do my work, there's a couple of impacts. I maybe have the social and cultural institutional power to resist work because I am in a 10-year track position. Not everybody in my unit is. So what happens to them? Am I just downloading work onto my colleagues for them to break? If the work doesn't get picked up, if that work downloads to nowhere, then it's students, it's faculty, often precarious faculty who bear the brunt, right? And so, oh yeah, so I just said all that. So this becomes a cycle, right? And I think for me and for others, as I've watched throughout this pandemic, that's a cycle that leads to burnout. So, you know, two millennial academics who are friends, I took to hook an eye as well to respond to my friend Hannah in my article, Pedagogy of the So Stressed Pivoting to Digital with an Ethic of Care. What I wrote there and what still resonates for me today is, you know, I was sort of acknowledging, like I don't save lives in my job. That's not what I do. But this work of mine is still urgent. It's urgent because we have no evidence that the institution left to its own devices will, sorry, will enact an ethic of care without the individuals who take on the labor. And the people left in the wreckage are real people. So what then? And like, it's a real question, right? Because until I figure it out, I'm trapped between an intellectual exploitation of my own, an intellectual awareness of my own exploitation and an emotional need to enact care on behalf of those who are owed it from an institution that cannot pay its debts or will not pay its debts. And because I'm an English major from a way back, I throw a little Samuel Beckett in there. I can't go on, but I'll go on. So all of this sort of trapped feeling brought me to this idea of moral stress that I'm finding increasingly powerful. And I see someone in the chat mentioned that this echoed their spouses or a partner's experience in healthcare. And this comes directly out of healthcare research. Moral injury is the concept that I'm drawing on here. And it's caused when we transgress our own personal morals or ethics in order to serve something or someone else. It initially comes out of research on the impact of military service on individuals, but it also has been applied to healthcare service. And we're seeing a resurgence of work on care and moral stress as part of the pandemic, right? So we think about something like having to follow hospitals' orders around triage, for example, in a pandemic situation. A less trauma-dependent analog, so a less life-or-death analog, is this notion of moral stress, which I think is useful for understanding burnout. And I'm not the first person to think of this. There's a citation in the bottom there for an article, Moral Stress in Teaching Practice, that talks about how coming up against institutional pressures that shape teaching practice can have a really substantial impact on burnout rates among teachers. And so I begin to think about when our care is repurposed to prop up the very systems that the ethics behind it would seek to strike down. And for many of us who work in open, but work in institutions with varying degrees of interest in open, this kind of moral stress can take on all sorts of different flavors. When our care is actually enabling institutional inaction, it seems to me that moral stress, not moral injury, if we're not taking it to that extreme, but if we think about this as sort of a burnout-causing pressure, moral stress seems almost inevitable. And likewise, I think if we're pressed to let it break, is the same outcome true. And this is sort of where I find myself. And the positive thing is that the notion of a moral injury or moral stress posits a potential for moral repair. I'm not sure our institutions are capable of it. And I see us getting towards time, so I'm going to wind up here. So Suzanne Shale, and the citation is here on the slide, and I will post all these citations in Discord after my chat today. She posits several steps to achieving moral repair. I'm not going to go through all of them here. It's a fascinating article. But key among them, she lists this notion of responsibility and particularly where applicable institutional responsibility. So I'm going to read this. Moral repair requires that those who are truly responsible for something acknowledge that responsibility. This is not the same as laying blame. In acknowledging responsibility, the person or institution recognizes that others have placed reliance on them have been let down. And acknowledging responsibility reinforces the view that norms are valid and it's reasonable to rely on them. I have come back to this sentence a lot in the last year. Norms are valid and it's reasonable to rely on them. So if I have an expectation that my institution will step in to protect me from harm and they fail to do so. This is a critical piece that's missing in the moral repair relationship. I'm not sure I'm hopeful that the modern university is structured in a way to take accountability in this kind of way. But it brings me to the question of what is the institution's duty of care to the caretakers. And that's something that I have not been able to let go. So my closing thought here, and I promise it's my closing thought, Louise, is we need more than a wellness webinar, right? If moral stress is what we're experiencing, then moral repair requires an acknowledgement of the systemic pressures. And I keep coming back to this idea that our mental health in this crisis is not about personal best practice. Like did you go to the deep breathing webinar? Did you do your yoga at lunchtime? But demands a kind of structural change that requires structural accountability. And now I'm done. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you so much, Brett. I have so much to think about there. I'm looking forward to deep delving into some of your resources there and some of your references. Loads of chat going on. I don't know if you've been able to pull over the comments and see what people have been saying. Just waiting to see if there's any questions or things. But I suppose my response to this is that yes, yes, yes to all of this. And there's something about the institution as this block and then the individual. And it always seems to me like the responsibility always seems to get trickled down to an individual. I've had a situation where members of teams have been off away with stress. And the responsibility isn't taken on by the institution, but it's actually passed over to individuals in terms of picking up the workload. And that repair, that time for repair. And I just keep coming back to the idea around repairing brokenness. And if we break as individuals, what happens then? And it seems to be its individuals that then have to do the repairing rather than something that's structurally built into the institution and who takes that responsibility? I'll just let you look through the chat there. Oh, Anne Marie's got a question. Anne Marie, right in my heart, pal. How do we make the points in this webinar? How do we take them back to the institution without hurting our careers? Let you know if I figure it out. I think that it's really important where we can to push back against the culture that has emerged where this kind of care is self-care, right? Where we've sort of, you know, you go back to like Audrey Lord and the womanists and the black feminists and this thinking around like self-care is a radical act. But that was self-care in terms of caring about a community, right? Like that wasn't, I'm going to use a bath bomb and then go back to my email, right? And really resisting the notion that this is an individual problem to solve. One of the phrases that I keep coming back to is that I am not failing. I am being failed. And even just knowing and trying to hold on to that, as you know, I am not a paragon of burnout resistance or self-care particularly. But I do think that the first step is challenging the individualization of this moral stress and burnout that so many are experiencing right now, really resisting the notion that this is something for the individual to repair. That was fast talking, sorry. That's a fantastic quote. I'm not failing, but I am being failed. I'm noticing so much like relationality and relation in the chat. Like folks are experiencing these same feelings at institutions all over the place in all kinds of different roles. And I do think wonder, perhaps hope that we are at something of a tipping point. I'm not sure what's on the other side of the tipping point. And the point Anne-Marie brings up about our careers and how we need to be perceived to be team players or playing the game and to what extent we can resist under that. And we're all in a sterility moment, right? Yeah. I know it's not lunchtime yoga as much as I enjoy it. I don't think what you were talking about there about celebrating people kind of keeping it together. And that's within all of this context. And I think that's hugely problematic. And within my institution, we've got a yearly award called Above and Beyond. It's like, what about just hanging in awards? Or not even making it quite through the year type of awards? Well, I'm just going to make it into the talk, but resilience discourse comes back to this idea, right? Nothing makes me more furious than somebody in an administrative position of power celebrating the resilience of staff or students. Because people only have to be resilient once they have been failed structurally, right? Like when everything is working properly within the institution, we don't need to be resilient and we don't need our resilience celebrated. And one of the things that I've heard people speak about resilience is that it's not an individual macho strength thing. Resilience is all about connection and connectivity. And if you don't have the supporting structure there, you're not going to be resilient no matter how many pressures you do. No, not ultimately. That's true. That's true. The chat is heartening and also my heart goes out to everyone in the chat. I'm so sorry that these experiences resonate so deeply. It has been such a year. I'm afraid we're going to have to wind it up there. But just heartfelt thanks to you, Brenna, for talking about this in such an articulate and intelligent way. It's been absolutely wonderful to connect and connecting with everybody in the chat. Let's take it over to Discord. Brenna's going to put the stuff in the resources channel and I will continue the conversations there. But thank you so much, everybody. Thank you, Louise, and thanks, everyone.