This project, by collecting WPA reflections and data from a critical moment in OWI practice, responds to a 2015 call from the CCCC OWI Committee (in Hewett & DePew 2015) to continue theorizing around OWI (Ehmann & Hewett 2015, in that volume) because of the unique moment of March 2020; additionally, as the reflections and profiles we have so far show us, we are in a unique position to continue theorizing about compassion and equity in pedagogy and WPA work. While it would be easy to consider Spring 2020 "a wash" in terms of education, reflections and data coming out now about this period show that, when things turned strange and difficult, teachers of composition largely rose to meet the challenge. Hewett & Warnock (2015) outline what good OWI means: being a good teacher; composition as both about and beyond text; rethinking our students; teaching technology in thoughtful ways; cataloging the House of Lore; re-framing writing research and assessment; ethical and moral writing instruction; and finally, of course, "Good OWI should help the field of composition be better" (p. 560). As the reflections above show, despite the crash-course of OWI many teachers received that Spring, they were still meeting many of these hopes for successful OWI.
The first OWI principle that may come to mind in the context of Spring 2020 is teaching technology in thoughtful ways. As 2020 teaching showed us, expectations of technological familiarity for instructors and access for students may have been problematic in some instances. Although OWI is a robust field of study that continues to grow, many folks teaching in the pandemic were not trained to teach online and were unfamiliar with the tools they needed to deliver course content. For example, a Bay View Analytics survey of people working in higher education across more than 600 institutions found that 56% of participants had to use technologies they had not used in the past (Ralph, n.d.). At the same time, many instructors and institutions have held high expectations of student access to technologies and internet connections when their courses switched to fully online modalities. Mitchum et al (2020) wrote about trying to reach out to students with inconsistent internet connections or who had to travel extensively at the moment of the remote switch; they note that students without reliable internet access remain an understudied population–and lack of internet is therefore a largely invisible problem. This is not to mention students are increasingly completing their coursework on smartphones instead of computers (Rodrigo 2015); Oswal (2015) adds that gaps in educational equity (such as minority status) can be exacerbated in online learning, and that even in studies on this subject, disability has been underrepresented. Many LMSs fail to consider disability in their design, and universities often are ignorant of this flaw. We can consider this alongside a previous CCCC OWI Committee survey on students' main difficulties in OWCs: keeping up, 75%; tech, 58%; motivation, 50%; getting started, 39% (Melonçon & Harris 2015).
Even before the emergency switch to remote teaching, OWI scholars have been aware of the increasing ubiquity of OWI methods in composition courses: Hewett and Warnock (2015) write that, as technologies become more and more integrated into writing and research, OWI will be less and less a subset of Composition studies but, instead, they will be one and the same. In the meantime, "OWI is and will continue to be about composition--not just composition taught in an online setting, but, we argue, composition writ large" (p. 549). Even before March 2020, with the use of word processors, search engines, and LMSs, traditional face-to-face courses (F2F) were becoming less distinct from Online Writing Courses (OWCs) or OWC-hybrids, and as Hewett and Warnock unfortunately predicted, "digital technologies will not wait on educators to catch up" (p. 549).
A global health crisis showed us this entanglement of OWI and F2F writing instruction more clearly, and it shed light on our levels of preparedness. A lot of instructors received a crash-course in designing course websites and delivering instruction when not F2F, although one area without consensus was whether courses should be synchronous or asynchronous to accommodate for uncertainties of Spring 2020. Mick and Middlebrook (2015) describe the considerations programs should make in regard to deciding on a course offering's synchronous or asynchronous modality: How familiar are students with the LMS?; How familiar are instructors with the LMS?; and What technologies does the institution have access to? They also tell us that one modality is not better than the other, and remind us that it's important to understand the instructor’s, the school's, and the students' technical capabilities in these courses.
There were, of course, still pedagogical concerns that had less to do with the mode of delivery. Teachers and WPAs alike were thinking more explicitly about what care work and an ethic of care meant for them: Nagelhout and Tillery (2021) define an ethic of care as one that "centers morality on the needs and experiences of others, and is fundamentally relational" (p. 3). Teachers and WPAs were thinking through ways to center their students' needs in this new context, although additional constraints presented in terms of time, positionality, and university culture. Still, that ethic of care appears throughout the literature about pandemic pedagogy, manifesting in calls for flexibility, changed expectations, and attention to access needs for students; teachers saw these changes as a form of care work. Johnson-Eilola & Selber (2021) describe pedagogical strategies that can help through the pandemic: a need for flexible classroom scaffolding; backwards design; and an awareness of interaction patterns. In many institutions, teachers had less than two weeks to move their courses totally online, while at the same time the stress and grief associated with the moment made many things more difficult than usual. As part of an ethic of care, many instructors tried to reduce students' workload during that time, such as Meyer (2020). The same Bay View Analytics (Ralph, n.d.) survey found that "Roughly one-half of faculty Participants (48%) reduced the amount of work they expected students to complete while about one-third (32%) lowered their expectations for the quality of student work," implying grading practices may have also adjusted as a part of this care work. Mandiberg (2021) articulates his decisions in moving half a semester of a Digital Media course online, wherein he understood the constraints of his students' situations and their need for rigorous preparation for the courses to follow. Mandiberg opted for nontraditional Adobe "clones," since software is usually located in a physical classroom, and asynchronous LMS lessons as part of what he calls a trauma-informed pedagogy of care to not add to students’ existing stress and uncertainties. Still, sometimes attempts to show that care had limits. For example, Doyle (2020) writes about teaching as a graduate student with little control over her course's curriculum; in her case, she could not cancel assignments or projects as much as other classes could to make allowances for students. She emphasizes that the smaller enrollment of a composition course was more conducive to a feeling of community, and notes that she could relate a little more easily to her students because she, too, was a student.
Pedagogical choices like these will last past the moment of the pandemic. Buckley-Marudas & Rose (2021), when writing about the Cleveland Teaching Collaborative, a group that shared pandemic pedagogies through 2020 and includes teachers of all levels (Pre-K through higher education), argue that "The postpandemic teacher will be more comfortable taking risks and assuming the role of learner, see collaboration as a privilege and an opportunity for growth, and operate with the belief that teaching and learning are deeply relational processes that must be rooted in collective care." This collective care seems to echo the ethic of care from Nagelhout and Tillery (2021) above that is also focused on relationships: teaching and administrative work, then, became more acutely aware of how care can be cultivated in these interactions and relationships.
A few profiles on how programs handled supporting instructors and students have been shared: for example, Mitchum et al (2020) describe how they crafted a correspondence packet to meet a need for inclusion and access among many of their students; Ristich, McArdle, and Rhodes (2021) focused on "archi-strategic decisions" which "extend individual and programmatic capabilities, despite their seemingly improvisational or impromptu nature" (p. 129). These are made in the moment and with "available means,” but they can be permanently useful. Nagelhout and Tillery (2021) focus on running TPC programs from an ethic of care in pandemic times: as they define it, its morality is based on centering others and relationships. Specifically, they discuss strategies for helping faculty maintain a work-life balance that target faculty workload through clear benchmarks and reflection. We’re finding, then, that pandemic pedagogy has not just asked us to push for further theorizing of OWI, but also of care work and WPA work.