In March 2020, we were all scrambling to move our courses online. University writing courses had to shift, mostly with only a couple weeks' notice or less, as everyone involved also found themselves navigating a new and uncertain world disrupted by a pandemic. Some of us were teaching, but others--faculty and GTAs alike--found ourselves working in writing program administration, and asking questions like, "What support do our instructors and students need from their program right now? What can we provide them with to make this transition smoother, especially for those unfamiliar with teaching online?"

In March 2020, we were all scrambling to redesign our courses, keep our students in mind, take care of ourselves and others, and still be good teachers--and we did the best we could. We have reflections from instructors to prove they were doing their best in their classrooms, and a few program profiles that describe measures taken to take care of faculty and students while still promoting learning. We also have the opportunity, now, to take a broader view:

This is the core question for my dissertation work, titled "Reflections on Writing Programs, Pandemic Support, and Resilience." This exploratory and reflective study will examine decisions made by WPAs during the sudden switch to remote learning experienced by many in March 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic. In doing so, I hope to illuminate some of the underlying assumptions made in decisions to support writing instructors, and ask how those interact with ideas of empathy, online writing instruction best practices, and larger ideas of WPA’s roles. These reflections can also be related to issues of crisis communication, self-care, and academic labor issues.

I initially thought of these questions as a graduate student who was doing WPA work herself at the time of the emergency switch to remote teaching and reflected on the choices I made and conversations I had in that moment. To conduct this study, I went to the experts themselves, asking for brief reflections from WPAs and those doing WPA-like work in March 2020. In this article, I begin to try to return the favor by discussing the results of a short survey (Phase 1 of my larger study) meant to prompt those doing WPA work to reflect on decisions they made in that moment of crisis. We are not yet out of pandemic pedagogy, but we are more keenly aware of how quickly our programs may have to adapt to a new situation. With this study, I hope to provide a "big picture view" of the decisions and challenges writing programs faced, building upon the meaningful reflections on pedagogy in the COVID age and the program profiles and reflections that are continuing to come out.

Pandemic Writing Pedagogy

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.

Methods

Study Design

This study reflects on the March 2020 choices of WPAs in a few ways: first, through a survey with questions about decisions, obstacles, and what instructors writing programs were supporting (Phase 1); then, through two interviews, with one focused on reflective narratives and the other examining support materials crafted for writing programs by those doing WPA-like work (Phase 2). The main question of this project is "What support did writing programs offer to instructors in March 2020 when a global health crisis suddenly forced us to change our methods of teaching and learning?" The Phase 1 Survey, which this article focuses on, thinks through this with a few sub-questions:

1. What areas of instruction (technology, delivery, synchronous engagement, other support to instructors) did that focus on?
2. Was that support catered at all to the specific often-tenuous situations (contingent faculty/graduate TAs) of instructors in these types of programs?
3. What barriers existed to delivering that support?

I first designed this study as part of an Empirical Methods course in my doctoral program, before working on it in more detail with my faculty advisor and with consultation of my university's Institutional Review Board (Approved IRB-2021-779). To capture these reflections before they faded from memory, I began Phase 1 of this study, the survey, in October of 2021.

Survey Design & Distribution

I designed my survey after more reading on empirical research, in particular Jarrett's (2021) Surveys That Work, which focuses on making surveys easy and quick to complete. Jarrett recommends using few open-ended questions, meaning that most questions on the Phase 1 survey were multiple-choice with one open-ended question at the end.

This survey was conducted on Qualtrics survey software and distributed through writing studies mailing lists (NextGEN and WPA-A), on Twitter (with the hashtag #WPALife), and later through direct recruitment emails. After initially circulating the survey in October 2021, the study was later revised to

1. Include direct recruitment, and
2. Expand inclusion protocol to those who did WPA work but did not have a named WPA position.

I was encouraged to pursue Direct Recruitment to increase response rates on the survey; the decision to revise inclusion protocol was for the same reason, and because, as literature like McLeod (2007) reminds us, those who do WPA work do not always have WPA titles (or their positions are more complex than one title, as we see in the Results). The Direct Recruitment list was pulled from my faculty advisor's contacts and other publicly-available information, such as CWPA conference programs and who uses social media hashtags like #WPAlife. These revisions, with an additional push on social media and mailing lists, more than doubled my response rate. Between October 2021 and January 2022, I received a total of 55 responses. It is difficult to estimate an accurate response rate for this survey: there are 822 members of the WPA-Announcements Google group, but finding information on current NextGen membership is difficult, and the expanded inclusion protocol (beyond named WPA titles) makes the numbers even fuzzier.

After the Survey

Conversation guides for the interviews, Phase 2, were drafted for IRB approval, but were altered based on survey responses. Phase 2 began over Spring 2022, and recruitment for Phase 2 occurred at the end of the Phase 1 survey, where participants could mark interest in being contacted about scheduling interviews. Phase 2 interviews then used the conversation guide, adapted to each participant's survey responses and support materials being examined. Survey data was assigned to specific participants only if they participated in Phase 2, and only as a means of prompting conversation; if Phase 1 participants declined to participate in Phase 2, their personal information was not collected.

In January 2022, I downloaded data from the Phase 1 survey from Qualtrics, using one big, messy spreadsheet with all questions and data, and then adding sheets to focus on specific questions. A few multiple-choice questions left room for "other" responses in a textbox, which I coded on these additional sheets. Responses to the one open-ended question, "If you could time-travel to two weeks before the emergency shift to remote teaching and give yourself a quick bit of WPA-related advice, what would you say?”, were also coded after data collection. However, when discussing the progress of my study with my peer-mentoring/advising group, I identified some early themes in this question's responses to discuss with them, and their feedback was kept in mind as I did my final coding. Coding was done in a couple of rounds, then: one in mid-November, to update my colleagues on my study, and one mid-January. In the initial round, I considered some notable answers for the "other" responses, and preliminary codes for the one open-ended question. More codes were defined in the second round to, for example, try to untangle the ways that OWI-specific preparation is different from technological familiarity and how that is different from other tech support infrastructure. Notably, this coding after-the-fact helped me rethink my initial questions: while I was wondering about how WPAs conceptualized empathy in the early pandemic, many responses brought up some form of self-care for themselves and their instructors, giving me a more specific lens for thinking about this emotional labor for WPAs.

Results

Demographics

Between October 2021 and January 2022, this survey received 55 responses. The following demographics represent participants' roles as of March 2020 and are represented in Table 1. Of those 55 responses, 32 came from participants in tenure-line positions, 12 from full-time teaching faculty, 6 from graduate assistants, three from WPAs with purely administrative appointments, and one each from a faculty in a position similar to the tenure-line and a non-tenure-line faculty with a dual appointment not covered by language in the survey. Most were in some sort of formal role with the writing program: Lead administrators (35), supporting administrators (10), online course coordinator (1), or even had multiple roles and duties in the program (2) or between the writing program and the WAC/WID program (1). Three participants assisted in the switch to remote teaching because they formerly had a position in the writing program, one because they were the lead administrator of the writing center, and one as a GTA with WPA experience.

48 of the participants were working at public universities and 7 at private institutions. 39 of those were doctoral-granting institutions, with 29 primarily research institutions, 12 regional comprehensive colleges and universities, 7 small liberal arts colleges, 3 community colleges, and 1 historically Black college or university. Most of these responses came from the contexts of larger institutions: using the Carnegie size classifications and reported undergraduate students, 3 responses were from participants at small institutions (1,000-2,999 undergraduate students), 14 from medium-sized institutions (3,000-9,999), and 35 from large (10,000+) institutions, with "very small" schools under 1,000 students unrepresented. Of the 35 large institutions, 12 were what I classified as "very large" with over 25,000 students.

Table 1: Particpants' Positions (Teaching and Administrative)

Table 2: Participants' Institutions
(these categories are not mutually exclusive)

Determining Support Needed

Participants were asked to identify which areas of instruction they addressed or focused on when communicating with faculty in their programs, to identify what they felt the most pressing needs of their instructors were. Multiple options could be selected. Table 3 represents the frequency of each selection in response to the question, “What area(s) of instruction did you focus support towards during the shift of March 2020? Choose all that apply.”

Table 3: Areas of Instruction Addressed by the Writing Program

Responses in the "Other" section included:

1. compassionate and trauma-informed teaching resources (3), including on student reflections in times of crisis (1);
2. adjustments to curriculum and assignments (3);
3. adjusting expectations of self and others;
4. getting technology and internet hotspots to instructors;
5. pausing program assessment;
6. resources on antiracism and linguistic justice; and
7. ungrading.

Another question focused on if all instructors in the program received the same communications or resources: “Did you provide different supportive communications or resources tailored to the different types of instructors in your program?” Two-thirds of participants (37/55; 67%) said that everyone in the writing program received the same communications and resources. However, when participants indicated that communications might be different for different groups of instructors, about 55% (11/18) said they reached out more or offered more support to graduate instructors, many of whom were teaching for the first time. 5/18, or 27%, focused on teaching or contingent faculty. Some had their own lists of who to send specific resources to based on something other than faculty type: at least a couple of participants tried to target more help to whom they felt would have the most difficulty moving instruction online. Finally, one response indicated specific communications may be directed for different courses, such as sections marked specifically for multilingual writers.

Delivering Support to Instructors

To clarify the types of hardships writing program staff may have faced in supporting their instructors, participants were asked, “What, if any, barriers did you face in supporting your instructors during the emergency shift to remote instruction? Choose all that apply.” Participants could select multiple options, and Table 4 shows the frequency of each selection.

Table 4: Barriers to Supporting Writing Program Instructors

Of the other kinds of obstacles listed, four were related to the mental wellbeing of faculty, three to other types of lack of infrastructure and preparation, two that simply indicated being overwhelmed, and one listing personal mental wellbeing. One response indicated being tokenized to the point of being responsible for all antiracism work in the program; another indicated that faculty resistance (largely from those in more secure positions) presented some barriers.

When considering institution size alongside the obstacles WPAs faced, all of the participants from small institutions (1,500-2,999 students) marked at least three obstacles: time constraints, resource constraints, and lack of clarity on new expectations. However, institution type did not appear to affect the time crunch that everyone felt: time constraints were the most frequent obstacles for those at primarily research institutions, regional comprehensive universities, and small liberal arts colleges. For both research universities and SLACs, constraints on resources came in second.

The Time-Travel Question: Giving Yourself Advice

As noted above, only one open-ended question was provided: "If you could time-travel to two weeks before the emergency shift to remote teaching and give yourself a quick bit of WPA-related advice, what would you say?” Below are the main themes found in these open-ended responses, with their frequency marked. Only one response was not coded under one of these categories: an outlier self-critical response.

In it for the long haul, surviving, and compassion towards self

The most common theme among the advice given was thinking about oneself within the larger picture: one response summarized this feeling with “You can't take care of others if you don't take care of yourself.” Others assured their past selves that they had the skills to make it through their situation. The frequency of these responses are what made the one uncoded response (above) seem like an outlier. Responses mentioned that things don't have to be perfect; that crises will have to be prioritized; having grace with oneself; and self-care as necessary before taking care of others.

Technology & LMS use (15)

Multiple responses mentioned getting faculty comfortable quickly with their institution's LMS. Others mentioned training faculty on synchronous engagement methods (such as videoconferencing software) sooner: for example, one response said “Make sure everyone in your department knows how to use Zoom and the University's LMS.” Others mentioned encouraging faculty to view online instruction more favorably shortly before the switch online was apparent.

Curriculum & Pedagogy (14)

Many responses related to curriculum and pedagogy overlapped with ideas for infrastructure and technology, such as collecting resources and deciding between potential course modalities. At least a few pointed to the existence of OWI scholarship, suggesting preparation could have included reading what we already know about online writing instruction. A few other recommendations referenced keeping course goals and outcomes at the forefront of their mind.

Labor & Infrastructure (11)

Responses discussing labor and infrastructure ranged from mentions of teachers' contracts to difficulty with communications with upper administration to discussing more faculty development opportunities that would have helped prepare instructors better for March 2020. One response suggested mobilizing early rather than waiting on their administrators to make more decisions; one suggested creating an online repository of teaching material ahead of time; one mentioned preparing instructors for the student body's potential lack of resources when classes moved online; one recommended focusing nearly all the WPA's work to just faculty support during that time of crisis. A few responses mentioned encouraging a culture favorable to online learning before the remote switch occurred, or distinguished their own roles in program administration from other parts of the university that could provide more general tech support.

Unsure/No Advice (9)

The reasons for responses saying some version of “I don’t know what advice I would give myself” were pretty evenly split into two different reasonings: the first, that participants believed they did the best they could in the moment; the second, that participants felt their best attempts were so impeded by external factors (such as upper admin and other faculty) that their advice wouldn’t have made a difference. Those who used the former reasoning weren’t cross-coded with the survival/self-care theme, but showed similar trends in compassion towards their past selves.

OWI-Specific Preparation (7)

Some responses either referenced reading existing scholarship on online writing instruction or referenced OWI best practices, such as one that said, "Don't start the conversation with a synchronous vs. asynchronous discussion. Start with major goals and work backward from there." All of these responses were cross-coded with Technology & LMS Use, but they added additional pedagogical interest or principles beyond technological support.

Determining Needs (5)

Five responses indicated they would have spent more time determining what their instructors perceived their needs to have been. One suggested town halls among the program and instructors to more directly address questions; one mentioned finding opportunities to address mental wellbeing more directly; another indicated their instructors may have received too much information.

Discussion

The goal of this survey was to begin a longer study that collects reflections from WPAs to better learn about how writing programs worked in a particular moment of crisis, and from even this preliminary survey data, we can start to make connections to issues of pedagogy, institutional support, and care work.

As a doctoral student, there were things I learned even just from research design: first of all, that not everybody who does WPA work has a WPA title (as McLeod 2007 reminds us), which is why the revision to my inclusion protocol was needed. A second major takeaway as a researcher is that, when you ask WPAs to help you with your research, they help: direct recruitment brought in not only more responses but multiple encouraging notes, and over three quarters of folks who took the survey marked that they might be interested in the interviews in Phase Two of the study. (Of course, we aren’t surprised by this.)

As the study moves forward, I look forward to learning more from the firsthand stories of WPAs who were supporting their writing programs in a critical moment. Right now, though, we have the following takeaways to think through:

Technology mattered and matters.

This is the most readily apparent takeaway, and the literature we already have from post-March 2020 agrees: we could have had more teacher training when it comes to online instruction. At the same time, there is a rich and growing body of work on OWI that we can use; while I won't attempt to answer the question, "Why didn't we use it sooner?", there is the indication from many of these responses that many instructors were reluctant to teach online pre-pandemic, and therefore were not familiar with online teaching strategies.

Even with our existing OWI knowledge, many programs and instructors had to approach their courses and goals with more open experimentation: trial-and-error is mentioned in responses (and the House of Lore referenced in Hewett & Warnock 2015, from North 1987, lives on). This is another reason that the teaching and program-specific reflections, like those in the literature review, are important to continue to collect. In some ways, the Spring 2020 term was a massive online instruction experiment under some of the worst possible conditions; I posit we can still learn from it. We must, as Hewett & Warnock urge, continue cataloging those experimentations. Although we can hope that no more crises emerge and online instruction can be saved for the teachers and students who want to use it, the contexts of online instruction–and of teaching as a whole–will continue to change, as will the technology we use to deliver our courses.

What is and isn't the WPA's job?

Beyond OWI, there was the question of balancing WPA work with IT work: one response said, "I'm not responsible for teaching people how to use" their LMS. This is something that varies based on institutional contexts: who is offering online course support, other than the program head also responsible for pedagogy and curriculum? How robust is that support system for online courses?

Among other infrastructural issues at the university is the ability of student populations to switch to remote instruction on a moment's notice, including cases where campuses closed and students needed to travel elsewhere. One response indicated a wish that faculty could have been better prepared for how students would handle the switch; Mitchum et al (2020) addressed these student needs as a program with their correspondence packets.My data here suggests that, perhaps, institution type wasn’t much of a deciding factor in whether a participant indicated they felt resource constraints when supporting their faculty, although more data is needed to say this decisively. So, WPAs and other higher education administrators need to ask: how can we build up these resources? How can learning to use and adapting to new technology be continuous and part of the local culture, rather than just something that is needed during a crisis or when the school switches their LMSes? More urgently, how can teacher training be adjusted so that good pedagogy can be sustained, rather than retaught, when uncertain times or big changes occur?

Hewett and Warnock (2015)’s discussion of online instruction and pedagogy becoming a larger and larger part of composition means that WPAs also have the opportunity to stop separating online instruction training from regular teaching training. Even face-to-face courses use LMSes and digital composing tools. Professional development opportunities, we will find if we haven’t already, can be catered to all potential course modalities.

We have the opportunity to reconsider priorities and more concretely theorize care work in these contexts.

Ethics of care in writing programs in the early pandemic days, according to the literature we have like Mitchum et al. (2020) and Nagelhout and Tillery (2021), appeared as additional accessibility considerations and reducing workloads for students and instructors in terms of assigning and grading writing. This doesn't mean the classes became pointless: multiple responses indicated critically considering the program's goals, and as one put it, "Learn[ing] what your priorities and values really are."

This conversation becomes complicated in the age of the long-pandemic: When do we return to our normal outcomes and assignment sequences and grading practices? Of course, some have suggested that we don't. This ties into the discussions of antiracism and pedagogy given exigence by the two summers following March 2020: in Summer 2020, during mobilization of many Black Lives Matter protests, and in Spring/Summer 2021, during mounting criticism of the Council of Writing Program Administrators and their Outcomes for First Year Writing. This is to say, there is a growing consensus that, whatever the outcomes and norms were before March 2020, we cannot return to them. The discussion of reconsidering outcomes because of their basis in whiteness runs parallel to discussions of not going back to priorities we had pre-2020 because of their exclusions of conversations around course accessibility and best online teaching practices.

These multiple calls to reconsider values and priorities go hand-in-hand with what I see as an opportunity to more concretely theorize what self-care and working with an ethic of care look like for the WPA. When I began this study, I was interested in how empathy could be understood through the ways WPAs supported their faculty in this critical moment. Indeed, our earlier definition of care work focuses on others' needs. What these survey results and our other discussions are revealing is that, to perform an ethic of care and focus on others' needs, one's own needs must be met. Survey responses that mentioned focusing on survival tell us that, for many, an ethic of care pre-pandemic was focused on delivering care to others before considering the care needed for the self. After these survey results, we can begin to approach empathy from another angle: how does someone--in a position to make policy and support others (such as at the head of a writing program), yet with abilities often limited by factors like faculty status, resources, time, and upper administration--approach caring for themselves so they may care for others in these critical moments? Further, what infrastructural changes can make this care work easier? For example, a few responses indicated concerns for contingent faculty who may have contracts put at risk by the pandemic; some indicated groups of instructors who needed additional support during the switch. Another common theme was that WPAs couldn’t make policy decisions for their programs because the policy decisions of their superiors were unclear; how can we consider caring for yourself and your faculty when the way forward is unclear?

We can begin to see some themes in the specific pieces of advice that were coded for self-care: a need for flexibility; lowering expectations for self and others; refocusing labor on what’s important; prioritizing people, not assignments or outcomes; and taking care of self to take care of others. This is something more to explore in the future. When we consider the relationality of teaching and administration with an ethic of care, we should fully conceptualize what that care is on both sides of that relationship. What we do know, however, is that those previous processes–with less attention to how care and equity may influence our goals–are unsustainable in uncertain times.

WPA work presents a site where intellectual and scholarly work in Composition and OWI meet practice and institutional power, meaning that capturing this particular moment in WPA work allows us to think about how these areas of scholarship and practice interact, especially when put under pressure. As I continue this study into Phase Two, I will continue to examine what it means to be prepared for continued uncertainty and what that ethic of care means in uncertain times. Further study of this kind of work will, hopefully, enrich both our theory and practice going forward, highlighting good work and resilience. In other words, we did our best, and we should articulate what, exactly, that means.

This study is ongoing at the time of publication! More information can be found at myerace.com/diss.