Dear Provost Richards,

Thank you for your reply to the AAUP board letter requesting clarification on expectations of faculty for delivering our courses simultaneously in both online and in-person versions in the fall. As you may be aware, the questions we posed in our earlier message emerged from our discussion on our faculty listserv. We trust you do not object to our posting your reply for our readers, who are urgently concerned with what autumn quarter teaching will entail.

If we are reading correctly, your response suggests that the expectations for in-person classes have not changed as a result of the pandemic – that we are, in effect, reverting to pre-pandemic teaching protocols and norms.  This is, indeed, reassuring.  At the same time, we find ourselves unable to reconcile that reassurance with the CTL’s now widely-circulated guidelines.

The Western Washington MOU between administration and the union clarifies that no faculty member can be required to undertake multi-modal teaching (and thus cannot be punished or disadvantaged for declining to do so) – indeed, faculty who undertake this work are understood to be assuming an overload (carrying supplemental compensation).  Faculty at UW currently do not have the same assurance, especially since so many decisions are pushed to the unit level.

Certainly, many of us will return to the classroom with new techniques and pedagogies; while the speed at which we learned them is new, the idea of pedagogical innovation itself is not.  We are always growing as teachers, trying out new methods, and using best practices; very few of us teach the same class in the same way for very long. But the CTL guidelines do not simply encourage growth and innovation:  they introduce an entirely new teaching modality that is hard, if not impossible, to implement across the diverse range of courses taught at the university.   To the best of our collective knowledge, the university has not previously envisioned a scenario in which remote students would enroll in in-person classes. The only, very specific and limited way in which this kind of multi-modal instruction occurred was in a handful of classrooms where discussions were conducted synchronously with both in-person and remote students participating – the so-called “hy-flex” model -- which is the one configuration CTL specifically recommends we avoid if we are untrained in facilitating such classrooms and do not have appropriate technology available.

Evidence-based pedagogies, now well-established at UW, concern our approach to either in-person or (more recently) to remote and online teaching. Aside from classes designed from the start using the hyflex model, best practice does not support multi-modal teaching in one class.  To be sure, “flipping” one’s classes and taping lectures can be very helpful in accommodating, for example, student athletes, or other students whose work or care obligations results in a relatively higher number of absences.  But students navigating such pressures are not remote students – they can and do nevertheless attend a majority of class meetings (or sections or labs).  The CTL guidelines envision something altogether different:  the accommodation of students who will simply not be present in the classroom and will therefore require the instructor to devise a parallel set of activities and assessments that can be conducted remotely (e.g., “for critical in-person exercises, activities, and assessments, determine how a remote student can still meet the course learning goals”).

As you rightly note, the CTL guidelines are recommendations, not “directives.”  In practice, however, the distinction is not clear.  While some units may leave it to the discretion of individual faculty to determine whether or not they might potentially accommodate remote students within in-person classes, other units will likely regard the CTL “recommendations” as a set of best practices to which all faculty (or at any rate, all meritorious faculty) are expected to adhere. (This is a widely-used managerial technique in the corporate world: Amazon or Google doesn’t require that programmers sacrifice work-life balance to 12 hour work days, but everyone knows that this is the expectation and the condition of professional success.)   

Within units, faculty with lower teaching loads, or whose research itself involves teaching and learning, may have more time and inclination to develop bimodal classes, whereas those with heavier loads (our over-worked teaching faculty and adjuncts), may be penalized for not being able to offer as many options to students. Students may expect remote access to all classes within a department because a few faculty have chosen to offer it: this will create expectations that could result in some faculty being penalized in merit reviews and student evaluations, to say nothing of work-life balance.

The UW-AAUP Board is deeply concerned about the potential for profound inequities across and within units, resulting from the differential interpretation by program heads or chairs of these frankly ambiguous guidelines. Further, we note that in the absence of reformed faculty dispute resolution language, faculty are justifiably fearful about how any complaints about performance will be managed. This is especially true now that it is clear that student complaints about faculty can be used in disciplinary procedures without revealing the identity or even the content of such complaints.

Respectfully,

The UW-AAUP Executive Board