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