Advocating for Ourselves as Students, With Ourselves
Picture it: the first week of classes. Unlike the spring semester, I had weeks to prepare my syllabus and course structure. One of the courses I teach socializes students to the expectations of graduate-level education and our field’s expectations. We discuss expectations around writing, class participation, the profession’s values, and what it means to be a student affairs professional. In our first week of the course, we discussed what it means to be a graduate student and how it differs from one’s undergraduate experience. Prompted by the authors of the week’s texts, we talked about the importance of advocating for oneself in classes and work.
We discussed the imperative that one must ask what they need. We talked at length about stating your needs in coursework with instructors and work with supervisors. I shared with students that if I was asked by my spring semester class to cut the (modified) major assignment of the course because of the pandemic, I would have done so in a heartbeat. We talked about ways to bring these things up with professors and bosses. It became one of our core discussion topics of the class period.
Fast forward to now: the fourth week of teaching over Zoom. Tonight, my co-instructor and I decided to check in with students using a visual tool I created. Though still a student, I am done with all my required coursework, and I am plugging away at my dissertation. Perhaps because of my lack of coursework, I was caught off guard at the sheer exhaustion on students’ faces tonight. We acknowledged the varied feelings of fatigue and sadness present in our Zoom room; we told students we would help drive much of the night’s conversation. Rather than relying on them to propel the discussion, we made some on-the-fly decisions to put further weight on us as instructors.
As I walked away from my computer after class, I wondered about our conversation in the first week. Are these students advocating for themselves? Are they saying what they need from supervisors and instructors?
I can only imagine what students are going through right now. Have other faculty tempered expectations on participation, reading load, and assignments? Working at a university that subscribes to a fantasy that campus life is like any other year, what expectations do their supervisors and offices hold for their productivity and workload? How long has it been since they have seen their loved ones in-person? What kinds of connections sustain them as they’ve moved across the state, country, and the world to start their graduate education? How does one who has recently moved develop a sense of belonging without being able to go to any place?
For many graduate students in my field — and others — these various questions are part of their daily lives. And they are doing this while finally getting to pursue the level and kind of education they have thought about doing for months and years! What they have pictured for so long — taking classes and doing work that most aligns with their career goals — is not what they are experiencing. While we all have our part to play to control the spread of COVID-19, the life adjustments for some have come at the expense of their ideal picture of certain life milestones.
Many of these students could not have imagined this would be their experience. They are being asked — many for the first time — to build relationships with peers through online mediums. They are being supervised by individuals they have only met once or twice in person. These very supervisors are fried from the endless parade of job insecurity, uncertainty about what campus leadership will do next, and attempting to manage their own lives through chaos.
In another class I co-teach, we asked students to envision parameters for a group assignment meant to help construct notes for everyone to access. We wanted to co-construct the framework together so everyone could be on the same page and advocate for what felt manageable. Students offered vague ideas of what they wanted:
“The writing should be clear.”
“It should have some sort of structure and consistency.”
“No Comic Sans.”
The Comic Sans comment is the closest we came to any level of specificity for the assignment. After about 15 minutes of discussion, my co-instructor and I agreed we would take students’ ideas and create parameters for the work. I thought to myself: “Here is the students’ chance to advocate for what they want, and they did not grab the bull by the horns like I thought they would.” Perhaps they were/are exhausted. Perhaps it is their newness to the graduate school process.
As I wrapped up dinner, a good friend asked me how my class went this evening. I shared my reflections on students’ exhaustion, how they seemed burnt out already, and it is only week 4. I shared my concern that everyone may have pre-COVID expectations of these master’s students during COVID. My friend asked: By everyone, did I mean supervisors/faculty or the students themselves?
I misread the text — I was finishing a delicious corn-on-the-cob — and said both faculty and supervisors. I brought up the class discussion we had in the first week about advocacy. How many of the students want routine and normalcy. I discussed my own decisions to eliminate readings or modify assignments and students’ reactions of shock, awe, and glee.
Being kind in my kernel-loving moment, my friend asked the question differently while offering me his own reflections:
What tools are being given to [students] to help them talk through the expectations they built themselves? I don’t think I would’ve been able to even think about asking for support [in coursework] because I couldn’t even talk myself through what it could mean to not do [the projects initially assigned on the syllabus]…I wonder if we push so much to advocate for change in others and asking for our needs but also not thinking about advocating for change in ourselves and to accept/readjust our own expectations for what we actually need.
The last part hit me like a ton of bricks.
I usually hear in statements like this as: “I shouldn’t expect to be helped in certain ways. I should make myself small and minimize my own needs at this moment.”
What I heard this time was something I thought I learned long ago:
“We often assume that our very status as helpers grants us immunity from the suffering we witness. We are often wrong” (van Dernoot Lipsky, 2009)
The students I am teaching, the ones many of us are teaching as emerging student affairs educators — on top of everything else — are working as helpers, wanting to do their best to show up for students and their supervisors, and may not be accustomed at all to adjusting their expectations for themselves.
I know many of the people around me during my master’s program would tell you my expectations for myself were almost too high. I was insecure about my place in the program, questioning whether or not I belonged there. I had two assistantship interviews during my program visit, and it seemed like everyone else had packed schedules. I was doing my best in a job placement that didn’t feel right for me — despite people around me who tried to do the utmost to accommodate me. How the heck could I adjust expectations for myself when those aspirations made me feel more legitimate? They were my Blue Fairy; they made me feel like a real graduate student.
I won’t lie: these high expectations still loom large. Last week, I made the difficult decision to change course on my dissertation after already defending my proposal. The topic I proposed — a dream project of mine — is impossible in our world right now. Doing it would be unfair to the participants with whom I have worked over the last two years. And the level and depth of analysis required to do that project feels impossible when I am already drained from teaching, writing, and trying to live in 2020.
Altering my dissertation is/was devastating and still quite raw. I am still mourning the loss of my topic. I feel shame because “I should be able to do the topic I proposed.” I feel angry because “this was the project I always wanted to do.” I feel sad because “this pandemic has taken away much of the agency I wanted to exercise during this final lap of the Ph.D.” My sadness and disappointment from this shift in the dissertation were because my expectations remained the same about my ending to my Ph.D.: despite a global pandemic, a national racial uprising, and a host of natural disasters affecting my loved ones, I believe(d) my expectations for myself could and should remain the same.
That is unrealistic. As is my hope that students could so internalize a lesson about expectations that I had not yet absorbed myself.
So what to do about all of this? I have three ideas.
First, as an instructor, I need to do a better job of steering the discussion and meaning making of conversation.
As someone who studies students, I know when students take learning into their hands and apply it to their own contexts, the learning takes better root in their thinking. In a pre-pandemic world, I would do much more co-constructing with students about course assignments, have them tell me more about what they read in preparation for class, and expect more participation in each class session.
With a pandemic in the background (and foreground), I need to continue anticipating their needs rather than expecting them to know what they need. I need to give them options rather than them coming up with solutions out of nowhere. I need to be flexible for the days they are engaged and energetic, and those days when we are all mentally and emotionally in bed.
And some days, I need to make class whatever it can be that day and not put too much pressure on myself or others to have significant or transformative conversations. There are many days where we all need the mundane and the boring to get through.
Second, as a student, I need to do a better job of holding myself more gently.
I need to remind myself I have made it to this point in my graduate studies because I have put in the work and belong here. My imagination of what makes up a real graduate student must match reality. I work hard, commit myself to my studies as much as possible, and that makes me as real as any other graduate student (no Blue Fairies needed here). Instructors relaxing reading or assignments do not make me any less of a graduate student. Supervisors adjusting workloads does not mean I cannot handle more. All this means is people are trying to help me through a tough time in life while still trying to give me a sense of routine and normalcy.
I need to undertake some honest self-appraisal about what I can and cannot take on. I need others to think through what they assign me and what feels realistic right now.
I need to rely on others who have reached out and offered their support. I need to remind myself I will be greeted with compassion and understanding more than disdain or malice when I say I cannot do something. I need others to meet with that compassion and understanding, as almost everyone already has.
And, all of this is to say my generalized anxiety will still loom large. All these needs and checks I need to do are incredibly tough to undertake in the current state of affairs. Some days, I need to curl up on my couch to watch Sister, Sister, or find my escape in nature. Some days, it is not about doing more and only existing as much as possible.
Finally, as both an instructor and a student, I have to talk about this more openly with the students I learn alongside.
Students in my classes — I hope — know me as someone who brings a great deal of energy, fun, and (awful) humor to learning spaces. I have told students about my daily concerns for my family — a dad who’s been an essential employee since this all began, my mom who is back working in a front office of a high school, my sister in the medical field combating this pandemic on the front line. I have shared how I am trying to navigate my days — but I have not shared how I have adjusted my expectations and changed my standards to take better care of me. I need to start doing that more.
I pride myself on a pedagogy that does not assume anyone inherently as a skill-set or mental model of doing something; as an instructor, I must model that first. This adjustment of expectations must be another thing I set an example for, no matter how tough it is.
And then I have to go back and remind myself to be gentle again. Here I am creating a post about loosening and adjusting expectations for myself and once again I have written a number of statements that put myself down for not doing things right or enough. We are all managing right now, including as instructors. We are going to fuck up and need to honor that as part of this process too. As a strong Capricorn, this is especially hard for me. And I know it is important to do.
Goldrick-Rab and Stommel (2018) delivered a strong argument about supporting the students we as instructors have, not the students we wish we had. There’s also an argument to be made that we must teach and learn in the conditions we have, not the conditions we wish we had.
Nothing I have shared here is new or shiny. And yet it feels so important to reiterate: We must be gentle with one another and ourselves especially. We must make hard decisions — decisions we may not want to make — in the name of getting through this pandemic, this academic year with some part of ourselves still intact.
We owe it to ourselves to adjust our expectations for what is possible right now and name what we actually need, not what we wish we needed.
