Faculty, staff, and students should not be left in the wind like this to wonder why this is happening. It’s infuriating tbh, and #HigherEd continues to be its own worst enemy.
We have to prioritize well-being and talk about trauma.
This is not only about students managing stress & trauma. A collective trauma is also always a crisis of meaning.
Why am I here? What is my purpose? What is the point of all this?
A #HigherEd focused solely on career training can never answer those questions or this crisis.
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Okay here goes nothing. A new thread 🧵about #CourseHero.
My name's Karen, I've worked in #HigherEd for 20 years, and this is the absolute last thing I want to talk about today. But, I'm compelled in the face of what I see as immense harm being done to students.
I want to be as transparent as possible and encourage you to take nothing I say at face value. Don't trust me. Trust what you see.
To that end, here's how I've profited thus far from talking about Course Hero, for any who might wonder about my motivations. $1.19.
I don't disagree with anything in this piece. What I find really interesting is the assumption that those of us who are advocating for caring pedagogy, grounded in a balance b/t support and challenge, have at any point become less rigorous.
And that to me is the mark of #ToxicRigor. When someone points to flexibility, humanizing, and support and says, "You're dumbing things down" or "You've sacrificed rigor," there's just no evidence of that, so something else is up.
I'm doing some research this morning on long-term collective traumas...
So many people are saying to me that they feel like they're at a breaking point, along with everyone around them. That they feel worse, not better. I thought this @insidehighered piece captured this really well (thank you students).
@insidehighered This idea that while we're managing individual crises, that everyone around us seems to be too. The whole of this is greater than the sum of its parts. What do we know about collective traumas that can guide us through this?
"But now it’s just expected and understood: everyone is just one minor event away from snapping. COVID scares can trigger existential crises and then ripple effects. Why ask each other “How are you?” when nothing has changed in almost two years?"