Care for Teachers After Covid-19

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Thank you for having us.

Angela

Yes, thank you.

Susan 

Of course, of course, yes. So I’m just gonna go straight in and ask if you could both tell us a little bit about yourselves and your work to this point. I’m gonna start with Angela since we have two of you in the room.

Angela 

Okay, thank you, sure. So I’m a former high school science teacher, I taught biology, physical science, AP environmental science in North Carolina before becoming a secondary science teacher educator. And my work has always revolved around the education and early career development and support for secondary science teachers. And so I look particularly at who they are expected to be as they first enter the classroom, what kind of science teachers’ identities are celebrated and marginalized and who are they held accountable to being. And part of what I also look at in kind of who science teachers become once they enter the classroom is how they enact equitable science teaching practices. And so kind of the two prongs of my work are the education and early career development of science teachers and equitable science instruction.

Susan 

Excellent. And how about you Melanie?

Melanie

So I’m on the other end of the spectrum. I’m an English educator. I started as a secondary English teacher in the high schools. I worked in both North Carolina and in Arizona before I went back to get my PhD. And I think I was probably grounded in the ideas of who teachers are, sort of in that sense of yes, we become many things once we enter the classroom, but to ourselves personally and professionally, what does it mean to be a teacher to yourselves? So my work has always been focused in what I would say is the effective domain. I like exploring teachers dispositions, how they enact their own beliefs and values and how they incorporate reflective thinking into their work so that they can become more conscious of how they think, what they believe and how that all comes together in the classroom.

Susan 

Yeah, and both of you are focusing on an area that I don’t think gets nearly enough attention. So many times we’re working with teachers in terms of pedagogy, of what they’re delivering to students. And I think what’s important about what both of you are doing is that you’re focusing on the internal, on not just what teachers can deliver, but who they are and who they believe themselves to be, which are sometimes not congruent.

with each other, which is interesting. So my next question is, how did you two meet and how did you get together to write this amazing book?

Melanie 

So your humor is that we were born in the same state and we grew up roughly 20 miles from each other. And we only met when Angela came to James Madison University and is now in the office beside me.

Susan

Right?

Melanie 

Of course, this is how this works. And so that’s how we came together as professionals. And since then, it’s lucky for me, quite frankly, that we’ve been able to become friends as well as collaborators in the different pieces of the work that we do.

Susan 

Wonderful. Now, I spoke a little bit. I just mentioned this book. You have both written this book, Reconstructing Care in Teacher Education After COVID-19. And I think we’ve been hearing a lot from people who will talk to or for teachers prior to COVID. But there’s not a lot out there about how things changed in education very specifically after COVID-19, particularly about teacher care, other than to talk about burnout and teachers leaving the profession, right? So tell us a little bit about this book. Tell us how it was structured, how you kind of came upon this and why this book now.

Angela 

That’s a great question. Thank you for asking it. I just want to echo everything Melanie said about how we met and just the value and how grateful I am to have her as a friend and a colleague. So even before the pandemic, she and I had engaged in multiple kinds of conversations about care. How we showed care to our students, what kind of care they expected of and from us, how maybe our caring practices look similar to or different from our colleagues. And so we were talking about and thinking about care even before the pandemic started, but kind of, I would say more like informally, more an undercurrent. It wasn’t something that either of us specifically researched and wrote about. And then the world fell apart, right? Because the pandemic hit. And so we were responding to our institutions, like instructional decisions around the pandemic, everybody being online and then like navigating all of these instructional choices and, you know, trying to navigate our own selves through, I’m gonna say it, we don’t love this word, but an unprecedented pandemic. Another one of those words that was used a whole lot. But as we navigated that space and did our absolute best. I don’t think anyone would tell you they didn’t do their absolute best to respond to students’ needs. We were also trying to take care of, well, the students, our family, our friends, each other, ourselves, as best we could. And, I mean, you remember how the pandemic felt? We felt we were doing not so great at that probably, despite our best efforts. And so, conversations about care and how we were responding continued. But it wasn’t really until I think probably fall of 2020 when we got back to course evaluations, where for each of us in the exact same course, I see Melanie chuckling, we were concurrently the most caring and the least caring professor that students in our classes had ever had. And we’re like, how can you be the most caring and not at all caring at the same time. And so reflecting on that and navigating that, making sense of it is partly what prompted us to write this book. I mentioned a few minutes ago that I am a science teacher educator, so science kind of gives me a lens on a whole lot of things. And sometimes things that maybe you’re like, related to science. And one of those things was the pandemic. Well, that was science, but how teacher education could respond to the pandemic. So the pandemic was really an instructive case study for science and science education, the value of science education, the importance of it, scientific literacy, and how we are preparing, you know, folks to move through the world and use science in their decision making. But it also gave a lens for kind of making sense of teacher education in the pandemic, right? The world was on fire, literally, with at the time, historic wildfire seasons across the globe, and like societally with pandemic and social responses to the pandemic. And so that got me really thinking about ecosystems and how naturally, but also human made, they get wiped out, but they are resilient and they come back. And the first things that show up We call them pioneer species. And so kind of one of the impetus, like one of the original ideas, nuggets of ideas for the book is okay K-12 education doesn’t look like we’ve known it to look right now in fall of 2020. Neither does teacher education. So when what we know has been destroyed, what are the first things we want to have come back? And for the two of us, we wanted that to be care and thinking of how we show care to our teacher candidates and then prepare them to show care to their future students.

Susan 

That’s powerful. Melanie, how about you? What was your impetus and role in the writing of this book as well?

Melanie 

Angela captured a lot of that, although she’s much more eloquent because I would just say I was really angry. That really drove me. Because it became for both of us, and I would say for everyone who was in a classroom at any level, it became very frustrating to see how the terminology and the words and the things that we say about care became quickly commodified. And so there were a lot of phrases that were put out and this idea of, for example, the idea of self-care has been around for a very long time, obviously, but it almost became a drum beat here, for example, at our university that many emails came out, oh, focus on self-care, and we would have conversations and I hope you’re taking care of yourself, and then you saw it more and more in newspapers or maybe online papers and news media outlets but we kept saying but wait a minute you’re asking people to do more work without giving them any direction as to what that means what that looks like while putting even more of responsibilities and to many in all intents and purposes more of a burden to say but you are also now responsible for everyone around you because we’re all experiencing this really difficult time. And we know that teachers have always been asked to do too much with too little. And again, that’s at every level, whether you’re in a kindergarten classroom working with five-year-olds or whether you’re in a post-secondary classroom working with 25-year-olds. There’s something about that classroom that we can acknowledge the students in that room need, and then fill in the blank, they need something and we should be able to provide that for them. But the public at large, and in many regards I would say education, has slowly kind of pulled back to being able to define what that means. And we’ve just said, oh everything, and so you get that kitchen sink approach, right? The teachers need to be able to figure out all of it. So when we look at the K-12 schools,

We say, well, kids can’t focus if they come to school hungry. And so suddenly schools are responsible for providing breakfast before kids get there and obviously lunch and then maybe snacks when they leave. And we say, well, we don’t really have the resources and the means to put meaningful counseling in each of our schools. Well, we’ll just give teachers a PD seminar next Friday to have them understand the signs of distress in students and then they’ll be able to work with students if they see these. And I wish I was being flippant because we’ve all been in that situation. And so we were seeing pieces of that same mindset here at the university. And I wanna be clear, I’m not castigating my university because it too was struggling with, as this huge institution, how do you suddenly care for 20,000 students when some are here, some are at home, the ideas of food insecurity are really coming to the forefront in ways they hadn’t before. The ways mental health were no longer things that could be acknowledged as something else, they were just health. And so with all of that swirling around us and all of the conversations that Angela and I were having about our own situation and our student situations that we were seeing, that sort of led us in that direction of well, people have to be dealing with this. People have to be thinking about this. We need to understand what people were doing. And if only we could be responsible, we want to push that idea that things have to be different now. Things are different. I think, I mean, it makes sense that the world went, no, we just wanna go back to the way things were. And even though there was a recognition of that’s never going to happen, that’s not how it works, we held onto that belief for a long time. And sort of, I can’t give Angela’s science analogy quite as much, you know, I can’t explain it as eloquently as she did, but it is that idea of if you burn everything down, then you’re creating a new house and instead, let’s figure out what that house can look like and what that means at all levels of education. So this first book focuses on teacher education. What is care looking like?

What does it mean as teacher educators work with their students who will go on to become teachers? Well, our book that we’re working on now focuses on induction years. Okay, teachers once they get into schools, especially teachers now. So we’re putting, if we would, we’re putting teachers in the classroom that have truly survived a pandemic as students who were educated to become teachers in very strange circumstances and are now entering schools that no one understands anymore because they’re completely different lands. What does care look like now in those spaces? And what does it mean for both teachers and students? Because everything is sort of a brave new world. And it would be nice if we took, we, both the two of us, and we as both education, took the responsibility to say, and because it’s new and because it’s different, let’s make something positive instead of just reverting to old and outdated ways.

Susan 

Absolutely. So based on what you saw in pulling this together, how do you feel like the definition of care has changed since 2020?

Melanie

I want Angela to pick up, but I’m just going to say quickly. You’ll laugh at me when I say the definition hasn’t changed. Because the definition has always been very, very amorphous and able to respond in different ways to different contexts, to different people. One of our one of our favorite educators is Geneva Gay.

And she writes very eloquently about culturally responsive teaching and within that culturally responsive care. And one of her wonderful quotes is the fact that people have great difficulty defining care. We all use the word, we all mean the word, but we don’t all agree on how we would define it. And so therefore there is no one way that it looks or it should be. So the definition can still be quite different depending on which school of thought you hold to looking at Geneva Gay’s cultural responsive care? Are you looking at Nell Notting’s sort of seminal work with the carer and the care for? Are you looking at Zemblus work with the emotional labor that teachers do and how that then creates a caring space? That can all be different. It’s how care has been enacted that we see really creative and interesting and thoughtful ways reflected in the chapters that are in the book.

Susan 

Angela, would you like to pick up on some of that as well?

Angela 

Sure, I think that when we look across the chapters of the book, and they do include different contexts, different voices, whether it be teacher educators reflecting on their own practice or bringing in teacher candidate stories about what they left their teacher education program thinking it care was. So we have different contexts, different voices, and we do have different frameworks for care. And I think if we had to boil it down, Melanie hit the nail on the head. Like there is no single way of thinking about care. We all define it for ourselves, which makes it really tricky when you are wanting to care for someone else because what I might think is care and caring, Melanie might not perceive that way necessarily. And so… there is this relational element to care that I think cuts across a lot of definitions or conceptions of care. And that’s also the thing that was blown up when it comes to education and teacher education during the pandemic. We had to figure out, how do I have a relationship with students and colleagues when usually that happened in the building.

And now everything is online and asynchronous. How do we do that? So different responses and reactions to how the authors navigated that is what makes up a lot of the chapters in the book.

Susan 

Yeah, and I think to your point, because care has so many different definitions, that’s why you received the responses that you did that you were some of the most caring and some of the least caring that they’ve had, right? Because this is a transient kind of definition based on who we are, who we are, and who we believe who we are, right? Which is, again, where your backgrounds are so beneficial for this, I think. So you mentioned that the book is really kind of a collection of stories and vignettes and case studies of what care is evolving into being. How did you select each of these for inclusion?

Melanie 

We wanted to have as broad of a representation as possible, so and that’s across the board in both the context that people were writing about, the identities that the authors were inhabiting, the ways that they were working with care in different spaces. So we were lucky, I mean it’s delightful when you have people, and that became very clear, people who were passionate about their work, people who cared about what they were doing were writing about care. So the ways of bringing it all together were how can we have a collection of chapters that is able to show the sweep of care in teacher education so that we can show how a single concept, care, can be operationalized and defined and enacted in completely different ways while achieving, if you will, the same outcome in that we’re trying to benefit and respond to and acknowledge the students in our classrooms as well as ourselves because it’s an iterative process. And we were really lucky that we had such a robust call, sorry, response to the call. We have 22 chapters in the book and that is very unexpected 12 chapters, you’re really excited if you have 15. We picked 22, we had obviously many more submissions. So it’s definitely a topic of interest and of continued interest, I think. This isn’t a one-off, this isn’t a blip on the horizon. This is something that’s only going to gain interest and importance as we keep going.

Susan 

Absolutely, and I think, you know, we’re, you keep coming back to this point of education and the world as we know it is not the same and it is continuing to evolve and we are in the midst of it. I think this is the piece that we often forget, even though we’re a part of it, is that it’s still going. Like, this is still evolving, this is still changing. And so being, giving that grace to ourselves and also learning from others as to their experiences is a powerful thing that we can do as we’re learning what this new world looks like. In your work, have you found any positive educator stories or changes that have happened since COVID-19 because we’ve heard a lot of changes that have not been so positive. So I think hearing that there’s a possibility for joy or for a positive change is always helpful.

Angela 

Yeah, Melanie pointed out that all of our chapters were written by folks who care deeply about caring for teacher candidates and who our future science or not science teachers, all teachers, but who are who our future teachers are. And so there is a lot of hope and optimism across the chapters that are in the book. We see increase in advocacy for the teacher candidates, especially as it comes to like licensure requirements, advocacy for the teacher educators in terms of, hey, we do a lot of this caring work, a lot of this emotional labor, and it needs to be recognized and supported by our institutions. And there is a lot of, and Melanie already alluded to this, a lot of creativity in ways that we are connecting with our teacher candidates with each other as teacher educators, locally, regionally, and across the globe. We do have international, I don’t know if we’ve said this, I don’t know if we have yet, international representation in the book, which means that this isn’t only something that we here in the US are grappling with, but care for our future teachers is a cross-cutting concern and showing intentional care is a cross-cutting desire. Like we want to do that. We know that it’s important for who teachers become. So we have seen some positive stories. Melanie alluded to the book that we’re working on right now. We’re getting to see kind of how, as these chapters are coming together, how the care that was talked about in

This current book, Reconstructing Care in Teacher Education After COVID, like how the care that was shown here is now showing up in newly hired teachers’ experiences and in their classrooms. So there’s also hope that way. Like we see it in the chapters in the book Reconstructing Care in Teacher Education, and then we see how it’s kind of being brought forward into our teacher candidates’ first years in the classroom as teachers.

Susan 

Mmm, that’s excellent.

Melanie 

I will say, I think Angela used a really important word that I hope comes through well in the book, and that the intentional work with care. That it’s being recognized that care is indeed work, and it is something that develops and it’s something that changes. And in that regard, that is absolutely a positive, that as it’s recognized and people become more intentional about it, they become more focused on how they enact certain practices over others. For example, one of the chapters is a conversation, if you will, of different teacher educators who are talking across, saying how they were working to rework different elements of their program to be more responsive to student needs, and in doing so, they had to become more responsive to their own needs as teacher educators. Great.

We have to recognize that we’re people as well. Another chapter that was very interesting, they all were, this I think because you always appreciate things that are really outside your wheelhouse, talked about the construct of care through Buddhist compassion. And two teacher educators talking about their understanding of Buddhist compassion had already been operating in their lives, but then they were taking it intentionally into their classrooms and working with their students in very specific ways to kind of pull those things through. And one of my favorites, if I can say that, is a chapter that’s talking about teacher writing groups and how the writing group, which we always think of, at least in a higher ed, we think of it as a space of productivity. You create a writing group because you are working on a paper that needs to be published or will be presented at a conference. And how this writing group, when the pandemic hit, morphed into a space of care and a space of connection. And they said, well, we still want and need to write, but we need to do that for ourselves, not for this broader consumption. And so they created a informal space where people met online where they continue to write, but they did so solely because they understood that need for recognition and care and relationship. And I think that speaks to this big idea of how there were good things that were coming from it, and those good things were being much more cognizant of the individual needs of the people who were writing those chapters.

Susan 

And that’s something that we and our organization works on a lot in terms of the arts. It’s a different perspective, but the word intention is something that we use quite a bit, particularly with arts integration, that it’s using the arts intentionally for the purposes that you’re looking to achieve, but also using the arts intentionally for yourself as just a way to explore your own creative being.

Melanie 

That’s it.

Susan

and sharing that with the world. And so I think that follows so naturally with some of the threads that you were just sharing, which is, I think it’s so important for people. What are some practical ways that you think that we might be able to reconnect with each other as educators and continue to support each other given such a broad sweep of care? What are maybe some examples that educators could use with both teacher educators who are currently in service or those who are first year teachers or even a little bit beyond.

Melanie 

The first thing that comes to mind truly, I think, and comes through with the different chapters is that intentional point of pausing and spending time with people. I realize this, you’re telling one of the busiest professions in the world, slow down, take some time. And I have a phrase when I tell my students, I say, oh, I have something for you to read in your free time. And then we all sort of laugh, ha ha, who has free time?

But that comes through so clearly that we, the collective we, and particularly we in education, need that time to pause, to sit and talk to each other as individuals, as people. Not a planning meeting, not a committee meeting, not a faculty meeting. We need to meet with each other for coffee, for tea.

Not a brief pause in the hall, but a, hey, let’s go out for dinner afterwards. I mean, and we need those spaces carved throughout the day. It doesn’t, it needs to be a way and a place for care to manifest itself on a daily basis in the time that it’s needed and not something that’s held off to the side. Well, I can care about you on Thursday at six o’clock when we can meet for dinner. Right?

And it’s like, no, you know, care doesn’t have to be big. It doesn’t have to be a production, but it does need to be able to manifest itself in the moment in ways that are meaningful to the person both giving and receiving. And in spaces where it is acknowledged as an important part of the day, not sort of something that’s either an afterthought or dismissed because, you know,

The corporation is bigger than the individual type of mentality.

Susan 

perhaps even just added on as a word we have to care for one another so we have a caring space where you all can go and sit down and have some coffee right like more intentional than that perhaps and thoughtful about building ways in that’s more natural than that maybe

Melanie

You do make me laugh because I was thinking recently of the whole concept of people need a space so you could have this lounge. And it’s really like, and you open up the lounge and it’s like dingy walls and a sad sofa and a coffee maker. You’re like, I’m not sure this is my space to recuperate, but thank you. There has to be that intention there, which would be nice. I just, all I really need is some caffeine.

Susan Riley (30:31.027)

Exactly.

Melanie 

People just in a nice space, caffeine in a nice space.

Susan 

There you go.

Angela 

If I can add on to some of what Melanie has said, so I think that probably people are becoming more intentional about how they build those relationships and fun time for themselves and each other throughout their day, right? Versus tacked on at the end, like how we used to care for folks. But I think we’re probably seeing a growth in our professional organizations in acknowledging, you know that, like, yes, yes, human shows up to your conference, you know? I’m not a science education machine, I’m a person. And so I think professional organizations are starting to recognize, at least from my experience in their conferences, like we need to attend to who people are doing this work, coming to this conference to learn. And I’ve seen somewhat of a shift in like how the days are structured or the focus of some of the sessions and building in more of those times in between perhaps for like the fellowship with you know other teachers or other teacher educators. So I really hope that persists well into the future but I do think that we’re starting to see some changes maybe in how individuals interact but then also how and spaces are crafted for us to interact when we go to like professional meetings, for example.

Susan 

Yeah, I was actually just at an event this summer in Minneapolis for Arts Education Partnership. And they had a desensitization room where if you needed a break from all of the chatter and all of the people, there’s literally room with the lights turned off. But it was a dedicated space that if that’s what you needed for that moment, have at it, you know? They had a variety of spaces like that provided people with availability of what they might need and they were thinking of that. And I thought, how great to be thinking about people who may need a break or those who need more interaction and provide a space for them as well. And so I think to your point, that’s if we can continue that trend and maybe even welcome some of that into our schoolhouses for teachers, that would be wonderful. So I want to make sure that people know where they can find you and stay in touch to learn about not only this book, but the next one that’s coming out as well.

Melanie 

So we’re both at James Madison University, so that makes us very easy to find. And then the typical email, we live on email. So feel free to email if you have any questions or if you’d like to connect in any way. We’re both on that dying Twitter that now is supposed to be called X. Still there until at least for a few more weeks. My handle’s a profprofshoff, S-H-O-F-F.

Angela, you’ve got one too, but I don’t know what it is.

Angela

Dude, no worries. It’s Angela W. Webb with two B’s. Two W’s, two B’s. Yes, Angela W. Webb.

Melanie 

You’re easy.

Susan 

All right. We will put all of that in the show notes, as well as your direct contact information so that people can reach out, and then as well as links to the book, and we’ll update it as soon as the next book is out as well so that we can kind of keep that conversation going. Melanie and Angela, thank you so much for your time today and for compiling this much needed resource for us.

Angela 

Awesome.

Susan 

I am really looking forward to having as many people as possible read it. I think it’s an important work.

Melanie 

Thank you very much. We really appreciate your conversation.

Angela 

Yes, thank you for having us.

Susan 

Of course.

Melanie Shoffner’s email address: shoffnme@jmu.edu

Angela Webb’s email address: webbaw@jmu.edu

Melanie’s X profile 

Angela’s X profile

Reconstructing Care in Teacher Education after COVID-19