This reflection considers how the decisive actions and choices faculty made when they moved to online emergency teaching in response to Covid-19 required leadership but those choices have continued beyond the timeline they were meant for. The Covid-19 pandemic has endured as have these practices and we can now, with digital technology leadership grounded in care of community and Indigenous leadership approaches support faculty to move out of emergency teaching solutions and into more sustainable practices.
In my undergraduate degree, the text we used to study leadership was the autobiography of Rudolph Giuliani who was the mayor of New York during 9/11 (Giuliani, 2002). Each chapter presented a leadership lesson in a sound bite and related it back to Giuliani’s’ experience. This presentation aligned with both contingency/ situational and great man theories of leadership (O’Toole, 2008). The book centred on the actions Giuliani took as mayor during the 9/11 attacks where he took decisive actions in the emergency communications and logistics for New York first responders. This book always bothered me because it seems in an emergency situation you can only fail by not doing anything and you can only succeed by doing something. After the fact, you can tie the decisions you made to traits of leadership and call it success but in chaos how can you assess leadership effectiveness ? I don’t believe an emergency such as an attack on a major city is necessarily the setting to weigh the effectiveness of leadership or to know if the characteristics required to lead for sustainably exist.
The quick pivot to online teaching in response to the Covid-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020 felt like an emergency for faculty in my institution. Choices needed to be made quickly and faculty made those choices moving their teaching online almost entirely in isolation. A gap in leadership meant that our instructors were working as islands and made decisions with no way to know what the decisions might mean and what the results of these decisions would be on students. Some examples where faculty made choices in response to moving online at my institution were; making surveillance platforms mandatory for students to write their exams, lecturing synchronously for three hour stretches and loading the LMS with content and walking away. As the pandemic has endured many of these practices have also. In the absence of any emerging leadership, faculty are still relying on the same methods they implemented at that time. Implementing digital technology leadership centred on care of community can help shift faculty away from those practices through dialogue and modelling other ways.
Care as a characteristic of leadership ranked highly for me as an individual (McMurray, January 24, 2022) and in our collaborative group efforts (Team E. February 4, 2022). Prior to the pandemic, care of community was at the centre of the leadership practice of my most admired leaders (McMurray, January 24, 2022). To engage with care in education as defined by Nell Noddings (Smith, 2020) we need to model, dialogue, practice and confirm and in the definition of digital technology leadership from Shenigner (2019) “establishing direction, influencing others, and initiating sustainable change through the access of information, and establishing relationships in order to anticipate changes pivotal to school success in the future” (para 6). Marrying care theory with digital technology and approaches that are grounded in Indigenous leadership feels like the remedy to our current ailment of faculty clinging to emergency teaching methods that in some cases are not grounded in well thought considered teaching approaches.
Mark, Wright & Zinni describe Indigenous leadership as “more egalitarian, non-hierarchical and consenusal” (p. 123, 2010) and digital technologies can hold those values. One way I can envision taking action that will benefit the teaching community and encourage them to move away from LMS centred teaching is to create a shared blogging space for faculty to share their stories of pandemic teaching and provide technical walk throughs on how to set the spaces up so they can replicate the blogging approach they are engaging in with their own students. This can model care, can allow for sharing, can de-centralize the leadership role in a shared digital space.
While emergency teaching required decisive actions to mobilize our programming, holding onto these emergency approaches because the pandemic has continued does not need to be our way forward. Modelling ways digital technology can be used in practice grounded in community care and in shared leadership and storytelling can help create better outcomes for faculty and students moving into more sustainable practices.
Hooks, Bell. (2014). Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics.Routledge. New York.
Giuliani, R. & Kurson, K.(2002). Leadership. Hyperion.New York.
Mark, J., Wright, B. & Zinni, D. (2010) Stories from the circle: Leadership lessons learned from aboriginal leaders. The Leadership Quarterly. (21)1 14-126.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2009.10.009
McMurray, K. (January 22, 2022). Karen’s Leadership Rankings. LRNT 525 Leading Change in Online Learning. Team Forums Unit 1, Activity 2, Part 1.
https://moodle.royalroads.ca/moodle/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=837309#p3294277
O’Toole, J. (2008). Notes towards a definition of values-based leadership. The Journal of Values-Based Leadership. 1 (1), Article 10.
https://scholar.valpo.edu/jvbl/vol1/iss1/10
Sheninger, E. (2019) Pillars of Digital Leadership. International Center of Leadership in Education.
http://leadered.com/pillars-of-digital-leadership/
Smith, M. K. (2020). Nel Noddings, the ethics of care and education. The encyclopedia of pedagogy and informal education. https://infed.org/mobi/nel-noddings-the-ethics-of-care-and-education/.
Team E. (February 4, 2022). Attributes of Leadership | Team E. Luis Rodriguez: A student blog MALAT 2021-2023.
https://malat-webspace.royalroads.ca/rru0216/attributes-of-leadership-team-e/
February 8, 2022 at 7:55 am
Hi Karen,
As I read your post I was struck by how similar many post-secondary experiences were (and are) during the pandemic and how we are all facing the big question of “what next”. How do we change the poor teaching practices that emerged, and at the same time, how do we keep the innovative and care-informed practices that many instructors embraced? You outline one approach – in the absence of any emerging leadership, taking it on yourself and establishing a community generated faculty learning space that focuses on good practice (a final project for this course maybe :)?). In his audio post on the Voices page Chad Flynn – talks about finding those who are quietly working away doing creative and innovative things and supporting them. But in the absence of a leader who is going to take on that role, where do we go for resources and support? I think often to each other…and the importance of grassroots initiatives as areas of growth and informal leadership within institutions. This is a somewhat rhetorical question, but how do we formalize these leadership roles, recognize their importance, and then change our often very hierarchical decision making and organizational structures?
February 8, 2022 at 7:55 am
Hi Karen,
As I read your post I was struck by how similar many post-secondary experiences were (and are) during the pandemic and how we are all facing the big question of “what next”. How do we change the poor teaching practices that emerged, and at the same time, how do we keep the innovative and care-informed practices that many instructors embraced? You outline one approach – in the absence of any emerging leadership, taking it on yourself and establishing a community generated faculty learning space that focuses on good practice (a final project for this course maybe :)?). In his audio post on the Voices page Chad Flynn – talks about finding those who are quietly working away doing creative and innovative things and supporting them. But in the absence of a leader who is going to take on that role, where do we go for resources and support? I think often to each other…and the importance of grassroots initiatives as areas of growth and informal leadership within institutions. This is a somewhat rhetorical question, but how do we formalize these leadership roles, recognize their importance, and then change our often very hierarchical decision making and organizational structures?
February 9, 2022 at 9:13 pm
Hi Karen,
I love your positive, forward-looking, and care-rooted perspective on such a difficult situation. I could not agree more that emergency teaching should be a blur in the rear-view mirror as we cruise forward into sustainable online and/or blended practices.
I recall giving a workshop to a group of local college instructors at the outset of the pandemic who were almost panicked facing a blank LMS template and little or no support or direction in how to create their online courses. My heart broke for them as they expressed feeling overwhelmed, exhausted, and unsupported. I shared my best recommendations but wondered at the time, and still debate now, whether more directive leadership from within their institution would have helped in those circumstances.
What are your thoughts on this? Would it have been better if experts in the field provided concrete recommendations about course structure, content, maximum hours of videoconference meetings, etc.? Was this an impossibility due to resource limitations, or to preserve professional autonomy?
In the absence of leadership or concrete direction then, and now in the transition to healthier, sustainable practices, do you feel that grass roots leaders may be able to help fill the void?
February 9, 2022 at 9:13 pm
Hi Karen,
I love your positive, forward-looking, and care-rooted perspective on such a difficult situation. I could not agree more that emergency teaching should be a blur in the rear-view mirror as we cruise forward into sustainable online and/or blended practices.
I recall giving a workshop to a group of local college instructors at the outset of the pandemic who were almost panicked facing a blank LMS template and little or no support or direction in how to create their online courses. My heart broke for them as they expressed feeling overwhelmed, exhausted, and unsupported. I shared my best recommendations but wondered at the time, and still debate now, whether more directive leadership from within their institution would have helped in those circumstances.
What are your thoughts on this? Would it have been better if experts in the field provided concrete recommendations about course structure, content, maximum hours of videoconference meetings, etc.? Was this an impossibility due to resource limitations, or to preserve professional autonomy?
In the absence of leadership or concrete direction then, and now in the transition to healthier, sustainable practices, do you feel that grass roots leaders may be able to help fill the void?
February 11, 2022 at 11:19 am
Hi Karen,
Your post really resonated with me. I agree with you that crisis leadership should not be used to evaluate leadership. I too found that Mark, Wright & Zinni’s description of Indigenous leadership as “more egalitarian, non-hierarchical and consensual” was something that we should move towards and away from the idea of great man leadership. Living and working in my own culture for much of my life has made it difficult for me to question or see different perspectives on leadership and managing change. Although I lived in Japan which has a very rigid hierarchical leadership system, coming back to Canada I realized that Canada is also quite hierarchical. Stories from the Circle made me realize we still have room for much improvement.
Your idea that we should move away from LMS to a blog space for faculty to share challenges and successes is something I am currently trying to set up at my organization and our classmate Stephanie had some excellent ideas that we explored in our group project in LRNT 524. She had some brilliant ideas of how to create spaces where there is not one leader. Those leaders would spring up depending on their knowledge or expertise. She also stressed that if it was important that in this challenging time, we should not make it feel like more work is being put on upon others and that the shared spaces are a place to congregate and create community. Perhaps in 10 years when we are having tea together, we will also discuss some of the changes we brought to fruition.
Thank you for sharing Karen.
February 11, 2022 at 11:19 am
Hi Karen,
Your post really resonated with me. I agree with you that crisis leadership should not be used to evaluate leadership. I too found that Mark, Wright & Zinni’s description of Indigenous leadership as “more egalitarian, non-hierarchical and consensual” was something that we should move towards and away from the idea of great man leadership. Living and working in my own culture for much of my life has made it difficult for me to question or see different perspectives on leadership and managing change. Although I lived in Japan which has a very rigid hierarchical leadership system, coming back to Canada I realized that Canada is also quite hierarchical. Stories from the Circle made me realize we still have room for much improvement.
Your idea that we should move away from LMS to a blog space for faculty to share challenges and successes is something I am currently trying to set up at my organization and our classmate Stephanie had some excellent ideas that we explored in our group project in LRNT 524. She had some brilliant ideas of how to create spaces where there is not one leader. Those leaders would spring up depending on their knowledge or expertise. She also stressed that if it was important that in this challenging time, we should not make it feel like more work is being put on upon others and that the shared spaces are a place to congregate and create community. Perhaps in 10 years when we are having tea together, we will also discuss some of the changes we brought to fruition.
Thank you for sharing Karen.