Education, Faculty of
Educational Studies (EDST), Department of
DSpace
UBCV
Westcott, Morgan
Doctor of Education - EdD
University of British Columbia
The purpose of this qualitative study was to identify and describe the ways some instructors experienced encounters with students in distress, to better support instructors, centre their voices, and acknowledge that instructor well-being is important in its own right. While there is a significant body of literature representing the challenges for students in post-secondary education, there is little research specific to instructor experiences. To contribute to an emerging body of work on the faculty viewpoint, this study was approached from the perspective of care ethics, where care was framed as a quality of the relation between the instructor and student (e.g., Noddings) as well as affected by organizational factors and broader social structures (e.g., Tronto, Fraser). It used Thorne’s interpretive descriptive framework, incorporating approaches from phenomenography and solicited audio-diary methods to identify and describe the ways a group of polytechnic instructors experienced encounters with students in distress. Through a process of manual encoding, diary and interview data was grouped into themes and presented as an outcome space (map) of the phenomenon. This expanded a previous 3R framework (DiPlacito-DeRango) of instructor responses to distressed students (recognize, render, and redirect) to 5Rs (recognize, react, render, redirect, and reciprocate) and situated these components within an organizational and societal context. The analysis shared instructor responses in their own words to highlight various themes and discusses the factors that can facilitate, and inhibit, caring relations along individual, organizational, and systemic lines. It concluded with a set of recommendations to the Institute to better support instructors in their enactment of care.
POLYTECHNIC INSTRUCTORS AS FIRST RESPONDERS TO STUDENT CRISES: CENTRING FACULTY VOICES by Morgan Westcott B.A., The University of British Columbia, 2002 M.A., Royal Roads University, 2009 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF EDUCATION in The Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies (Educational Leadership and Policy) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) April 2025 © Morgan Westcott, 2025 ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies for acceptance, the dissertation entitled: Polytechnic instructors as first responders to student crises: centring faculty voices submitted by Morgan Westcott in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Education in Educational Leadership and Policy Examining Committee: Dr. Claudia Ruitenberg, Professor, Department of Educational Studies, UBC Supervisor Dr. Alison Taylor, Professor, Department of Educational Studies, UBC Supervisory Committee Member Dr. Amy Metcalfe, Professor, Department of Educational Studies, UBC Supervisory Committee Member Dr. Sabre Cherkowski, Professor, Okanagan School of Education, UBC University Examiner Dr. Deirdre Kelly, Professor, Department of Educational Studies , UBC University Examiner iii Abstract The purpose of this qualitative study was to identify and describe the ways some instructors experienced encounters with students in distress, to better support instructors, centre their voices, and acknowledge that instructor well-being is important in its own right. While there is a significant body of literature representing the challenges for students in post-secondary education, there is little research specific to instructor experiences. To contribute to an emerging body of work on the faculty viewpoint, this study was approached from the perspective of care ethics, where care was framed as a quality of the relation between the instructor and student (e.g., Noddings) as well as affected by organizational factors and broader social structures (e.g., Tronto, Fraser). It used Thorne’s interpretive descriptive framework, incorporating approaches from phenomenography and solicited audio-diary methods to identify and describe the ways a group of polytechnic instructors experienced encounters with students in distress. Through a process of manual encoding, diary and interview data was grouped into themes and presented as an outcome space (map) of the phenomenon. This expanded a previous 3R framework (DiPlacito-DeRango) of instructor responses to distressed students (recognize, render, and redirect) to 5Rs (recognize, react, render, redirect, and reciprocate) and situated these components within an organizational and societal context. The analysis shared instructor responses in their own words to highlight various themes and discusses the factors that can facilitate, and inhibit, caring relations along individual, organizational, and systemic lines. It concluded with a set of recommendations to the Institute to better support instructors in their enactment of care. iv Lay Summary A young adult’s time in postsecondary education can be challenging, and one of the ways students might look for support while at school is through their instructors. To help instructors take care of their students, but also themselves, I tracked six instructors at the postsecondary institution where I work, so I could learn more about the types of issues they faced when dealing with students having problems. After reading special diaries the instructors kept, and having conversations with them, I created a map of what happened in those situations. Since not many people know about their side of the story, I also shared some of the instructors’ words so readers can understand the situation more clearly. By working with instructors on this project, I was able to come up with recommendations for our institute to on how to better support instructors when they are trying to help their students. v Preface This thesis is original, unpublished, independent work by the author, Morgan Westcott. No Generative Artificial Intelligence tools were used in the research process, development, or writing of the thesis. This research study was approved by: • The University of British Columbia Office of Research Ethics – Behavioural Research Ethics Board, under Certificate of Approval for Harmonized Minimal Risk Behavioural Study (also reviewed and approved by “Polytechnic Institute”), REB Number H22-03555. • The application for ethical review and the document(s) were reviewed and the procedures were found to be acceptable on ethical grounds for research involving human subjects. • As the study extended beyond the initial certificate, a subsequent certificate numbered H22-03555-A001 was issued, and the study was completed in that timeframe. vi Table of Contents Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... iii Lay Summary ............................................................................................................................... iv Preface .............................................................................................................................................v Table of Contents ......................................................................................................................... vi List of Tables ................................................................................................................................ ix List of Figures .................................................................................................................................x Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................................... xi Dedication .................................................................................................................................... xii Chapter 1: Introduction ............................................................................................................... 1 1.1 Research Problem and Purpose ................................................................................... 2 1.2 Positionality ................................................................................................................ 4 1.3 Research Questions ..................................................................................................... 5 1.4 Polytechnic Institute, British Columbia, Canada ........................................................ 6 1.5 Legal and Policy Considerations ................................................................................ 8 1.6 Overview of the Dissertation .................................................................................... 14 Chapter 2: Literature Review .................................................................................................... 19 2.1 The Changing Face of Students ................................................................................ 19 2.2 Instructor Responses to Students .............................................................................. 35 2.3 Impact on Instructors ................................................................................................ 47 2.4 Caring as Work ......................................................................................................... 60 2.5 Summary of the Literature ........................................................................................ 61 Chapter 3: Conceptual Framework – Care Ethics ..................................................................... 67 vii 3.1 A Quality of the Relation Between Two People ....................................................... 67 3.2 Affected by Organizational Factors .......................................................................... 71 3.3 Influenced by Broader Systemic Forces ................................................................... 73 3.4 Caring as an Ethical Orientation: Additional Perspectives ....................................... 82 3.5 Summary ................................................................................................................... 90 Chapter 4: Methodology ........................................................................................................... 97 4.1 Interpretive Description ............................................................................................ 98 4.2 Phenomenography ..................................................................................................... 99 4.3 Diary Methods ........................................................................................................ 101 4.4 Participant Recruitment and Screening ................................................................... 103 4.5 Data Generation ...................................................................................................... 106 4.6 Data Analysis .......................................................................................................... 114 4.7 Completed Outcome Space ..................................................................................... 130 4.8 Ethical Considerations ............................................................................................ 131 4.9 Into the Outcome Space .......................................................................................... 133 Chapter 5: Outcome Space ...................................................................................................... 134 5.1 Touring the Outcome Space .................................................................................... 134 5.2 Raising Their Voices ............................................................................................... 157 Chapter 6: Findings – Narrating the Outcome Space ............................................................. 159 6.1 The Student-Instructor Relationship ....................................................................... 159 6.2 Institutional Forces .................................................................................................. 174 6.3 Societal Forces that Shape the Interaction .............................................................. 195 Chapter 7: Discussion ............................................................................................................. 202 viii 7.1 The Student-Instructor Relationship ....................................................................... 203 7.2 Institutional Factors ................................................................................................ 210 7.3 Societal Forces ........................................................................................................ 227 7.4 Caring Conversations .............................................................................................. 235 Chapter 8: Conclusion and Recommendations ....................................................................... 236 8.1 Summary of the Dissertation .................................................................................. 236 8.2 Answers to Research Questions .............................................................................. 237 8.3 Recommendations ................................................................................................... 245 8.4 Scholarly Significance of the Study ........................................................................ 254 8.5 Limitations of the Study .......................................................................................... 256 8.6 Future Research Opportunities ............................................................................... 257 8.7 Concurrent Impacts on My Practice ....................................................................... 260 8.8 Instructors Need Care ............................................................................................. 261 References ...................................................................................................................................262 Appendices ..................................................................................................................................286 Appendix A: Postsecondary Resources Related to Student Mental Health .....................287 Appendix B: Recruitment Poster (institution name and details redacted) .......................297 Appendix C: Sample of Email to Program Heads ...........................................................298 Appendix D: Meeting Agenda .........................................................................................299 Appendix E: Diary Prompts .............................................................................................300 Appendix F: Interview Questions ....................................................................................303 Appendix G: Outcome Space “Member Check” – Your Input Needed ..........................306 ix List of Tables Table 1: Study Participant Characteristics .................................................................................. 105 Table 2: Six Participants’ Perceptions of Care at Polytechnic Institute ..................................... 241 x List of Figures Figure 1: Polytechnic Institute Policies Surrounding Instructors Responding to Students .......... 12 Figure 2: Outcome Space from McKendrick-Calder & Choate Study ......................................... 52 Figure 3: Visual Representation of the Care Ethic Conception for the Study .............................. 95 Figure 4: Steps in the Methodological Process ........................................................................... 116 Figure 5: Working Off The Side of My Desk At Polytechnic Institute ...................................... 119 Figure 6: Early Map With Post-It Notes ..................................................................................... 120 Figure 7: Adding The Yellow (Interview) Snippets ................................................................... 123 Figure 8: Completed Outcome Space (Recognize, Render, Redirect from DiPlacito-DeRango, 2017) ........................................................................................................................................... 131 Figure 9: The Heart of the Interaction (Recognize, Render, Redirect from DePlacito-DeRango, 2017) ........................................................................................................................................... 135 Figure 10: Pressures and Support from the Institution ............................................................... 141 Figure 11: Societal Forces That Shape the Interaction ............................................................... 152 Figure 12: Outcome Space (Recognize, Render, Redirect from DePlacito-DeRango, 2017) .... 237 xi Acknowledgements To my participants, who gave willingly of their time, vulnerability, and experiences to get to the heart of the matter: your voices have been heard. Thank you for trusting me with them. To my committee and the EDST faculty who gave wisdom and guidance: thank you for helping me find my own voice. To my colleagues, who entertained my soapbox moments: thank you for listening to my voice. To the Pandemic Peeps: thank you for joining my voice in your scholarly choir. To my recovery fellows: thank you for your honest, open, and willing voices that carry me through one day at a time. To my family – my parents; my coparent and his family; my brother, sister, and niece; and my wonderfully supportive partner – thank you for nourishing my voice. From early in the morning to late at night, in all places from the kitchen table to the waterpark to picking chanterelles on a muddy trail, you’ve been immersed in this work, and your voices are here, too. xii Dedication And to my beloved Fraser and Douglas: thanks to you most of all ❤ 1 Chapter 1: Introduction This study addresses the role of instructors at Polytechnic Institute1 as first responders to students in mental health distress. At least 25% of post-secondary students will have mental health challenges during their studies (Eisenberg et al., 2012; Ong, 2017; Pedrelli, 2015; Squires, 2019). Instructors are now named as important supporters in student mental health frameworks (DiPlacito-DeRango, 2017; 2022), yet few studies have looked at the experiences of instructors as they respond to students during these challenges. The COVID-19 pandemic has put increased focus on the intersection of student and instructor mental health (Cordaro, 2020; Grant-Smith & Payne, 2021, McKendrick-Calder & Choate, 2024; Zakharchuk & Xiao, 2023). At the same time, interacting with students about their mental health is not a formally recognized part of the instructor role and little is known or documented about instructor experiences during these encounters at Polytechnic Institute or elsewhere in post-secondary education (PSE). Over the last decade, numerous policy frameworks, tools, and resources have attempted to address the systems, departments, and people that support student mental wellness in PSE, and some of these are captured Appendix A. In Canada, efforts to situate instructors as first responders to critical distress include the work of DiPlacito-DeRango (2017; 2022) who mapped the intersection of instructors and students in mental health support systems, cautioning that the current situating of instructors as intervenors “can put pressure on (or makes assumptions about) instructors’ knowledge and confidence” (2022, p. 9) and acknowledges that “what is in place is not necessarily what is in practice” (p. 12). It is time to learn about what is happening in practice, 1 Polytechnic Institute is a pseudonym for a polytechnic in British Columbia, Canada; the institution will be described in section 1.4. 2 to challenge assumptions about interactions between instructors and students in mental distress, and to hear what instructors think and feel about these encounters. 1.1 Research Problem and Purpose Responding to mental health distress is a largely undocumented component of post-secondary instructors’ experience and yet is an increasingly important part of their role (Hughes et al., 2018; Payne, 2022; Spear et al., 2021). Depending on the source, it has been noted that at least a quarter of post-secondary students will experience a mental health problem during their studies (Eisenberg et al., 2012; Ong, 2017; Pedrelli, 2015; Squires, 2019), and this statistic appears to be growing. The US Center for Collegiate Mental Health (2016) reported that from 2009 to 2015, post-secondary enrolment increased by almost 6%; however, students seeking mental health related appointments on campuses increased by almost 30%. A 2019 American College Health Association (ACHA) survey of over 55,000 Canadian students reported that the majority (63.4%) have experienced traumatic life challenges, with just less than half (45.6%) experiencing higher than average stress, and 15.8% were diagnosed and treated for both depression and anxiety (p. 15). Moghimi and colleagues (2023) found that almost 40% of their Ontario post-secondary student respondents had been diagnosed with a mental health disorder and over 60% reported poor mental health. The COVID-19 pandemic, which immediately preceded this study, both highlighted and compounded student challenges around “increased social isolation, lack of resources, and economic instability” (Read et al., 2023, p. 2). 3 According to the Canadian Campus Well-being Survey (CCWS) administered at Polytechnic Institute in early 2023 with an overall response of 2236 (9.5%), the institute was found lagging in the areas of providing a supportive learning environment, using effective teaching strategies, providing opportunities for students to explore their full potential, and inspiring confidence in program completion despite challenges. While Polytechnic Institute was found favourable when compared to other British Columbia institutions in the areas of mental health distress; 66% of respondents reported some level of distress: 28% severe, 18% moderate, and 20% mild (Yuna Chen, personal communication, November 2023). At Polytechnic Institute, instructor job postings typically include duties and responsibilities such as: developing course outlines, preparing teaching materials, creating and sharing assignments, delivering course content, marking assignments, monitoring student progress, and reporting on performance. Polytechnic Institute instructors are neither recruited nor trained for interacting with students in distress, and yet, anecdotally, we know that these interactions are taking place. Although often couched as an academic issue, these are not academic encounters; they exist outside of assignments and learning outcomes, and often take place outside of classrooms. Examples of these incidents from my practice include: 1) A student experiencing distress over her upcoming abortion approaching the instructor (me) with concerns about meeting academic deadlines. 2) Two students approaching their instructor (me) to explain the absence of a third student, revealing they had rescued her from a violent domestic situation. 4 3) A student appearing to be intoxicated in a video assignment; shared with the Associate Dean (me) when the instructor was unsure of how to respond. 4) A student participating in a group project check-in with the instructor (me) and exhibiting signs of cocaine use. 5) A sudden change in a student’s behaviour observed by peers and instructors (from assertive to aggressive) whereby the student also sent repeated disturbing messages to their classmates and instructors, reported to the Associate Dean (me). In conversations with institutional peers, EdD faculty, and my cohort it became clear that these incidents were not anomalies, but instead part of a relatively unexplored and undocumented facet of the instructional experience. Therefore, the purpose of this qualitative study is to identify and describe the similar or different ways Polytechnic Institute instructors experience encounters with students in distress, in order to offer better support for instructors, to centre their voices, and to acknowledge that instructor well-being is important in its own right. 1.2 Positionality I have a trinity of positionalities at Polytechnic Institute: I am a graduate of one of the business programs, I taught in the department for five years, and I am currently the Associate Dean of that department. This study is grounded in my observation that instructors are in a unique position to be the first to observe or be approached by students experiencing distress. While students may seek solutions that appear logistical (e.g., an extension for an assignment), there are often other issues bubbling under the surface. Reflecting on my days as a Polytechnic Institute student, I was 5 exhibiting many symptoms of active alcoholism (absenteeism2, sleeping in class) and was frequently upset in interactions with faculty members.3 As an instructor, I was inspired to register for the EdD program by the incidents described above. Today, as Associate Dean of the department, I have a responsibility for both faculty (as they engage with students) and students, and I am noticing the toll student distress is having on my teaching faculty. 1.3 Research Questions The overall question for my study is: what are the experiences of some Polytechnic Institute instructors when they are the first to respond to students in distress and how might they be better supported in these interactions? This question breaks down into a set of sub questions: 1) What types of contact do these instructors have with students in distress? Where, when, and how are these encounters taking place? 2) How do these instructors experience their (in)ability to respond with care in those encounters? What are the commonalities and differences in these experiences? 3) How do institutional, social and societal structures and systems facilitate or hinder these instructors’ caring responses to (and/or caring relations with) students in distress? 2 In the Business School, the practice (though not supported by institutional policy) has been that students can’t miss more than 10% of class and continue in their course; attendance is taken by instructors at the start of class. 3 I am happy to report that I recently celebrated 16 years of continuous sobriety, one day at a time. 6 4) What are the personal and professional risks involved (either perceived or actual) for these instructors engaging with students in distress, and how might these be mitigated? The site for this study is Polytechnic Institute in British Columbia, Canada. The next section provides additional information about the origins of Polytechnic Institute, its mandate, and its instructional body. 1.4 Polytechnic Institute, British Columbia, Canada Polytechnic Institute’s origins can be traced to the 1960 Canadian Technical and Vocational Training Assistance Act, a “response to national unemployment and a growing awareness of job obsolescence” (Cowin, 2018, p. 79). The act led to the development of training centres, with funding that came on the heels of a British Columbian needs-assessment process in 1959 that also identified skills training as a gap to be addressed (Cowin, 2018). Polytechnic Institute opened in 1964 with a “philosophy … to prepare job ready graduates” and despite “many changes … has upheld that key philosophy” to this day (Polytechnic Institute, 2022, p. 2). Under the 1996 BC College and Institute Act, Polytechnic Institute “is provincially mandated … to act as a polytechnic institution for British Columbia by offering technological and vocational instruction, as well as baccalaureate and applied master’s degree programs” (Polytechnic Institute, 2022, p. 2). The Ministry of Advanced Education and Skills Training, to which Polytechnic Institute reports, is also highly focused on labour market development, as named in a recent service plan that highlights the importance of a “post-secondary education and skills training system, including the trades, [that] provides pathways for British Columbians into good- 7 paying, high-opportunity jobs and supports the economic recovery of our communities and province” (2021, p. 5). Polytechnic Institute delivers on this mandate through two streams of programming: technology and trades, via six separate Schools (Academic Studies, Engineering and Science, etc.) in career-focused programming areas4. Within these two streams, instructors are employed by one of two unions: the Polytechnic Institute Faculty and Staff Association (Polytechnic Institute-FSA) and the BC General Employees’ Union (BCGEU). Both collective agreements make a distinction between regular and non-regular faculty: regular faculty hold permanent positions (either full, or part-time) whereas non-regular faculty are hired on a temporary (full, or part-time) basis. A third category are auxiliary, course-specific temporary contracts for those who teach in Polytechnic Institute’s flexible learning area.5 While membership in the FSA fluctuates, in 2022 there were 1688 FSA faculty actively employed by Polytechnic Institute (Polytechnic Institute Human Resources, 2022). BCGEU faculty (as distinct from BCGEU staff, which includes administrative and program assistants) teach in the trades, and there are significantly fewer of these: 269 regular and temporary employees and 6 auxiliaries (Polytechnic Institute Human Resources, 2022). The compensation of instructors in both BCGEU and FSA collective agreements is not based on the traditional tripartite job description 4 Examples include accounting, TV and video production, business management, HR, marketing, graphic design, interior design, architectural and building technology, forest and natural areas management, mechanical engineering, mechatronics and robotics, nuclear medicine, nursing, biochemistry and forensic science, boilermaking, carpentry, piping, sheet metal work, welding, machinist, millwright, HVAC, aircraft maintenance, airport operations, auto tech, heavy duty mechanic, nautical sciences. 5 Programs offered in the “full-time” stream are cohort-based with set timetables and schedules. Polytechnic Institute also offers for-credit courses and whole credentials through “flexible learning”, once known as “Night School”. 8 of teaching, service, and research but rather on instructional contact hours, for FSA this means 15 instructional hours (which are compensated as a 35-hour, or full-time, work week). Together, these roughly 2000 instructors participate in a complex system of laws and policies that pertain to the ways in which they interact with their adult students. The next section highlights considerations related to the law and policy in both the broader educational, and the Polytechnic Institute, context. 1.5 Legal and Policy Considerations Section 93 of the Constitution Act, 1867 states that “[in] and for each Province the Legislature may exclusively make Laws in relation to Education” (Shanahan, 2016, p. 11). In British Columbia, two separate streams of legislation have created two distinct forms of post-secondary governance. Universities have an autonomous, bicameral governance structure granted via the BC University Act (1996), with academic matters governed by a senate, and operational matters handled by the board of governors. Institutions like Polytechnic Institute, on the other hand, report directly to the Ministry of Advanced Education; with institutional bylaws developed and managed by the board of governors who are advised by an education council on matters including “policies on faculty member qualifications” and “adjudication procedure for appealable matters of student discipline” as well as “other matters specified by the board” (BC Colleges and Institutes Act, 1996). Whether reporting to their autonomous board or to the Ministry, institutions must balance intersecting laws where these relate to their programming or operations – for example, provincial 9 and federal labour and employment statutes (Shanahan, 2016, p. 13). The Charter of Rights and Freedoms applies to the creation of provincial laws and is therefore applicable to legislation related to education (p. 14); it also becomes relevant in institutions when they are acting as agents of the government. Whereas universities are corporations and legally distinct from the government, colleges and institutes have been found in Supreme Court cases such as Douglas/Kwantlen Faculty Association v Douglas College to be “Crown agent(s), substantially controlled by government, with a specific mandate to implement government policy (p. 16). 1.5.1 The Law and Students The relationship between students and institutions is “sui generis” or one-of-a-kind (Hannah & Stack, 2016, p. 132), involving a complex intersection of provincial and federal laws: provincial statutory law establishing and regulating institutions (see previous section); administrative law around governing and decision-making; constitutional law relating to rights and freedoms; private law as it applies to contracts between institutions and students; and tort law regarding specific student activities. With the adoption of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982, students became protected against discrimination on prohibited grounds including religion, creed, disability, family status, sex, and age. Here we encounter the duty to accommodate, which institutions must provide unless they would incur “undue hardship” (p. 138). Consideration is also given to the legal risks and liabilities the institution may incur. An institution is not bound to provide accommodations that would interfere with the rights of others, impact health and safety, or undermine academic requirements or standards. Multiple Supreme Court of Canada cases show institutions have a 10 “tort law duty of care … to take reasonable steps to protect students from harm” (p. 158) including “a duty to warn against the threat of violence” (p. 159). Legal scholars maintain that, to protect themselves from lawsuits, institutions need to regard their relationship to students as contractual and develop clear policies as conditions students accept upon admission. To stand up to scrutiny, policies must be applied as written and administrators are advised to follow policies to the letter “even if [they] believe they are flawed” (p. 165). 1.5.2 Polytechnic Institute Policy and Practice To date Polytechnic Institute has not achieved the clarity in its policies and documentation recommended by legal experts. This is the case both generally, and specifically as it pertains to students in distress. Polytechnic Institute has policies designed to address dangerous or disruptive behaviour; use of illegal substances; use of regulated substances (e.g., alcohol and cannabis) and impairment (2019a); violation of Institute policies including those covering sexual violence and misconduct; and breaches of safety standards (2019b). Policy 5103 and the related procedure address academic concerns including the ability to issue an incomplete grade and grant an extension on assignments (INC), and an Aegrotat (A*) that allows a high-performing student to abandon a course and be credited for completed work, provided this is medically substantiated (Polytechnic Institute, 2016). Policies like 4501 also enshrine Charter rights to accommodations. Policy 5101 states that “Departments/program areas, set their own regulations to govern attendance, or in the case of on-line learning, presence, for courses/programs” (May 2016). While this policy has been under review for the last four years, instructors are expected to take attendance and enforce consequences (including potentially 11 reduced marks) for absenteeism. Instructors at Polytechnic Institute are also responsible for all steps in Academic Integrity investigations, with final decisions regarding sanctions reported to the Office of Student Life, but no independent Academic Integrity Office. Additional policies and procedures that intersect with this topic include those regarding credentials and credit counts: in February 2024 a two-year diploma program at Polytechnic Institute had a minimum credit count of 120 (versus the standard 60 credits at all other BC post-secondary institutions). An edit to the policy was passed by Education Council in Spring 2024 that reduced the minimum credit count to 75; public discourse leading up to this change was tied directly to student wellbeing6. To leverage these tools, a Polytechnic Institute instructor would have to be familiar with each policy as well as the corresponding procedure, and understand a hierarchy of policy considerations, to recommend or take action. An instructor responding to a student distress, therefore, may need to draw upon several policies, as depicted in the figure on the following page. 6 The adjusted minimum credit count is available to any two-year diploma upon their following the Institute’s prescribed review process, on an ad-hoc basis. 12 Figure 1: Polytechnic Institute Policies Surrounding Instructors Responding to Students As the conversation around student support evolves, so do the tools and frameworks that provide additional context for my study. These include the National Standard of Canada for Mental Health and Well-Being for Post-Secondary Students (Mental Health Commission of Canada, 2020); the calls to action and key principles of the Okanagan charter: An international charter for health promoting universities & colleges (International Conference on Health Promoting Universities & Colleges, 2015); and the joint work from the Canadian Association of College and University Student Services and the Canadian Mental Health Association (2013). An initial scan of student support frameworks from across Canada is found in Appendix A, which covers policy frameworks, guidebooks and facilitated workshops, handouts, referral services, and a pilot (summer 2022) student support group. 13 A confidential Polytechnic Institute service called Early Assist, launched in 2017, allows students, faculty and staff to identify “students who may be struggling personally or academically” (Polytechnic Institute, n.d.a, para 3). This referral tool enables the Student Life Office to assess the situation and reach out to the student, after which point the instructor may or may not receive a specific update (beyond acknowledgement of receipt of the referral), depending on the outcome. Separate from, but often complementary to, the Early Assist service, the Accessibility Services office assists students in navigating the accommodations process, including the development of Individual Accessibility Plans (IAPs) with the support of trained vocational rehabilitation specialists. In recent years, both services have seen increases in numbers; while these aren’t always attributable to increased student need, and may also reflect additional staffing, sources from these offices shared that from 2022 to 2024 increases were indeed a result of an increase in student demand for these services. In the four years between 2018 and 2022, the number of students in a Canadian diploma program rose roughly 16% (from 492,639 to 572,442) and by a comparable number at Polytechnic Institute (Statistics Canada, 2023a); at the same time, the number of students with Accessibility Services appointments and IAPs at the institute rose by 53% and 54%, and the number of unique students referred to Early Assist went from 230 to 735, representing a 220% increase. In addition to providing these services, Polytechnic Institute has made initial strides on strategies related to student well-being, including the first version of a Student Well-Being and Resilience Framework in October 2020, which refers to eight dimensions of student well-being and a three-pillar framework to address these. At the time of writing, the Institution had launched a process to create a revised student well-being framework; as a member of the Student Wellbeing 14 Advisory Committee (SWAC), I can report that a new framework is expected in early 2025. In my time at Polytechnic Institute preceding the start of this study (2015-2022), there was little in the way of institutional training or professional development for instructors on these topics. With the reinvigoration of the SWAC and draft framework, a new series of regular PD sessions was created in late 2023 and piloted in 2024, indicating increasing institutional interest in this topic. In the context of the various policies, laws, and support frameworks I have outlined, the growing attention to student mental health issues, and the relative lack of insight into instructor experiences with students in distress, there is ample room to explore these interactions between instructors and students, and the impacts of interactions on instructors, in a BC-based study. The goal of my study, then, was to render this unseen part of the instructor experience visible by creating a picture of the instructor-student interaction at Polytechnic Institute during times of student distress within the framework of care. 1.6 Overview of the Dissertation The next chapter is a review of the literature relating to scholarly conversations around the changing face of students (individual challenges, institutional conditions, and systemic factors); instructor responses to students (roles; instructors as first point of contact); impacts on instructors (secondary trauma and “burnout”, emotional labour); and caring at work. In Chapter 3, I present a conceptual framework grounded in care ethics, a theory championed by feminists in the 1980s that has since been revisited by several scholars. Caring has been analyzed both from an interpersonal, relational perspective as well as from a systems approach. Pulling 15 from various theorists, for the purpose of this study I propose a model of care in post-secondary education as a quality of a relation between two people (Noddings), that is affected by organizational factors (Tronto) and influenced by broader social systemic forces (Fraser; Tronto). Chapter 4 unpacks the methodology of the study and the use of interpretive description to gain a deeper understanding of the experiences of six Polytechnic Institute instructors through interviews and solicited audio diaries and interviews. Taking a phenomenographical approach to analysis, the study generated and interpreted data using care ethics frameworks to map data into the creation of an outcome space, a diagrammatic representation of the instructor experience. Instructors were invited to participate in the process through member checks and reviewed iterations of the outcome space as these were created, in addition to multiple draft chapters of this work. In Chapter 5, the Outcome Space is described in three layers: the heart of the interaction between the student and the instructor; the pressures upon, and supporting factors that contribute to, the caring relation that takes place; and the societal forces that shape the institutional environment and influence the caring relation. The heart of the interaction has five components: recognizing, reacting, responding, redirecting and (presence of, or absence of) reciprocating. The next conceptual grouping of the outcome space represents institutional factors that either help or hinder an instructor’s ability to recognize, react, respond, redirect, and experience reciprocity. They have been grouped into: student workload, enrolment pressures, program structure, departmental culture, roles, and available supports. These influences are fluid and interconnected; influencing each other, as well as the faculty members. The final layer of the 16 outcome space pertains to the broader social and societal issues that have an impact both on the Institute and on the students themselves. The external, broader influences on the caring relation were harder to categorize as these as emerging themes were more varied and included: gender roles, cultural norms, mental health, the impact of COVID-19, accessibility, healthcare, housing, the role of organizations like BC Housing and the RCMP, the cost of living, food security, and diversity. These were later grouped into broader categories of: necessities; cultural influences; and global events. In Chapter 6, the voices of participants are shared more substantively and placed into dialogue with scholars from the literature review (noted here in parentheses). Together, they include calls for supportive communication (Clemens & Robinson, 2021), attention to students as whole people (Keeling, 2014), and holding care as a core value (Hunter et al., 2021; Schussler & Collins, 2006). Instructors in the study group demonstrated a high level of attentiveness as the fundamental and foundational first step towards caring (Noddings, 2012, Tronto, 1993). Instructors experience a range of reactions that have gone undocumented in some previous studies (DiPlacito-DeRango, 2017; 2022; Eisenberg et al., 2012) that include emotional impacts, physical exhaustion, and similarities to the effects of PTSD (Cordaro, 2020, Spear et al., 2021). Instructors who do not receive a sense that their caring has been received in some way through “reciprocity” (Noddings, 2002) or “contact agreement” (DiPlacito-DeRango, 2022) are at risk of “burning out” and might potentially not able to provide care again. Challenges around student workload levels and program structure speak to the ways that Polytechnic Institute as an institution does not care well (Tronto, 2010). While high degrees of 17 contact time and small courses (program structure) could potentially create opportunities for caring; currently the lack of caring as a core value (Schussler & Collins, 2006) or common ground understanding (Hunter et al., 2021) or a “purpose of care” (Tronto, 2010) seems to inhibit caring-oriented instructors. Role precarity (Ivancheva, Lynch, & Keating, 2019; Moos, 2021) was further described by many as a barrier to responding with care. Further, in departments where this caring is not embedded, there are risks to faculty when they step outside of the emotional, or “feeling rules” (Hochschild, 1983, p. 76) and defy the pressure to support emotional norms. And while Polytechnic Institute has made efforts to increase supports, these don’t address the diverse (physical, cultural) barriers and needs of students; addressing these would help support help seeking (Eisenberg et al., 2012). In these ways, Polytechnic Institute falls short of “tailoring of care to meet individuals’ needs” (Tronto, 2010, p. 158). Chapter 7 engages in a discussion that calls out the recommendations of instructor participants and speaks to the factors that promote caring in the student-instructor relationship including attentiveness; an orientation to, and capacity for, caring; and strong relationships with colleagues. It also looks at potential barriers to caring in the student-instructor relationship including a lack of caring orientation; stigma and shame; lack of preparation for encounters; and treatment of students as homogenous. Institutionally, caring is supported through communities of care; clarity of communication and augmented teaching practices; and the reduction of risk to instructors. The factors that inhibit caring at Polytechnic Institute are distilled into the intangible (a set of beliefs and practices that Polytechnic Institute is, and should be, a “school of hard knocks”), and the structural (fragmentation of duties, responsibilities, and abilities to respond). Lastly, Polytechnic Institute has the potential to interact with societal forces outside of the 18 organization’s control, facilitating care by acknowledging the world is changing, and by challenging neoliberal and capitalist assumptions; conversely, the Institute will continue to limit and inhibit care if they promote individualism and re-enact societal assumptions about care. Based on the study findings and discussion, Chapter 8 concludes the dissertation with answers to the research questions, and recommendations designed to support instructors in their caring relationships with students. These recommendations are aimed at the Institute and suggest that the next step for Polytechnic Institute leaders and community members is to work together to: initiate a conversation around a purpose of care at Polytechnic Institute; honour instructor voices and acknowledge the work being done; provide clarity on roles and better allocation of caring functions; provide appropriate training to instructors; make it easy for instructors to share information; and increase available supports while making these structurally and culturally appropriate. Before moving into a review of the ethical orientation for this study, the next chapter will provide an overview of literature related to the changing face of students; instructor responses to students in distress; impacts on instructors; and caring at work. 19 Chapter 2: Literature Review The focus of this literature review is to prepare a foundation for understanding the experiences of Polytechnic Institute instructors when they are the first to respond to students in distress, and the ways they might be better supported. This chapter is broken into four major sections that explore scholarly conversations about: the changing face of students; instructor responses to students; impacts on instructors; and caring at work. We begin with the student side of the equation. 2.1 The Changing Face of Students It is widely understood that students experience health stressors and significant life events during their transition to, and trajectory through, post-secondary education (PSE). Student distress can be rooted in individual struggle (physical, psychological), social challenges (relationships, connection), or environmental conditions (institutional, societal) that either exacerbate or alleviate stressors. Additionally, the profile of post-secondary students has shifted dramatically over the last 60 years, and these aggregate changes have had an impact on the type of students that instructors connect with both inside and outside of the classroom. Whether or not someone engages in post-secondary education is a result of complex and interconnected “influences, experiences, relationships, and developments that are rooted in the family and start quite early in an individual’s life” (Finnie et al., 2016, p. 160). These may include parental education, preparation in K-12, and cultural nuances. While access to higher education was once constrained to “elite” classes, since the 1960s the participation rate of 18-24-year-olds in PSE has increased to more than 50% in many countries, reaching saturation in countries like the US (Altbach et al., 2017, p. xii). In Canada the PSE participation rate for the 20 last ten years has remained fairly steady at 43% (ages 18-24), 12% (ages 25-29), and 6% (ages 30-34) (Statistics Canada, 2023a). Beyond a steadily high participation rate, the makeup of Canadian post-secondary students has shifted dramatically, based in part on a national International Education Strategy for 2019-2024, drawing students from approximately 225 countries, with over half from China and India (Khalid et al., 2024, p. 2)7. In the last reference period reported by Statistics Canada (2021-22), of the 482,313 new entrants to postsecondary education in Canada, 24.3% or 117,202 were from outside Canada (Statistics Canada, 2024a). Meanwhile students raised by parents or guardians with less than a bachelor’s degree, also called first-generation students (or first-generation college students, FGCSs) are on the rise (Thomas et al., 2023; Toutkoushian et al., 2018). Participation in PSE is also nuanced by culture; for example, amongst Chinese Canadians the participation rate in PSE is almost 90%, regardless of parental education levels (Finnie et al., 2016, p. 161). In addition to international students and FGCS creating a more diverse student body, the number of post-secondary students who report some form of disability is on the rise; in the US, this number rose from 6% in 1995 to 9% in 2000 to 11% in 2008 (O’Shea and Meyer, 2016, p. 5). 7 At the time of writing this chapter, there are policy shifts within the Canadian Ministry of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) and other national ministries including Housing, Infrastructure and Communities, that could dramatically reduce the number of international students across Canada. These announcements began after the study period was complete, and the full impacts have yet to be seen. 21 2.1.1 Individual Challenges Regardless of student background, it is understood that post-secondary education intersects with a challenging time of personal and psychological development. In relation to psychology, as noted by Pedrelli and colleagues (2015), some disorders like “panic disorder, generalized anxiety disorders (GAD), and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)” typically appear during the post-secondary years, with 75% of disorders appearing by age 25. A 2018 World Health Organization project on mental disorders across 14,984 college students in eight countries found that 35% of the respondents “reported at least one of the lifetime mental disorders assessed in the survey” (Auerbach et al., 2018, p. 635). A 2019 ACHA survey of 55,284 Canadian students across 58 post-secondary institutions, found that 15.8% of the students surveyed (8.4% male and 18.3% female) had been diagnosed or treated by a professional for both depression and anxiety (American College Health Association, 2019, p. 15). Post-pandemic, a survey with 448 Ontario post-secondary students (Moghimi et al., 2023) found that almost 40% had been diagnosed with a mental health condition. To begin to analyze the extent of these challenges for Polytechnic Institute students, in early 2023 the Institute administered the Canadian Campus Well-being Survey (CCWS) through an online survey emailed to 23,538 students, with an overall response rate of 9.5% (n=2236). Polytechnic Institute’s goal was to assess, identify intervention priorities, and enhance the capacity to link research with policy and practice for health and well-being at the Institute. The respondents were 58% full-time and 42% flexible learning students, with 85% of respondents identifying as domestic, and 15% as international. Data was compared with two groups: six BC institutions and 12 Canadian colleges/institutes/polytechnic institutions (Y. Chen, personal 22 communication, November 2023). As mentioned in the introduction, Polytechnic Institute was found favourable when compared to other BC institutions in the areas of mental health distress; however, even with relatively favourable results, 66% of respondents reported some level of distress: 28% severe, 18% moderate, and 20% mild. Non-traditional students (older, independent) are already over-represented in vocational education, and as countries evolve their post-secondary offerings beyond the traditional undergraduate model to offer alternate modes (including vocational studies), institutions are faced with the challenge of attracting “individuals who are not adequately prepared for academic study” (Altbach et al., 2017, p. xiv). This lack of preparation can manifest multiple ways. A US study found that college students from affluent backgrounds not only experienced less financial stress but achieved higher GPAs and, conversely, students with less “financial socialization” (e.g., learning how to budget, having access to appropriate financial resourcing) faced more stress and had poorer academic outcomes (Sabri et al., 2020, p. 267). Students are also unevenly susceptible to the negative impacts of these circumstances: a student’s socioeconomic background can have a positive or negative impact on their postsecondary performance; and the same can be said for whether a student is domestic or international. Khalid et al. (2024) discussed the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in foregrounding the vulnerabilities of international students who juggle financing, housing, access to information, food insecurity, in addition to unique factors such as “culture shock, and racism” (p. 1). These students had trouble accessing both institutional and broader support systems in their host communities and frequently felt they had “nowhere to go” or that they were being a 23 burden (p. 1). This is represented in the Polytechnic Institute CCWS data, with 31% of the international students citing language/cultural barriers in accessing support. There is a challenging tension between students being motivated to attend post-secondary education, and vocational training in particular, and a student’s need to simultaneously support themselves through these studies, before they can realize the financial promises of that education. When Polytechnic Institute students were surveyed for the CCWS, 84% of respondents cited financial pressures or work obligations as key sources of stress and obstacles to academic progress. In the 2019 American College Health Association survey of Canadian students, 63.4% said they had experienced “traumatic or very difficult to handle” academic, career, family, intimate, relationship, financial, sleep or other circumstances (p. 15) during their studies. While that survey bundled together interpersonal and material (financial, other) circumstances, these are affecting, statistically, more than half of Canadian students at some point during their post-secondary journeys. Beyond individual psychological, social, economic, and cultural factors, students participate in interconnected social networks within broader campus communities; and their ability to seek and find support for challenges appear to be rooted in their relationships with peers, instructors, and institutional staff. This next section looks at institutional help, and hindrance, for students facing distress during their post-secondary studies. 24 2.1.2 Institutional Conditions A 2012 study by Eisenberg, Hunt, and Speer indicated that several correlates act as either barriers or facilitators of student help-seeking including: stigma, perceived need, social context, and cultural competence. They mentioned stigma reduction efforts, screening and linkage (whereby students are identified and referred towards the appropriate contacts), as well as training for “gatekeepers [including] faculty members, advisers, residence-life personnel, or peer leaders, among others” (p. 227). Their study categorized student help-seeking into three models: the health belief model, the Andersen Behavioural Model of Health Services Use, and the network episode model. The health belief model focuses on interventions that influence the individual student’s “knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs” (p. 223) to motivate them to seek help. The behavioural model focuses on removing barriers to help and increasing the number of care providers. Finally, the network episode model focuses primarily on the student’s social network and whether or not this is conducive to help-seeking behaviour. Ong’s 2017 thesis, The Elephant in the Classroom, brought forward student voices around barriers to accessing mental health support including “stigma/shame, lack of knowledge surrounding campus resources, and not knowing what to expect” (p. 24). Ong also addressed different levels of comfort with disclosing a mental health issue. Students were most likely to disclose to a campus mental health counselor (77.8%), family (75.6%), and friends (75.6%), whereas professors (37.8%), fellow students (27.3%) and coworkers (22.2%) ranked lower (p. 20). This is echoed in the Polytechnic Institute CCWS findings that indicated only 35% of respondents felt there was a good support system at Polytechnic Institute during difficult times 25 (lower than the Canadian institution average), while three out of four respondents said they felt comfortable talking about problems with a professional. Institutional practices may serve as a help or hinderance to students’ personal and academic progress. In Ong’s study (2017), participants noted the post-secondary environment is “fast-paced, regarding both activities and interactions, where “if you’re not the ‘norm’, you’re out” (p. 20) with some describing having heard labels like “weak,” “lazy,” “dangerous,” or “attention-seeking” ascribed to students with mental health conditions (p. 20). The fast-paced climate at Polytechnic Institute includes significant workload, in particular in full-time programs8, and 73% of the students surveyed cited difficulties with academic workload as a barrier to their success, compared to 64% citing personal or family problems. Supportive practices have been shown to make an impact. In Ong’s (2017) study, where an institution demonstrated “campus friendliness towards students with mental health problems” (p. 19), students were more comfortable disclosing to instructors. Student suggestions for improving resources fell into normalizing mental health problems; broadening the range of services available; and increasing the awareness of services. This is similar to findings from Spiker and Hammer (2021) who indicated that the greater the mental health awareness at a particular institution, the less personal stigma was experienced by students, which then enabled students to take more responsibility for their mental health and access services as needed. 8 Polytechnic Institute’s cohort, or full-time diploma programs are two years long, feature set timetables of required courses, and students are expected on campus Monday to Friday, 8:30 am to 5:20 pm, for seven to eight courses in a term, for 24 or more hours of classroom (instructional time) per week in addition to team projects, assignments, readings, and exams. 26 One of the ways in which institutions attempt to address students’ needs for support is through student services. These can be (via Coniglio et al., 2005): integrated (all-encompassing service centres offering a range of personal and academic supports), traditional (clinical, personal psychological focus with few career or other services), and minimal (storefront only, relies primarily on outsourced support) (Russel, 2010, p. 115). At Polytechnic Institute these services most closely match the traditional model with Accessibility Services, Indigenous Services, tutoring and the writing centre all separate departments (with Indigenous services and academic support services reporting to different senior administrators, and career advising offered through the Student Association). Mirwaldt (2010) explained that additional domains of wellness services on Canadian campuses encompasses primary care (physicians), wellness programming (stress reduction, safer sex, substance use, nutrition), immunization campaigns, and disability certification. A 2020 study of 8,248 students who had sought mental health help across 41 Canadian campuses found that the prevailing problems were students feeling overwhelmed (95%), suffering from exhaustion (94%), extreme sadness (83%), overwhelming anxiety (83%) and extreme loneliness (80%), with approximately 26% reporting they had considered suicide (Ogrodniczuk et al., 2021, p. 837); the authors recommended institutions implement “comprehensive service and referral protocols” (p. 838) to address these challenges. Unfortunately, however, the availability of services does not mean these are well understood or accessed, as is the case at Polytechnic Institute: according to the Canadian Campus Wellbeing Survey, only four out of ten Polytechnic Institute student respondents knew where to access 27 campus resources for their mental or emotional health and physical health, lagging when compared to Canadian institutions. Without being able to access adequate support, students may turn to unhealthy coping behaviours; a University of British Columbia (UBC) Okanagan study found “significant correlations … between stress level, marijuana use, and an increase in “risky sexual behavior” (Buch, 2007, p. 3). Mahmoud and colleagues (2012) conducted a study of 508 full-time undergraduate students and found that “maladaptive coping strategies, such as self-blaming, denial, and giving up” were strongly correlated with increased stress (p. 155). Polytechnic Institute is not the only post-secondary institution to struggle with addressing changing student needs. Nationally, the efforts to prioritize well-being across institutions is uneven, as seen in an analysis of ten university signatories of the 2015 Okanagan Charter, a pledge to embed health across all aspects of the institution, and to lead collaborative health promotion efforts locally and internationally. When reviewing signatories, Squires and London (2021) identified leaders and laggers. Leading campuses had several things in common: supportive champions, clearly communicated structures for collaboration, highly visible and well-defined milestones for their work, dedicated resources, and a “focus on student, staff, and faculty well-being” (p. 107). The institutions that struggled experienced gaps in leadership and championing of the work, siloed approaches, communication and visibility deficits, under resourcing, and a “difficulty broadening the focus beyond students and student services to classroom experiences and to employee well-being” (p. 108). These challenges were also evident in a 2023 scan of mental health services at Canadian post-secondary institutions (Read et. al) that concluded the system needs clearer information for students on institutional websites (p. 5); more 28 involvement by students in the design of services, programs, and information sharing (p. 6); and more reporting on student satisfaction and outcomes of care (p. 6). There is also an intersection between the personal and the institutional: the ways in which students experience, and access support services is influenced, for example, by their backgrounds and identities as first-generation students, as international students, or as disabled students. Thomas et al. (2023) found that FGCS (first generation college students9) both experience higher stress levels than their non-FGCS counterparts and are less likely to access services designed to mitigate these (p. 1). This was also seen in a US-based study that found non-FGCS (traditional) students reported lower levels of depression and stress than their FGCS counterparts, and that despite a greater need for these campus services, FGCS used these at a lower rate than traditional students because of inconvenient location, lack of awareness, inconvenient hours, and lack of available time (Stebleton et al., 2014, p. 13). The FGCS students also reported a lower sense of belonging, and that “every one-unit increase in sense of belonging was associated with a 0.23-unit decrease in the frequency with which students reported feeling stressed, depressed, or upset during the academic year” (p. 14). 9 Terms like FGCS can potentially perpetuate the illusion that students are homogenous. That is not the intent here. Rather, I use these examples to show that there are potentially different challenges for students depending on their cultural, social, economic, and family background. As explored by Nguyen and Nguyen (2018) “studies often use the FGS term to lay claim to students’ challenges and educational outcomes, ignoring the possibility that other dimensions of their lives and identities may overlap or play a larger role than the FGS status alone” (p. 148) and that conferring a first-generation term on students can mask other differences. Using an intersectional lens, they caution against accepting first generation status as a “single and simple dominant narrative” (p. 149) nor to use this “status independent from [an examination of] other social forces” (p. 157). They also note that students are not only affected by these forces, but that there are “many, overlapping ways students are influenced by their institutions” (p. 165). 29 Zakharchuk and Xiao (2023) identified challenges particular to social supports for international students during the pandemic. They noted that institutional responses were primarily focused on academic interventions, and that international students were less aware of supports than their non-international counterparts, less able to access these, and more reliant on their families. More broadly, and outside of COVID-19 measures, de Oliveira Soares and colleagues (2024) studied resources offered by Montreal universities from the perspective of Chinese international students. Their participants called attention to challenges noted earlier, for example, around lack of awareness of resources, and lack of available resources (e.g., wait times for counselling appointments), that are found in other studies. However, these international students also faced unique help-seeking barriers in terms of language challenges (for example, in being able to read and understanding emails from institutional service providers), and “self-exclusion”, primarily from clubs, athletics, and activities (p. 135), that otherwise could have represented part of their social networks. Similarly, students with disabilities have expressed wanting more customization of support, including broader advising and empathy from their disability resource office, and integration into other parts of the campus community like the library, or math tutoring (O’Shea and Meyer, 2016). This call for integration matches an integrated (macro) approach preferable to traditional or storefront (minimal) approaches to delivering student support (Coniglio et al., 2005, as cited in Russel, 2010). When speaking to the needs for counseling services to address diverse student populations (be these differences of gender, nationality, sexuality or socioeconomic status), Russel (2010) named the results of previous studies listing “competencies that include: the importance of being aware of one’s own cultural values and biases, understanding the world 30 views of the client, and developing culturally appropriate intervention strategies” (p. 118). In 2010, Mirwaldt noted special considerations for student subgroups in wellness strategies (that they classified as GLBTQ, first generation, and international students), indicating this is not a new concept. Despite potential barriers to accessing appropriate care, the volume of Polytechnic Institute students using campus services has increased dramatically. In the four years between 2018 and 2022, the number of students in a Canadian diploma program rose roughly 16% (from 492,639 to 572,442), and similar growth was experienced at Polytechnic Institute (Statistics Canada, 2023a). During the same period, the number of Polytechnic Institute students with Accessibility Services appointments and IAPs rose by 53% and 54%; and Early Assist referrals by 220%. This has not yet peaked: in 2023-24, the Early Assist team had 830 unique referrals (an increase of 13% over the previous year). The team expanded to meet this demand by hiring a permanent second Student Life Manager in February 2020; a temporary third Student Life Manager in December 2020, and a temporary fourth Student Life Manager in October 2024. These year-over-year increases in demand (and commensurate increases in staffing) outpace the growth in numbers of students and may be indicative of shifts in both the profile of students pursuing PSE, the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, and institutional adaptations to meet these new student parameters. And beyond these shifting individual and institutional landscapes, there are systemic and environmental conditions in which the individual, and the institution, are operating. Carney Strange (2010), spoke of two streams of conversation that shaped the student services discipline in Canada: one was a conversation around student development 31 (psychosocial, cognitive, personality) and the other was related to the campus environment (physical; human aggregate; organizational design; and social climate) (p. 19). These two domains have been explored in most of the studies highlighted up to this point. That said, this orientation to the individual and the institution ignores the broader societal influences that might impact student development and the campus in which students are developing. The next section discusses these considerations. 2.1.3 Systemic Factors Barnetson (2018) named the four “main components of Canada’s training system [as] post-secondary education (PSE), government training and immigration policies, workplace training, and community education” and noted that instead of a system, these represent a loose assembly of separate pieces that often contradict each other (p. 6). Each of these (PSE, government training and immigration policy, workplace training, and community education) are also subject to external forces. For example, the economic drivers for PSE enrolment intersect with a social context that “for most individuals PSE is a life-changing – and generally life-improving – experience” (Finnie et al., 2016, p. 150). On this basis, PSE in Canada has been seen as the pathway to a better future, even as conditions may prevent students from accessing this prosperity. To this end, in 2011 the Canadian senate made recommendations including a call to convene ministers of education to address “non-financial factors (such as socioeconomic issues, family environment and K-12 education) in order to ultimately encourage all young Canadians to pursue post-secondary education” (Finnie et al., 2016, p. 173). National efforts to intensively recruit international students, and now to deny access to seats and post-graduate work permits to 32 these same international students, are recent federal changes impacting both institutional dialogues and the experiences of particular students. Vocational schools like Polytechnic Institute express mandates to produce job-ready graduates, layered onto provincial government imperatives that all post-secondary institutions have a responsibility to advance job-readiness. Barneston (2018) offered the example of EducationPlannerBC where career outcomes, labour market data, and career mapping form part of the decision-making frameworks for potential students (p. 36). While it can be asserted that post-secondary graduates “attain higher wages than those who do not complete PSE” (p. 49) these benefits have not been uniform; women and Indigenous graduates earn less than their non-Indigenous and male counterparts and the benefits of PSE (in income, health, and lifestyle factors) cannot be isolated from these other systemic factors. As mentioned, students can be caught in a tense position between using PSE as a route to a potentially more financially stable future, and the need to simultaneously support themselves. This comes at a time when 45% of Canadians say that rising prices are greatly affecting their ability to meet the daily costs of living, an increase of 12% points over the previous year (Statistics Canada, 2024b). According to the World Health Organization (WHO), “social health determinants are the circumstances in which people are born, develop, live and age” (Canadian Medical Association, 2020, p. 1). A list of these was developed by experts at a conference at York University to include: “income and income distribution; early life; education; housing; food security; employment and working conditions; unemployment and job security; social safety net; social inclusion/exclusion; and health services” (p. 1). These are determinants of health outcomes 33 because the majority of “diseases including heart disease and mental illness follow a social gradient with those in lowest socio-economic groups having the greatest burden of illness” (p. 2). The Canadian Medical Association called on the federal and provincial governments to recognize this relationship and to use that information in their decision-making; to explore options to reduce financial barriers to care (p. 3); to ensure the public is aware of this relationship; and to collect and report on related data on an annual basis. They also made recommendations related to medical education and clinical practice. Statistics Canada (n.d.) produces a report card for these determinants of social health, and in 2024 they shared that only 40.4% of Canadians reported high life satisfaction (16/41 of OECD countries); that only 71% of Canadians lived in acceptable housing (17/41 for the OECD) and that 9.9% of the population lived in poverty (no comparison). In March of 2024, food bank visits reached an all-time high across Canada, reflective of record high food insecurity (Food Banks Canada, 2024). In the 2023 Canadian Campus Wellbeing Survey at Polytechnic Institute, food insecurity emerged as a significant concern: 31% of domestic and 47% of international students reported some food insecurity, and 12% of domestic, and 23% of international students reported having very low food security. Institute initiatives like a student food pantry and a fall food drive were launched in response to these considerations. In addition to the influences of health determinants, social shifts can have an impact on students and their experiences in PSE. For example, there is literature that shows potential differences in the ways that some members of Gen Z (those born approximately between 1997 and 2012) and older generations including X (1965-1980) and Baby Boomers (1946-1964) approach work and 34 learning. This may be important as Gen Z comprise the majority of PSE-aged students, and Gen X and Baby Boomers predominantly comprise employers10 and post-secondary instructors, staff, and administrators11. Seifert and colleagues (2023) found support for theories that suggested life experiences vary amongst generations and therefore create different expectations about work; within their college environments they found that Baby Boomer participants perceived the following to be more important than Gen Z counterparts: self-reliance; morality/ethics; the value of hard work; the centrality of work (work as more central to life); and productivity. They found no difference in the dimension of delayed gratification; and they found that Gen Z placed less importance on leisure time than Baby Boomers (counter to their hypothesis). Madden (2024) suggested that members of Gen Z tend to be highly relational, valuing approachability in leadership, trust, and clear learning and development pathways, responding well in “clan-type” organizations with high levels of engagement and commitment towards common values (p. 46). All members of a generation are not the same, and values are not necessarily uniform amongst Gen Z. For example, de Boer and Bordoloi (2022) surveyed 1,188 PSE Gen Z students across China, Germany, the Netherlands, and Thailand and found that responses varied greatly, although specific intrinsic motivators (learning and visible results) were commonly two of the highest ranked values across all nationalities (p. 381). 10 In Seifer et al., 2023: “Baby Boomers are projected to make up about 27% of the U.S. workforce in 2025, with Gen Z comprising almost 20% in 2025 (a number that will rise over time as Gen Z ages up; Department of Labor, as cited in Lettink, 2019)” (p. 403). 11 In Canada, the median age of full-time academic staff is 52 (Statistics Canada, 2023); this data is not available for Polytechnic Institute. 35 When reflecting on the literature relating to the causes of and responses to student distress, it is important to recognize there are increasing vulnerabilities and complexities across multiple dimensions. There are measurable and dramatic increases in the demand for special services for students at most post-secondary institutions including Polytechnic Institute, and as these challenges and demands increase, it is apparent and intuitive that faculty are being increasingly called on to participate in the response to these needs. Yet thus far, faculty have been minimally regarded in the institutional approach to improve student wellbeing. They have been seen for example, as forming part of the human and cultural aggregate of the campus environment (Strange, 2010), but on the whole have notably been “an afterthought in this regard” (Squires & London, 2021, p. 111). To move instructors to the foreground, the next section further unpacks their side of the equation. 2.2 Instructor Responses to Students This examination of instructor responses begins with a general overview of instructor roles before delving into the literature regarding instructors as first responders to student distress. 2.2.1 Instructor Roles Many of the scholars who examine faculty roles approach their studies from the tripartite model that speaks to the functions of research, teaching, and service in the academic profession (Jones et al. 2013; Maxey & Kezar, 2016; Dawson et al., 2019; Museus & Sasaki, 2022). However, Polytechnic Institute does not share a developmental history with universities, as vocational institutes are focused on training and oriented to meeting the economic development needs of the local area or region (Hogan & Trotter, 2013). True to these vocational roots, at Polytechnic 36 Institute the notions of research and service are not present in instructor role descriptions nor explicitly part of the faculty compensation nor the promotion (regularization) process. As is often the case with unionized teaching environments (Gilligan-Hackett & Murray, 2016), at Polytechnic Institute the collective agreements for each union have an influence on the nature of job postings and role expectations. BCGEU instructional postings must include “trade qualification in a designated trade or recognized industry qualifications in nondesignated trades and other occupations”; “five (5) years’ experience as a Journeyperson or equivalent”; “previous supervisory or teaching experience”; and “skills and abilities to instruct the curriculum” as developed by the labour/management committee (2019, p. xxxiv). Per the Polytechnic Institute-FSA collective agreement, postings developed by the employer must be shared with the hiring committee for their feedback and input prior to publication (p. 6). While not rendered explicit in the FSA agreement, based on the BCGEU framework and the historic underpinning for Polytechnic Institute’s existence, postings for instructors in both unions are highly focused on professional competencies, years of experience, and relevant credentials, with duties and responsibilities focused on teaching as the application of industry expertise through instruction and assessment, with no mention of research or service functions. This reflects the compensation model at Polytechnic Institute; unlike institutions with a tripartite compensation model (teaching, research, service), instructors are paid for teaching and marking and a finite minimum amount of non-instructional contact time. Service functions are compensated through structured release from teaching hours (anecdotally called ‘release time’); this can be used for curriculum development or non-teaching service to students (program heads, faculty club advisors, etc.), and research is not typically compensated unless it is part of a formal 37 PD funding application. Polytechnic Institute does not have tenure; permanence of teaching positions (called regularization) is an employment status rather than a formalized process. This is based on the availability of permanent positions within various departments, as well as a function of the delivery model (full time vs flexible learning). Despite the differences between Polytechnic Institute and universities, much of the discourse around post-secondary faculty roles is still relevant, including those calling out an institutional “demand that faculty assume ever-expanding responsibilities and respond to excessive productivity expectations” (Museus & Sasaki, 2022, p. 555). Jones and Weinrib (2022) observed that academic work is increasingly subject to fragmentation and hierarchies, and these observations also apply to the Polytechnic Institute context. At Polytechnic Institute horizontal fragmentation around the areas of “teaching, curriculum, and research productivity” (p. 37) can be seen in the delineation between the trades and technology streams, as well as the limited interdependence between sub-disciplines and the substantive organizational silos created by the distinct schools (e.g., Health Services, Academic Studies). Within the broader Polytechnic Institute organizational structure, functions like student affairs are siloed and staffed by “situated professionals” with credentials specializing in that area (p. 38) who report to a Senior Director, Student Success (responsible for student life, recreation services, financial aid, housing, accessibility services, and the library), who in turn reports to the Provost and Vice President Academic. This delineation of functions represents a continued move towards unbundling of faculty responsibilities and a shift away from what Macfarlane (2011) termed the “‘all-rounder’: someone who teaches, researches and performs a variety of service or administrative tasks such as leading a department or working as a student adviser” (p. 61). 38 Clarke and Arnold (2021) summarized the development of student services as a distinct discipline in Canada, as first shared by Hardy-Cox and Strange (2010) as having taken place in four phases. Mirroring the discussion of the evolving legal landscape discussed in the introduction, the first phase of the development of student services was to address the need to provide those functions that replaced the role of parents (in loco parentis). A second phase (1950s to 1970s) saw the initial professionalism of student services as a discipline; while simultaneously a third shift represented the creation of specific sub-disciplines and areas of expertise (e.g., the Canadian Association of Disability Service Providers in Post-Secondary Education). A final phase (through the 1980s to today) expanded these developments to respond to trends in education such as international education, and graduate students as distinct learners. Clarke and Arnold asserted that the COVID-19 pandemic represented the most drastic of these shifts, when institutions moved these services online (p. 147). The separation of student services as distinct from teaching functions continues through to today. While some of this delineation and fragmentation can be seen in the post-secondary system and at Polytechnic Institute, scholars have observed faculty being asked to perform an all-round functionality in addition to the specific departments or offices tasked with student services. This multi-purpose role comes at the intersection of union agreements, reward structures, the “stretching [of] faculty in too many directions”, “low [perceived] value of teaching”, shrinking budgets, “market-based system mindsets”, and “hierarchy in the system” (Holcombe & Kezar, 2018, p. 97), leading to a variety of responsibilities placed on faculty. 39 As part of these experiences, instructors are being increasingly called to interact with students experiencing distress. The next section highlights the emerging literature regarding this topic. 2.2.2 Instructors as First Point of Contact Internationally, the phenomena of instructors interacting with student distress, and as frequently the first to respond, has been studied by Hughes et al. (2018), White and LaBelle (2019), and Kalkbrenner (2021). In Canada scholars exploring this topic include DiPlacito-DeRango (2015; 2017; 2022) and Kelly (2022). Their work is discussed at length here as these authors address the specific intersection of instructors with distressed students, highly relevant to my research. Hughes and colleagues’ (2018) pan-UK case study, Student Mental Health: The Role and Experiences of Academics, interviewed 52 instructors across multiple disciplines with varying levels of academic experience. Participants expressed several concerns: that “academic problems almost always have a non-academic cause”; that students will seek non-academic help from their instructors “regardless of how the [instructor’s] role is described to them” (p. 2); that defining and maintaining boundaries was challenging; and that they were increasingly being asked to engage with “assessing student need and triaging” (p. 2). Many participants spoke of confusion around responsibility for student wellbeing and where this sits within an institution, with the additional challenge that responding to students in distress often takes place outside of traditional working hours. The authors called on institutions to acknowledge instructors’ roles in responding to these students; provide clarity around responsibilities; offer support to instructors impacted by these interactions; and to provide training designed to target these interactions. 40 White and LaBelle’s US-based 2019 study led to their identification of four types of instructor approaches to responding to student mental health challenges: empathic listener, referral source, first responder, and bystander (p. 140). The empathic listeners were instructors who made themselves available to discuss the topic of mental health; who were willing and able to engage in dialogue and offer potential support, and who may have also disclosed their own mental health struggles (p. 140). Referral source instructors were also conversationally engaged with their students, however, were more “quick to redirect [students] to professional mental health resources than discuss mental health issues personally” (p. 142). The next group, referred to as first responders, were engaged in an observational, non-actor role. White and LaBelle found recognition was common amongst their first responders as evidenced by a high degree of consistent monitoring of their students for signs of distress such that referrals could be made. The smallest group of study participants were considered to be bystanders: those who recognized that mental health challenges were being presented but would not take any action based on perceived risk (making a mistake, legal challenges); the perception of being “constrained by the instructor–student relationship”; or because they were either not qualified, had not been sufficiently trained, or both (p. 142). An additional fear, one of violence from students, was also brought forward by some (p. 145). The authors suggested approaches to better supporting instructors, beginning with an institutional acknowledgement that not all instructors will be able, equipped, or willing to be empathic listeners. They noted that while many participants had received Title IV training (to recognize and deal with sexual assault) the majority were lacking the equivalent formal training in mental health interventions with such training representing a potential opportunity to move instructors 41 out of the bystander role (White & LaBelle, 2019, p. 149). They advocated for standard mental health resource information in syllabi and empowering instructors to mention this at the outset of classes. They suggested institutions acknowledge the under-resourcing of official services such as counselling; recognize the complex intersecting personal and social reasons why faculty may or may not be able to engage with distressed students; and overall (as with the majority of research covered thus far), they urged caution when considering instructors as part of the solution. Kalkbrenner et al.’s 2021 study explicitly explored faculty members as the “first institutional points of contact” (p. 636) in supporting student mental health. They identified findings from a previous faculty survey by Albright and Schwartz who discovered that 87% believed supporting student mental health was part of their role, but that the majority (63%) were not engaging in recognition and referral practices. Through semi-structured interviews with faculty and staff participants, five themes emerged: knowledge of mental health disorder (MHD) definitions, knowledge of warning signs, comfort and willingness to recognize and refer, limited knowledge about resources for mental health issues, and the faculty-student relationship. Based on their work, the team presented four recommendations: awareness and education about the institution’s counselling centre; unifying campus resources and policy; structuring the learning environment to remove barriers and facilitate connection; and advocating for more resources for the counselling centre. Humber Institute of Technology professor Maria DiPlacito-DeRango has written extensively about the role of Canadian post-secondary instructors in mental health frameworks. Her 2015 42 PhD study of faculty at an Ontario career-focused college brought together 42 survey and 23 interview participants. The findings of this study centred on (1) awareness of students and their mental health challenges; (2) instructor knowledge about these issues; and (3) their perceived role in supporting these students. Her recommendations were fairly comprehensive, beginning with suggestions for supporting current college practice through: encouraging conversation; ensuring confidence in the referral process; ensuring instructors understand the validity but also limitations of accommodation documentation; and through a curricular inclusion and instruction piece (p. 224). Future-facing recommendations included: generating greater mental health awareness at the college (p. 226); encouraging mental health literacy; strengthening mental health knowledge and confidence (p. 228); increasing opportunities for mental health training and professional development (p. 230); establishing essential resources (funding and time) (p. 232); developing and/or clarifying policies related to mental health (p. 235); and implementing whole-school approaches or systems of care (p. 237). DiPlacito-DeRango’s 2015 dissertation highlighted previously discussed themes including fragmentation and hierarchy, as well as separation of student affairs from teaching responsibilities, and noted that at her institution of study, a career-focused site similar to Polytechnic Institute: the promotion of student well-being is not identified as a vital component in the functioning of post-secondary instructors. In this light, it seems that instructor quality is narrowly-defined by subject knowledge, student academic performance, or the ability to promote that which is encouraged by traditional models of schooling – esteemed 43 education and opportunities for economic development – pushing the rest to “the sidelines. (p. 15) The dissertation also noted the relegation of responsibility for student mental health to specific professionals “such as such as psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, and/or school counsellors, who function through student support service departments, such as a counselling centre” (p. 16). Building on the initial findings of her dissertation research, in 2017 DiPlacito-DeRango sought to situate instructors in mental health frameworks and “to propose and discuss a (re)conceptualized understanding of the postsecondary instructor as one who not only creates, delivers, and/or facilitates academic curriculum, but who can also support the well-being of students” (p. 284). This paper situated instructors as critical in responses to students for several reasons: authentic settings work better for interventions, mental health issues are “likely to first appear in the classroom” (p. 286), and less than half of post-secondary students who need help proactively seek out formal supports, which is in line with the findings of Eisenberg and others. Using the findings from her PhD research, DiPlacito-DeRango formally proposed a model called RRR: recognize, render, and redirect as a process for instructors to follow in their interactions with distressed students. The first step for an instructor is to “recognize when students are experiencing a challenge or stressful situation” (DiPlacito-DeRango, 2017, p. 287) especially when it affects academics, taking care to ensure recognition is not diagnosis. Next, instructors should “render preliminary 44 initiatives of support in their classrooms” regardless of whether an “official document” has been filed (p. 287). Finally, they should redirect the student to other support at the institution. The introduction of this framework makes several assumptions: that instructors can recognize signs of student mental health challenges; that these appear predominantly in classroom settings; that they are equipped to intervene and render support; and that the resources to which students should be redirected are robust and clearly communicated. This model was subsequently shared within Canada’s post-secondary community, including as part of a keynote address at a 2018 SFU conference entitled “Recognize, Render, and Redirect: Supporting Faculty to Support Students with Mental Health Challenges.” In 2022 this was followed with a document analysis of student mental health frameworks and policies across 20 Canadian post-secondary institutions that also described the positioning of instructors therein. In reviewing frameworks, DiPlacito-DeRango explained that some institutions have more systems than others, but that all models analyzed call on instructor involvement as an increasingly important piece. Mapping frameworks against her RRR paradigm, she found the first R, recognize, was present in more than half, either as disclosure (an explicit statement) or as observable signs of “students in critical and non-critical distress” (p. 6). The second R, render, was harder to spot: 45% referenced “compassionate narrative exchanges”, 40% addressed this through “curriculum content”, and 55% through “teaching practices” (p. 9). The third R, redirect, was accounted for in references to having instructors contact both emergency and non-emergency services (p. 9). 45 The use of the relatively untested RRR model raised questions about whether this was a fully developed concept; perhaps institutions are falling short on delivering comprehensive frameworks, or RRR needs to be revisited and revised, or both. The author also highlighted several challenges for instructors. First, and similar to the caution made by White and LaBelle, the situating of instructors as intervenors “can put pressure on (or makes assumptions about) instructors’ knowledge and confidence” (DiPlacito-DeRango, 2022, p. 9) and institutions must not ignore their role in providing instructors with support. An additional challenge identified here is a lack of contact agreement, the practice where the student and instructor make a commitment to follow-up after supports have been realized. A key limitation of the study was expressed towards the conclusion, in that it was a document analysis and thus “what is in place is not necessarily what is in practice” (p. 12). This was also the first application of the RRR framework, offering an opportunity to map RRR against a live, applied situation. Patrick Kelly’s (2022) doctoral thesis looked at the intersection of distressed students and their instructors from the point of view of a Canadian student affairs professional. Kelly’s “personal belief [is] that faculty should have a role on campus in supporting students’ mental wellness” (p. 41), and his study aimed to explore factors that would influence a faculty member’s receptivity or resistance to supporting students. Using an anonymous survey distributed to full-time faculty from 10 Ontario universities (chosen randomly from a total of 22 institutions), the research analyzed responses from 822 faculty: just over 50% female, 46% male, remainder other (1.9%); with a mean age of 50.7. These parameters were important because Kelly was interested specifically in whether an instructor’s generational background was a help, or hindrance, to their receptivity to suggestions. From the data gathered, seven themes emerged: system (structure, 46 class size, workload, resources); training (lacking); not responsible (not my job, someone else’s job); personal impact (mental health, career growth, leadership support, inequality of distribution); impact on students (fairness, student preparation); boundaries (faculty/student relationship, privacy/legal); and appreciation for the topic (pp. 86-87). The study found that “those who identify as women were more likely than those who identify as men to be receptive to the proposed changes” which is in line with other change management theorists quoted in his research (p. 105). Respondents commented specifically on female and racialized faculty as being more likely to be approached by students, and how this phenomenon exacerbated the pressures on these faculty, who tended to be already “overburdened with service”, with resultant challenges for their career advancement opportunities (p. 105). In summary, these studies advocate a holistic approach to responding to students that ranges from the interpersonal to the institutional and back again, as well as offering practical suggestions including training and mentoring of faculty. At the same time, and as discussed at the beginning of the chapter, student numbers are increasing, demands for services are increasing, and in many cases (by design or by default) the instructor is increasingly serving as the point of contact for distressed students. This increased demand for instructors to respond could potentially increase their workloads, and commensurately, their stress and risk of detrimental personal impacts. As such, the next section of this chapter further examines the potential impact response work has on instructors. 47 2.3 Impact on Instructors This section starts with brief perspectives from K-12 schooling, where the mental health impacts on first response were first recognized, before engaging with emerging research in the post-secondary context. 2.3.1 Secondary Trauma and “Burnout” In 2015, Hydon and colleagues addressed the prevalence of secondary trauma (or STS, secondary traumatic stress) in teachers, administrators, and staff in the K-12 system. This was found to be the stress experienced when school personnel “hear about a crisis or ongoing traumas of students but do not directly experience such events” (p. 319) leading to physical, emotional, behavioural, cognitive, interpersonal, spiritual, and professional impacts. To address these impacts in K-12 school personnel, the US Department of Education created a full-day workshop including medical definitions, sharing of experiences, a self-care exercise, and “Psychological First Aid” (p. 329). Holmes (2016) found “hidden causes” (p. 50) of instructor distress were related to instructor emotional regulation, inner being, and attachment. In an exploration of these hidden causes, Harding and colleagues (2019) asked, “Is [K-12] teachers’ mental health and wellbeing associated with students’ mental health and wellbeing?”, and noted that teachers are at higher risk for mental health challenges than other professionals (p. 181). The thrust of their research, however, was demonstrating the impacts on students, rather than on teachers. In 2019, Squires was motivated by “alarming attrition rates” for early career K-12 teachers (p. 255) to advance an exploration of teacher well-being, quoting Cherkowski and Walker’s (2018) “four key signals of a thriving school: noticing, nurturing, sustaining, and flourishing” (p. 257). 48 Her work advocated for the mentorship of new teachers where well-matched mentors could build peer connections with experienced teachers as well as build trust with administrators in a “tridimensional relationship” (p. 259), towards the development of a PLC (professional learning community) where there are shared goals, collaborative work towards these, and fostering of belonging and community even while celebrating the diversity of the participants (p. 261). In the higher education profession, the aforementioned 2021 mixed-methods study by Spear, Morey, and van Steen examined the prevalence of instructors having to respond to student crises, and found that the majority of the instructors who participated felt they did not have the time or resources to respond to these challenges and were “distressed” during or after the encounter (p. 1125). This distress, if unchecked, could lead to significant impacts such as secondary traumatic stress (STS) and a concept often described as “burnout”. Greinacher and colleagues (2019) used the term “secondary traumatization” to refer to phenomena of secondary traumatic stress (STS), vicarious traumatization, and compassion fatigue (p. 1). These concepts came from Figley’s 1999 description of “the stress deriving from helping others who are suffering or who have been traumatized’ (p. 10, as cited in Greinacher et al. 2019, p. 2). In a thesis on the impacts of the BC overdose crisis on community mental health workers (CMHW), McDaniel (2022) explored the relationship between secondary trauma in the workplace and “burnout” as “the manifestation of the feeling of being depleted of one’s resources, cynicism and detachment towards interpersonal relationships, and a lack of achievement and productivity” (p. 28). McDaniel highlighted that worker “burnout” is 49 unfortunately often attributed to a failure of self-care or job unsuitability, as opposed to other correlates like role ambiguity, conflict, and workload pressure. In post-secondary education, some research has specifically focused on the prevalence of secondary trauma in student affairs professionals. Lynch and Glass created an instrument known as the Secondary Trauma in Student Affairs Professionals Scale (STSAP) in 2019. They shared the theories of Graf, Sator, and Spranz-Fogasy (2014) around helping professions “including medicine, nursing, psychotherapy, psychological counseling, social work, education or coaching” who found that those “who choose careers in the helping professions expect to interact with people who have experienced various types of traumas” (p. 3). This work took place in a profession where this assertion makes sense, whereas post-secondary instructors, particularly in a polytechnic context, have likely not been professionally nor personally prepared for interactions with traumatized individuals. Building on this work related to student services professionals, Kyle Baillie’s (2022) dissertation examined resilience and perceived organizational support as it related to secondary trauma in Canadian student affairs professionals. Reiterating Figley’s definition, Baillie made a distinction between secondary trauma, which may take place after one exposure, and “burnout”, which is a longer-term process “precipitated by increased workload and institutional stress” (p. 21). He noted that secondary trauma disproportionately affected marginalized groups including women, BIPOC, and LGBTQ+ individuals. Student affairs professionals engage in helping work similar to social work, and Baillie drew parallels between their high caseloads, colleague support systems (or lack thereof), direct contact with clients, and stresses associated with helping 50 marginalized clients. Baillie found that perceived organizational support (POS) is another variable of importance and indicates several studies have found the quality of the relationship between an individual and the organization can impact the extent to which they are affected by secondary trauma. Similar to Kalkbrenner and White and LaBelle, Baillie spoke to the aforementioned increase in demand for formal campus interventions like counselling, noting that the Centre for Collegiate Mental Health (2016) reported that from 2009 to 2015, post-secondary enrolment increased by almost 6%; however, students seeking appointments increased by almost 30%, and attended appointments increased by close to 40%. Again, these outside pressures (increased workload, institutional stress) were found to be significant contributors to the destabilization of the individual and contributors to the extent to which they experience negative impacts. While it has been recognized that student affairs professionals can be harmed by interactions with students in distress, and affected by a lack of institutional support, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the extent to which this happened with their instructor counterparts had not been extensively explored. The pandemic, however, opened additional discussion about the challenges faced by post-secondary instructors in interacting with distressed students. Cordaro’s (2020) “Pouring from an Empty Cup: The Case for Compassion Fatigue in Higher Education” focused on the impacts of COVID-19 on instructors who found themselves “managing distressed students with a wide range of issues, while also managing their own interpersonal stress” (p. 17). It identified the symptoms of compassion fatigue including emotional impacts, physical exhaustion, substance use, and similarities to the effects of PTSD. Risk factors for instructors included “neglecting one’s self-care”, “porous professional boundaries”, age, gender, personal 51 history and “inadequate personal … or professional support” (p. 20). Conversely, protective factors included self-care, self-compassion, meditative practices, and both social and professional support networks. The article ends with an assertion that institutions have a key role in supporting instructors personally and professionally. This is reinforced by Jelińska and colleagues (2021), who found that most literature related to the pandemic focuses on pedagogy and program delivery logistics, rather than “the psychological impact of the situation on the teachers’ functioning, let alone … well-being” (p. 2). They reiterated that institutions could play a greater role in instructor mental health, particularly around job security concerns, and repeat 2020 OECD recommendations that well-being be prioritized for both students and staff, with related goals more explicitly created, shared, and resourced by institutions. A phenomenological study by McKendrick-Calder and Choate (2024) conducted with 17 participants recruited from a Canadian and an Australian institution catalogued interactions between instructors and students in distress during the COVID-19 pandemic. They found these encounters centred on “course assessment, in-person interactions in the classroom or during an office visit, student peers reporting concerns for their classmate’s wellbeing, noted student absence from the classroom, and student communications (emails)”, noting that the majority of interactions were associated with course assessments (p. 185). Instructors in this study also noted observing behaviours including changes in affect, absenteeism, and aggression. The reported impacts on the instructors primarily centred on increased workload and pressures on the instructor’s time (including responding to challenges but also through mitigation efforts like extensions on assignments). They found that instructors responded to these pressures in three 52 ways: “adapting teaching practices, compartmentalization and strengthening boundaries, and seeking relational connection with other educators” (McKendrick-Calder & Choate, 2024, p. 186) and within the latter, expressing the need for reassurance as well as “processing their emotional responses to these encounters” (p. 189). The participants generally expressed that the more experience they had, the easier it was for them to adapt in these ways and the more confident they became. Notably, this study incorporated the DePlacito-DeRango’s 3R framework into a thematic figure representing the instructor-student interaction as follows: Figure 2: Outcome Space from McKendrick-Calder & Choate Study *recognize, render, redirect from DiPlacito-DeRango, 2017 53 Grant-Smith and Payne (2021) also engaged in a review of pandemic instruction that they situated in a context of today’s neoliberal post-secondary environment; one that sees students as customers while putting pressure on instructors and staff to deliver education using the fewest resources possible. While centred on care ethics and the student-instructor relationship, this work was mostly concerned with metrics around student engagement. Using the elements of Tronto’s framework for care ethics (to be discussed further in the next chapter), the authors developed questions for instructor self-reflection based on the following phases: attentiveness (caring about), responsibility (caring for), competence (care giving), responsiveness (care receiving), reciprocity (caring with) and maintenance (self-care). Their self-reflection on each phase, however, was entirely focused on academic situations. For example: caring about students was evidenced by pivoting to informal program surveys; caring for facilitated through online drop-in sessions; care giving through assignment support; and caring with by sharing their own challenges around marking assignments with students. Grant-Smith and Payne (2021) indicated they felt this last point “modelled a willingness to accept care” (p. 176) but I would caution that this could have also been interpreted by their students as tone deaf. In reflecting on self-care, they raised valid concerns about the normalization of online teaching and institutional pressure on instructors to take on increasing unpaid labour to deliver education across new modalities without additional resources. That said, the authors failed to indicate how they achieved better self-care outside of practices limited to pedagogy. Their resultant model of levels of care, from micro to macro level engagement, spoke primarily to academic concerns. Thus, while they championed Noddings’ (1992) assertion that “students will ‘listen to who matter to them and to whom they matter’” (p. 179), they applied a specific lens 54 (engagement, learning outcomes) with little attention paid to non-academic matters, or the inner worlds of instructors, except to champion research and policy reform at the micro level. Both studies (Grant-Smith and Payne; McKendrick-Calder & Choate) seemed to centre on academic challenges as the focal point for interactions with little insight into instructor’s emotional responses. This may be due, in part, to the unique conditions of the pandemic wherein engagement between instructors and students was focused so tightly on instruction, learning outcomes, assessment, engagement, and output. A study conducted under post-pandemic circumstances might find broader touchpoints. Whether inside or outside of the classroom, interactions between instructors and students in distress take place as part of workplaces that are frequently emotionally charged. One of the ways in which we can shed light on this inner world of instructors, then, is to explore the concept of emotional labour. First introduced by Arlie Hochschild in 1983’s The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, emotional labour, also referred to as caring labour, represents the fulfillment of employer and employee expectations required to perform a role. 2.3.2 Emotional Labour One of the best definitions of Hochschild’s concept, which also summarizes the origins of her model, is shared in a 2018 interview on “The Concept Creep of ‘Emotional Labor” in which she clarifies that emotional labour is work, for which you’re paid, which centrally involves trying to feel the right feeling for the job. This involves evoking and suppressing feelings. Some jobs require a lot of it, some a 55 little of it. From the flight attendant whose job it is to be nicer than natural to the bill collector whose job it is to be, if necessary, harsher than natural, there are a variety of jobs that call for this. Teachers, nursing-home attendants, and child-care workers are examples. The point is that while you may also be doing physical labor and mental labor, you are crucially being hired and monitored for your capacity to manage and produce a feeling. (Beck, 2018, ¶ 9) In The Managed Heart (1983) Hochschild explored a process in which by “managing feeling, we contribute to the creation of it” (p. 26) and that within this context, the full expression of a feeling cannot exist without a social and societal context (p. 27). To meet the demands of workplace contexts, Hochschild theorized that emotional labour can be categorized into two efforts: either surface acting, in which the employee is only acting as if they had the feeling (p. 39); or deep acting by calling up the feeling directly or by using one’s imagination or memories to evoke it (p. 40). The challenge with this acting is that it is not entirely driven by the employee as the institution (be it corporate, correctional, health care, educational) often takes on the role of director (Hochschild, 1983, p. 46). This direction from the employer can be explicit via access to information, or implicit conveyance of feeling rules, which represent for the individual a “pinch between ‘what do I feel’ and ‘what I should feel’” (p. 51). These rules exist in social, civic, and institutional contexts to help individuals avoid pain (p. 53); seek advantage (p. 53); navigate feelings that don’t match the situation (p. 55); and mirror public expectations (p. 56). In this way 56 the management of feelings (emotion work), feelings rules, and our interactions with others “make up our private emotional system” (p. 61). The study by White and LaBelle (2019) tied their findings to the notion of emotional labour, even though this wasn’t explicitly named by their participants. Through their interviews the authors believed that “instructors were conscious of the emotional labor required to address students’ mental health” (p. 148). They named negative impacts of this labour as emotional contagion (empathy to the point of experiencing the same feelings), work stress, and emotional exhaustion (p. 148). Instructors they termed responders and bystanders, they mused, were perhaps relying on the syllabus (rather than interpersonal interaction) as a means of avoiding the need for surface or deep acting, mitigating “burnout.”12 In 2021, Waldbuesser and colleagues looked at the application of feeling rules in college instructors and found corroboration for five feeling rules for classroom teachers first developed by Winograd in an elementary school context. The initial five rules centred on: affection for students, enthusiasm, “dark” emotions, love for teaching, and humor. This study found a sixth rule, around “using emotions as learning tools” (p. 384) in the post-secondary context. They also found that in the post-secondary context, instructors were more open to “displaying authentic negative emotions” where they felt the context was appropriate (p. 396). 12 Citing psychological scholars and emotional labour theorists including Ashforth & Humphrey, 1993; Grandey, 2000; Grandey, Fisk, & Steiner, 2005; Hobfoll, 1989; and Hochschild, 1983, the authors offer that “burnout” is one of the negative outcomes that may occur, along with “work stress” and “emotional exhaustion”, as a result of continued emotional labour. 57 Yin’s 2023 study of 434 instructors from Anyang Normal University and Anyang Engineering College in China tested a theory that there is a positive correlation between “job burnout” in employees who employ surface acting and a converse relationship using deep acting (p. 2). Citing Peng et al. (2016), this study defined “job burnout” as “a state of physical, mental, or emotional exhaustion caused by job pressure” (p.2). The study identified high risk populations for “burnout” including teachers and police officers. While initially this study referred to a model created by Demrouti et al. (2001) to describe multiple job demands and resources, only the introduction called attention to a broader list of demands including “workload, time pressure, job responsibilities, and work-family conflict” (Yin, 2023, p.2), and a longer list of potential resources including “organization atmosphere, labor compensation, incentives, and psychological capital” (p. 2). This study focused specifically on the last item, the notion of psychological capital, and used the Diefendorff Scale (2005) to assess and measure surface acting, deep acting, and expression of natural emotion (or ENE). Yin found that if instructors had a high degree of psychological capital, the use of surface acting did not have a strong impact either way; conversely if they had a low degree of psychological capital, the use of surface acting contributed strongly to “job burnout” (p. 5). The notion of psychological capital used in Yin’s study pulled from positive psychology, positive organizational scholarship, and positive organizational behavior, and can be first traced to Luthans and Youssef, who identified four components of this capital: self-efficacy, hope, optimism, and resilience; and distinguished this form of capital from the notion of human and social capital (Newman et al., 2014, p. S121). Human capital is grounded in intellectual capacity, and social capital is related to connections, whereas psychological capital relates to the 58 individual’s internal resources (p. S121). Yin’s findings asserted that if post-secondary instructors could draw on tools such as self-efficacy, hope, optimism, and/or resilience they would be better able to avoid burnout even if employing models like deep acting. This concept of “psychological capital” and the associated human capital theory suggests that every human trait and ability, from compassion to kindness to generosity, could be exploited towards capitalist aims. It further places the responsibility for “burnout” and its prevention on the individual worker and suggests that, if the worker could only cultivate these qualities, they would be able to prevent themselves from experiencing negative impacts of performing emotional labour. The challenge with this approach is that it ignores broader factors as well as the other demands named at the outset of Yin’s study. This approach also ignores societal factors outside the workplace including sexism and racism as they relate to service work. In 2019, Hanasono and colleagues identified gender and racial biases in post-secondary service work, with findings aligned to previously mentioned studies showing that women and people of colour spend more time in academic service (e.g., answering emails, advising and mentoring students, serving on committees) than their male and white counterparts. Through interviews with purposefully selected faculty from a mid-western US university, they examined service work from the perspectives of visibility (what work is seen and acknowledged) and valuation (the extent to which it is perceived to be of value) and noted that many forms of service— especially relational-oriented activities like mentoring, advising, emotional labor, and managing a positive work climate—are difficult to quantify and 59 may not directly result in clear forms of goods, services, or money, they often remain hidden from organizations’ formal records. (p. 88) This was corroborated by Berheide, Carpenter, and Cotter’s 2022 “Teaching College in the Time of COVID-19: Gender and Race Differences in Faculty Emotional Labor,” that looked at faculty demands across 182 faculty at small US colleges during the pandemic-driven move to online teaching. They found that white men performed less emotional labour than their counterparts from other gender and racialized backgrounds. One of the variables they examined was the demand from students for special considerations. They focus on the SRI (student ratings of instruction) as an important metric in tenure decisions which can influence the power dynamic (p. 443); however, it is important to note that this is not a factor in faculty promotion for FSA instructors at Polytechnic Institute.13 Berheide et al. (2022) found that, since the pandemic instructors have reported more activities directed towards students such as “helping [them] feel better about themselves,” as opposed to directed at themselves such as being “artificially friendly” (p. 448), thus providing some potential ways classify this type of work (i.e. directed at students vs directed at themselves). In doing so, they drew on the work of from El-Alavi, Hansen-Brown and Ceynar (2018), who separated student demands into three categories: standard work demands, solicitation of special 13 At Polytechnic Institute, surveys were once conducted on paper, but were moved to an online platform, after which time response rates plummeted. Under the FSA collective agreement, management has the right to a “statistical summary” but most of these summaries are blank as responses don’t meet the threshold. Instead, instructors can access their verbatims (if these exist), are able to voluntarily share this with selection committees or other bodies. While the agreement states managers can request survey data during “performance appraisal”, there is no process of appraisal at Polytechnic Institute – it is mentioned in the collective agreement but not practiced. This is something HR is seeking to remedy. 60 favors, and friendship behaviours. El-Alavi et al. had found that female instructors faced more demands from students and were more prone to friendship behaviours, under which they included discussions of student mental health. These studies made assumptions including relegating mental health conversations to interpersonal (or friendship) interactions; and that whether directed inwards or outwards, that instructors were acting as if they cared to meet the requirements of their work, acting that is indeed the underpinning of emotional labour. 2.4 Caring as Work The work of Goode and colleagues (2020) to examine what they call “intrusive teaching” illustrated the similarities between the scholarship around emotional labour and care ethics, as well as key differences. They spoke to enrolment shifts in US publicly-funded post-secondary institutions addressed at the outset of this chapter. The authors identified that, for fiscal and other reasons, doors have been opened to non-traditional students (living off campus, older, attending part-time) and that this shift in student profile, accompanied by a lack of institutional resourcing, has sometimes led to increased calls for faculty to take on retention efforts for students who are challenged in a number of ways (p. 51). They highlighted that faculty may now be exposed to students’ trauma because of assault, food insecurities, and other similar issues in their classroom … [which] becomes an unwritten ascribed duty” even though this is not contractually obligated nor acknowledged in training or preparatory work. (p. 52) 61 Goode and colleagues (2020) ran focus groups and interviews with 19 faculty members along two themes: “role strain” and “intrusive teaching as care labor” (p. 54). Role strain represents the tension between or shifting expectation about what is and what isn’t considered an instructor’s role. The authors found that some participants felt they were expected to address all aspects of student well-being in addition to meeting learning needs and outcomes as part of their duties, no matter what the impact on their own well-being (p. 54). Instructors mentioned that they were “not a counselor” while being unsure of where the line between instructor and counselor lay; as well as “moral compunction” in that even in the case of available resources it was the duty of the instructor to support students if they were unable to access these themselves (p. 55). Goode and colleagues called this service orientation, and the “extraordinary behaviors” associated with providing support, “intrusive teaching … made up of demands on time, extensive student management, and long-term relationship maintenance” (p. 56). This included being available and giving students their personal time (well outside of the classroom or office hours); providing “check-ins” as a means of potential behavioural intervention and keeping track of the students (p. 57); participating in “required relationships” where “listening became an assumed part of their duties” (p. 58); and providing interventions (like walking a student over to the counseling office) (p. 59). 2.5 Summary of the Literature Individual, institutional, and societal contexts for post-secondary student distress reveal several factors that may be supports for, or hindrances to, student well-being during their post-secondary journeys. While it has been repeatedly acknowledged that the time in post-secondary education is often one of personal and psychological challenge, the changing nature of the student body 62 indicates variable needs, and addressing these variably is considered best practice (Russel, 2010). Support for students can be achieved through influencing the health beliefs of the student population, by reducing barriers to supports (Andersen Behavioural Model), and by influencing a student’s social networks (Eisenberg et al., 2012). This can be enhanced when campuses cultivate destigmatization and broad support (Ong, 2017); but undermined if an institution has structural barriers (extreme workload) or cultural factors that may position those students who fall behind as having personal deficiencies. The opposite is also true. In campuses that normalize supports and make these readily available, accessible, tailored, and broadly promoted, including via comprehensive referral protocols (Ogrodniczuk et al., 2021) students are better able to take responsibility for their health and access supports (Spiker & Hammer, 2021). In the absence of these students may turn to risky behaviour (Buch, 2007) or self-blaming and giving up (Mahmoud et al., 2012). Unfortunately, even amongst institutions that signed the Okanagan Charter, a pledge to embed health across all aspects of an institution, and to lead collaborative health promotion efforts, there is uneven implementation. A 2021 (Squires & London) study found that leading campuses had supportive champions, clearly communicated structures for collaboration, highly visible and well-defined milestones for their work, dedicated resources, and a “focus on student, staff, and faculty well-being” (p. 107). Struggling institutions had weak leadership, lack of champions, siloed approaches, communication and visibility deficits, under resourcing, and a “difficulty broadening the focus beyond students and student services to classroom experiences and to employee well-being” (p. 108). A broader 2023 scan of services at Canadian institutions by Read 63 et al. similarly found the system needs clearer communication, student involvement in service design, and more reporting out on satisfaction and care outcomes. Institutional services must also account for the changing nature of the student body: the ways in which students experience and access support services is influenced by their backgrounds and identities. For example, first-generation students may experience more stress and may be less likely to access services (Stebleton et al. 2014); international students may have unique social (Zakharchuk & Xiao, 2023) and communication comprehension challenges (de Oliveira Soares et al., 2024); and disabled students have called for the design of accommodation and accessibility services that are better integrated into other parts of the campus community (O’Shea & Meyer, 2016). Various policies have encouraged increased participation from non-traditional learners (Barneston, 2018; Finnie et al., 2016). Unfortunately, these learners, including students from non-affluent families (Sabri et al., 2020) and international students (Khalid et al., 2024) are more vulnerable and face additional challenges than their counterparts. There are generational considerations as well; Gen Z learners potentially place less value on self-reliance; hard work; morality; centrality of work; and avoiding wasting time than their Baby Boomer counterparts (Seifert et al., 2023); and may demonstrate a preference for relational approaches that prioritize shared values (Madden, 2024). These intersecting factors are expressed differently in individual students, who are also impacted by differences related to social class, gender, race, and ethnicity, for example, generational differences were found to be diffused across students from different nationalities (de Boer & Bordoloi, 2022). 64 While the promise of a better life (Barneston 2018) can motivate students to attend post-secondary, during their pursuit they may face material struggles like food insecurity and lack of housing; especially as these pressures are being felt on an unprecedented scale across Canada. These ever-increasing vulnerabilities and challenges are exposed in the sharp increase in demand for student services at most institutions, including Polytechnic Institute. As these increase, faculty are being increasingly called on as part of the response, yet an “afterthought” (Squires & London, 2021). To bring faculty from afterthought to active consideration, one must also consider the changing nature of the instructor role. Institutions increase their demand for instructor productivity while expanding faculty responsibilities (Museus & Sasaki, 2022); and instructors are increasingly called to participate in systems that support student mental health. Yet their involvement has not been extensively studied. Internationally the work of Hughes et.al (2018), White and LaBelle (2019), and Kalkbrenner (2021) has addressed instructors as first points of contact. In Canada, DiPlacito-DeRango first explored this dynamic with instructor participants in 2015. In 2017 she proposed a 3R model: recognize, render, and redirect, and in 2021 attempted to situate that model in institutional frameworks using document analysis. In 2020 (published in 2024) McKendrick-Calder and Choate created a model of instructors responding to students in distress during COVID-19, building on the 3Rs to include the instructor’s self-evolution. More recently, Kelly’s (2022) attempts to correlate generational, organizational, and professional identities to instructor responses found that while these were not strong determinants, race and gender were factors: woman and racialized faculty were more likely to be approached about, and to engage in this work, sometimes to the detriment of their careers. 65 Outside of implications for academic careers, the prevalence of secondary trauma (or STS, secondary traumatic stress) in K-12 teachers, administrators, and staff (Hydon, 2015) was also found in the post-secondary system by Spear, Morey, and van Steen (2021). In their UK-based study, most of the post-secondary instructors who participated felt they did not have the time or resources to respond to student mental health challenges and were “distressed” during or after their encounters (p.1125). This distress, if unchecked, can lead to significant impacts. These have been measured in the field of student affairs, where a Secondary Trauma in Student Affairs Professionals Scale (STSAP) was first developed by Lynch and Glass in 2019 and confirmed by Kyle Baillie (2022). Baillie joins other scholars like Kalkbrenner and White and LaBelle who highlight an unmet increase in student demand for campus interventions like counselling and call out additional workplace and systemic and social pressures that impact instructors and front-line service providers. These system deficits were exposed during the COVID-19 pandemic: scholars including Cordaro, who studied COVID-19 impacts on instructors and their students, suggest that institutions should play a key role in supporting instructors personally and professionally. Jelińska and colleagues (2021) found that most literature related to the pandemic focuses on pedagogy and program delivery, rather than the very real psychological impacts on instructors’ personal and professional lives. The expectation of academics to do more than teach, but to engage in emotional labour, has been applied in a college setting by Waldbuesser et al. (2021) who found evidence for Winograd’s five feelings rules for classroom teachers in the post-secondary context. A later study of over 400 Chinese post-secondary instructors (Yin, 2023) found that instructors who had a high degree of 66 psychological capital could shield themselves from the impacts of emotional labour if they had high emotional capital. This approach is challenging, however: it suggests that human traits like caring and compassion can be exploited for productivity and places the burden of responsibility for “burnout” on instructors themselves, as well as disregarding other factors named in the study including workplace and personal demands. This approach also ignores the external, systemic forces on instructor care raised by Hanasoto et al. (2019), Kelly (2022), and Baillie (2022), who found that women and racialized academics performed more service work, and Berheide and colleagues (2022) who found white men performed less emotional labour than their counterparts from other backgrounds. Lastly, Goode and colleagues’ examination of “intrusive teaching” (2020) illustrates the similarities between the scholarship around emotional labour and care ethics, as well as key differences. The literature has begun to scratch the surface of the inner worlds of post-secondary educators as they interface with students in distress; but most of the research to date has been either broad in scope or has situated hypothetical instructors in written frameworks. There has been some engagement with affected instructors specific to their experiences, but there is ample room for an exploration of distressing interactions and their impacts on instructors in a BC-based study. Further, to build a more comprehensive understanding, it was important to ensure that such a study would approach the topic from a perspective that acknowledges individual, institutional, and systemic factors that extend beyond classrooms and assessments. To situate this broader understanding, my research was therefore grounded in theories around care ethics and education. The next chapter explores these concepts in more detail and constructs the theoretical model for the research. 67 Chapter 3: Conceptual Framework – Care Ethics This study into the experiences of instructors responding to students in distress, and the ways they might be better supported in these interaction, was grounded in the notion of care as: the quality of the relation between the instructor and the student (e.g., Noddings, 2002; 2013) that is also affected by organizational factors (e.g., Tronto, 1993; 2010) and broader social structures (e.g., Fraser, 2016; Tronto, 1993; 2010, and others). This chapter weaves together theories that address caring within the dyadic, organizational, and systemic layers, including conversations around caring that are more radical and communal. It starts with the quality of the relation between the instructor and the student. 3.1 A Quality of the Relation Between Two People The genesis of care ethics was Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development in 1982. Gilligan argued that a relational approach to ethics was not a sign of imperfect moral development, as moral psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg believed, but rather an equivalent form of moral reasoning common to women. This was followed by philosopher of education, Nel Noddings’ Caring, A Feminine Approach to Ethics & Moral Education in 1984 (updated in 2002 and 2013). For Noddings, care ethics is not an examination of the virtue (or lack thereof) of the agent or the objective justice of the agent’s actions, but rather relational, examining the “one-caring and the one-cared-for, [who] both contribute significantly to a caring relation” (Yokota & Douglass, 2019, p. 122). In 2012, Noddings further described the dyad of carer and cared-for in an educational context. The carer’s role is to be attentive, with a goal of fully grasping the experience of the other. 68 Through motivational displacement, the carer, over the course of being attentive, flows their “motive energy” by willing the cared-for reach their goal (p. 772). This is the carer’s response to the need, even if only to acknowledge the need exists. Last, the cared-for provides feedback in the form of a response that Noddings termed “reciprocity”, no matter how small, that acknowledges “the caring has been received”, and thus completes the loop of “caring as relation” (p. 773). An equal relation would be one where both parties exchange positions, that one is the carer at times, and at others is cared-for. This can also happen in unequal relations, but cannot be expected. Noddings’ list of unequal relations included doctors and their patients, lawyers and their clients, and teachers and their pupils. Thus, while a post-secondary instructor is an adult, and their student is also an adult, this is not an equal relationship; to borrow from Noddings’ (2012) description of the parent-child relationship, the instructor “must do things for the [student] that the [student] cannot possibly do for” the instructor (p. 772). In this situation, the instructor is the carer, and the student is the cared for. In the instructor-student dyad, Noddings identified the difference between caring as performative conduct (emotional labour) and caring as relation: Noddings cautioned that if an instructor simply assumes the needs of their students and acts on those assumptions, they would be is engaged in something she termed virtue caring. One potential barrier to establishing and sustaining caring relationships between instructors and students at Polytechnic Institute, is Noddings’ requirement of reciprocity14. In modeling the 14 With respect, note that the use of the term “reciprocity” here is that put forward by Noddings, and not the interpretation used in Kirkness and Barnhardt’s (1991) article, “First Nations and Higher Education: The Four R's— 69 caring relation, Noddings (2002) has spoken of the way the carer requires responses that provide them with a sense that their caring has been received in some way. It has been noted that if the carer does not receive this feedback, they will burn out (p. 19). At Polytechnic Institute, the institutional process around responding to student crises, Early Assist, removes this kind of reciprocity. Instructors fill out a web form and are assured that steps are being taken by the Student Life Office. Because of privacy regulations, the instructor has no right to any further information about the student’s wellbeing, outside of an acknowledgement by the Early Assist team that their inquiry has been received, and whether or not their office has made contact with the student. Many times, the student will not know who made the first report (instructor, peer, or administrator), and so they may not be able to provide any indication to the carer that the caring has been received. Joan Tronto’s Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (1993) helped to frame new perspectives on caring within broader “structures of power and privilege” (p. 3). Tronto described four dimensions and corresponding elements of an ethic of care: caring about Respect, Relevance, Reciprocity, Responsibility.” In their own words: American Indian/First Nations/Native people have been historically under-represented in the ranks of college and university graduates in Canada and the United States. From an institutional perspective, the problem has been typically defined in terms of low achievement, high attrition, poor retention, weak persistence, etc., thus placing the onus for adjustment on the student. From the perspective of the Indian student, however, the problem is often cast in more human terms, with an emphasis on the need for a higher educational system that respects them for who they are, that is relevant to their view of the world, that offers reciprocity in their relationships with others, and that helps them exercise responsibility over their own lives. (p.1) Here, reciprocity is framed as a give-and-take of knowledge where the “faculty member makes an effort to understand and build upon the cultural background of the students, and the students are able to gain access to the inner-workings of the culture (and the institution) to which they are being introduced” (p. 10). While these definitions and concepts were not used in the development of my theoretical framework and did not contribute to my data gathering or analysis, potential future work that incorporates these four R’s is discussed in Chapter 8. 70 (attentiveness), taking care of (responsibility), care giving (competence), and care receiving (responsiveness). Attentiveness is first and fundamental – “since care requires the recognition of a need and that there is a need to be cared about, the first moral aspect of caring is attentiveness” (p. 127), citing the importance of attentiveness in the works of Socrates, Hume, Weil and Arendt, amongst others. The second dimension of care is taking care of, and the related concept of responsibility as more flexible in that it relates to one’s gender, class, status, and culture, distinct from obligation, which is more rigid (p. 133). The third phase is the giving of care, in which the element of competence interrogates the idea that any and all care provided is good care. Good care is one that is competent, and professional ethics takes place within a specific context for this good care (p. 134). Lastly, the ability of the care-receiver to respond (or not) is tied to notions of systemic inequality, and an awareness of “the possibilities for abuse that arise with vulnerability” (p. 135). Tronto stated that this is “not the same as reciprocity, but [a] parallel notion” (p. 136). Together these four components of care must be enacted as a whole, which Tronto acknowledged is challenging as “care involves conflict” (p. 137). Tronto (1993) addressed differences between this model, and the one brought forward in Noddings’ original work, claiming Noddings’ position is “that care is corrupted any time it occurs beyond a dyadic relationship”, a view Tronto conceded was later shifted to allow for “chains of dyadic caring relations” (p. 204). Further, Tronto explained that Noddings lacked an understanding of the “political location of care” (p. 215), of the structures that are required to create opportunities for care amongst those in differential positions of power, and that Noddings’ work could not be extended to situations where care-giving may not mimic the “immediate care-giving of our daily lives” (p. 215). In order to understand these other contexts, Tronto later 71 produced work focused specifically on caring in organizations. This next section builds from her institutional observations as well as the contributions of several scholars in addressing care (and the lack thereof) in educational institutions in particular. 3.2 Affected by Organizational Factors Tronto’s 2010 “Creating Caring Institutions: Politics, Plurality, and Purpose” developed a systems view of care ethics to address caring at an institutional level. She argued for a movement away from familial, relational thinking towards an institutional focus on three areas of consideration: “the purpose of care, a recognition of power relations, and the need for pluralistic, particular tailoring of care to meet individuals’ needs” (p. 158). In my study, it was important to take a step away from the family context, which is the foundation of Noddings’ work, and into the realities of a post-secondary institution; this is where Tronto made an important distinction. A post-secondary institution is not a family; it is an organization that may or may not be supportive of a caring relation. Tronto identified seven warning signs that institutions may not be caring well: misfortune causes the need for care (p. 163); needs are taken as given within the organization (p. 163); care is considered a commodity, not a process (p. 164); care receivers are excluded from making judgments because they lack expertise (p. 165); care is narrowed to care giving, rather than understanding the full process of care (p. 165); care givers see organizational requirements as hindrances to, rather than support for, care (p. 165); and care work is distributed along lines of class, caste, gender, race (p. 166). Tronto’s 2010 work centred primarily on institutions in the field of health care. The absence or presence of care in higher education institutions, however, has been discussed by several 72 scholars, especially as neoliberal influences and new managerialism are seen to be impacting the post-secondary landscape, fostering “a culture of carelessness” (Lynch, 2010, p. 54). According to Lynch, under neoliberalism there has been a tendency for institutions to approach students as unconnected individuals (consumers) rather than relational beings and create environments where “scholarly work is separate from emotional thought and feeling” (p. 54). Keeling (2014) made a case for connecting the notion of care with student outcomes in higher education, championing “attention to students as whole people, and to their individual and collective well-being” (p. 141). Others have added that the institution’s obligation to care extends to instructors as well: “it is not only students that benefit from a caring relationship; when teachers are valued as caring individuals, this can shift the landscape of pressures and constraints that are placed on them” (Schrock, 2020, p. 192). Jackson (2024) reiterated that while modern educational institutions often “borrow the language of care” they frequently advance “individual and neoliberal approaches to education” (p. 1), demanding accountability through test scores and financial utilization metrics rather than fostering responsibility for genuine student well-being (through using formative assessments, for example). Thus, there is a simultaneous pressure from the organization to advance a narrative of care while operating in “environments that otherwise thwart caring approaches” (p. 8). Dionne (in Tronto, 2021) noted that “a slow scholarship and departmental cultures of care … can effectively counteract the damaging effects of neoliberalism in higher education” (p. 8). Scholars including Romano (2021) have used this slow scholarship approach to explore, in a practical and applied way, the “teachers’ ability to respond – their response-ability – [as] crucial to the way that students experience the care offered to them (p. 73). This work, according to Romano, is 73 especially important in sites of practice like South Africa where he teaches, as racialized communities carry specific, acute, and particular traumas that cannot be ignored. Thus, it is important to consider how broader systemic and social forces, such as colonialism, racism, and sexism act upon the individuals in the caring relation and the organization in which they operate. The next section draws attention to these larger-scale forces. 3.3 Influenced by Broader Systemic Forces Numerous scholars have identified that certain groups are overrepresented in caring relations and structures, and that race and gender represent two of the broader forces that can influence a caring relationship. 3.3.1 Caring, Gender, and Race Kathleen Lynch (2010) found a connection between gender and care in higher education, where women are called on to do caring work and men are expected to be “care-less” (p. 54). According to a study by Weinrib et al. (2013), while Canadian full-time academics were satisfied with their jobs, women academics reported less overall satisfaction with their jobs (p. 98). In a qualitative study on faculty perceptions of service work, O’Meara (2016) noted that women academics viewed service work as part of a community orientation, whereas their male counterparts were more likely to express an interest in more visible research and teaching obligations that could further their careers. Ivancheva, Lynch, and Keating (2019) found this was exacerbated amongst precarious or non-tenured female faculty, highlighting “the complex interrelations between two profoundly gendered types of precarity in academia: labour‐led 74 precarity and care‐led affective precarity” (p. 449) in which the care-based responsibilities placed on female academics at work and at home led to a compounded inability to create professional and personal security. During COVID-19, the intersection between caring work and gender became more apparent, as studies showed daily home-based care was predominantly undertaken by women even as male family members were increasingly home and available to participate (Bühler et al., 2021, p. 1). Nash and Churchill (2021) specifically documented the challenges of managing remote work and home-based caring responsibilities during COVID-19 for female academics. In these instances, there was a neoliberal tendency to frame the additional burden of caring work (for children, spouses, parents, the home) as a challenge for individual women rather than a systemic one. The authors furthered the argument that there is no such thing as a neutral organization; inequality is built into their structures, holding up the illusion of meritocracy based on the notion of a successful academic professional as someone unencumbered with these responsibilities. As work in education becomes increasingly “flexible” (p. 836) the burden is being disproportionately felt by women to perform, and the “higher education sector is relatively uneven in terms of the generosity of its work-life balance” (p. 837) where caring responsibilities have been seen as personal choices rather than material challenges to be accommodated. Within the tripartite structure, women have been significantly under-represented in the ranks of full professors, and female mid-career professors have been faced with multiple pressures to be navigated in the development process, that merit strategic and multi-layered supports (Squires & Hamilton, 2024). In 2022, Gaudet et al. wrote about the challenge for female academics to 75 balance care (service) work with their other tasks (teaching, research, supervision, administrative work), and argued that self-care should be more closely attended to. Participants in their study experienced a “constant drive to focus on productivity engendered by this performance culture … so nerve-racking that it has led to insomnia, musculoskeletal tension, and eating disorders among [their] interviewees” (p. 81). While this work also specifically addressed tripartite components not inherent to the Polytechnic Institute progression and compensation model; it was noted that participants were using mechanisms like sabbatical or other leaves to create space for self-care. These mechanisms may in fact weaken the career trajectories of female academics. As noted in James et al. (2021), the pursuit of tenure-track positions for women in academia often problematically intersects with maternity leaves, creating fear of erasure, a need to balance promotion with family duties, and challenges to their research processes. In 2022, Davis et al. investigated the impacts of the COVID‐19 pandemic on 781 tenured and tenure‐track faculty across Canada and similarly found that female and racialized academics “experienced higher levels of stress, social isolation and lower well-being” (p. 703). Women with children were not able to advance their research interests as they had to reprioritize caregiving in their households (p. 712), and these impacts were felt more significantly amongst pre-tenure female faculty. Racialized faculty shared that the pandemic amplified pre-existing inequities, explaining that those with structural advantages such as research chair endowments were able to pivot more easily than those with primarily teaching burdens (p. 716), and that those belonging to, and working with, marginalized First Nations and other racialized communities were more impacted by the pandemic (p. 715). While one male participant indicated a preference 76 to “let us look after ourselves”, the authors instead championed recommendations that would dismantle the structural inequities highlighted in their study (p. 716). Much of the literature reviewed here centres on care ethics and instructors. That said, instructors are part of a broader academic environment in which students may, or may not, receive care. Brower and colleagues (2021) examined the ways in which institutional care ethics (or the absence thereof) were experienced by stigmatized students. They recommended that all members of a campus community should be responsible for care, including getting to know students on a personal level; connecting stigmatized students with resources; providing students with counseling; “role modeling academic and life success despite stigma” (p. 7); and creating opportunities for other staff to develop as caring professionals. In addition to formal supports, the article highlighted the importance of “faculty members … as the early alert “first responders” (p. 7) in these caring systems. The challenge with recommendations like these is that, without awareness of, and precautions against, underlying inequities in the distribution of care work, a call for whole organizations to engage is likely to result in female and racialized academics undertaking more of this work. Dr. Christie Schultz specifically addressed the role of women academic leaders in her book Leading with feminist care ethics in higher education: Experiences, practices, and possibilities (2022). Using narrative inquiry, and drawing from Noddings, Held, and Tronto, Schultz put forward examples of “care-centered reciprocity and relationality, [as] present and practiced” in post-secondary environments (p. 3). She noted that while “caring actions are an important part of care ethics … fully embracing an ethic of care is more extensive and centers on everyday 77 decision-making, choices, and practices” (p.8). The work also addressed the impacts of neoliberalism pressures — which she named as “limited time, increased accountability, and restricted finances” (p. 26) — on post-secondary environments and on leaders specifically. One of the calls of this book was “making care in leadership in higher education visible” (p. 135) which involves a different kind of risk, one that encourages educational leaders to voice the (sometimes challenging, often personal ways) that care shows up in our professional lives (p. 146). At the same time, there was an acknowledgement that for leaders in particular there may be circumstances where decisions appear not to have been made with care (p. 150). One of the limitations of this work, which Schultz acknowledged, was that the inquiry was done amongst middle aged white women (p. 19), which was in fact emblematic of the lack of racialized women in leadership positions in academia. In her 2024 doctoral dissertation on the “Caring practices of women in higher education leadership” Leslie Diane Johnson noted that “caring is both political and public … many institutions [show] superficial support without meaningful actions, especially affecting leaders from marginalized groups” (p. v). Her work was primarily founded in Tronto’s examination of political and public care and highlighted previously mentioned studies by Ivancheva et al. (2019) and Lynch et al. (2020) who also noted challenges of precarity and exposed a false gender balance integrated into academic performance management and leadership tracks, as well as gaps in Tronto’s self-care theory exposed by Gaudet et al (2022). Working with women who were senior academic leaders from multiple backgrounds (including radicalized and LGBTQ+ participants), she uncovered many themes including: authenticity as a caring leader (p. 118); performative caring and inequities of care encountered by radicalized women (p. 124); caring for 78 oneself (p. 131); caring identity as mothers and its effects on career trajectory (p. 137); and the role of boundaries and shielding as an aspect of care (p. 142). Her findings indicated that, amongst her participants, care was nuanced and contextual (p. 155), and they highlighted there has been a: locus of responsibility placed upon individuals as regards care responsibilities, in a neoliberal institutional context of audit culture that does not reward work regarded as more pastoral in nature, such as mentoring, over other more itemizable “products” of academic work, such as fundraising or publishing culture; nor is it geared toward those with significant care responsibilities outside the workplace. (p. 156) Johnson acknowledged that her study was not a comprehensive representation of women in higher education leadership, and that women (from racialized communities, from the LGBTQIA+ community) are not monolithic. That said, her findings surfaced questions around the importance of care that is public, political, and authentic (p. 159) calling out a concept called “performative allyship – occasions when they experienced institutional lip service or hollow performative demonstrations of care from within their institutional contexts” (p. 160), which surfaced during the Black Lives Matter movement. She also named specific factors that “for marginalized women in higher education leadership often [tend] to be at odds with career advancement” (p. 162) which has been surfaced elsewhere in the literature, but is conveyed by some of her participants as: a pulling of energy, attention and focus away from career development and into causes they feel ethically compelled to support; by modelling to other 79 marginalized academics that they shoulder additional care work; and by a lack of care from white counterparts for their career development (p. 162). Gender, racialization, and membership in marginalized communities all contribute to differences in care that affect leaders and instructors in the post-secondary environment. These considerations intersect with literatures that specifically call out capitalism as a force that inhibits caring relationships. 3.3.2 Caring and Capitalism Yin (2023) asserted that post-secondary instructors can draw on tools such as self-efficacy, hope, optimism, and/or resilience in order to avoid “burnout”, implicitly endorsing a capitalist notion of tool building that Lynch (2010) would associate with a view of education as a commodity and careless. A view that focuses primarily on the individual disregards factors including workload, time pressure, job responsibilities, organization atmosphere, labor compensation, and incentives. This lack of critical regard for systems and structures highlights the tension between caring and capitalism. Fraser (2016) initiated a public discourse around a caring crisis “linked to ideas of ‘time poverty’, ‘family-work balance’, and ‘social depletion’” (p. 99) and asserted that these implicate multiple compounding stresses around childbirth and child rearing, familial and personal relationships, community, and other connections. Fraser provided a caution that “economic, ecological and political strands … intersect with and exacerbate one another” (p. 99); interlinked strands that are virtually impossible to untangle. Under capitalism, economic production and social production (community building, raising of children) are held separate in an unsustainable tension, with economic production elevated as 80 most valuable, yet completely dependent on the devalued social system (Fraser, 2016, p. 103). These divided spheres of domestic and industrial production were made clear during the 19th century, under liberal competitive capitalism (and through colonialism), wherein the primacy of economic production was espoused “even as it deprived most people of the conditions needed to realize it” (p. 104). Through the state-managed capitalism of the 20th century, and into present-day financialized capitalism (through globalization), we have seen the shifting of manufacturing work to “low-wage regions”, enlistment of women into the workforce, and a move for governments and organizations to distance themselves from “social welfare” (Fraser, 2016, p. 104). Fraser referred to an example where women were being recruited to work for large corporations and offered (otherwise expensive) egg freezing to encourage them to delay childbirth and rearing in the corporate interest (p. 115). Thus, Fraser suggested that “the roots of today’s ‘crisis of care’ lie in capitalism’s inherent social contradiction—or rather in the acute form that contradiction assumes today, in financialized capitalism” (p. 117), and called for a complete restructuring of “social order” rather than a manipulation of social policy (p. 117). This is not dissimilar to Tronto’s 1993 call to redraw the boundaries “between public and private life” in particular as (within Western societies) this ever-changing line ensures that “women are restricted to the private realm” – if this line is not to be eradicated, then it needs to be redrawn in order to see women more fully engaged in all aspects of public life (p. 11). 81 3.3.3 Caring as Labour vs The Caring Relation While discourses around economic forces (namely capitalism) and caring are important in an examination of caring within a professional context, caring labour is not the same as what Noddings’ calls the caring relation. Caring labour represents the fulfillment of employer and employee expectations (feelings rules) required to perform a role; emotional labour, especially in the expressions of deep acting or surface acting, is performative by nature. There is a difference between caring as performative conduct and caring as relation: Noddings (2012) cautioned that an instructor who simply assumes the needs of their students and acts on those assumptions, is engaged in something she termed virtue caring. It is crucial to listen and hold a space in which the cared-for can express their needs. Whatever the outcome – even if this doesn’t yield a solution per se – by working together, the two parties establish trust and solidify the relation. This also involves the carer thinking not about what they would want in that situation (which is a function of deep acting), but to dialogue with the cared-for in a way that honours different people’s different wants and needs. Caring as an ethical orientation isn’t about acting per se, it’s about a genuine demonstration of care: caring for, not (pretending to) care about. Thus, while positive and negative consequences are possible both in the application of ethical caring and in the execution of emotional or caring labour, in the former this is a genuine attentiveness to needs in which negative impacts on instructors (such as contributing to “job burnout” or secondary traumatization) may occur due to a lack of reciprocity or a lack of other institutional or societal supports. In the latter, this is a performative expression of written and unwritten rules wherein negative impacts on instructors may occur due to the incongruence between the performance and the internal state of the employee, a lack of “psychological 82 resources”, or additional tension between the feelings, rules and the expressions of the employee and their employer. Fraser has spoken of the need for a social restructuring that takes us beyond these traditional paradigms of labour. If a restructuring is to take place, the experiences of marginalized and racialized people provide an important orientation. 3.4 Caring as an Ethical Orientation: Additional Perspectives In 2002 Beauboeuf-Lafontant highlighted that from a womanist perspective15, caring can be expressed in a way that is particular to black women. Her description of the “pedagogy of black women teachers” (p. 71) included examples of specific teachers who demonstrate qualities of black womanist caring: a “maternal sensibility” (p. 72); a sense of political clarity about “systemic injustices” and an ability to work with students to overcome these (p. 73); and a willingness to take risks creating fairness in systems where it does not exist. These values align with models proposed by other care ethicists and yet were expressed in unique and “culturally relevant” ways (p. 76) to the communities in which these educators were demonstrating care. Similarly, Witherspoon and Arnold (2010) connected care ethics to pastoral notions of care in their case studies of Black female principals, whose practices echoed the caretaking 15 Womanism is distinct from feminism. Clenora Hudson (Weems) (2024) developed the concept of Africana Womanism starting in 1985 as a research focus initially termed “Black Womanism” (p. xvii). In Hudson (Weems)’ own words, Africana Womanism centers on a critical difference from other “female-based theory [is] that we are … the other side of one coin—the Africana man and the Africana woman, collectively struggling, as we’ve always done as Africans, as a people collectively working” (p. xxii). Thus, while the “over-arching mission of the feminist … is to establish female empowerment … we, as a collective, are talking about race empowerment as a first priority, with class and gender issues following that” (p. xxiii). 83 demonstrated by the pastors at their Black American churches. The authors found strong parallels between the care provided by these principals and pastoral caring characteristics including: demonstrating wisdom; maintaining a mission closely tied to social justice; trust; and the use of subversion (when required) to reach right ends. The connection between caring frameworks and communities extends beyond Black experiences. Using Latinx Critical Theory and Critical Race Theory frameworks, Rolón-Dow (2005) explored the “intersection between race/ethnicity and care” (p. 77) in an ethnographic study of the experiences of Puerto Rican girls in middle school. This study is rooted in a critical care praxis, one that acknowledged that “to care for students of color … we must seek to understand the role that race/ethnicity has played in shaping and defining the sociocultural and political conditions of their communities” (p. 104). Using this lens, the author was able to identify instances where teachers’ white privilege was masked in statements of caring (what I would identify as acting or virtue caring) and to champion new practices where teachers and administrators could be immersed in the cultural realities of students; where they might be more “intimately connected with the communities where they work” and (echoing Nieto, 1998); where the relationships between teachers and students could be transformed alongside efforts to restructure the institutions themselves in order to build authentic caring relationships (p. 106). Similarly, Antrop-González and De Jesús (2006) profiled two Latino community-based schools applying a critical care lens. Citing Audrey Thompson’s 1998 work that criticized a “colour blind” approach, they stressed the importance of contextual caring that transcends the tendency for educators to pretend that race is not a factor and that instead embraces cultural contexts. The 84 authors described an “‘Ay Bendito”, or pitying syndrome (p. 412), wherein educators lower their expectations of students, conflating caring with pity for their social and economic conditions. Instead of this perspective, the authors suggested there are Latinx cultural values that could and should form part of a contextualized caring ethic at the institutional and instructional level using principles such as “personalismo” (p. 421), the notion of a strong personal connection, as the foundation for authentic caring relationships. In a similar study, Curry’s 2016 examination of rites of passage in urban schools identified the importance of both “interpersonal and institutional care and … the dynamic interplay of familial, intellectual, and critical care” (p. 884) as essential components to authentic caring, or in Latinx contexts, cariño authentico. 3.4.1 Radical Care The notion of authentic caring is complemented by emerging discussions about radical care. In 2021 Rivera-McCutchen conducted a case study of a Black middle-school principal named Byron Johnson who transformed his school on an interpersonal and institutional level. His success as a leader was rooted in caring that was highly attuned to social and cultural challenges. As a result of this case study, the author put forward a radical care framework that was grounded in anti-racist, social justice principles; focused on authenticity in relationships; championed growth mindset for educators and their students; encouraged the navigation of political and institutional realities in a strategic way; and embraced “a spirit of radical hope” (p. 257). Radical care was held up by Hobart and Kneese (2020) as a way to transcend the “the neoliberal model of care as one of moralized self management … an unachievable goal that … glosses over the political, economic, and ideological structures that do the work of marginalization” (p. 5). 85 They highlighted tensions that exist in notions of care, including the often contradictory concept that in order to care for others, one has to care for oneself; that care is a highly necessary and yet highly undervalued component of a functional society; and that the ways in which care is mobilized are often seen as dependent on moral or charitable outpourings (depending on racial or other affiliations) rather than on a spirit of solidarity. In order to create radical new discourses of care, their suggestion was that we continue to shed light on, and address, these tensions. Ethnic studies professor Sam Museus and his colleague Christen Sasaki discussed the ways in which radical care could be enacted in higher education, in their article, “Creating Spaces of Refusal in the Neoliberal Academy” (2022). Museus’ work as the founding director of National Institute for Transformation and Equity (NITE) and critical analyst of “inequitable educational structures” (University of California, San Diego, n.d.) contributed to research on improving campus environments from a social justice perspective that focuses on collective action (2022, p. 553). In their article, which was a call to in(action), they described “neoliberal contexts [that] induce individualistic hyper-competition, fragment community, and hinder collective action in academia” (p. 553). Theirs was an invitation to question, rather than a series of answers, but some of the components they examined included: self-care; radical dreams; and radical formations, as the means to counteract neoliberalism in the academy. A competitive environment, one that prioritizes non-service components and makes time a commodity, could “hinder more robust collective social justice efforts” (p. 556) and through a spirit of “slowness and community” they suggested that we could move to “spaces of collective refusal, where people are humanized, collective dreams 86 are cultivated, and alternative realities are constructed” (p. 556). To resist dehumanization and facilitate this space-making, they suggested “proactively checking in on those struggling … allocating portions of meeting times to talk about the challenges facing families, kinship networks, and communities, and creating assignments with flexible deadlines for students” (p. 559). These networks deliberately developed in the pursuit of care have also been collectively termed ‘communities of care’. 3.4.2 Communities of Care Studies that have investigated the presence (or absence) of care in the high school environment, for example, have identified ideological and structural factors for these communities. Schussler and Collins’ (2006) case study of a specialized secondary school pulled from interviews, observation, artifacts (e.g. student newspaper), and field notes, to identify five caring relationships: from teacher to student (academic, personal, social), from student to student (unity, acceptance, support), from school to student, from student to school, and from student to teacher (p. 1486). Organizational factors that contributed to caring included: the relatively small size of the school; the small sizes of their classes; and the core value, caring, that came before the construction (both figurative and literal) of the school. These values were clearly communicated with prospective students, and students “accept the values when they choose to enroll” (p. 1487). The authors concluded: “that students want to be cared for, seems so obvious that it is trite” (p. 1488). The authors championed an ongoing exploration of ways “schools can hold care as a core value and still exist within certain structural parameters” (p. 1490). 87 A subsequent study by Ellerbrock and Kiefer (2010) examined “Creating a Ninth-Grade Community of Care”, noting three caring relationships and conditions therein that promoted caring: teacher-to-program (critical factor: buy-in); teacher-to-student (critical factor: addresses both academic and non-academic life); and program-to-student (critical factor: personalized learning environment). In the last category, students worked together to prepare for a pep rally and took a peer mediation course to mentor the incoming cohort of students (p. 402). As with the previous study, these findings were isolated to a specialized, cohort-based program for students at risk of dropping out (p. 397) and, while the data gathering included one teacher (and nine of her students), the study was focused on the impacts on students, not the teacher or the other employees (staff, admin) at the school. It missed, for example, the tridimensional nature of relationships described by Squires (2019) “between [a teacher] mentor and administrator and between the administrator and [teacher] mentee” and the critical involvement of school administration in creating and maintaining a professional learning community. In 2014, Bozalek and others used Fisher and Tronto’s systems-based caring framework to create a curriculum development workshop for South African Heads of Departments. They used the five elements of care from Tronto (described earlier: attentiveness, responsibility, competence, responsiveness, and trust), as well as an additional concept of “care for the self” (p. 455). They then endeavored to embody these elements in the creation of their workshop to embed care ethics in the professional development practices of participants and, via heads of departments who participated in the workshop, through to their faculty, essentially advocating and establishing a community of care via professional development. 88 As discussed previously, the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted stressors and opportunities for care as well as the role of institutions in fostering caring communities. Health communication scholars Clemens and Robinson (2021) studied caring and the impacts of the pandemic on students. They developed four recommended practices for educators seeking to cultivate a community of care: supportive communication; collective sensemaking; inclusive pedagogy; and mindfulness (p. 136). The communication practices they advocated include listening as “an interactive process between two or more people” (p. 137) and providing individualized attentiveness. Noting that “social determinants of health are … a mediator of toxic stress” (p. 139) they encouraged instructors and administrators to bring awareness of these inequities to their pedagogical practices. And lastly, in consideration of the exacerbating effects of the pandemic on an already challenging “spike in mental illness on college campuses” (p. 139) they reiterated the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)’s 2021 recommendations to continue to provide support services but recommend enhancing these with mindfulness-based approaches. While these were helpful recommendations, they did not address the potential impacts of these approaches (positive or negative) on teaching faculty. Similar to core value highlighted by Schussler and Collins, Hunter et al. (2021) spoke of the creation of a “common ground understanding of a “Community of Care” ethos” at Arizona State University during the pandemic (p. 30). As the university welcomed students back to campus, they developed a set of values centred on mutual care, and engaged in coordinated strategies around: communication (prearrival videos for housing residents, social media, web); enforcement (staff approaching non-compliant students); and support through a “Community of Care engager model” (similar to an Early Assist program) to ensure students who were isolated 89 or quarantined had a single contact for all of their support needs (p. 31). Much of their recommendations and findings centred on communication, with students having to watch videos and sign off in agreement with the principles prior to moving into residence. Thus, similar to the Schussler and Collins study these authors found that a common ground understanding is supported through: clear behavioural expectations; education on these behaviours; accountability for them; and consequences when they were not followed (p. 34). COVID-19 impacts inspired scholars Day, Hughes, Zanders, Van Zanen and Moos (2021) to write an essay to collectively answer the question “What Does a Good Teacher Do Now? Crafting Communities of Care.” As graduate students, these authors were “educators [and] also students and teachers of education, writers [and] also students and teachers of writing” (p. 389). Addressing the emergence of trauma-informed pedagogy, and the acknowledgement that trauma impacts both students and educators alike (p. 393), Zanders cited the work of disability justice advocate Leah Lakshimi Piepzna-Samarasinha who advocated for a shift from individualized care roles (both paid and unpaid) to “to a collective responsibility that’s maybe even joyful” (p. 33) and advocated for a shift from a model where “teacher gives, student receives” to one where “everyone gives and everyone receives” (p. 393). Their colleague Sarah Hughes expressed that instructors could better facilitate care by reflexively and graduall adapting all dimensions of their teaching (assessments, instructor, platforms, classrooms) by continually centering their practice on care (not dissimilar to the call for core values above). Moos, however, rightfully pointed out that instructors can only act when they are removed from precarity, and noted that, while institutions used the concept of “hope” during the pandemic to induce production, they 90 also engaged in “a pitting [of] students, instructors, staff, and faculty against one another, shifting blame and responsibility on to everyone but those at the top” (p. 399). To combat this challenge, Moos advocated for instructors to acknowledge this differential between secure and precarious faculty while working together to prioritize care and navigate the nature of labour and professional boundaries. The co-authors collectively answered their question as follows: A good teacher crafts communities of care. Care work is dynamic and multiple, produced and reproduced by its collaborators, but it shares common threads: care privileges people over institutions and values access and empathy over rigid constructions of rigor. As we rework our practices, pedagogies, and policies for a new season, we argue for a reckoning with our responsibility to promote the well-being of every member of the institutional community. (p. 390) 3.5 Summary Following Gilligan’s initial proposal of care ethics as a feminine, relational, and valid form of moral reasoning, educational philosopher Nel Noddings established care ethics not as an examination of virtue or objective justice, but as an observable relational exchange between the one-caring and one-cared for, who are both contributing to care. The carer’s role is to be attentive and respond to the need of the cared-for, if only to acknowledge a need exists. The cared-for provides feedback in the form of a response (or, in Noddings’ term, “reciprocity”). In 1993 Joan Tronto sought to situate caring within broader “structures of power and privilege” (p. 3) beyond this dyad. Tronto’s four dimensions and corresponding elements of care are to be enacted as a whole: caring about (attentiveness), taking care of (responsibility), care giving 91 (competence), and care receiving (responsiveness). Expanding on this notion, in 2010 Tronto used examples from health care systems to raise three areas of potential institutional consideration: “the purpose of care, a recognition of power relations, and the need for pluralistic, particular tailoring of care to meet individuals’ needs” (p. 158), along with seven potential warning signs that institutions may not be caring well. These signs refer to external factors that may have an impact on the (in)ability to enact care. These external factors include gender. Lynch (2010) found women academics are called on to do caring work and men are expected to be “care-less” (p. 54). Weinrib et al. (2013) found women academics report less overall satisfaction with their jobs (p. 98), and O’Meara (2016) noted women academics were more likely to view service work as part of a community orientation than their male counterparts. Ivancheva et al. (2019) found the care-based responsibilities placed on female academics at work and at home led to a compounded inability to create professional and personal security, in particular for precarious faculty. The COVID-19 pandemic provided a view into additional pressures for women to be responsible for home-based care (Bühler et al., 2021), with female academics disproportionately affected by family pressures (Nash and Churchill, 2021). In institutions with a tripartite structure (teaching, research, service), women have been significantly under-represented in the ranks of full professors, and female mid-career professors could be more strategically supported in their advancement (Squires & Hamilton, 2024). Gaudet et al. (2022) suggested female academics could be better supported in their self-care as they suffer significant psychological and physical impacts when they attempt to advance their careers while fulfilling gendered care responsibilities at home; and care associated with 92 motherhood (from maternity leave through to raising children) has been linked to significant professional challenges for female academics (James et al., 2021). The Polytechnic Institute progression and compensation model is not tripartite; however these lessons about gender and care in academia are likely relevant to the broader context for care at the institute, in particular as instructors are increasingly called on to form part of institutional caring systems for students experiencing distress, trauma, and stigma where “faculty members … as the early alert “first responders” (Brower et al., 2021, p.7). Without awareness of, and precautions against, underlying inequities in the distribution of care work, a call for whole organizations to engage with care is likely to result in marginalized academics undertaking more of this work. Schultz’s work with white female academic leaders highlighted tensions around organizations as obstacles to care, for example that leaders are removed from care in teaching and learning contexts, and that gender-based assumptions around care persist in the academy. Women leaders who are racialized experience additional unique challenges: Leslie Johnson’s dissertation spoke to these, including the notion of “performative allyship” (p. 160) where institutions publicly expressed care for causes including Black Lives Matter, but where racialized women leaders faced additional pressures – for example, tension between dedicating their energy to these causes and to their own career development. In addition to the unique considerations around gender and race that factor into institutional and social caring structures, there are the impacts of capitalism and neoliberalism on caring relations and the study thereof. For example, Yin’s (2023) assertion that instructors can draw on tools such as self-efficacy hope, optimism, and/or resilience ignored the systemic pressures on 93 instructors and the institutions in which they work. Gaudet (2022) and others have spoken to the need for self-care, and at the same time others have called out a “locus of responsibility placed upon individuals in a neoliberal institutional context” (Johnson, 2024, p. 156). This is an individualism that exists within a capitalist “crisis of care” (Fraser, 2016, p. 99). Including marginalized and radicalized voices in a construction of care, Beauboeuf-Lafontant (2002) and Witherspoon and Arnold (2010) connected care ethics to Black Womanism and Black American pastoral (church) contexts, respectively. Rolón-Dow (2005) explored the “intersection between race/ethnicity and care” (p. 77) in a middle school setting, advancing a connecting caring to community, caring that Antrop-González and De Jesús (2006) termed, in Latinx contexts, cariño authentico. Rivera-McCutchen (2021) used a case study of a Black middle-school principal as the foundation for a radical care framework that embraced “a spirit of radical hope” (p. 257). Radical care, then, is one that acknowledges tensions discussed by Hobart and Kneese (2020) and unveiled here: those of self-care as a foundation for caring-for; of care as critical yet undervalued in society; and as often mobilized along racial and other lines. To create space for this radical care, Museus and Sasaki (2022) produced a call to (in)action in the academy, a refusal to participate in the pace of neoliberalism, and instead to participate in space-making. While they invited readers to take time to question and make space for radical dreams, they also offered tangible examples of space-making including allocating meeting time to discuss challenges, checking in, being flexible with student deadlines and work, and the formation of kinship networks and communities. 94 Caring communities have been studied by Schussler and Collins, who noted the importance of caring as a core value (2006) and by Ellerbrock and Kiefer (2010) who raised the importance of interdimensional caring relations within a school environment. In the post-secondary context, Bozelek et al. used Tronto’s (2010) framework to create professional development curriculum for heads of departments (2014). Clemens and Robinson (2021) studied campus health and wellbeing during the pandemic and found supportive communication; collective sensemaking; inclusive pedagogy; and mindfulness were key factors in creating a caring campus community. Hunter et al. (2021) investigated a “Community of Care” ethos” at Arizona State University during the pandemic (p. 30) and (like the core values highlighted by Schussler and Collins) found that “common ground understanding” (p. 30) was supported through establishing clear expectations for caring behaviour, educating about these behaviours, and creating accountability. And building on their pandemic experiences Day et al. (2021) looked at communities of care through a trauma informed approach, one that acknowledged that trauma impacts students and educators alike. In their work, they also acknowledged that positionality, including job security (or precarity) and marginalization must be called out and addressed. They advocated for models where instead of teachers giving, and students receiving, “everyone gives and everyone receives” (p. 393). Their work positioned care as “dynamic and multiple, produced and reproduced by its collaborators”, one that acknowledges and promotes the well-being of every member of the institutional community (p. 390). 3.5.1 Conception of Care for This Study This dynamic consideration of care is one that forms the caring conception of this study, one that examines care as a quality of the relation between the instructor and student (Noddings’ dyadic 95 perspective) that is also affected by organizational factors (as identified by Tronto) and broader social and systemic forces (discussed by Fraser, Tronto, and others). Figure 3: Visual Representation of the Care Ethic Conception for the Study Most attempts to create models of caring relationships (or caring institutions, caring schools) specifically name student-focused relationships but few speak to the relationships between instructors, or between the instructors and the institution. To better understand these myriad relationships, this study used Thorne’s interpretive descriptive framework, incorporating approaches from phenomenography and solicited audio-diary methods to identify and describe 96 the ways Polytechnic Institute instructors experience encounters with students in distress. The next chapter further details the methodology and methods of the research study. 97 Chapter 4: Methodology As discussed in 1.3, the overall question for my study was: what are the experiences of some Polytechnic Institute instructors when they are the first to respond to students in distress and how might they be better supported in these interactions? This question led to sub questions: 1. What types of contact do these instructors have with students in distress? Where, when, and how are these encounters taking place? 2. How do these instructors experience their (in)ability to respond with care in those encounters? What are the commonalities and differences in these experiences? 3. How do institutional, social and societal structures and systems facilitate or hinder these instructors’ caring responses to (and/or caring relations with) students in distress? 4. What are the personal and professional risks involved (either perceived or actual) for these instructors engaging with students in distress, and how might these be mitigated? To answer these questions, this study took a generic qualitative approach (Kahlke, 2014). Generic qualitative research, which includes the genres of interpretive description and descriptive qualitative research, is a broad approach that welcomes researchers who “do not fit neatly within the confines of a single established methodology” (Kahlke, 2014, p. 38). This represents an intentional lack of adherence to one particular methodology while at the same time, deliberately ensuring congruence between the components of the study (p.39). Citing Lim, these 98 types of descriptive studies combine methods and approach research in a way that is “highly inductive; the use of open codes, categories, and thematic analysis” (Lim, 2011, p. 52 in Kalkhe). Thus, methods can be selected by the researcher in an embrace of potential messiness during data generation, discussion, and other phases. In consideration of the research questions, and in an expression of an ethic of care for participant vulnerability, attention was paid to embody care ethics at each stage in the process. Particular care was taken to ensure unique instructor perspectives would be heard, and that participating in such a study could potentially make an impact on practice. The first step of the research design, then, was the adoption of interpretive description, and a dedication to use whichever methods would best provide the induction required. 4.1 Interpretive Description The interpretive description approach was developed by Thorne (2017) to address a need to take research into practice (in Thorne’s case, nursing). Interpretive description has since been embraced by practitioners who seek to explore a distinct context or environment, such as a workplace or institution. Thorne’s (2017) view of interpretive description is that this methodology is not sharply distinct from other traditions but rather invites the best of different approaches and “shamelessly encourages borrowing from the full universe of available design technique as appropriate to the nature of the research question at hand” (p. 39). To be successful, Thorne posits that a study based in interpretive description must have three key components: “(1) an actual real-world question, (2) an understanding of what we do and don’t know … [and] (3) 99 an appreciation for the conceptual and contextual realm within which a target audience is positioned to receive the answer we generate” (p. 40). This study fit these criteria well. The research question was tied to real-world experiences of Polytechnic Institute instructors as first to respond to students in distress. Both in the broader scholarly conversation and this specific context, it has been apparent that these encounters have been taking place, that they have been accounted for in some institutional frameworks, that they have not been accounted for at Polytechnic Institute, and that they have had an impact on instructors. At the same time, we have been unclear on many of the details – in particular from the instructor point of view. The answers sought by this study related to the instructors themselves (in terms of validation, or giving voice, to their experiences) as well as potentially to Polytechnic Institute as an institution whose policies and practices have not yet acknowledged instructors as carers in this capacity. As care is highly dependent on both the context and the persons involved, the descriptive interpretation in this study also drew from phenomenography, as is an orientation to exploration and analysis rather than a specific methodology. 4.2 Phenomenography Developed in the late 1960s, phenomenography is a qualitative method that seeks to highlight participant discourses and present the differences and similarities in the ways phenomena are understood and experienced (Barnard et al., 1999). Marton (1981) has described this as “research which aims at description, analysis, and understanding of experiences; that is, research which is 100 directed towards experiential description” (p. 180). Phenomenography is not an examination of the “first-order perspective [in which] we aim at describing various aspects of the world” but instead the goal is “describing people’s experience of various aspects of the world” (p. 177, emphasis added). This distinction is important in that this study was oriented towards the experiences of instructors as they respond to students in distress, rather than a description of particular incidents. Daniel (2022) noted the importance of phenomenography in higher education studies as it provides an opportunity to first understand the beliefs around, and experiences with, a phenomenon, before trying to develop or recommend practices around particular aspects of the instructional experience, and that the results can then provide a foundation for future work. The research goal of a phenomenographer is to produce an outcome space, a diagram that shows the system of understanding that is derived from the relationships between conceptions. Conceptions are categories of description that “represent the collective understanding of the phenomenon” (Barnard, 1999, p. 220). To create the outcome space, a phenomenographer distills conceptions down to their core meanings, and creates categories which are relational, experiential, content-oriented, and descriptive (Barnard et al., 1999). Interview transcripts are the prevailing source of data in phenomenographic studies; however, this study enriched the data gathered though interviews by using something called a diary-interview method (DIM). 101 4.3 Diary Methods Diary methods can be split into two distinct groups: solicited diaries and personal (archival, unsolicited) diaries. Solicited diaries are those gathered for a research purpose, either using event-based sampling (i.e., the recording is done close to the time of an event) or interval-based sampling (i.e., recording is done at fixed intervals, regardless of when events have happened). For participants, diary methods can offer an increased perception of control over their private experiences and emotions, and even catharsis in the relating of these (Bartlett & Milligan, 2015). Diaries provide participants with the opportunity for reflection as well as a mechanism to document longitudinal perceptions and experiences and ways in which these vary between and within participants and structural/cultural contexts (Buford, 2021; Cottingham & Erickson, 2020; Monrouxe, 2009). While not all fields welcome diary methods (Cao & Henderson, 2021), they are becoming increasingly popular in higher education and other social science research as they afford many advantages. Diaries are not the only source of data in many of these studies as these can be complemented with interviews, creative writing, focus groups, and other methods. One of the key disadvantages of diary collection, however, is how onerous written diary entries are for the participants. Some have also found that text diaries (whether through hard copy or online submissions) lack depth of emotion and thus are not necessarily sufficient in cases where affect or feeling may become important variables. For this reason, studies including the work of Monrouxe (2009) as well as Dangeny et al. (2021) have used the audio diary as a mechanism to capture both words and vocal tone, as well as to reduce barriers to collection. 102 4.3.1 Audio Diaries Audio diaries capture voice recordings by participants, typically at a place and time of their choosing, in response to (an) event(s) relevant to the study in which they have agreed to participate. This can be an accessible technique for gathering thoughts and feelings immediately after an event, in the participant’s own words. The specific benefits of audio collection over other methods (structured written diaries, for example) are that these can, according to Cottingham and Erickson (2020), allow for researchers to see what is happening within the individuals as well as “illustrating the ways that emotional experience and management are connected to one’s relationships with others and the surrounding structural and cultural context” (p. 551). For this study, I used solicited, event-based audio diaries as one method of data generation. This was enhanced using interviews, in what is known as Diary Interview Method. 4.3.2 DIM: Diary Interview Method DIM is a technique that combines a diary collection period with a pre- and post-diary semi-structured interview. This was determined to be ideal for a study that sought to situate Polytechnic Institute instructors and their relationships with students within the wider institutional and societal context. It also provided an opportunity to capture the participants’ experiences in all their complexity both in the immediacy of the moment, i.e., via the audio-recording following an event, and in the retroactive interpretation of their thoughts, emotions, and actions. Combining the classic semi-structured interview with a diary period has been shown to provide more of an insight into “within-person variation and effects” as well as reducing recall bias in participant interviews (Bartlett & Milligan, 2015, p. 8). Scholars caution, however, that this approach must be used in a way that is mindful of the vulnerability of participating faculty. 103 In this study this mindfulness was particularly embodied by providing participants with choices around audio entry collection and data sharing. Section 4.5 shares more details on how this method was employed with these participants, as a way to provide them with autonomy, to create trust and relationality, while providing some immediate data with which I could work. 4.4 Participant Recruitment and Screening The primary criterion for participants was that they were actively teaching one or more class at Polytechnic Institute during the study period. Initially the target for the study was to recruit up to three participants from across five of the Institute’s Schools (Academic Studies; Transport; Science and Engineering; Built Environment; and Health Services). The plan was to recruit as many faculty as possible and from there, to seek representation across demographic (age, race, gender) as well as experiential lines (years of instructional experience, area of expertise) through purposeful sampling. Recruiting of participants proved to be more challenging than anticipated. One of the first challenges that presented itself was that, due to conflict of interest, I could not recruit within the School where I work, where my relationships are strongest. In January 2023, following BREB approval, a description of the study was shared at an AD Forum, a routine online meeting of Polytechnic Institute Associate Dean colleagues. At this meeting I also shared a poster and spoke to my personal experiences as a student, instructor, and manager at Polytechnic Institute. From there, both printed and electronic copies were circulated to various departments across multiple campuses via Associate Deans, Deans (via executive assistants), program heads, and through posts on the Polytechnic Institute intranet. There was an opportunity for snowball sampling and 104 informal referrals. When no participants from trades came forward, for example, key contacts in one of the Schools re-sent my email invitation to their faculty. I also reached out to the office of Student Life, which processes Early Assist requests, and they sent out an email to faculty who had made referrals. Their email invitation made clear this was not a Polytechnic Institute-initiated study and that they were simply sharing an avenue to participate. See Appendix B for the poster and Appendix C for an example of an email (written by the sender) to their program heads. As potential members were recruited, I used a survey to attempt representation through purposeful sampling. This sampling method has been used in several phenomenographic studies in higher education (Brown et al., 2016; Daniel, 2022; Hanasoto et al., 2019) to ensure that a variety of contexts are represented in the data gathering. In addition to not recruiting participants from the school in which I was working, I reflected on how other aspects of my positionality might affect the relation with my research participants. For example, could my being a doctoral student be a factor? However, at no point in the recruitment or data collection process did I get the impression that my being a doctoral student was either a concern or a point of interest for my participants. This is likely related to the fact that, different from many post-secondary institutions, Polytechnic Institute does not require, expect or even celebrate doctoral degrees to any significant extent in most roles across the Institute. In the School where I work, for example, there are over 200 faculty with fewer than 10 doctorates, and only one senior manager (a fellow AD) currently holds a doctoral degree. 105 4.4.1 Participant Screening and Profiles The call for participants received interest from nine participants, eight of whom went on to participate in the screening survey. Labels regarding ethnicity and gender identity were chosen by the (prospective) participants in an open-ended question. However, once the faculty had been invited to the introductory focus group, this initial group dwindled to six participants. Despite repeated efforts to use additional recruitment methods, only these six were interested and made it to this phase, and as such, the study proceeded with these participants. In the following table, information about each participant has been scrambled to protect identifiers of each person while providing an overview of the instructors who participated and the experiences they were bringing to bear on the study: Table 1: Study Participant Characteristics Characteristic type Participants School of instruction Health Services (two participants); Academic Studies (three participants); Science and Engineering (one participant) Years of teaching experience, from least to most 15 years (two); 25 years; 26 years; 27 years; 35 years Years working at Polytechnic Institute, from least to most 1.5 years; 3 years; 5 years; 15 years; 23 years; 29 years Industry/field of practice Clinician in community and mental health; communication; chemistry; pediatric nursing; ESL/EAL; technology education Age bracket 50-59 (five participants); 60-69 Self-identity with a racialized background (their choice of descriptor) Mixed race (Eurasian); White English-speaking Canadian; Caucasian; Eastern European; Anglo-Irish; Chinese-Canadian 106 Gender (their choice of descriptor) Female (four participants); male (two participants) LGBTQ2+ identifying? None Employment status (added by researcher) Regular (permanent) – 4; temporary (on contract) – 2 4.5 Data Generation Data generation began in March 2023, and the length of the study period varied depending on participant schedules. Key milestones included: a study kick-off group session, audio diary collection (via the instructor’s personal device or a digital recorder), periodic data sharing (either electronically or in person), and final individual interviews (in person reflection). This process is described in more detail in this section, starting with the first group meeting. 4.5.1 Initial Group Meeting In the initial group meeting I shared the study purpose and set the tone for the generative period to follow. I emphasized that this was not a series of incident reports, but rather an honouring of the lived experiences of participants. I shared the personal experiences that led to my interest in this topic and demonstrated my willingness to be vulnerable with them. Study logistics, such as choosing a recording method (e.g. cell phone, digital recorder), prompts for recording, how to protect student confidentiality, and other parameters were also discussed. For the two respondents who were unable to participate in the initial group meeting, I provided a longer initial one-to-one meeting whereby the key components were shared with them individually. See Appendix D for a copy of the meeting agenda and plan. 107 4.5.2 Commitment to Participate Following this, participants were given a few days to reflect before committing. Confirmed participants received additional instructions over email and were contacted on an individual basis to establish their method of collection and sharing of recordings: either electronically (e.g. uploading recordings, sending over email) or at in-person check-ins (short meetings where recordings could be transferred from their device to my device). This approach was designed to be mindful of different comfort levels with technology and in-person conversation, and the time constraints faced by participants. Diary collection methods varied by participant as described in section 4.5.4. 4.5.3 Opening Interview Following the kickoff meeting, the individual opening interviews took place in May of 2023 at the convenience of each participant. The interviews were from 18 to 45 minutes in length and were based on two questions to allow participants to explore their motivations for participating in the study, and to open the study period (see Appendix F). All meetings were conducted over Zoom, recorded, and transcribed using online software. At the end of each meeting, each participant discussed their comfort level in recording and sharing diaries and a plan for this was created. These discussions about data collection provided an opportunity to build rapport and trust with participants. 4.5.4 Diary Collection Having met as a group and individually and with an established plan for collecting and sharing recordings, we entered the diary phase. The diary collection used event-based sampling, wherein 108 participants created each diary entry as soon as possible after their interaction with a student in distress. In order to preserve student confidentiality, instructors received guidelines on appropriate spaces for recording and the need to redact student names and identifying details, please see Appendix E diary prompts. Participants were each given the option of choosing their recording method, based on their comfort level with technology and the tools they had available. Here are the recording methods selected by each participant: Participant 1 – WhatsApp voice memo Participant 2 – Voicemail recording (to my cellular phone) Participant 3 – Using voice-to-text on their own device, sending me a transcript of that recording Participant 4 – WhatsApp voice memo Participant 5 – Emailed recordings of m4a made on their own device Participant 6 – Opening a Zoom session, recording the session, and sending both files (video with audio, and audio only) to me While this was not a consistent data gathering method, in that there was variability between participants, the decision to allow participants autonomy over their diary collection seemed to be an early way to establish that they were in control of their voices, and of how much, how, and when to share these with me. Some participants had no concerns about immediately sending over content, while others preferred having the opportunity to reflect before sending over a file. One participant did not have a smart device nor a data plan (only a flip phone with talk and text plan) and we discussed this in the opening interview, working together to evaluate different alternative collection methods before settling on Zoom recordings. 109 Participants also appreciated that, while there was a diary prompt, aspects of the study were left open for their interpretation, such as the meaning of the term ‘distress’. In the initial interviews, some participants were uncertain of how ‘successful’ they would be at diary collection. Per one participant16: I noticed that again, in the consent form, you let us define what distress is. I'm not that concerned. I don't know how many entries you’ll get, because the other factor is how much communication you can get with a particular student. And I think the other aspect is, as an instructor, as a faculty member, potentially we could spot other observables in students, but they may not communicate to you. And [these observable] things are dropping performance; lack of attendance after a certain point; lack of motivation; lack of interest; maybe they're not as collaborative with their classmates from week two, or three, as they are in week eight, for example. So if those are the observations that you want me to record, I could do that. But again, this will just be an observation of their actions, I'm not going to make any conclusions because I don't know what's going on. At regular points in the process, participants were invited to share their recordings with me, again using a method and timing of their choosing (via email, via upload to a secure OneDrive folder, via physical file transfer, etc.). The number, frequency, and duration of audio diaries 16 Per Corden and Sainsbury (2006) there are numerous approaches to using verbatim quotations in social research, and these vary depending on the intent of the researcher and the nature of their work. Throughout the rest of this dissertation, I use participant quotes to explain, illustrate, enhance readability, and most importantly for this study, to give voice to the participants. In some places, very short excerpts have been extracted (this process is explained in that section). In others, particularly where the singular voice of a participant is to be highlighted, I have removed repetition and halting (e.g. yeah, um) where this is not part of the analysis but rather represents “the hesitancies and false starts of normal speech” (Corden & Sainsbury, 2006, p.18). This light editing has been applied uniformly to longer passages to ensure each voice is treated equally. 110 varied by participant: Participant 1 – six entries from May to July 2023 Participant 2 – four entries from May to June 2023 Participant 3 – ten entries from May to November 2023 Participant 4 – one entry in July of 2023 Participant 5 – two entries in October of 2023 Participant 6 – ten entries from August to December 2023 The diary process lent itself to reflection. As noted by one participant in her first entry: Since meeting with Morgan, I thought I would take notes every time an issue came up. That’s been hard to do in the moment or even immediately after sometimes because of workload. Also, because dealing with students’ mental-health challenges has just become normalized. It’s just part of the job now, and I forget to note the instances. Another participant said: I'm sorry I didn't do more submissions. I could have, and I just didn't get in a good habit of, ‘Okay, pull out your phone and do it right now.’ You know, it's like, I'll do it later. I have this big poster on my wall. I'll show you ... it says, ‘Westcott Study, Diary Recordings, Do It’. So, I didn't succeed in that. But I do I value this idea of your study so much, because this place is kind of nuts. 111 Another instructor also felt reticent about their contributions, stating in his exit interview that “I apologize for all the late incoherent recordings.” At the same time, the diary was also seen as a benefit. One participant noted in their diary: “It’s good to be doing this diary; it reminds me to prepare myself for students’ stresses.” Another responded to my email asking for entries: I enjoy it. It’s interesting to contemplate these interactive economies. Polytechnic Institute has a robust structure to officially support students but offers little in the way of staff training for these initial touch points that can indicate mental health struggles for students. As mentioned in the opening meeting, the study was never intended to be an incident report. This was echoed by a participant who stated: “for every recording I made, there's probably at least two other people that have some similar circumstances, either during that week or over term.” 4.5.5 Final Interviews The final interviews served as a closing point to the process for each participant and were scheduled at a time that each felt complete with the process. Some participants stopped teaching earlier than others, including one instructor who was not re-hired by Polytechnic Institute following the summer of 2023. The interviews were from 36 to 93 minutes in length and included questions to allow participants to reflect on the study period and their experiences (see 112 Appendix F). Per phenomenographical best practice, questions were open-ended allowing participants to share their meanings, experiences, interpretations and understandings of what had happened, and prompts were used to come back to their “string of reflections” in a way that facilitated elaboration and clarification from their point of view (Hajar, 2021, p. 1427). 4.5.6 Member Checks Member checking can be a form of establishing qualitative research validity17 and helps to ensure that participant voices are reflected in the final work (DeCino & Waalkes, 2019; Thomas et al., 2024). It can also be helpful to confirm that presented models that are extrapolated from multiple accounts are reflective of the participants’ experiences (Thomas, 2017). Challenges with member checking can arise due to differential power dynamics (between researcher and participant); discrepancies between the experiences of the researcher (theoretical) as opposed to the practical or lived experiences of the participants; or differences between the goals of the researcher and the participant (DeCino & Waalkes, 2019). There can also be challenges around re-traumatization of vulnerable or traumatized participants, when there is tension between the interpretation of the researcher and that of the participant (Thomas et al., 2024). Additionally, some members may not be available for or respond to checks (Thomas, 2017). Vella (2024) cautions that researchers must be clear and explicit about the reasons for member checking and ensure the checking and outcomes align with the researcher’s epistemology. In this case, the search for participant feedback through these checks was grounded in the phenomenographical 17 From Akerlind: “Qualitative researchers are still traditionally expected to address issues of the validity and reliability of their research, even though these notions derive from a positivist approach to research that attempts to study an objective reality, rather than the more intersubjective ‘reality’” (2005, p. 329). 113 approach as a means to explore whether or not the textual and graphic reproductions of participants’ lifeworlds, reflections, and awarenesses resonated with the participants themselves. Throughout this study, much of the institutional power dynamic was minimized by avoiding research in my own School and by repeatedly assuring participants that the context for data gathering and our time together was rooted in my studies. I was careful to use my UBC student email for all interactions, as well as my UBC Zoom account for all meetings. The study opened with a conversation about my own instructional experiences, demonstrating vulnerability and a parity of sharing, and the study was grounded in a practical orientation, with mutual study goals discussed in the initial focus group as well as individual meetings. Initially it was envisioned that participants would be emailed an electronic copy of their transcript, with five business days to either approve the transcript or provide feedback around specific information to be removed, further anonymized, or otherwise amended. After discussions with each participant, and the opportunity to trial collection (e.g. by sending me a voice memo, leaving me a voicemail, or trying to record their own Zoom meeting), all participants agreed instead that their diaries and interviews could be openly used in the creation of the outcome space and narrative findings sections. All six participants engaged in the member check process to different extents (some sending long emails, others leaving voicemails and one last participant giving a quick affirmative over WhatsApp) but all were able to review and engage with the outcome space and subsequent findings prior to their finalization. 114 4.6 Data Analysis According to Hajar (2021), the “main aim of phenomenographers is to enter into the lifeworlds of their participants, to explore their reflections on and awareness of a particular phenomenon” (p. 1426). As data is given an initial coding, reflected on, and recoded, the goal is to create “conceptions”, categories of description, that “represent the collective understanding of the phenomenon” (Barnard et al., 1999, p. 220). These conceptions are organized into an ‘outcome space’ that lays out the categories of description as well as the relationship between these categories; a relational approach that mirrors the relational conceptual framework of this study. Phenomenographers Marton and Booth (1997) explain that “there is not a real world ‘out there’ and a subjective world ‘in here’. The world [as experienced] is not constructed by the learner, nor is it imposed upon her; it is constituted as an internal relation between them” (p. 13). In developing an outcome space that reflects this relational process, they suggest three important considerations: that each category represents something different about a way of understanding a phenomenon or experience; that the categories are laid out as logically related; and that the outcomes are represented in as few categories as possible (Hajar, 2021, p. 1428). This is challenging, as the researcher is simultaneously attempting to champion the diversity of perspectives and experiences while attempting to create “a tidy and useful outcome space” in a balance some suggest can be achieved by alternating between “being a proponent of an outcome space and its critic” (Zygmont & Naidoo, 2022, p. 10). Throughout the analytical period I practiced bracketing (per Barnard), the conscientious suspension of my own beliefs and judgements to the best of my ability. That I have experienced 115 similar things made this challenging but throughout the collection and analysis of entries I worked towards immersing myself in an understanding of how each participant experienced their world. This was challenging: on a day off as I was sifting through entries and attempting data analysis, I received a call from the office about a student in distress, who had first approached the program head, who was now seeking a second opinion after reconnecting with Student Life. I thought to myself, “this part of the work never ends.” I then re-listened to an entry from a participant to reground myself in the study. This ability to listen to audio diaries provided a valuable tool for bracketing and immersion. Embedding myself in the notion of interpretive description, I revisited data codes, drafted and redrafted categories, and worked towards the best representation of the categories and their relationship to one another. While outcome spaces must demonstrate a logical connection between categories, these need not be hierarchical, but I did require a scaffolding for these ideas. To assist with this process, I referred back to the framework of care ethics to refine and shape the model, playing with the space between the personal and the organizational, between the dyadic and the systemic. 116 Figure 4: Steps in the Methodological Process As the creation of the outcome space was an iterative process spanning weeks of analysis, this specific process is detailed more in the next section, which also serves as a grounding point for categories used to classify and highlight findings around participant experiences. 117 4.6.1 Creating the Outcome Space Akerlind (2005) suggests that the reliability18 of a phenomenographical study can be demonstrated by making the interpretive steps clear to the audience, by clearly documenting and conveying the researcher’s approach to their own interpretations, and by explaining the work undertaken to set aside their own perspectives (p. 332). Thus, this section details the process by which the data was coded, interpreted, shared, and re-interpreted. This process began with transcription and interpretation. 4.6.1.1 Transcription and Interpretation – Developing ‘Snippets’ As suggested by Dangeni and colleagues (2021), the large amount of data generated in diary methods lends itself to early transcription, even while data is still being generated. That proved to be the case here: the diary entries provided a rich amount of data early on in the process. They further recommend that audio diary content be divided into smaller segments during the transcription phase. Using this recommendation, and based on the staggered completion date of participants, I began transcription once the first two instructors had completed their interview-diary-interview cycle. This started with a review of the diary transcripts generated by OtterAi, making small edits for accuracy (referring to recordings as necessary), and then capturing small segments and copying these into an Excel file. In this way “the transcribing process [contributed] to the … meaning-making process through additional opportunities to listen to participants’ reflections” (Dangeni et al., 2021, p. 54). Listening to the recordings also provided me with an 18 Also from Akerlind (2005) “a phenomenographic researcher asks not how well their research outcomes correspond to the phenomenon as it exists in ‘reality’, but how well they correspond to human experience of the phenomenon” (p. 330). Thus, for this study, the aim was to honour the participants’ lifeworlds in the creation of the outcome space, while also attempting to ensure some level of credibility such that the research outcomes would be accepted by Polytechnic Institute as ‘valid’ insights. 118 opportunity to immerse myself in the world of the participant, helping me to bracket my own experiences and set aside my position at the Institute. As I listened to the diaries and interviews, and reviewed their transcripts, I attempted to create smaller data segments, scanning for content that represented: a) Types of contact with students – where, when, how is contact happening. b) Instructor experiences of either an ability or an inability to care. c) Institutional, and broader, structures and systems that facilitate or hinder or help caring relations. d) Personal and professional factors (risk or perceived risk). When I had collected 70 segments, I printed the file and cut each statement into a strip I referred to as a ‘snippet’. While I initially attempted to group these based on similarities or differences, it quickly became apparent that I needed a tethering point. For that reason, I referred to my framework of care ethics to create a scaffold for the analysis, ultimately creating a large form poster for my office of the ‘three layers’ of care, with the instructor-student dyad nested in the middle, surrounded by organizational, and then social and systemic forces. 4.6.1.2 Mapping the Snippets As snippets were printed and cut, I physically mapped these by adhering them to the poster. This pilot, using two participants’ worth of snippets, enabled me to ensure the method would work. 119 It also led me to the observation that I was, quite literally, engaging in data analysis off the side of my desk. Figure 5: Working Off The Side of My Desk At Polytechnic Institute At the conclusion of this pilot, I had a printed poster with 70 grouped snippets and draft categories on sticky notes. The diary transcripts were well suited to this purpose. In alignment with assertions made by Eidse and Turner (2014) that “diaries allow for nuanced, detailed understandings of everyday experience” (as cited in Burford, 2019, p. 164), I found the diary entries consistently delivered short bursts of content, concise yet highly descriptive relating of the experiences, and some of the thoughts and circumstances surrounding these. When all participants had completed their study cycle, I worked with the remaining diary transcripts to produce an additional 91 snippets that were cut and mapped against the three rings of the theoretical framework. Working in this relatively analog approach provided me with an 120 opportunity to group thematically similar and different feedback, playing with the space between the personal and the organizational, between the dyadic and the systemic. As I grouped similar concepts (e.g., around enrolment pressures or workload) and keywords (e.g., references to program head), I used Post-it notes to create potential categories and dialog with the content. In fact, by forcing me to physically move snippets and Post-it notes around and to stand closer to or further away from the map to see details or patterns, this analog approach also enabled me to process my own feelings. This more consciously embodied data analysis process raised for me how emotionally challenging the data was. Re-listening, transcribing, and mapping, I began to ask questions of the data. A key question that emerged early on, for example, was “but what does it feel like?”, as seen on an early version of the poster in the next figure. This question arose precisely because of the embodied emotions that arose during the process. Figure 6: Early Map With Post-It Notes 121 Re-reading instructor experiences of being “wiped at the end of a day” and impacts like “I wake up in the night carrying someone else’s anxiety” touched me deeply and reminded me of incidents from my own teaching career. One afternoon, as I was mapping these emotionally charged snippets, I exclaimed “this is what a document analysis can’t touch!” I instantly recalled the work of DiPlacito-DeRango (2020) to conduct a policy review of her earlier (2017) RRR model: recognize, render, and redirect. While it was apparent at this stage that these 3Rs were emerging (see Post-it notes above), additional categories were also emerging. In DiPlacito-DeRango’s model and second study analysis a key limitation had been that “what is in place is not necessarily what is in practice” (p. 12). As I interacted with the diary snippets, and recalled my own experiences, that statement was both validated and overcome. To quote one of my participants: “what I’ve learned being back at Polytechnic Institute for this one year is that systems and individuals can sometimes fall apart.” In pulling apart and putting back together the immediate realities of my participants, I was beginning to see a new model take shape. As the inner portion of the map became crowded, it became clear that the greatest concentration of diary statements was around the centre – the dyad. A new poster was created, and I reprinted and replaced the snippets into emergent categories expanding from the 3R concepts around recognizing (noticing); responding (empathizing, listening, mitigating impacts, offering resources); and redirecting (outside of the dyad) to include a piece around reacting (emotional and physical reaction in the instructor). The concept of reciprocating, already questioned early in the mapping, was also added as I noticed where instructors would express either satisfaction with 122 an outcome, or an inability to move into the next task. Thus, the centre map began to settle on 5Rs of recognizing, reacting, responding, redirecting, and reciprocating19. With the centre of the map now drafted, I was able to place it in the institutional context. Additional snippets were grouped somewhat thematically but became more dispersed. Having worked through diary submissions, I expanded the process to include interview content. As observed by Cottingham and Erickson (2020), a limitation of exclusively using diary recordings is that at times “recordings in the sample were quite short and/or vague” (p. 553). While diary entries for most participants had been specific and rich, they did tend to concentrate on the immediate and personal rather than the contextual. In consulting with the interview transcripts, these reinforced the dyadic themes but also provided more insight into the organizational and societal components: additional quotes were captured, printed in yellow, and mapped, to provide more depth to these areas. A further 139 pieces were added to the map. These included references to the pandemic, religion, governmental priorities and agencies, wars, the cost of education, institutional departments, and other systemic factors further discussed in the next two chapters. 19 Here I would like to note again the work of Kirkness and Barnard around the four Rs of respect, relevance, reciprocity, and responsibility. I was not intimately familiar with this work when coding data, nor did it influence my work. The Rs developed were inspired by the DiPlacito-DeRango readings, with the addition of Noddings’ notion of reciprocity. 123 Figure 7: Adding The Yellow (Interview) Snippets Once these were added, I placed and replaced the “themes”, before moving on to the next phase of the process. 4.6.1.3 Relationships – Connections Between Categories In order to complete the draft outcome space, I needed to reflect on the relationships between the categories. First, I drew (on paper) the outcome space to represent just the categories and to question the relationship between these. Here I again referenced the transcripts to check whether the final (reduced) categories represented the experiences that had been shared. As I worked on this piece, it began to feel that the outer rings (institutional and societal pressures) were swirling around and pressing into the inner piece. I began to digitally draw the outcome space using PowerPoint, allowing me to move conceptualizations and categories, and to create connections 124 between elements. After three iterations, and further engagement with participant transcripts, I arrived at a first digital draft. 4.6.1.4 Discussion With a Colleague While I was engaged in this mapping work, I had a surprise opportunity to vet the emerging outcome space with the program head for our first-year students. We meet weekly to discuss student progress, curricular matters, and other departmental business; at the end of one of our meetings, he glanced up at the wall and made a comment about my poster. I was inspired to talk him through aspects of the diagram, being careful to share only the categories and their relationships (rather than the statements made by participants). His response was that the dyadic mapping and 5R framework represented his experiences very well. In fact, he reiterated a story about a student in distress he had mentioned briefly during our meeting, this time using the 5R model to share: the moment of recognition of the issue, his reaction, the initial response, and the redirection of the student to institutional resources. He also identified a challenge of pending reciprocity, and that some of this need had been met by sharing the story with me. This spontaneous vetting, using a real example (already on his agenda to discuss) proved most helpful. When it came to the ‘outside’ pressures on the interaction, however, we differed in our conceptualization. To that point I had seen the pressure as rings: larger or ‘outer’ societal factors (healthcare, cost of living), pressing into the Polytechnic Institute context (roles, departmental culture, additional supports), having an effect on the interaction, and the interaction then also having a direct relationship with the Polytechnic Institute context and environment. While 125 initially I was committed to the “concentric ring” concept, the discussion led me to query the position of the outer rings and their relationship with the dyad. The program head grabbed a piece of paper and drew two halves, each pressing into the middle at the same time. In reflection upon that conversation, I created a second digital representation to match what the instructor had contributed, where instead of concentric rings, the institutional and societal pressures represented two halves. Given that there were now two potential conceptualizations for this part of the outcome space, it felt appropriate to check in with participants to ensure they were aware of the progress of the project, and to offer them an opportunity to tour the spaces and provide their own feedback and I did so over email communications. Before I detail this particular moment, and their responses, I will further discuss the concept of member checks. 4.6.1.5 Member Check According to Burford (2021, p. 164), “another argument in favour of diary methods is that they facilitate a more participant led approach, offering participants more control over the research.” This had already proven to be the case from my perspective: the process of data gathering using audio diaries had created multiple touchpoints with participants, sometimes over email, sometimes over text message, over Zoom, and over the phone, if only to acknowledge receipt of materials and that their voices mattered and were being heard. In the proposal stage of the study, I had imagined that participants would review their transcripts prior to any work commencing; however, in dialogue with participants early in the data gathering process, we decided instead that they would check more completed materials. This spoke to a confidence from members that 126 I would be sensitive in dealing with their materials, as well as (in some) a sense that whatever was shared with me was important and essential in building a representation of the phenomenon and would not need to be redacted. However, having completed multiple drafts, and two iterations of an outcome space, I had reached a natural point in the analysis to reach out to participants. Thus, the two differing digital iterations of the outcome space and a draft copy of this chapter were emailed to each participant in late May 2024 with a request for permission to use their content, a call for any redactions, if necessary, but also an invitation to provide feedback. A copy of this communication is found in Appendix G. 4.6.1.6 Feedback from Participants All six participants responded to varying degrees. Of those who expressed a preference for one or other of the models, all felt that the concentric model was the most representative. The check also gave an opportunity for participants to see their voices combined for the first time. Here is one of the participants’ responses to my email, which also captures my initial questions: Thanks for sending your draft and seeking our opinions. Reading the draft made me interested to read the entire dissertation when it’s ready. It also underscored the value in sharing experiences with other instructors (other than those I “naturally” share with in my own area). Here are my responses to your four questions: 127 1. Whether or not this chapter resonates with your experiences – oh yes! In fact, all of the snippets spoke to me, whether I recognized them as my own or not my own or didn’t know 2. Which version of the outcome space (also separately attached) better represents your experience – the version of the graphic with necessities, cultural influences, and global events on one outer ring 3. Any words or phrases that should be redacted – no 4. Any additional feedback that I should consider before moving forward – no. So many aspects of your project interest me, and I wonder things etc.—so many conversations could spin from so many points—but if “feedback” means evaluation or suggestions of additions, deletions, changes, shifts etc., no Another participant had challenges understanding the initial question, which led for an opportunity for more dialogue. Their initial statement: Thank you again for including me in your important work. I read the chapter fully and looked at the Outcome Space graphic closely. Apart from agreeing with much of what was stated in the chapter, I need to underline my affinity with the areas that set out the unnecessary distance between the stated goals of supporting students at Polytechnic Institute and the departmental culture that makes [my particular] School a gauntlet of attrition. By this I mean the brutality of the conservatism that reigns supreme in my department and by fiat for me, the Institute. By supporting students, many instructional faculty perceive they are supporting the weak (students who shouldn’t graduate anyhow) 128 and that feels deeply mean and discouraging. I sometimes feel that when I develop a relationship that is supportive to students, it runs counter to the supposed objectivity of assessment that our departmental culture promotes. Ridiculous. When a student fails a course, it’s rarely for reasons of content understanding but more about privilege and opportunity. Do I work in a work in an Institute that’s just a giant sorting engine? Maybe. At any rate, I appreciate your scholarship in this area. Me: Hi [Redacted], Thank you so much for the prompt and encouraging response. I'll find a way to include what you've shared, either in this chapter or the next. Your support means a lot, and will help fuel what's next. Morgan Participant: I apologize for not answering earlier. If I’m participating in your diagram correctly, I believe that “Departmental Culture,” is the place where I feel the most tension and energy. Am I answering this query correctly? Me: “Hi [Redacted], good clarification, and I'm glad the department culture piece resonates. I meant, which picture does a better job (in your opinion) of illustrating the phenomenon? V1 or V2? Or no preference? Participant: I think version 1 is more my thing as it isn’t so much of a binary. They both are compelling but the visual of the supportive surround feels more true. 129 One participant was somewhat late to responding, but had similar, supportive feedback: Hi Morgan, thanks for sharing your chapter with us (participants). This is most likely the first time that I have read a thesis chapter not specifically connected to [field]. Recently, I was discussing phenomenography with a colleague who used it with [field] students to investigate how they understand concepts for [scientific term]. 1. Whether or not this chapter resonates with your experiences: I feel connected to the narratives that other instructors detailed about their experiences with students in distress. To a certain extent I have felt the different levels of emotions expressed and it reminds me that there are other faculty / staff that are trying to navigate this (it seems the faculty are also siloed). 2. Which version of the outcome space (also separately attached) better represents your experience: I have a preference for the May 1 outcome space (see below). I think that each category is connected. Each characteristic does have different degree of effect on a student’s distress that is recognized / unrecognized. I think global events could be expanded to other aspects (they may not have been mentioned by study participants e.g. climate change / environmental issues / economic downturn / social unrest) I don’t think there is any hierarchy between the categories as each student will have a set of different factors causing distress. The second outcome space makes me think there is a “split” between the outer connections. 130 3. Any words or phrases that should be redacted: none that come to mind – I tried to focus on my own entries (to the best of my memory). Other entries are quotes. 4. Any additional feedback that I should consider before moving forward: Interesting read with your narrative and analysis incorporated with the interview details and categories (different reading from the format I am accustomed to for STEM based thesis). My personal comment – on the flip side, I hope all the participants were able to get some wellness on their part (not easy). 4.7 Completed Outcome Space Having engaged with the participants on the iterations of the outcome space, and the categories and layout of the space, I was able to discard the ‘two halves’ model move forward with a final version of the space as presented on the following page: 131 Figure 8: Completed Outcome Space (Recognize, Render, Redirect from DiPlacito-DeRango, 2017) 4.8 Ethical Considerations One of the primary ethical considerations for this study was the notion that third party (student) stories were going to be shared by those participating in the process. Care was taken to maintain student confidentiality so students could not be identified, particularly because this work was conducted at my site of practice. Participants were aware of their surroundings and background noises when audio diaries were recorded so as not to capture any inputs or be overheard, and 132 student names were reduced to initials. Additionally, the role of first responder carries with it risk of trauma – for example, in my experience hearing about the assault of a student, I felt triggered. In the introductory meeting with participants, I made myself vulnerable and explained how I had come to this topic. This helped to create a relation of trust that was specific to the research but also to highlight this risk. As the research process and interviews may have re-triggered the participants counselling resources were identified and shared frequently. Another consideration is that of my position of power at Polytechnic Institute. It has been mentioned that participants were recruited from outside my School, but additional care was taken to separate the research from my role, as well as to create and maintain the relation of care and trust with my participants. While the process was immersive, and intimate, I worked throughout to create a distinction between my role as an Associate Dean at PI, and as a researcher. I took care to identify using door signage, auto-responders on my email, and through statements like “I’m wearing my researcher hat” to signal the times I was stepping into my researcher role. There are not many people at Polytechnic Institute with doctoral degrees and this afforded me several moments to explain the nature of doctoral work and that this work was outside of my role as Associate Dean. As the outcome space was being coded during closed door sessions, snippets were not traceable back to participants, even by initials, and the door was closed so that members of the community would not be at risk of seeing raw data. If members of the community took an interest in the poster, I took care to complete official PI business and then switch the discussion to the research; always sharing only at the highest level of conceptualizations, and with this ‘researcher hat’ in 133 place. If I saw participants outside of the study, I would acknowledge them with a glance or a nod, but I interacted with them quite differently than in the confines of the study. With multiple audiences, on study materials, and in all email communications, I explained clearly that I was conducting this research in my capacity as UBC student, not as a Polytechnic Institute Associate Dean, and that none of my data was to be shared with Polytechnic Institute except for the final version of the dissertation, as a public document. Lastly, while recordings belonged to the participants themselves, once transferred to me, their storage was secured in Canada, and participants were kept abreast of how data has been stored and shared. By using the UBC OneDrive, data storage was compliant with FIPPA and other privacy and data storage guidelines. 4.9 Into the Outcome Space As mentioned, the process of creating an outcome space is iterative. Engaging in this process led to uncovering findings not just about the phenomena that I wished to capture, but also about the capturing process itself. Thus, I have provided a separate chapter that details this journey, highlighting findings relating to the creation of the outcome space, as well as detailing the space itself. This is followed by a chapter that engages with individual participant voices. 134 Chapter 5: Outcome Space Participants in this study were motivated by a desire to share their unique perspectives. To honour this need to be heard, there are two chapters that speak to my findings – one on the outcome space itself; and a second findings chapter to highlight individual experiences and engage in a further dialog with the literature. The division of chapters was developed with participants through the member check process: this chapter, which details the creation of the outcome space, and explains the categories of conceptions and their relationship to one another, blends the voices of participants together. In other phenomenographical studies, researchers frequently illustrate categories with appropriate, anonymized quotes from the data gathering process, and this is the format for the subsequent chapter. 5.1 Touring the Outcome Space As it is grounded in my concept of the ethic of care, the outcome space was built around three layers: 1) The heart of the interaction between the student and the instructor 2) Pressures and support from the institution in which the interaction takes place 3) Societal forces that shape the institutional environment and have an effect on the caring relation The next section will magnify each of these components and provide a tour of the categories and components. 135 5.1.1 The Heart of the Interaction The heart of the interaction has five components: recognizing, reacting, responding, redirecting and (presence of, or absence of) reciprocating20. Figure 9: The Heart of the Interaction (Recognize, Render, Redirect from DePlacito-DeRango, 2017) These components are described in the following sections. 5.1.1.1 Recognizing All instructors began their experience in a caring relation by recognizing when they either noticed, saw, sensed or were explicitly told there was an issue with a student. This was frequently the result of noticing non-verbal cues, instances where students were “acting 20 Again, I would like to acknowledge that these terms were inspired by readings from Noddings and DePlacito-DeRango and are not currently connected to the work of Kirkness & Barnhardt (1991). 136 differently than they had in the past.” One participant noted that when students are paying attention, they provide physical cues such as nodding – “thank goodness for the nodders” – but that when this had ceased, he recognized the student may be in distress. Other body language cues included: physical shaking; ceasing to acknowledge classmates; and no longer sitting with particular classmates. One instructor noted it had been challenging to observe changes in student behaviour because he had been ill and away at the start of term and was now “playing catch-up with who my students are.” Some explained their ability to recognize student distress had come from tips provided by the Office of Student Life, and that these had helped them to identify distress when otherwise they may have not noticed. In addition to non-verbal cues, instructors also noted that some students would verbally share their distress either in conversation or unprovoked, for example: stating they were having family difficulties; that they had lost a family member; or that they were having a challenging time with their roommate. Not all language (literal or physical) was gentle or benign: one instructor mentioned “I had someone verbally assault me following the completion of an exam”, while another was physically charged by an agitated student in a lecture hall. 5.1.1.2 Reacting At the centre of the heart is the instructor’s reaction. Once an instructor noticed, saw, sensed, or were explicitly told about a student’s distressful situation, they were internally and externally reacting. Much of the detail of these reactions came from participant diaries, including their emotional statements: “I’m really worried”; “I’m so disappointed”; “I’m holding back tears”; “I 137 feel terrified and frightened for her” or “this made me feel quite upset.” Not all the reactions were negative, some instructors experienced more connection and validation at this stage, stating things like “I felt very honoured and engaged that she was finally able to talk to somebody.” Often instructor emotions were accompanied by reflections: “I feel for him because it’s different compared to when I went to school”; or “my heart hurts to see young people so weighed down with worry”. Reactions were sometimes recollections of times they experienced something similar to the student, specific triggers like “it brought me back to my own … cancer, and the loss of people close to me” and “this made me feel quite upset because I remember being in the very same situation as a student.” The reactions also have external manifestations. One instructor noted “I find myself holding my body internally tense”; “I’m paying extra attention to my voice – volume, speed, body language, everything, to be sensitive”; and “carefully choosing every move I make like I’m tiptoeing among a field of frightened deer”. At another time: “my brain went right into flight-fight-freeze with a tall male student running at me” and in the next moment “I acknowledge the biases are there, but that’s how it felt.” This reflection within the reaction sometimes included deliberate boundary-setting or the intent to set boundaries: “sometimes we get too over involved or emotional in the other person’s experience”; “I remind myself it’s not my anxiety”; “I know I have to trust my judgement”; or “I have to put it aside for now.” This sometimes also included a move to re-centre themselves professionally, such as: “I have to put my feelings in check until my marking is done.” Instructor reactions sometimes lingered well after the incident. 138 5.1.1.3 Responding Often immediately after the reaction, the instructor would move to the response phase. Responding encompassed many actions including: empathizing; listening; offering resources; or immediate mitigation. In the 2020 document analysis, DiPlacito-DeRango found that the “Rendering of support” could include “compassionate narrative exchanges”, “curriculum content”, and “teaching practices” (p. 9). In terms of compassionate narrative exchanges, participants mentioned sitting with their students, listening, and allowing them to share their feelings. One instructor was concerned about the tension between taking action and being compassionate. In this case the instructor was both the person conducting an academic integrity violation investigation, with such an investigation being the cause of distress, and the one listening to the student’s distress about the investigation and it was “challenging to be both the investigator and the person to be an ear to listen to the student”. At this stage, there may also be tension because the nature of the advice might be contradictory to the student’s stated aims: it’s hard to recommend to students, for example, to take a break from school entirely, or to leave their cohort and complete through alternative means. It’s clear, however, that the process of responding can extend far beyond what’s noted in documents, and outside of the classroom. For example, one participant reflected on past instances where colleagues were taking students home with them or offering them grocery money. 5.1.1.4 Redirecting The next stage was redirection. This could have been to other members of their departmental team and often was to the program head in particular. The program head may have participated by either listening to the instructor and helping them work through their challenge, or as a 139 referral point for the student themselves. The program head was mentioned more than any other specific resource in both the diaries and the interviews. Additional supports mentioned were: Early Assist; the Office of Student Life; counselling services; the library learning commons; peer tutoring; and the Accessibility Services department. 5.1.1.5 Reciprocating Noddings (2002) asserted that a carer requires a sense that their caring has been received in some way (reciprocity) and that in the absence of this feedback there are negative consequences for the carer (p. 19). This was clearly expressed by multiple participants: when an instructor noticed or was informed that a student had a positive outcome, the instructor experienced relief; conversely when they were sitting in uncertainty it could have exacerbated their stress. Sometimes reciprocity took place when students reported back that they were helped. As Early Assist could only confirm to instructors that their inquiry had been received (and whether they were able to make contact), instructors were relieved if they saw students on campus, back in the hallways, or in class. Post-incident some instructors were proactive in reaching out and making sure that students were communicating with them, often multiple times a day. Sometimes at this point instructors reflected on the fact they “need to check in with students more”; or that they “should keep an eye on students more.” When an instructor saw or heard news about the outcome, it was not always a clean relief, as some instructors were torn between the satisfaction of being able to help the student and upset that the student was in the situation in the first place. In the absence of reciprocity, it was challenging for instructors, who retained the impact of these exchanges: feeling exhausted; worried; stressed; having to actively shake off “fight, fight, freeze 140 stages”; finding themselves thinking about a situation during the evening; waking up “in the middle of the night carrying the facts of what’s happening to a student.” Some instructors retreated to their office to sigh, to swear, to breathe. Some expressed the need to crawl under blankets or spend time alone when they get home to decompress and unpack what they’ve experienced. When students don’t accept the help that is offered, many expressed frustrations or disappointment either with the student or with the Institute. One instructor mentioned that time constraints created a barrier to reciprocity, in particular if “students vanish … we don't really ask faculty and program heads, usually there's no follow up … it's a little bit unfortunate, but I know that it's short on time.” 5.1.2 Pressures and Support from the Institution The next conceptual grouping of the outcome space is the institution as either a help or a hindrance to an instructor’s ability to recognize, react, respond, redirect, and experience reciprocity. 141 Figure 10: Pressures and Support from the Institution While broader institutional initiatives (policy conversations) were sporadically mentioned in both the diaries and the interviews, what emerged was a picture of the immediate pressures and resources available to faculty. They have been grouped into themes of student workload; enrolment pressures; program structure; departmental culture; roles; and available supports. These influences are fluid and interconnected, influencing each other, as well as the faculty members. 5.1.2.1 Student Workload Multiple participants spoke of student workload as both a cause of student distress, and a barrier to response and potential redirection: “what we call boot camp, I guess is one way to put it.” Polytechnic Institute cohort (full time) students are block-registered into 7-8 courses per term, 142 and at the time of the study, the minimum credit count for a two-year Polytechnic Institute diploma was 110 credits (50 credits more than the minimum for a diploma at other BC institutions), which is 10 credits shy of the minimum requirement for a four-year degree at other BC institutions). To reiterate: Polytechnic Institute students complete almost a degree’s worth of credits in two years of diploma study. If they are unsuccessful, there are significant obstacles to continuing with “so many deliverables coming every week ... even just missing one day you get farther and farther behind”. Others also reflected on the ability of today’s students to keep up with the pace and volume of work, asking “does our youth right now have the capacity to engage in three years of such intense cognitive load and expense?” or noting that students are “strikingly unprepared to cope with the workload here.” One seasoned instructor called the workload “punishing” and stated that even with all their experience and credentials “I would never pass at Polytechnic Institute.” Another instructor mentioned their distressed student had perhaps already joined the program primed for a difficult experience as they had heard “from multiple sources before entering the Polytechnic Institute program that the program is exceptionally difficult.” One faculty member referred to the institutional conversation around the (then) proposed changes to the credentialling policy, a reduction in the minimum number of credits for programs including the diploma (from 110 minimum to 75). Their diary entry noted “the credentialling changes are framed as dealing with wellness, but I’m not sure it’s the workload” before immediately adding “but yes, the workload is high.” Others stated that despite an occasional institutional conversation around the volume of student work, in their departments the high workload was taken as a given: “it’s just kind of stated that it’s the way it is and that’s how it is”; or “at Polytechnic Institute the culture is like, you slam them with workload, nothing is difficult, 143 technically, but there's just the volume is way, way, way up … don't feel great about the way we do it.” Some instructors were not passionately against the workload, but rather neutral, stating for example “a certain percentage of students that don't make it through Polytechnic Institute, even when things are going well, in normal conditions, because of the fact that our programs are designed a certain way.” That said, while no-one felt the volume of work was a positive attribute of the Polytechnic Institute environment, one faculty member spoke of the opportunity to support personal growth in students in response to that stress, provided that the student is supported in addressing any challenges, and the instructor is equipped to help with that support. 5.1.2.2 Enrolment Pressures Some of the faculty members also spoke about enrolment pressures as impacting the responses or referrals. This was expressed by some as a pressure from the Institute to retain a student in the program (for FTE funding reasons or to maintain enrolment in a low-enrolled program to avoid potential program cancellation). Other participants expressed feeling pressure not to have underperforming students continue in the program as this may indicate a lack of readiness for industry or their profession. Note that participants within the same discipline (e.g., health sciences, engineering) were receiving and interpreting these pressures differently – some feeling a pressure to “pass students and push them through” and others feeling pressured to use criteria too stringent to have a student continue. 144 5.1.2.3 Program Structure (Cohorts, In Person) Despite the “punishing workload” and challenges around enrolment, many participants spoke to program structure and the cohort as a benefit in terms of relationality with and among students: small class sizes; frequent contact with their classes; and the ability to follow students through their learning journey were seen as benefits to recognizing distress and choosing the appropriate ways to respond and/or redirect the student. One instructor zeroed in on the delivery of these programs in person (rather than online), as helpful. Based on their experiences with online learning during COVID-19, they asserted that “I wouldn't be able to recognize when people are in distress or do an immediate on the ground assessment of how the education is actually going” in an online environment. One instructor was concerned about teaching high volumes of students, because of the large number of programs his course was servicing, speaking to the noticeable difference in the ability to recognize and refer when one is teaching “140 students”. And while a small volume of students and frequent contact were deemed beneficial and conducive to offering support, the program structure also seemed to have an impact on the reactions of the faculty. If students were known to their faculty members, the impact of what is being shared with them was often amplified because of that relationship. One participant spoke of an opportunity to better leverage this “community in the classroom … because we have the same students in the same group for two years, that community is really vital, and it needs to be spoken to and constructed carefully.” 145 5.1.2.4 Department Culture The instructor’s ability to recognize student distress and respond, as well as their reactions, hinge on the culture21 of their department. Granular differences were summarized by one participant as “the truth at Polytechnic Institute, is that your department … not even School … has their own little way of communicating.” Some felt their departmental culture contributed positively to their ability to care: “my colleagues are made of gold, and silver and sugar and spice … those people are helpful … on a very personal level” with another sharing that “my colleagues, of course … are very supportive, and we're always supportive of each other.” Others pointed to departmental culture as a hindrance: “I've worked at other schools, and there's less systemic BS, we really hear what the students say, we try to support them, we have a little bit more latitude in terms of how we can support them.” Another instructor from the same School discussed how colleagues were skeptical of institutional data around student wellbeing, in particular reports that unhoused students were sleeping in their cars: “people were saying ‘you know, maybe they just don't want to travel home,’ and I was saying … are you telling me somebody has chosen to sleep in a parking lot?!” These instructors were health practitioners, but 21 Meek (1998) was critical of the use of the term “organizational culture”, in particular noting a “need for a conceptual distinction between culture and social structure” (p. 453) and cautioning against seeing “organizational culture as a ’variable’ that can be controlled and manipulated like any other organizational variable” (p. 470). At the same time, Meek acknowledges that if, borrowing from anthropology and sociology, we acknowledge culture “as something that an organization ’is’, not as something that an organization ’has’” (p. 471) we can begin to examine the symbols, rituals, and other constructions of meaning that comprise what some would refer to as an organizational culture. Meek specifically names, for example, “academics use jargon” (p. 464) as a special language and participate in ritualized behaviour at events like convocation where members share “a feeling of belonging to an academic community whenever the artifacts are displayed and the ritual is performed” (p. 469). Culture was the term explicitly used by some participants in the study to define their contexts and experiences in their departments. Perhaps this is reflective that members of specific departments are indeed tied by jargon (in health sciences, in engineering, etc.) as well as to rituals including graduation but also extending into department-specific practices like marks meetings and other student-facing activities. In this way, departmental culture, as well as institutional culture, is made up of the words, symbols, and ritual activities of the department. It is not a single variable that can be controlled, but a multitude of social variables that can be influenced. 146 the sentiment was echoed by a participant from an engineering area who spoke to the culture as “dominantly very quantitative, in its take on … how emotional things are dealt with.” This participant also shared: “unlike any other place I've worked … there is a deep culture of like, throw them to the wolves and see who floats to the surface or whatever metaphor I'm butchering.” Similar to the impacts of lost reciprocity in their interactions, many faculty who felt unsupported by their departments or colleagues, for any reason, experienced significant personal impacts. Some felt their approach to students was being stifled and that “when you can't be a whole person, it can lead to burnout.” Another participant validated this by sharing that the uncertainty of their future at Polytechnic Institute, compounded by dealing with student stress, meant that since the start of the study period they had experienced significant anxiety. While initially the outcome space mapping included a category around Polytechnic Institute policy, only one of the six participants spoke about policy at the Institute explicitly and directly. This participant spoke of the ongoing negotiations institutionally around attendance, credit count, and credentialing. In this case the commentary seemed to be related to uncertainty around these policies. At another time, the instructor spoke of uncertainties regarding the financial situation at Polytechnic Institute, and of potential program closures. Rather than a commentary on policy or operations, the faculty member seemed to be more frustrated by a lack of direction or guidance. 5.1.2.5 Roles Many participants shared reflections on what it meant to be an instructor; what the role of an instructor is; and what it is not. As discussed above, the cohort program structure means that many instructors have repeated, frequent contacts with their students. One instructor mentioned 147 that in September they “ended up being … kind of like the person who sort of flags” the students who may struggle, and the students who may have been better equipped to succeed. Another instructor made similar comments, in that they saw engaging with student wellbeing and providing more than academic support as “part of my responsibility, and in my professional development is to become a better instructor”, versus their colleagues who may have focused primarily on becoming subject matter experts. While many participants stated there is more flexibility and less hierarchy at Polytechnic Institute today than in the past, the program head role, and their (in)ability to support instructors, was mentioned by all six participants more than once in the process. The difference between an instructor’s role, and a program head’s role, came up in particular when instructors were talking about their ability to respond. While program heads are technically instructional peers, they are (typically) elected by the department to be released from teaching into service roles. Program heads can help instructors deal with student distress by being a sounding board; administering next steps directly; or intervening on behalf of a student. In fact, one faculty member reported referring a distressed student to their program head, so that the program head could share one update to relevant faculty, rather than the student having to “be vulnerable with seven or eight instructors.” Another referred students to the program head as part of their strategy to “try to distance myself a little bit more in the sense that I'm not trying to engage with them on that personal level.” Some participants, having been program heads, felt that the instructors in those roles had good intentions, even if “the amount of training you get as program head sometimes … doesn't help you deal with all the circumstances” around particular cases of student distress. 148 Other participants suggested that their program head was a hindrance: for example, calling the instructor out for taking a relational approach; or as not being collaborative. More than one instructor shared that, fundamentally, their program head did not have the same view of student mental health as they did. These instructors felt it was their responsibility to respond to students with care, and to help their students navigate any challenges; whereas they felt their program head would say that this was outside of their role and responsibility as educators. An additional faculty member mentioned several times throughout the study, that while their program head was helpful, supportive, and provided tangible suggestions for how the instructor could better respond (and where to redirect if needed); their Associate Dean was not accessible, helpful, or supportive and had actively avoided meetings with the faculty to discuss student distress and related issues. Thus, they began to rely even more heavily on program head support. Multiple instructors also mentioned the difference between an instructor and a mental health counsellor. For three of the participants, this difference in role was something they reflected on frequently, including not being a counselor, or having to refer students out because their needs exceeded what an instructor could provide (e.g., housing, food). Some also noted their peers may not be recognizing or interacting with student distress because these colleagues compartmentalized their feelings. One of these participants was clear in their diary entries that “Polytechnic Institute should invest in doing some proper training for all of the faculty”, and another faculty member attributed their having participated in Mental Health First Aid (with a previous employer) as having been beneficial. Two of the participants did have counseling and/or social work training as part of their healthcare backgrounds and cited it as a factor in their ability to recognize and respond, while simultaneously noting that the culture of their 149 departments was not conducive to these activities. In fact, the three participants with previous mental health training were the most critical of the (in)ability of their departments, and the Institute, to take effective action. A last component of this category had to do with the instructor’s status or career stage and the impact on their ability to manage their reactions and responses. Instructors who were on contract, rather than permanent (or ‘regular’) seemed to sense risk around their ability to respond in distress situations. Instructors who had both extensive teaching experience and were close to retirement seemed to have the most confidence in terms of their ability to respond and freedom in terms of their response. One of these instructors stated they were comfortable using their own judgement and unafraid of the consequences: “if the Institute is going to fire me for hugging a student when they’re upset, that’s okay.” Contract instructors who were in a state of precarity would state things quite differently. One mentioned not being acknowledged by the Institute because of their part-time status, driven home when they received a message from Polytechnic Institute wishing them a good summer break, when in fact they were going to be teaching through the summer. Another stated that institutional decision-makers, facing budget pressures, may undervalue the importance of having faculty interact with students: “we need to cut, like, what $2 million or something and this may impact staffing … Can they provide support like I can provide?” 5.1.2.6 Available Supports The amount and quality of contact time with students lends itself to strong assessment of student needs, which is frequently followed by redirection to other institutional supports, either directly 150 or in collaboration with the program head. Many instructors referenced institutional supports including Early Assist (by far the most mentioned); counseling; and accessibility services. Some reflected that their fellow instructors were not aware of the depth and breadth of services available, especially as these grow and change, but also due to the “haphazard onboarding” experienced by most faculty. Referencing Indigenous Services, one participant suggested that connecting with these departments is important, and needs to be facilitated by institutional leaders, for example “it would have been … pretty awesome if my Associate Dean had walked me down to a place like that and introduced me to people.” The enthusiasm for the support available is tempered at times with frustration. One faculty member stated that “the Institute is really superficial [in] how they reach out for care” in particular when the access isn’t evenly distributed. For example, supports are primarily available in English, and this is a barrier for international students. Multiple participants encountered long wait times when attempting to redirect students to other areas, for example “Counseling Services ... they were good … they are, however, backed up”; and “Accessibility Services [has a] long waiting period, not uncommon, again, because of the high demand”; and “it really throws things into a wrench when [members of a support team] are also taking sick leave.” Additionally, some students are in class when supports are offered, illustrated by the example of “you're doing mindful meditation at 12:30 and they're in class until 1pm.” This scheduling challenge extends to faculty who would have liked to better engage with the departments who offer support, but couldn’t attend due to teaching, or who missed communications because these landed during busy term start-up or wind-down periods. 151 Some of the frustration with the use of outside supports centred on whether students took advantage of these; even when an instructor attempted to temper their expectations: “a little bit disappointing … I started thinking, okay, it's out of my control [but] a large majority of the students did not participate in the Early Assist, even though they were contacted by them.” As discussed in my theoretical framework, Noddings explained that reciprocity, a sign that care offered has been received, is important to maintaining a caring relation. If neither the student nor the service to which they are referred has given any indication that the instructor’s care has been received, the caring relation the instructor has tried to establish with the student remains incomplete. This can make it more challenging for that instructor to offer care to another student in the future. And in a full circle moment back to student workload, one participant stated her relationship to the Institute was sometimes one of anger and frustration, because even if supports were offered, the “crushing workload” presents a barrier to seeking and receiving support. 5.1.3 Societal Forces that Shape the Interaction The final layer of the outcome space pertains to the broader social and societal issues that have an impact both on the Institute and on the students themselves. 152 Figure 11: Societal Forces That Shape the Interaction Data about these forces was mostly derived from the interview transcripts, whereas the heart of the caring relation was predominantly informed by the diary transcripts, with the institutional layer being addressed in both. The external, broader influences on the caring relation were harder to categorize as these as emerging themes were varied and included: gender roles; cultural norms; mental health; the impact of COVID-19; accessibility; healthcare; housing; the role of organizations like BC Housing and the RCMP; the cost of living; food security; and diversity. Some of these factors were mentioned as one-off statements. For this reason, it was necessary to revisit the snippets and the whole transcripts multiple times. As I worked with additional 153 participant statements, I was better able to group these into broader categories of necessities; cultural influences; and global events. 5.1.3.1 Necessities In revisiting the statements around cost of living, healthcare, housing and food security, one of my participants summarized these as “necessities”. They explained that when a student comes to an instructor with a need in one of these areas, the services available for redirection are inadequate. This challenge for students was illustrated in the need to meet institutional requirements around medical documentation for absences and accommodations: “if you're lucky to have a family doctor, which many people don't have, they can write you good notes.” For some, this went beyond the microenvironment of Polytechnic Institute; with one participant sharing the observation that “our healthcare is collapsing, there is always money for wars, but we are closing mental health institutions”; noting the changing nature of the family and lack of parental support; and that in the broader social environment “there is an increased level of, I call it a baseline stress, and then they slap expectations on top.” Even instructors who were more primarily focused on academic performance as an indicator shared that the challenges they were seeing included the impacts of increased cost of living in the city, and that this had shifted over the course of their teaching into these programs. One participant spoke to the cost of education, in that “school is never supposed to cost money, but it costs money in Canada”. Notably, according to Statistics Canada (2024c), the percentage of college-level students in Canada who graduate with large debt (over $25,000) at graduation nearly doubled from 12% to 23% from 2000 to 2020; and the average student debt for college 154 students in 2020 was $16,700. This comment about the cost and commodification of education intersected with the observation of another participant who shared that “post-secondary still … sort of sees themselves as a sorting exercise [in a] capitalist kind of regard.” This category, or bundle of themes, around necessities and the challenges of students in meeting their basic needs, was discussed by all six participants either in their interviews, their diaries, or both. The remaining categories were only discussed by some of the participants. 5.1.3.2 Cultural Influences Cultural influences on the institutional conversation, and on an instructor’s (in)ability to care were mentioned by participants primarily in addressing their own contexts. Gender constructs and lived experiences were raised by three of the female participants (and none of the male). One participant explained the unique context for her students and the instructional body: “in nursing, and I'll just use stereotypes; there's a lot of single women”. Another female participant identified that her physiological response to a (physically charging) distressed male student was informed in part by gender; in later reflections she shared about the impact of the 1989 antifeminist mass murder at “L’Ecole Polytechnique … I always have somewhere in the back of my mind”. Another female faculty member, approached by a young female student facing threats from her ex-boyfriend, mentioned her own experiences as a young woman. In this case, the parallels were even stronger because the student and her alleged perpetrator were from the same East Asian country where this faculty member had encountered her own negative experiences. Reflecting on the incident that prompted the student to reach out, and on her attempts to redirect the student to the RCMP, the faculty member also thought about her own family: “I have two teenagers; now I 155 need to go and have these conversations with my daughter … I'm really worried about how young women are treated.” The cultural background of learners was raised by participants of both genders. One male faculty member spoke of an experience, early in his teaching career, where he was sent to teach a specialized program for Indigenous learners; noting that prior to this experience “no-one informed me about what was the best way to work with Indigenous students … no prior training in Indigenous ways of knowing” and that for this population there were a number of challenges for which he was unprepared including that “some of the students also potentially are recovering from either alcoholism or drug addiction … that affected the way they perceived what attending classes would be like.” Instructors mentioned working with distressed students from backgrounds including “South Asian”, “Chinese”, “Indian”, “Korean”, and that the reality of working with students from diverse backgrounds can be different than departmental conversations, leading one participant to note that “it's caused me some distress … because how do you work in diversity if you don't practice diversity?” and another commenting that “when I work with international students, some of the problems that I have to solve are quite different.” One participant stated that in their School there are conversations about equity and diversity but that the impact of these might be different than the intent: “we have these committees that are diversity, inclusion that are very exclusionary to some … there is committee after committee after committee … you sit for two hours [in a] meeting and it has nothing to do with learners.” 156 5.1.3.3 Global Events The impact of COVID-19 on student enrolment numbers, student readiness, and teaching modalities, was mentioned by most of the participants. In terms of enrolment impacts, in the four years leading to COVID, Polytechnic Institute had a higher volume of international students than in any period previously22, “so many international students … like bursting at the seams with international students” whereas through the pandemic and into the study period (mid-2023 to early 2024) this number had decreased sharply. Another attributed a lack of student readiness, in part, to the fact that “most are part of the ‘COVID cohort’” of students who had their learning impacted during the pandemic. More than one faculty member reflected that during the pandemic, they were mindful of external stressors taking temporary action: “I didn't fail very many students because I kind of figured there was enough going on in life” and others had made permanent adjustments to their teaching style; for example, “I still adopt from the COVID … I always have a two-minute wellness break in the middle of a class after about 20 minutes” to help students with their learning and socio-emotional regulation. Another participant noted that “one of the great things that COVID did … is it put to bed a little bit, the sort of fetishization of online learning.” In addition to the lingering impacts of COVID-19, one participant spoke of global conflicts as having a strong influence on stressors for students and instructors alike, reflecting that “me, who is coming from war torn country, I can tell you, my pain has never been acknowledged in 22 In the Flexible Learning stream, at the time of the study and of writing, students are able to register into a majority of courses without having met any prerequisites, language requirements, or entrance requirements. 157 Canada.” In our interview in early 2024, this participant noted that the events in Gaza were having an immediate impact on the teaching and learning environment. It is perhaps because this one faculty member came from this traumatic background that they were mindful of it, as these incidents did not register for other members of the study group. This particular instructor spoke to the challenges of having to navigate complex situations while teaching and responding to students, and the challenges of the Institute wishing to remain neutral during conflicts. While global conflict was not explicitly mentioned by other participants, it seems clear that these conflicts, and other social stressors, are having an impact; the totality of these external influences reminded me of a diary comment from a participant that “walking into classes, I imagine I can feel anxiety in the air like never before.” The three interconnected parts of the heart (dyad), the Polytechnic Institute environment, and larger-scale forces all create an environment that makes it challenging for instructors to deliver care, especially when largely unacknowledged in the job descriptions and other Institutional frameworks. There are also opportunities for hope, with more than one instructor challenging the deficit notion of addressing distress, and another expressing the potential “for students to hopefully be more engaged and … directed toward finding their own solutions.” 5.2 Raising Their Voices This outcome space does not represent the sum total of the study; snippets and isolated statements were grouped together to create a map of the phenomenon, but do not represent the whole story. Similar to the study by Spear, Morey and Van Steen (2021) where instructor voices 158 (via quotes) were mapped back to survey data, phenomenographers Daniel (2022) and Brown et al. (2016) used transcript excerpts to add educator perspectives to each of their category descriptions. With the description of my outcome space generation complete, I will share illustrative quotes pertaining to each category as well as engage these collective voices with the literature. This dialog takes place in the next chapter. 159 Chapter 6: Findings – Narrating the Outcome Space With an overview of the outcome space complete, this chapter will provide space for the instructors’ individual voices, while interacting with the scholarly conversation related to each statement. As with the last chapter, we will begin with the core unit of study: the instructor-student relation. 6.1 The Student-Instructor Relationship Goode and colleagues (2020) coined the term ‘intrusive teaching’, which they saw as a collection of behaviours including: giving students personal time (outside of classroom or office hours); checking in on students; and providing interventions. The authors spoke of pedagogical actions and interactions in an “altered role” (p. 61) but at Polytechnic Institute, this type of engagement has always been the norm, at least in full-time tech programs. It is not that the instructor role at PI is changing per se, but that the number (and sometimes the intensity) of occurrences are increasing. While Goode and colleagues identified “required relationships” where “listening [is] an assumed part of their duties” (p. 58), the participants in this study did not call out their relationality as a duty, but rather an orientation: I know [I have a] relational approach, but I think my style gets misinterpreted and also can be threatening to more traditional [colleagues] because I use my examples of how I supported the students. And then I get feedback like this from the odd one who will say, ‘Oh, you're so relational, [Participant],’ but I was effective with the students. So, I walk away knowing that I have set the personal professional boundaries. I talk about behaviors 160 at the beginning of term. I acknowledge that. People go through ups and downs, and I said, as long as you're communicating with me, then I can support you. This orientation was described by another participant as: [T]hinking of the student as a whole being, and how I can support that whole being … I strongly believe that my strength as a teacher lies in my ability to help students start to trust themselves and believe in themselves, because [with regards to the topic being taught] let's be honest, they already know it by the time they're 20 and coming to me … I help them discover their confidence; I help them believe in themselves. And by this participant as an approach that is challenged by the institution’s mandate: I think what's codified is we're a vocational institute … it's right in our mandate statement that we are here to provide people with job-ready skills, and where I land in that thinking, is that my particular little, tiny program, the job-ready skills are actually … just as much qualitative skills, metaphysical skills … as well as … tangible technical skills. In these excerpts instructors mirrored statements from scholars of caring in institutions, including those who have called for supportive communication (Clemens & Robinson, 2021), attention to students as whole people (Keeling, 2014), and holding care as a core value (Hunter et al., 2021; Schussler & Collins, 2006). Instructors have engaged in interactions with students in distress in a variety of contexts: in physical and online classrooms, in the hallways, over email, while setting 161 up and packing up for class, and inside and outside of office hours. The distress may be overt and stated, or it may be a set of cues. Instructors demonstrated a high level of attentiveness, described by both Noddings and Tronto as the fundamental first step towards caring; as Tronto (1993) writes, “care requires the recognition of a need and that there is a need to be cared about” (p. 127). 6.1.1 Recognizing At times, participants experienced the recognition phase as explicit, and in and of itself, shocking: I can tell you exactly the moment that led me to this study, was when we went to all online teaching. It was a little bit new to me, but I was in Bongo [Polytechnic Institute’s online classroom]. It was literally one minute before the start of my lecture. So, it was live. And all the students were there – something like 80-something students – and a student wrote in the chat … that his sister had committed suicide three days before. And he didn't want to be here. Period. This was one minute before the lecture was set to start. And I read it. And I quickly didn't know whether ‘I don't want to be here’ meant ‘I don’t want to be here in this lecture and I'm letting you know’, or ‘I don’t want to be here on this earth’ …that was the first time [of] what appeared to be potentially an ideation of suicide, and really traumatic in the moment of it. This account was reflective of the notion that trauma impacts both students and educators alike (Day et al., 2021). 162 Emotional impacts in one interaction sometimes fueled future recognition: One term early in my career as an instructor, there was definitely a quiet student that did not interact a lot with other students. And it's difficult sometimes respecting their space: you don't know if they're shy, or if they're just fine with how things are going. And unfortunately, probably in the fifth week of the term, the student was reported deceased. So, I'm proud to say that was a big turn for me emotionally, because of the fact that at that point, I didn't think about recognizing student wellness, to the great deal that I probably have gotten better at now. This instructor spoke of a general awareness of student wellness, but at the same time, their interactions indicated that within Polytechnic Institute, misfortune (negative events) signals the need for care. Tronto (2010), reminds us to maintain “a perspective that recognizes humans throughout the life cycle” (p. 163). Not only does the ‘incident-based’ recognition of care at Polytechnic Institute centre the vulnerable and the dependent, these events, experienced as negative moments, also elicit negative reactions within the instructor. All instructors in the study group, regardless of how they recognized the student was in distress, experienced a reaction in every encounter. As mentioned in the previous chapter, this reaction component has gone largely unnoticed in previous studies, and it is more thoroughly examined here. 6.1.2 Reacting Holmes (2016) referred to internal processes triggered when encountering distress, such as: emotional regulation; inner being; and attachment. This inner work was apparent in some of the 163 interview responses and diary entries. In the case of one instructor, their emotional regulation and inner work was not part of performing emotional labour (as part of deep or surface acting) but related to their professional (nursing, counseling) and personal process when facing distress. Referring to both their internal process, and the process they would encourage students to take, they shared: You can start to filter out what is like just a reaction versus what you actually need in the moment to get you through, right? And I'm very solution-focused or problem solving. And that's nursing. Because we look at something and we constructively say ‘what's the goal here?’ and the goal would be to stabilize the students so they can focus on academic performance. That's my goal all the time. Another instructor pointed to work she has done in therapy: Going back and forth with the boundary of, right, where does the professional role stop? … a counselor that I saw was just a wonderful person. I remember asking her, ‘how do you sit with people's pain and not let it in you?’ Because it's gonna go right in there [gestures to heart]. And then she said, ‘you hold it, like, you just hold it right here’ [gestures in front of her, like she’s holding a little box in front of her heart]. ‘But it's not yours.’ This strengthening of boundaries was specifically named by McKendrick-Calder and Choate (2024) as a technique instructors used in their study. Not all instructors were able to centre their 164 reactions on a goal, or to hold space for the student’s emotions without taking these on; some instructors were able to do this in some cases, but not others. Similar to the findings of Spear et al. (2021), reactions can occur within the encounter itself and cause distress to the instructor. As voiced by one participant, this can happen when a student behaves unexpectedly, as in this case of a student who broke down during a conversation about an alleged academic integrity violation: That student’s reaction, because I wasn't at all prepared for it, it was tough, because you know for me, sorry – when someone has that level of emotion – that touches me too. And I felt myself start to cry, with him, which, you know, I stopped because that doesn't help, he doesn't need my emotion there and that felt unprofessional [given the investigative context]. I think maybe, if the student was sharing a death in the family, my weeping a bit might be appropriate. But I was struck by that. This incident was immediately followed by a second, private reaction: And of course, you know, when he left the office, it was just huhhhh [big exhale] ‘what the fuck was that?’ And I, you know, I had to work through that. I also had to think through … how is or isn’t that going to affect how I approach this whole thing? You know, on the official level? And in the end, I thought, yeah, you know what, I think he learned his lesson. 165 Within this reaction we see what Hochschild (1983) presented as a tension “between the clue of feeling and the interpretation of it” (p. 34). Not only did this instructor abide their emotional signals, but they were also able to manage their outward reaction and recalibrate it to make it appropriate for the student and the circumstances, before releasing this in private. This speaks to Waldbuesser and colleagues’ (2021) finding that post-secondary instructors are more comfortable displaying negative emotions than their K-12 counterparts. This instructor’s ability to restrain their reaction was not, however, “deep acting, which from one point of view involves deceiving oneself as much as deceiving others” (Hochschild, 1983, p. 34) but rather an example of the instructor using what Noddings (2012) called their “motive energy” and attentiveness to enact a caring for. This involved protecting the student from a reaction, and selecting a response commensurate with the interaction, e.g. the cessation of crying. There was no deception of self or others; instead there was a genuine feeling and connection with the student, and within that, an appreciation for dialing back an outward expression that was not congruent with serving the student’s need. The private reaction, however, also reflected Cordaro’s (2020) finding that managing these interactions can lead to symptoms of fatigue including emotional impacts, physical exhaustion, substance use, and similarities to the effects of PTSD. This same instructor spoke of how much more impactful their reactions were when they were earlier in their career and had more familial pressures: It's easier for me now in the life that I have that when I come in the door, I don't have little kids who immediately are hanging on me and needing me, those were hard years 166 you might relate to. But I do remember that sometimes I parked the car and sat in the driveway for five minutes, just to make the transition from work to home. This instructor was also able to draw on personal supports to learn how to better manage their reactions: There have been two students ideating suicide and when those conversations happened, I luckily have a [family member] who was a paramedic, and a lovely empathetic person. So that was somebody I was able to go to and say, ‘how do you fucking come home and sleep after you've just been you know, in a situation?’ and she was helpful. Despite these supports, however, the aftershock of reactions carried into the participant’s life outside of work: I came home after work having forgotten the usual transition from work to home. I stepped in the door, and my son started chatting in detail about how his writing is going and some motivation issues he’s having. I wanted to sink through the floor and avoid ANOTHER person I need to listen empathetically to. Luckily, he and I have a long history of working through our shit together, so he got it immediately when I was able say I needed half an hour to have a shower and breathe, then we had a great evening talking our heads off. But I’ve got to watch now how much emotional giving I’m doing at work. 167 Note that here, the participant was speaking to a monitoring of their giving, not alluding to a controlling of this through techniques of emotional labour management. In fact, instructors in the study group repeatedly provided diary content that spoke to a real emotional reaction to the student and the circumstances. Here an instructor was grappling with disappointment and worry: I'm so disappointed this morning because the student … who has been having some pretty serious attendance troubles didn't show up again today. I sent him an email saying, ‘I want to support you as best I can but it's hard to do that if you're not here, and is there anything I can do to help you come on time and be here? Because right now, I'm really worried.’ So, I just left it at that. And I think the most disappointing thing for me is this student is really engaged with the material … one of those – you look out across the crowd as you're talking and they're nodding and smiling – and I always say, ‘Thank goodness for the nodders’, because he's nodding, and really engaging with the material. And the stuff he's handed in has been pretty exemplary. But I'm seeing the last two weeks he's just really faltering. And this is the two weeks where we've reached the sort of peak-slash-regular workload. And there's so many deliverables coming every week and even just missing one day you just get farther and farther behind. So, I really am worried about this and it doesn't look great. Another instructor voiced that the impact of these interactions, that are challenging, but manageable, can be seen as an opportunity for their own professional growth: 168 The emotional baggage means that there's things that run on in my mind, if it's really bad. Of course, I lose sleep about it. Nothing that really affects me long term, but it's just that it's something that I think, okay, I'll make a record of it. Think about how I could approach it differently in the future. For others, the reaction, coupled with other stressors like job uncertainty and the potential closure of their program, required additional intervention: I just feel like, like, everything's worse now than it was when we started. You know, I started seeing the counselors, I started [having] anxiety, I started twitching and having anxiety attacks in the middle of the night. And I'm just I'm about to meet with my doctor tomorrow to get some kind of prescribed medication, because it's just like, it's all just too much, right? It's all just too much. This instructor was facing particular uncertainty due to the precarity of her role, described by many (including Ivancheva et al., 2019; Moos, 2021) as a barrier to responding with care. Despite these sometimes-challenging reactions, all instructors in the study group were able to respond to students. We can analyze the responses by using some of White and LaBelle’s (2019) classifications, who categorized responding into empathic listening, referral source, first response, and bystanders. 169 6.1.3 Responding Empathic listeners were both available to discuss the topic of mental health, and were vulnerable about their own struggles, before referring students out if needed. One participant spoke to this approach, and understood that she was perhaps different in her approach from other colleagues: This is part of being human, no matter where we are, whether we're in an educational environment or anywhere else. There are people who are struggling, and we struggle from time to time … so yeah, it is a normal part of the job, if you're halfway perceptive and empathetic, it's a part of the job. I imagine there are instructors who don't ever get aware that students are struggling and maybe don't ever get talked to about it, because maybe they're not appearing approachable. Or they're discounting like, you know, they’re the kind of ‘suck it up’ instructor. And that's not me. Listening of this type is what Noddings (2012) described as a hallmark of genuine caring, as distinct from virtue caring (assuming needs and acting on assumptions). While the referral source instructors in White and LaBelle’s (2019) study were also conversationally engaged with their students, these instructors were more “quick to redirect them to professional mental health resources than discuss mental health issues personally” (p. 142). The participants in my study did not cleanly fit one category or another. 170 In some cases, an instructor could be instantly empathic, and in others, they may have been quicker to refer students out to other parts of the Institute, albeit sometimes with additional intervention: I had students in the past who had come to my office to say that they were struggling with anxiety or depression. Or, you know, they were feeling sad, they were finding it hard to get along with their classmates, etc. And in a couple of instances, in the past I’ve walked them over to counseling, or phone counseling, you know, when counseling says ‘we have a three week wait’ I've just a couple of times in my career phoned and said, ‘Yeah, this is one, could you and to find a way to push this one to the front of the line?’ Observers and reporters in the White and LaBelle study were termed first responders. After a thorough examination of the transcripts, I could not find any instances of this in the study group. The smallest group of the White and LaBelle study participants were dubbed to be bystanders: those who recognized that mental health challenges were being presented but would not take any action (not even to report it). The fact that none of my participants fit this categorization makes sense because I had specifically recruited instructors who had rendered support to students. That said, the following example could be categorized as bystanding, because in this case the instructor didn’t personally relate to the student (empathic listening), they didn’t provide additional resources or refer the student, they simply held space for the student’s own decision: She said, ‘I went to the GP and they said, Everywoman’s Health Clinic [an abortion provider], can you tell me more about this resource?’ And I said, ‘Well, you know, the 171 thing about it is, they will just sit with you, and talk with you about the choices or about what you're going through. And you can still leave, you don't have to do anything right away.’ I wanted her to understand about the resource, my understanding of the resource, and really try to support her making up her own mind. And I really, within a couple of minutes, alleviated her emotional distress, she went to classroom with a smile on her face, she could feel better because there were options, and she wasn't struggling. Very little observable action was taken here, and yet the student’s distress appeared to be, for that moment, relieved. This seems to indicate that while there are elements of each of the four classifications that can describe responses to students in distress, no one instructor nor interaction embodies one classification consistently. 6.1.4 Redirecting Whatever approach they embodied the most in the moment, all study participants shared at least one example of meeting a student’s distress with a redirection to other resources. In many cases, the redirection was a critical part of managing their personal and professional boundaries. According to Noddings (2012), “an ethic of caring implies a limit on our obligation. Our obligation is limited and delimited by relation” (p. 86). Instructors reflected carefully on whether it was time to redirect, feeling for the limits and delimits of their obligation. For example: Needing to remind myself what’s mine as an instructor to cope with and when to suggest students make a counselling appointment. A student emailed this morning (it’s Sunday) that they’ve never been positive or successful and want to be both and hopes for my help. 172 First, I’m going to respond Monday, not give the message that I will on a Sunday. They’re not in crisis, I don’t think. But this is an opportunity to separate what I and our course offer to support this student’s goal and what other specific supports Polytechnic Institute has. In the moment of recognition, some instructors were immediately able to share and identify that’s where they were in the process and move immediately to redirection: I think what I've learned better to do is say, ‘Hey, I recognize that you're in a stressful situation right now. I'm getting better at this. I don't have a response for you right now. But let me think about it. And I will get back to you. And if not, if I can't get back to you with something that can be beneficial for you, I will try to refer you to other resources.’ It is that redirection which can prove challenging, as instructors are then removed from the next steps in the process and potentially unable to see whether their efforts to care have been received. 6.1.5 Reciprocating In modeling the caring relation, Noddings (2002) has spoken of the way the carer requires responses that provide them with a sense that their caring has been received in some way, which she refers to as reciprocity23. If the carer does not receive this feedback, they may experience negative effects (p. 19). DiPlacito-DeRango (2017) referred to this as contact agreement, a 23 Distinct from the use of the term reciprocity in Kirkness, V. J., & Barnhardt, R. (1991). 173 practice where the student and instructor make a commitment to follow-up after supports have been realized (p. 12). Many instructors expressed it was a challenge finding out what happened to students: So it's kind of that black box or void where you're not sure what happens to these students other than unfortunately have to give a grade for them for Polytechnic Institute purposes. And they end up as a vanish or some sort of failure grade if they manage to make it up to a certain point, but then they don't show up for the final exams. Baillie (2022) and others note that while secondary trauma may take place after one exposure (as in section 6.1.1 where the instructor sensed a student might be about to end their life), “job burnout” is a longer-term process and one that is influenced by myriad factors. This longer-term effect can be mitigated by reciprocity, which is not explicitly supported at the Institute; neither in the student-instructor relationship, nor in the instructor-institute relationship. Consciously providing a meaningful response to student distress could potentially be rewarding and motivating: I do feel this is a positive thing about it – it’s a crappy thing to say, but I mean, I do feel valuable. When those interactions happen, and I feel like I've helped or made a little bit of a difference for that student, pointed that student to correct resources and all of that is satisfying. I mean, it's a hell of a lot more satisfying than saying, now you know how to use a semicolon. I feel valuable, that’s awesome. You know, it's a different part of 174 communication, but it is part of it. And I think we are now helping students understand their relationship with themselves and how they present themselves in the world and realizing their actual life's dreams and all of that. That's just as important as ‘you want to be an accountant; I will teach you how to become that’. There’s something satisfying to being able to teach as a human and relate to students as humans and not just as, whatever it might be … bums in seats or a set of learning outcomes or a number of hours. This passage reflects a tension between joy and sadness, of the triumph of optimism in dark times, which speaks to the complex nature of hope shared by Rivera-McCutchen (2021). At the same time, it calls into question whether instructors are being well enough resourced to develop and maintain these perspectives, and what institutional supports might be needed to ensure this resiliency is not made the responsibility of the instructor themselves. These institutional supports could likely draw from frameworks that champion community connection, authenticity, vulnerability, and kinship in a holistic way. 6.2 Institutional Forces One of the themes that came up about the institution was that the pressures and supports that surround the instructor-student relation were not coordinated but rather were experienced as a “patchwork”, something that Tronto (2010) addressed as one of the signs an institution is not caring well. In such a patchwork, care is often considered a commodity, and care is narrowed to care giving, rather than a full process. In contemplation of this full process, this section highlights instructor voices related to student workload, available supports, roles, department culture, enrolment pressures, and program structure. 175 6.2.1 Student Workload The courseload in Polytechnic Institute’s full-time cohort programs (minimum 24 hours per week in class, plus assignments, projects, and assessments) is unlike other institutions. This student workload seems to place students under additional stress that they would not face in other post-secondary contexts. This instructor, who has taught at UBC, Langara, for private institutions, and has been a workplace trainer, voiced the increased pressure placed on Polytechnic Institute students: That's the pressure of working in the kind of learning environments that Polytechnic Institute put students under. And maybe that's unique to Polytechnic Institute, or when you're doing groups is that you're putting people through a lot of stress, and a lot of change really quickly. And you can't always know your own reaction to how the students are coping, or what the system is saying you should and shouldn't be doing. One of the phenomena described by Hochschild (1983, p. 86) is the reduction of contact time between the worker and the customer, as observed when airlines became more efficient, decreasing the amount of down time flight attendants and passengers had together. What used to be more relaxed interactions became compressed and this in turn affected the flight attendants’ ability to deliver emotional labour. While this study distinguishes between the component of emotional labour that is performative (virtue caring) and the dyadic ethic of care, there is a challenge when interactions are compressed due to workload. Further, students (individually and collectively) have voiced that this workload is concerning, but these comments have not yet 176 resulted in a reduction of courseload, suggesting that, as care receivers, students are excluded from making judgements that would impact their care (Tronto, 2010). 6.2.2 Enrolment Pressures Instructors in the study received contradictory messages from the Institute about enrolment: on the one hand, uphold standards; and on the other, retain and graduate students. This interfered with their ability to render care, in particular when the outcome of that care may have led to a student withdrawing from a program, or having to retake a level prior to graduation. Here, an instructor experienced distress because of the potential safety issues of passing a student whose mental health considerations may impact their ability to practice the profession. It's coming from, ‘You got to get these students through, we’ve got to keep funding’ ... I've always erred on the side of what the institution expects, I’ve tried to stay within the guidelines. And if at the at the end of the day, if the student is performing the skill consistently, by the last two weeks, I pass the student, but I haven't felt good about it. My ethical distress is still within me, I don't trust that the student is going to be safe consistently, and I pass them to the next level. And it has proven that maybe later, they struggled with managing their anxiety or their frustration around not knowing how to do something. But I think that's the ethical distress for me sometimes, you're expected to get these students through, but there could be personal issues, they don't know how to negotiate their own fitness to practice, because you never know what's going to trigger someone in the kind of job that we're doing. 177 In this case, another instructor reflected on the potential closure of their program, and the importance of retaining students to keep their doors open: In order to increase our numbers, we have to be a little bit more welcoming, to be a little more generous, we have to be a little bit more compassionate and understanding. The work of Goode and colleagues (2020) highlighted some unique differences between instruction at Polytechnic Institute as a site of practice and other collegiate workplaces, in particular US public higher education institutions. Whereas traditionally these institutions have welcomed undergraduate learners (living on campus, under 24 years, completing a 4-year-degree), the authors identified that, for fiscal and other reasons, doors have been opened to non-traditional students (living off campus, over 24 years, attending part-time) (p. 50). Polytechnic Institute’s full-time technology student base has largely consisted of exactly this non-traditional population for decades. Paradoxically, because of the transient (shorter-term) nature of the programming, Polytechnic Institute seems to have under-invested in the types of resources already in place at other post-secondary institutions (for example, in training for instructors), and has only begun to make more significant structural and financial investments in this area over the last few years. 6.2.3 Program Structure Instructors in the cohort model typically have a high degree of contact time with students. However, some of the programs are structured so there is less direct contact with students, depending on the teaching function performed by the instructor. For example, in some of the 178 applied courses, instructors may be running simulations rather than providing traditional classroom instruction: My interaction with learners was really limited, and there are roles that people have in Polytechnic Institute, where learners go to when they are in distress. So, let's say a learner demonstrated some kind of distressing behavior, their instructor is going to send them to a student success person, or counseling or something, so I can be bypassed, easily. It's not like I don't meet with students, it's just they don't find it pertinent to present distress to me specifically. Within the cohort model, student groups of 20-26 are together for all of their courses across each academic year (sometimes multiple years). Schussler and Collins (2006) identified that small class sizes like these present a structural advantage for creating caring communities, but the structure alone does not create caring. At present, instructors don’t seem to be supported in mindfully approaching this cohort structure, although at least one participant felt this was an opportunity: An economy of joy and excitement, built on the fact that we have a connection with each other and amongst ourselves, and then we have a community in the classroom. And building a community because we have the same students, in the same group for two years, that community is really vital, and it needs to be spoken to and constructed carefully. And I do think that it shouldn't just be sort of coincidental to what we're doing, it should be very much constructed properly and talked about and codified. And it doesn't 179 seem like that level of human commitment to interaction and to a humanist way of interacting, is that important. It sort of happens kind of off the side of the desk ... and I would appreciate it if I was more supported. I don't think it's overtly unsupported, just people are quite uncomfortable with that. Clemens and Robinson (2021) advocated for mindfulness in caring educational approaches, a collective responsibility that could be potentially joyful (Day et al., 2021). While Polytechnic Institute does not currently provide support for community building of this type, working with instructors like this who have already bought in to the concept (Ellerbrock & Kiefer, 2010) would help Polytechnic Institute more readily approach what Zanders (as cited in Day et al., 2021) calls a collective community of care. One instructor observed there is an opportunity to approach this community and learning from a place that acknowledges trauma responses as an avenue for growth: You can see them quite quickly, [the] signs of somebody who's bringing trauma into their learning experience, and how to sort of use those things to an advantage for the student, because it's typically not going to go away. We definitely, as an institution, I think, look at those in a sort of a deficit model, like, ‘Okay, what's wrong with the student?’ … I've had an experience with a student this year – she's a very able student, very creative, really able to solve problems quite well – but she does display difficulties in relating to her peers, and talks too much and kind of overshares and pushes herself into the middle of conversations very quickly. And … we have to identify those things for her in a very gentle way and get her to examine some of that practice. 180 In this way, similar to Keech et al. (2018), the instructor seemed to be advocating for a view of embracing challenging emotions as a means of enhancing student learning and skill building, rather than approaching stress, trauma, and upset as only debilitating. Lastly, this participant had observations about the delivery model of these programs, which must also be carefully regarded: In the … online learning that I use in some courses, it's like, ‘okay, we're going to do a little bit of an information lecture dump today so, if you want to attend from home, you can.’ So, we do that once in a while, maybe one in six class meetings. And even the rule of ‘okay, cameras and microphones on 100%’, let's not beat around the bush, that's what has to happen. Even with that, you'll see people fuzz right out. And I think I wouldn't be able to recognize when people are in distress, or my ability to do an immediate, on-the-ground assessment of how the education is actually going, has any real validity online. So, I think it comes back to, okay, well, what's the goal of our little endeavor here? Is this just about the transfer of information? Or is this about you having kind of a metacognitive regard for your learning? For faculty members like these, it appears that an inability to explore these opportunities is echoed in their departmental culture. 181 6.2.4 Department Culture For some participants, the culture24 at Polytechnic Institute, and particularly in their department, was experienced as a barrier to supporting students through their challenges. This seemed to mirror the observations in Ong’s (2017) study: a depiction of the post-secondary environment as both fast-paced and one where “if you’re not the ‘norm’, you’re out” (p. 20) with labels like “weak,” “lazy,” “dangerous,” or “attention-seeking” ascribed to students with mental health conditions (p. 20). This challenge could be compounded by Polytechnic Institute’s mandate, and therefore orientation, to produce job-ready graduates: I think the narrative that comes out of many of my colleagues is like, ‘Oh, well, you know, we need to this is part of our job because when students get to The Real World’ … I get really pissed off when I hear people talking about the real world, because this is the real world for our students. Right? We're not some sort of strange gatekeeper. Like, they are living their real life, they are coming in, they are having breakfast, they're taking care of their kids, whatever they do. And they come to school, and they need this education, these experiences. And so this is very much the real world. And I don't think that showing our students that this is some sort of battleground that they need to get through, run this gauntlet is actually a healthy way to educate people. Again, the lack of caring as a core value (Schussler & Collins, 2006), a common ground understanding (Hunter et al.), or a “purpose of care” (Tronto, 2010) seemed to inhibit instructors 24 As discussed in footnote 21, departmental culture, as well as institutional culture, is made up of words, symbols, and ritual activities. It is not a single variable that can be controlled, but a multitude of considerations. 182 oriented to caring. Several participants referred to a pervasive belief at Polytechnic Institute that echo my own impression of a ‘school of hard knocks’. Participants and I have noted that because the institution’s role is to prepare students for (an uncaring) labour market, the institutional narrative seems to mimic this work context. One participant, whose contract was not renewed after the study period, stated that this lack of caring had caused other instructors to leave: I actually had a couple friends teaching here as well. And we have been long standing practitioners like a minimum of 20 years in [industry]. And we got to Polytechnic Institute and … the reason they left is because they didn't feel supported by the faculty or the administration. This lack of support signaled a lack of reciprocity between the instructor and the institution, here at the department level. It also seemed to indicate that the locus of caring has been frequently seen as individual, rather than departmental, or institutional. Dionne (2021) wrote that “a slow scholarship and departmental cultures of care … can effectively counteract the damaging effects of neoliberalism in higher education” (as cited in Tronto, p. 8). In order to create and cultivate an ethic of care, there needs to be a collective acknowledgement that the nature of work is changing, and that there are risks to upholding an environment that simulates an uncaring labour landscape – for faculty, as well as students. In departments where care was not embedded, there were risks to participants who stepped outside of the emotional, or “feeling rules” (Hochschild, 1983, p. 76) and defied the pressure to support emotional norms. These risks extended to other relationships at the Institute, including not being accepted by colleagues: 183 There's this culture of whispering, like people talk behind people's backs, not understanding what's really going on. Even when the truth has been told. Engaging in caring behaviour can pose a risk to relationships with colleagues and managers, and in particular for participants teaching contract-to-contract: I shouldn't be a pain in her butt for … caring for my students. But I think that she sees me as a pain in her butt. And so I'm afraid to ask her for a reference letter. And I really need one from her to move on with whatever, I haven't decided what I'm doing next. And I won't ask her because I don't think that she would give me a good one. Even though I'm a good teacher, and I have been a definite positive impact on Polytechnic Institute, I'm afraid to ask her. I think there's been a risk like I put myself sort of on her firing range too many times. Participants experienced risks when taking a supportive stance with students, but these risks seemed to weaken for more established instructors. A faculty member nearing retirement was able to address the arc of her rigidity giving way to vulnerability: I am allowing myself to be more of a human professional now, probably as a result of these interactions, but also as a result of a whole bunch of shit that's happened in my life. Because now it's like, if there's a student sitting in my office, and their mom has just been 184 diagnosed with breast cancer or they're, you know, they're having a hard time getting out of bed in the morning, whatever it might be. I'm going to say ‘would you like a hug?’ I'm going to ask obviously, I don't reach out and grab people. Or I'm going to say ‘would you like me to shut the door as this is a sensitive conversation?’ So I think that I have lost some of my rigidity… because, like, at this point, if somebody said to me, you're not allowed to do that, then I would retire. Because, as life goes on, and as one realizes there's less of life than there was … I'm getting older, and I'm having friends die. So it's like, no, I don't want to be in a job where I can't be a human being … I don't go to the classroom to put my heart on the table or anything. But yeah, let's be real. So I think I'm just maybe relaxing some of that. None of the participants cited an ability to discuss their feelings about caring work in any formal way within the workplace; this seemed to be ad hoc, and in the absence of informal peer support, one instructor proactively sought ‘allies’ outside of their department: There was a period of time at sort of a four-year mark, where I really was, I would have done anything to leave Polytechnic Institute. Just because I find parts of it are quite toxic … I found that the sort of school of hard knocks as a as a way of schooling – I get tired of that, and I don't see the purpose in it. But it's so pervasive and so deep at Polytechnic Institute, that [I did] the first thing I do when I encounter a professional challenge: I try to find allies. 185 For others, the instructional colleagues within their department have been crucial to their persistence: My colleagues, of course, my co teachers are very supportive, and we're always supportive of each other. And we kind of get through things because of each other. And that's the only way we we've been able to manage for a while now is just through each other, like listening to each other and saying, ‘Okay, I know, I have this’ and relating to each other and communicating and sometimes emotions get worn. Unfortunately, while some participants named individuals within their department as supportive of caring, no participants spoke of entire departments where an ethic of care was present. Many participants pointed to a lack of training, both specific to student mental health, and the absence of an orientation to Polytechnic Institute in general. Per one participant: I definitely did not get any training … and also felt inadequate to deal with some of their other issues that are definitely non-academic that really dominated how they were able to interact or not interact in the class. Another participant spoke of a lack of training that was particularly noticeable when they became a program head, and that they sought out courses from HR organizational development: I know, the amount of training you get as program head doesn't help you deal with all the circumstances. And then students are expecting one thing. So there are some times where 186 I felt, ‘okay, I could have handled that conversation better’. And I've been working on things such as I've taken the training for Crucial Conversations. And I have also done Coaching out of the Box. And I think I look at that as a way to help me engage in these conversations. Comments like these spoke to the uniqueness of specific roles at Polytechnic Institute. The roles most often discussed by my participants were program head and Associate Dean. Whereas Associate Deans are excluded employees (not members of the instructional unions), governed by a specific role description, program heads are not categorically distinct from other instructors. There is no role description, and these ‘positions’ are chosen through collegial department workload assignments, sometimes through elections, sometimes by appointment or default. The next section highlights comments from participants around these roles and the impacts on the instructor-student relationship. 6.2.5 Roles Holcombe and Kezar (2018) named system hierarchy alongside unions, reward structures, and mindsets as having an impact on the way instructor roles are imagined. One participant spoke of the difference between his approach to students, and that of his program head, and the conflicts that arise: My program head and I, we have very different philosophies of learning and teaching. He's a very effective instructor, extremely organized and effective. But we're on really different pages around the reliance on hierarchy and reprimand and rules. I think maybe 187 the best example [is] … when we had a student who was chronically coming late, which, you know, you have one of those every year, usually, just, it's just how it works. So the answer for our program head is to write the student a reprimand letter, and deliver it in an envelope to them and say, ‘This letter’s for you,’ and then kind of turn around and walk away. Whereas I would like to be like, ‘Okay, you're late,’ in person, ‘you're late, you're coming late all the time. I need to formally put this communication that I'm having with you in your file. But I'd also like to know, is there is there anything I can do to support you to help you come on time? And I want to check in and make sure, is the way the course is running really not clicking with you and you're not engaged with it? Is that why you're late? Like I need to kind of understand why you're coming late.’ And there’s that kind of dichotomy around those two approaches, like all the way through both of our teaching styles. And so, when a student is having a mental health crisis … he's like, ‘go talk to [Participant], he's good … at dealing with this stuff.’ … it’s one of the reasons I despair a little bit, and I go on Indeed, [a job search board] and start looking for different work, but then I come around again. So I mean, I really like the idea of what we're doing, but it depends -- catch me on which day and you'll see different reactions -- but … the students come into this, thinking that there's hierarchy there. But really, I mean, as far as the union structure goes, we’re work colleagues, of course, we are in the same bargaining unit, and we're treated as peers in the 188 structure of Polytechnic Institute … program head being maybe an administrative function, but not a supervisory function is an interesting thing to kind of get your head around. Within this instructor’s reflection, a questioning of the union’s position that a program head is administrative, but not supervisory, was apparent. With regards to the dynamic between instructors, the program head, and their manager, another participant was explicitly critical of their Associate Dean and observed how this administrator’s tendency to avoid conflicts meant that more problem-solving responsibility landed on the desk of the program head: She pushes problems underneath the carpet, and tries to minimize them until the problem doesn't exist anymore … we've told her, we've had to call her to schedule an appointment to talk about a problem that the students were having. And she spoke to us for two minutes, and then said, ‘I'll look into it,’ and then hung up. And it was like, you have two instructors on the phone right now on a conference call. And this is what you say to them. Like, that's not a solution. Our program head tries to solve problems and sort things out with the students and to act as an in-between. Instructor performance at Polytechnic Institute is not formally evaluated. Student evaluations are mentioned in the literature but, to the dismay of this instructor, they have not been accounted for25: 25 As mentioned in the literature review (Chapter 2), survey data is not part of the advancement or professional development process in most departments with FSA faculty at Polytechnic Institute. Although this participant wishes student evaluations were taken into account, other post-secondary institutions are moving away from these as 189 I always ask students to do the instructional surveys, and I always get like, extremely high marks on it. I don't think that the program, I don't think anybody can see those marks except for me. So I wish that they could see because … there's no accountability, or there's little accountability. So, my shining joys just become my shining joys and I get to share them, they get to make me feel good or boost my ego or whatever. But that's about it, they don't have any fallback rewards for my career. Another instructor indicated that the mechanism of reciprocity can be fulfilled through in-person, informal exchanges, for example at convocation: A student that has a really bad term might bring up something or complain about your teaching, which is okay, I think I've developed a thick enough skin now that usually, there's some negative comments. And I think that usually, the students that have positive comments don't take a lot of time to actually fill out the surveys. It's only when I meet them at convocation, or on the street afterwards, that they say, ‘Hey, I appreciate what you did,’ [when] they’ve definitely forgotten how much stress you put them through. performance development or management tools because of a demonstrated bias in student evaluations (e.g., women of colour teaching challenging material tend to get low scores, etc.) 190 There also appears to be an assumption that faculty who come to Polytechnic Institute with specific training or qualifications (e.g. in healthcare, including counseling designations), understand how to apply it at Polytechnic Institute: I think it's assumed if you're a member of a certain profession, or you have certain education qualifications that makes you capable of knowing or maybe acknowledging [student distress], and I would suggest that that's not the case. Whatever their background, all participants in the study were aware of the supports available for students. That said, there were varying degrees of appreciation for these. 6.2.6 Available Supports One of the themes that emerged was not that the support offered doesn’t address the diverse (physical, cultural) barriers and needs of students and instructors. According to the Anderson Behavioural Model of help seeking (Eisenberg et al., 2012), these barriers need to be addressed but have not been. One instructor with a program at Downtown Campus stated: [Student support services are] not catered to help people in need … it's just a patchwork. It's not enough. Like, somebody in crisis is not going to email somebody when they have limited language, and they can't explain what's going on or … the counselor, at Downtown Campus, she does a lot. But we tried to tell her so many times, your hours conflict with [program] hours … and it just seems like the Institute just, I don't know, it's really superficial. It's really superficial, how they reach out for care. 191 Another instructor spoke about the improvements they were seeing, but that these were inaccessible for instructors: I know that the Institute is also trying to promote professional wellness, and then there's all of these emails, I just find that they're all scheduled at the time that I'm teaching. I think a lot of faculty will say that same thing for the potential training. I mean, our Associate Dean pointed out that, yeah, we have information and a little handout for people to follow up on recognizing distress in students. But I don't know how many people actually read it. And when you just mass distribute it at start term again people are busy. The concern with the superficiality of supports offered, mentioned by the instructor at the Downtown Campus, was echoed by another participant, who offered the following unprompted observation in our opening interview: If Polytechnic Institute did not overload students so bloody much academically, I think we would have far fewer mental health issues … a 17,18,19-year-old … my kids are in their 30s now, so I know that when they're that age, they're not fully grown up let alone trained to handle the workload that we put on them. Multiple deadlines, multiple teams, seven courses, eight courses, that does not mimic the workplace, that mimics far worse than the workplace. And I think we need to look at that. And I really get pissed at 192 Polytechnic Institute, on the one hand, saying, here are all sorts of new mental health supports [and] here's a crushing workload. This again called attention to the paradigm at Polytechnic Institute where the classroom and program structure are meant to mirror the workplace, but an imaginary uncaring workplace where there are no concessions nor flexibility. Another instructor voiced concerns that the available supports were fragmented, and not linked into a system, making it more challenging: I would say my own learning is that if you start to explore the process, you might get into trouble, because you're challenging the system to look at how they work effectively or not. I think information gathering, and resource building, is wonderful at Polytechnic Institute. I think that's there. But it's how we connect, and how we work together. That isn't so clear to me. Like, how did the systems work with the individuals to support the instructors? I don't know. I mean, ultimately, I think, philosophically, a lot of people are there to support students. But I don't think enough. One of the ways that participants have overcome this challenge is through the use of Early Assist as a hub. This instructor shared two different experiences using the service: I had a student come and disclose abuse from another student, and … they were very, very upset and broke down. And I needed to kind of immediately say, ‘Okay, well, there's resources available to you,’ but I didn't really know what those resources were, I had an idea that Polytechnic Institute had things in hand for this sort of thing. And I said, ‘I'm 193 going to put your name in for an Early Assist.’ And they were like,’ I don't want anyone to know, I don't want anyone to know, I only feel comfortable talking to you about it.’ And I said, ‘Well, I feel very privileged that you've done that, but I need to keep up my end as an arm of this institution, and these people won't do anything about your complaint unless you say that it's okay. So it's probably a good person for you to talk to.’ And then the Early Assist folks got back to me and said, ‘We just want you to know that we followed up’ -- and they followed up like that evening, the student disclosed to me at like 4pm and at 6:30pm the person followed me on my cell phone and said, ‘We want you to know we've talked to your student and we've got this in hand and thank you very much’ and that was a good experience. I didn't reengage with a student on that particular topic again, because they didn't bring it up and I thought, for privacy’s sake, I just I'll let them be the person to come to me. And in the other instance, one of the people I work with let fly with some super homophobic stuff. And one of the students who's very outwardly gay, was super upset and so I said ‘yeah, this is really difficult for me, it brings up some interesting ethical pieces. So I'm gonna put you over to Early Assist, and they can provide you with support and structures that you could use if you wanted to’. And that ultimately, that's what's happened. So I was interviewed as part of an investigation for that. And so I had a really good feeling from the Early Assist structure, those people were on it, they were qualified, they understood the processes, but they also had a really good 194 kind of human way of interacting with me and made me feel like I was doing the right thing. So that was great. Despite this praise for Early Assist and other supports, many instructors voiced that these services are overtaxed: It's difficult when our model is very heavily packed. And there doesn't seem to be a way to build in flexibility for certain things at this point. So again, change is slow. You know, for everybody that I referred to other services for the students, some of it may or may not be accessible for them such as counseling, accessibility services. Again, I heard that there was a large waiting period … because of the high demand. Participants mentioned challenges with international students not being able to engage meaningfully with the service, indicating that Polytechnic Institute falls short as a caring institution that provides “tailoring of care to meet individuals’ needs” (Tronto, 2010, p. 158). Another participant speculated that the siloed approach was also potentially rooted in the expense and resources required for increased contact: I'm good at this. I finished mental health courses and everything. I have some good mental health insurance. I'm very partial to that. Well, no, [I’m not offered the opportunity to work with students on their mental health] because it's not part of my role, because they compartmentalize things. We can't do one on one. Well, we should do one on one with learners. 195 Thus, this was an example of an instructor who saw organizational requirements (financial resources, role descriptions) as hindrances to, rather than support for, care (Tronto, 2010). 6.3 Societal Forces that Shape the Interaction The challenges faced by Polytechnic Institute instructors responding to students extended far beyond institutional walls. These instructors have been “exposed to students’ trauma because of assault, food insecurities, and other similar issues … [which] becomes an unwritten ascribed duty” (Goode et al., year, p.52). These external forces include an increased scarcity of necessary resources, shifting cultural conversations, and global events. 6.3.1 Necessities Students in Polytechnic Institute cohort technology programs are expected to commit to being on campus for learning Monday to Friday, 8:30 am to 5:20 pm, in additional to homework and prep outside of these hours. At the same time, it has become increasingly impossible for students to meet their basic needs. One instructor spoke to the increasingly challenging environment for students, and this shift towards increased pressures to take on work outside of studies: I have a lot more students are working than used to, because nobody can afford to live in Vancouver anymore. And so, they're juggling work, before they only had to do school. But now the school is just a part of their responsibility. And my program is expensive. Another spoke to a mismatch between the growing external pressures and the expectations of the institution: 196 That was another thing that I encountered, you know, five people are renting a condo or something and the roommate is dirty and loud, and you’re a shift worker and all of these things affect how learners can invest mentally, because you have to be emotionally available to devote yourself to such hard work that [the program] is requiring. And what is academia doing? Ramping up requirements, they're not scaling down requirements. We acknowledge the collapsed enrollment. We’ve acknowledged through the admissions office that we are no longer able to pick and choose the learners that we wanted to admit. We had to decrease [admissions] criteria, but we are increasing [graduation] requirements. This is in direct desynchrony. Another addressed the changing conversation around what it is to be productive in the world: You hear people, you hear economists … saying Canada has a massive productivity problem. But when you hear those messages in the media, you don't also hear that Canada also has one of the best human rights regulatory structures, I think it’s irresponsible. Because you say that we're not productive, but we're comparing ourselves to other countries where they don't have those structures. And those people are living, they're crushed, right. So I always yell at the radio, when I hear them say, oh, you know, ‘Canada's very unproductive’? Well, it's like, yeah, there's a cost that we're paying to be this unproductive …the cost is that we're actually treating folks like human beings. And we have structures that ask us and tell us and compel us to treat people like human beings. 197 Thus, the instructor was upending the capitalist view of economic production as most valuable, while calling attention to the importance of the typically devalued social system (Fraser, 2016, p. 103), moving away from specific student-instruction interactions to talk about problems in the larger systems. These conversations around the tension between productivity and necessity, and around the need to balance human rights, have been complemented by cultural shifts in the way Canadians interpret the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Unfortunately, instructors have encountered challenges in having their department acknowledge the existence of Charter rights, and the implications of these on program delivery and decisions around student performance. These observations matched my own experiences, for example, in discussing student conduct with Associate Dean colleagues from other areas of Polytechnic Institute, who have argued that a student’s family status (for example) is not a protected characteristic and therefore not important for consideration when making accommodations. In a climate where even Charter-protected accommodations are sometimes disregarded, it can be challenging for instructors to extend accommodations even further, for example into providing concessions for students who have incompatible work schedules. At the same time, institutional initiatives around respect, diversity and inclusion as well as national conversations around racism and truth and reconciliation have been discussed. These could potentially offer an opening in which relationships between teachers and students could be transformed inside of efforts to restructure the institutions themselves to facilitate authentic care (Rolón-Dow, 2005, p. 106). 198 6.3.2 Cultural Influences Authentic, contextualized conversations could potentially reshape Polytechnic Institute as a caring institution, and facilitate more effective instructor-student relations. Some of these positive changes include new ways of thinking about mental health, both inside and outside of the institution, and have already been underway: It happened in society and culture as well. Like we now just have a much more open conversation about mental health. We finally understand, okay, ‘that person has a sprained arm’. Well, ‘that person has, you know, a mental health issue.’ It's, it's a symbol to think you just can't see the one. You can see the other one. But we didn't used to understand that. While there have been some institutional shifts around making conversations about student mental health more explicit, one instructor highlighted numerous times the unique challenges of working with cohorts of entirely international students, and that this context was going unnoticed by others in the Institute: Some of the problems that I have to solve are quite different than the problems that other instructors might have to deal with in terms of like domestic students A little example today was the student told me she went to Tim Hortons and she tried to order a French Vanilla iced latte and it was something so simple, and she just told me in class while I was packing up … but she felt so much shame because she wasn't able to explain herself to what she wanted. 199 This same instructor was additionally distraught over a potential decision, fueled by budget cuts, to eliminate a preparatory program for international students, and the potential impact on these students: It's hard to go from your home country, like some students, they just arrived a week before. And, then they get thrown into this environment. And it's so different for them. And we’re going to take that bridge away… I don't even know what's going to happen. Very few stakeholders were initially involved in the decision to cut this program; a decision that was later challenged by several others in the Institute at the 11th hour. The lack of conversation and open dialogue on this issue was echoed elsewhere. For example, an instructor who was having a challenging time interpreting the best way to broach interculturalism in their classroom was left frustrated by a lack of reaction and feedback from program administrators: He [the student] clearly came from a culture, like he was having some difficulty understanding legislation and professionalism. And I said, ‘Do you think it's due to your culture?’ and he took that as an offense, and I guess it was a potential microaggression. I don't know what that means. But I was trying to help do a reframe because and then I said, to the program head, ‘I use a cultural framework, I do try to apply a cultural lens, to my interpretation of, you know, professionalism’ … And when I asked for feedback, ‘how I can improve?’ … constructive criticism? Absolutely none, asked for it in emails, asked for it in person. And there were two or three incidents like this, and no feedback, nothing. 200 This was not the only area where, in times of distress, participants felt the effects of institutional silence. This was also seen when instructors discussed global events, such as the conflict in Gaza. 6.3.3 Global Events For some students and faculty, global events may form the background of their daily experience whereas, for others, they are more prominently foregrounded. These events can create baseline stress, making it hard people for people to cope, while many in the institution stay silent. The conflict in Israel and Gaza was a clear example. One participant recounted: I did hear Muslim students saying, you know, why is this happening to us all over again? Why? Why no one talks ceasefire. Because everybody is condemning all the acts of terrorism and attack, but civilians didn't do that. And yet they're still dying. I have also seen a couple of Jewish students cry, because they weren't happy that even when this conflict began, initially, that Polytechnic Institute did not declare a clear stance against terrorism, which was so wrong, that initial attack, it was just kind of solely for the war. Also, some employees see significant distress over trying to be neutral, but you're not neutral. So much of the distress that people are experiencing right now is also circumstantial. So if you are a Muslim, or if you're Jewish, you're going to be not feeling at ease, regardless, lives are flying. But then you have academic requirements, then you have assignments, then you have a very low tolerance to [the point] where you [can’t 201 learn] something. And yeah, we can refer people to a counseling hotline, whatever, but learners are saying that it takes a while to get counseling appointments. This passage illustrates the connectedness between the centre of the interaction, where instructors and students relate, through the institutional ring, where these pressures are mitigated or exacerbated, to the global context, and back again into the instructor’s ability to respond to, and potentially redirect a student. What we see on the surface of an interaction is underpinned by these additional pressures. They are complex pressures and ones that need to be discussed to make way for authentic caring as championed by Rolón-Dow; Antrop-González and De Jesús; Curry; and Rivera-McCutchen – one wherein caring is highly attuned to the social and cultural challenges at hand. The next chapter provides space for that discussion. 202 Chapter 7: Discussion The findings from this study present a model of instructor-student interaction and begin to call attention to several gaps between Polytechnic Institute’s potential as a caring institution, and the current state. The very act of undertaking this study has signaled to the members of the instructional body at Polytechnic Institute that there was someone who cared about and listened to their voices: I was super excited when I heard that this [study] was a thing. Partly because somebody at Polytechnic Institute cares, you know, there was that but also, it's, it is a piece of the whole thing when we think about mental health and we think about the world right now. We're thinking about societal mental health and global mental health and all the things … but nobody had ever asked me other than my colleagues, my direct colleagues and my direct personal family and friends, what kind of effect these things were having on me. And so I saw the study, and I was like, ‘Wow, I like this. There’s somebody in this Institute [who] is actually engaged with these topics.’ And I want to learn more about this person (you), and then it identifies in its structure something that I think is important, and that I try and bring into my practice as a teacher. The aim of this chapter, therefore, is to provide a transition towards the conclusion and recommendations that builds on participants’ identification of challenges and suggestions for what to do differently, if Polytechnic Institute is to become a more caring institution, and if instructors are going to be supported in their care for students. 203 7.1 The Student-Instructor Relationship It is now well-established that, depending on the individual backgrounds of the students, their readiness for post-secondary education, and the backgrounds of the instructors involved, there are both opportunities for connection, and tensions, between individuals in all stages of the process: recognizing, reacting, responding, redirecting, and reciprocating. While both the one-caring and the one-cared-for “contribute significantly to a caring relation” (Noddings, as cited in Yokota & Douglass, 2019, p. 122), this study focused primarily on the instructor side of the caring relation and therefore this discussion will primarily centre on the instructors. 7.1.1 Factors that Promote Caring Instructors cannot simply assume the needs of their students and act on those assumptions, lest they engage in what Noddings (2012) calls virtue caring. Caring as an ethical orientation isn’t about acting per se, it is about a genuine demonstration of care: caring for, not (pretending to) care about; and both Noddings and Tronto (1993) are clear that the first and most important factor in ensuring an ethic of care is present is that of attentiveness. 7.1.1.1 Attentiveness Through motivational displacement, the carer, over the course of being attentive, directs their motive energy to the cared-for and to helping the cared-for reach their goal (Noddings, 2012, p. 772); Tronto (1993) elaborated that this attentiveness begins with the recognition of a particular need as well as the overall need for care (p. 127). An ability to be attentive may stem from a number of personal and professional characteristics. Instructors participating in my study had an average of 24 years of teaching experience (none under 15 years), with an average of almost 13 204 of those years spent at Polytechnic Institute. More than one participant mentioned that, as they gain experience, they lose fear of any risks of institutional reprimand for behaving in a caring way (such as holding private conversations or offering students a hug); that they are able to tap into their life experiences; that they can lose “rigidity” about what it is to be an instructor, and relax into a different paradigm of what it is to relate to their students. This ability to be attentive and to adjust into a caring relation may have also stemmed from an orientation to, and capacity for, caring. 7.1.1.2 Orientation to, and Capacity for, Caring Goode and colleagues (2020) referred to this as a service orientation involving a number of behaviours, and these were highly present within the study group, including: the giving of personal time; checking in with students; engaging in listening; and intervening if needed. While one participant was clear that they “don’t go to the classroom to put [their] heart on the table,” they are able to bring their emotions to situation, demonstrating for students, enthusiasm, “dark” emotions, love for teaching, and humor, as well as an openness to “displaying authentic negative emotions” where they felt the context was appropriate (Waldbusser, 2021, p. 396). In order to ensure they are creating space for encounters, instructors must not only ensure that they have the mental and emotional capacity for care, but also create the physical conditions in which caring relations are more easily maintained. 205 This means a return to pre-pandemic practices such as holding regular office hours, as discussed by one participant: I think it's important for me to have formal office hours. It’s good for students to know they can look online. It's like, okay, ‘I know he's gonna be in his office here. And you can come and see this person. Sometimes [faculty set up office hours] by appointment only, but, it is important. And I found that that students use that time when they come in and can speak one-on-one. If I was in the position of Associate Dean, I would be telling my instructors, ‘Hey, make sure you have some published office hours and you're actually there, that's important.’ It sounds really simple, but it's been really important. While this represented a more traditional approach to making space for caring, participants seemed able to move beyond hierarchy, union definitions and reward structures (Holcombe & Kezar, 2018) inside of their caring orientation, which also extended (where possible) to their colleagues. 7.1.1.3 Strong Relationships with Colleagues In the McKendrick-Calder and Choate study (2024) their model found three themes of techniques used by instructors who were responding to distressed students by adapting teaching, strengthening boundaries, as well as creating and cementing “relational connection with other educators” (p. 186). This last point was evident in most of the participant group, who sought contact with colleagues to share their experiences, receive reassurance, and to process “emotional responses to these encounters” (p. 189). Where instructors were able to find these 206 supports (“gold and silver and sugar and spice”) they were able to find help on a personal and professional level that seemed to sustain them as instructors. Dialogue with colleagues also seemed to enable adaptation of teaching, with two participants specifically naming adjustments to assessments, and cohort orientation, as areas of practice that had been influenced through peer connection. 7.1.2 Factors that Inhibit Caring Tronto (1993) asserted that in the giving of care in a professional context, there is an element of competence that challenges the idea that all care provided is good care. Rather, good care is competent and related to professional ethics (p. 134). While in the study group, participants seemed oriented to care and accepting of care as part of their instructional role, they discussed interactions with others at Polytechnic Institute that would indicate this is not a uniform orientation. 7.1.2.1 Lack of Caring Orientation Specific examples that seemed to indicate a lack of caring orientation included a program head who refused to meet with students, but passed disciplinary letters to students through an instructor; and the instructor colleague who asserted that students who were sleeping in their cars were doing so to avoid commuting, rather than doing so because they were unhoused (which was the case). This is not to say that instructors who were not oriented to care for students are uncaring people. There could be many reasons for avoiding entering a caring relation. As White and LaBelle (2019) discussed, there can be negative impacts including emotional contagion, work stress, and emotional exhaustion (p. 148), and instructors they termed bystanders could be 207 in fact trying to mitigate “job burnout”. That participants experienced these impacts is clear; more than one cited emotional contagion (taking on the emotions of the student), increased stress and associated impacts, and exhaustion (including hiding under piles of blankets, and an inability to engage with friends and family). Two participants specifically used the term “burnout.” One used this to explain (as mentioned in section 5.1) that “when you can’t be a whole person, it can lead to burnout.” Both also used this term to describe impacts to colleagues and other front-line staff at the institute. In the first case, a participant questioned whether the departure of a front-line staff member in a student-facing role was because of “burnout”, which the participant described as the cumulative effects of stress that led to an untenable work situation. A second participant described a colleague in crisis as being “high in burnout.” The colleague had disclosed to the participant that they had offered to have a student in crisis stay at their home. The participant was concerned about specific risks to this colleague— that the situation may be discovered by peers or their Associate Dean and potentially be seen as unethical. The participant attributed this as contributing to their colleague’s “burnout”, which they described as a struggle to manage high levels of stress derived from supporting this student in addition to their other duties, compounded by their inability to find specific answers or direction from institutional policy, and further exacerbated by an inability to share this dilemma with colleagues or their manager. This dilemma highlights the challenge of stigma and shame as a barrier to care. 208 7.1.2.2 Stigma and Shame Stigma and shame were named by several of the scholars (Brower et al., 2021; Eisenberg et al., 2012; Ong, 2017; Spiker & Hammer, 2021) as a variable critical to whether or not students are able to access support. One of the barriers to caring in the study was identified by participants as a belief held by some at the Institute that caring for students will leave them unprepared for a much less caring world of work. More will be said on this when I speak to institutional factors, as these barriers intersect. 7.1.2.3 Lack of Preparation for Encounters With Distressed Students A study by Kalkbrenner and colleagues (2021) identified critical factors in instructor responses, and of their five themes, three were knowledge-based: mental health disorder (MHD) definitions, knowledge about warning signs, and knowledge about resources. Even amongst their study participants, who seemed to have a relatively high level of comfort and willingness to recognize and refer (the fourth theme), there appeared to be gaps in understanding or insight into these definitions, markers, and resources. There were also examples where study participants were caught off guard by a student’s story, their emotion, or their reaction, suggesting that even those with a caring orientation can (in the moment) be unprepared for the nature of the encounter. The fifth component identified in the Kalkbrenner study was the faculty-student relationship itself, which can be further challenged if instructors are unable to see students as individuals. 7.1.2.4 Treatment of Students as Homogenous Tronto’s (2010) identification of the “need for pluralistic, particular tailoring of care to meet individuals’ needs” (p. 158) was supported by those who have spoken to distinct needs of student 209 groups, including first-generation students (Thomas et al., 2023; Stebleton et al., 2014), international students (de Oliveira Soares et al., 2024, Zakharchuk & Xiao, 2023), and students with disabilities (O’Shea & Meyer, 2016). Pluralistic care would also acknowledge that individual students within those groups also have variable needs: students are individuals, and they can belong to more than one category at a time. Care should be taken to understand their worldview and develop appropriate responses, as well as for those providing care to understand their own values and biases in delivering care (Russel, 2010). Some instructors in the study were highly attuned to the uniqueness of these; for example, the participant who diarized and spoke about an international student’s paralyzing encounter ordering a coffee. In this example, the instructor understood that for this student, newly arrived in Canada, the inability to convey a simple need (in a public place, under pressure) brought forward a trauma response. The inverse is true, and the treatment of students as having similar backgrounds and abilities is a significant barrier to care. For example, participants noted peers who made generalizations about students and their values and work ethic on a generational basis, or other over-simplifications; and while values may differ generationally (Seifert et al., 2023) they are not necessarily uniform amongst Gen Z (de Boer & Bordoloi, 2022). Behaviours instead could be potentially attributed to a number of forces outside of students’ control: It's difficult. The students coming in now have different priorities compared to previous students. And part of that is, of course, dealing with some of the external factors, the cost of living in Vancouver, trying to find part time work, trying to find a career, seems to be a lot more challenging for some of these incoming students. 210 While this instructor seemed to be considerate of the systemic factors that influenced this shift, study participants referenced dialogues with others at Polytechnic Institute whose interpretations of student behaviour (absenteeism, lateness, missed assignments) were that these could be ascribed to personal shortcomings, or that behaviours were indicative of generational values, rather than a response to other pressures. 7.2 Institutional Factors The first call to action of the Okanagan Charter is to: “embed health … into all aspects of campus culture, across the administration, operations and academic mandates” (International Conference on Health Promoting Universities & Colleges, 2015, p. 3). Further, as noted by Baillie (2022), where there is perceived organizational support (POS) for caring individuals, there is an opportunity to insulate them from the negative effects of secondary trauma. Bozalek, Zembylas, and Tronto (2021) refer to “a slow scholarship and departmental cultures of care” (p. 8). This is suggested as a counterattack on the neoliberal influences that Lynch (2010) described as contributing to a “culture of carelessness” (p. 54). While culture is not something the institution can isolate as a variable, and instead comprises myriad variables like symbol, language, and ritual (Meek, 1998); Polytechnic Institute could promote or inhibit care through its language and rituals and within their operational and academic directives. 211 7.2.1 Factors that Promote Caring Creating an environment that fosters caring relationships is a community effort, as in community, we can ensure that “care privileges people over institutions and values access and empathy over rigid constructions of rigor” (Day et al., 2021, p. 390). 7.2.1.1 Communities of Care Madden (2024) determined that Gen Z is highly relational, valuing approachability in leadership, trust, and clear learning and development pathways (p. 3). Gen Z particularly values “clan-type” organizations with high levels of engagement and commitment towards common values (p. 46). The deliberate creation of kinship networks and communities in the pursuit of care have also been collectively termed ‘communities of care’, for example in high schools where the organization “can hold care as a core value and still exist within certain structural parameters” (p. Schussler & Collins, 2006, 1490). There have been suggestions on the construction of these caring communities: instructor buy-in (Ellerbrock & Kiefer, 2010); conversations around shared identities in the spirit of destigmatization (Brower et al., 2021); supportive communication, collective sensemaking, inclusive pedagogy, and mindfulness (Clemens & Robinson, 2021, p. 136); as well as the co-creation and articulation of common ground understanding of care ethos (Hunter et al., 2021). This likely requires champions (Squires & London, 2021) but is done collectively. The work of disability justice advocate Leah Lakshimi Piepzna-Samarasinha refered to “collective … even joyful” care (as cited in Day et al., 2021) prompting scholars like Zanders to advocate for a model where “‘teacher gives, student receives’ model” to one where “everyone gives and everyone receives” (Day, Hughes, Zanders, Van Zanen, & Moos, 2021, p. 393). 212 One of the first places that a culture of care could be cultivated in community at PI is in the cohort model, and this is already taking place in pockets around the Institute. One participant explained their efforts as a champion in this area: And then I think, on the first day of class, you would do a Get to Know You exercise, the kind of stuff that, I think some people look at as like, ‘Oh, we're gonna waste some time,’ or ‘we gotta get that done’. But the more I know about my students, the better job I can do. So every year, I do a little bit of a Get To Know You icebreaker thing. And then each year, I think, ‘Okay, I'm gonna make this bigger and better’. And so now it's like, ‘Okay, we're gonna have a party’ on the Friday, after we've done our first week, ‘we're going to find a way to get Polytechnic Institute to pay for some pizza,’ which we figured out a way. ‘And we're going to have a party, and we're going to have some games, questionnaires, some weird surveys you're going to fill out to walk around and get to know each other.’ Those are vastly important things. And the more I can know about my students, as people as individuals, the better their learning is going to be. So it does have a direct link. As instructors in cohort programs have large amounts of contact time, they could also help coach students through challenging behaviours and patterns – not dismissing these as unprofessional but acting as mentors who empower students to embrace these aspects of their personalities in what Waldbuesser and colleagues (2021) termed “using emotions as learning tools” (p. 384). Here an instructor shares how they leveraged the emotional and social challenges of one of their students in order to further their development: 213 And that's the nature of differentiating between ‘these are the things that are going to trip you up’, and ‘here's what I can offer you to make you feel a little more successful in that area.’ And a lot of that has to do with when we stress the students with assignment work, and project work, and then we start to see their personal quirks and foibles come to the surface, then we can address those. Lastly, as the lead of the cohort, an instructor can model good practices: I recognize that if we're asking students to adopt these characteristics of being adaptable and resilience and dealing with things well, I think that's something that's hopefully I can model that by doing that myself. Thus, within the context of these communities, instructors can help influence the health beliefs of students; reduce stigma; model caring; and leverage the network that surrounds the students towards helping them advance as whole beings. To support, some instructors have been bringing in practices from their fields of work, or based on their decades of teaching experience, that convey clear, caring communication. 7.2.1.2 Clarity of Communication and Augmented Teaching Practices Although communication at Polytechnic Institute, and within Schools, can be fragmented and challenging, study participants identified a number of strong practices. One participant created and shared resource lists, based on her experience in community nursing: 214 I've been a nurse and a counselor, and I've worked a lot in community as well as, so I've worked in hospitals … in community, when you're supporting clients, patients, their families, it really helps to know what resources are out there. Whether it's things like Meals on Wheels, using the food bank, advocacy groups that can provide volunteers to help them access, you know, a variety of resources, they either can impact them directly or indirectly. Another participant felt that a physical and digital booklet of resources would help them do a better job of connecting students with support as well as perhaps alleviate some of the strain on Early Assist team members: If I had, like, if I had like a quick resource book, where I can just say, like, “Here, take this – apply for these bursaries. You know, you can do it, we're excited to have you here”. Where that sort of always feels like a little bit sort of tertiary to, to our core purpose, I guess. But maybe that’s what you have to learn when you’re a post-secondary instructor in a cohort model is like, you got to have that stuff at your fingertips. And I'm still — after seven, six years – I feel like I'm still just getting there. Another participant (with her co-instructor) has been proactively posting the following message into the Learning Hub for each of their courses, along with information about health and well-being resources for students: 215 If You're Struggling Under a heavy workload, your energy, sleep, coping, concentration, motivation, joy, mental clarity, social interest, mood, or general wellbeing might occasionally be low. If low levels of any of these are feeling unmanageable, are interfering with your ability to get things done, or are deeper than temporary, please do one of these: make an appointment with Counselling: 604-432-8608 submit an Early Assist referral for yourself: https://www.Polytechnic Institute.ca/early-assist/information-for-students/ We all struggle sometimes. Early Assist is the mechanism at Polytechnic Institute to connect a struggling student with support. If you're overwhelmed and the above is too much, just e-mail your lab instructor one sentence, "Put in an Early Assist request for me," and we'll do that: [instructor email address] [instructor email address] Instructors in the study have demonstrated an awareness and enactment of caring communications, and supporting these efforts could contribute to a more supportive learning environment. Building on these resources, there have already been some conversations around shifting teaching practices. Hughes (in Day et al., 2021) speaks to formative assessment and continual adaptation of classrooms, assignments, echoed by an instructor who discussed an opportunity for instructors to work together to change the way students are assessed: I'm frustrated sometimes by the response of some of my colleagues, and also, I'm frustrated by myself, because ultimately, I rely on summative assessment practices, like we all do, we have final exams and all that kind of stuff. And there's just a whole bunch of educational research out there that says summative assessment is not really worth too much … the acquisition of knowledge is so much better when we're using formative assessment, as opposed to summative assessment. 216 This type of work needs to take place in a safe and supportive environment. In order to engage in these activities, instructors need to be secure in their employment and confident that they are taking the right action. 7.2.1.3 Reducing Risk Instructors participating in the study experienced risk when they entered into caring relations with their students. These included impacts on their mental and physical health, dissonance with colleagues and unpleasant working conditions, challenges in their personal relationships, and potentially negative career implications. This has been noted in studies by Cordaro (2020) who frames these under the concept of compassion fatigue; by Jelińska et al. (2021), who spoke of impacts to functioning and wellbeing (2021); and White and LaBelle (2019) who found some instructors were unable to enact care based on fear and perceived risk. To mitigate these risks, it is important for Polytechnic Institute leaders and departments to consciously cultivate opportunities for reciprocity, which Noddings (2002) described as the responses that provide carers with a sense that their caring has been received in some way. These responses could come directly from the students or come through as observable changes in behaviour. And while the Early Assist team cannot divulge details due to privacy, a simple communication to let instructors know that students have connected with their team could make a big difference: I think we wanted to try to make sure that, because there was the expression of suicide, the student would follow up and get as much help as possible. So, after sending the email 217 to Student Life, we waited for a few hours. And then although Student Life said that they could not confirm if the student had shown up for an appointment due to privacy, [they confirmed] the student did try to get help from them. I think that was as best as we could do under those circumstances. Definitely. I've felt comfortable with the situation with my own personal boundaries of not getting too involved with it. And that my colleague knows that we did get a confirmation from Early Assist. Jelińska et al. (2021) called attention to the added risk of job insecurity that arose during the pandemic and the effect this had on instructors’ abilities to respond to students with care; they specifically called on institutions to address this issue as well as repeated 2020 OECD recommendations that well-being should be prioritized for both students and staff. Moos (in Day et al., 2021) asserts that instructors can only act when they are removed from precarity; advocating for an acknowledgement of the differential between secure and precarious faculty. Whether communicated by the institution, or through instructor colleagues, or both, it is important that this notion of security be addressed if instructors are to be supported. In this study, job security contributed to the well-being and confidence of some study participants as they participated in caring relations; those who were regular employees and were nearing retirement expressly called this out as a factor in their being able to respond with care (e.g., hugging, closing doors for privacy) in a way they might not have been able to respond earlier in their careers. Others felt they took risks (to challenge colleagues, to persistently bring up student concerns to their Associate Dean) that contributed to their not being rehired by their departments. And for those who have been able to continue at Polytechnic Institute, any type of 218 job precarity had immediate impacts on their ability to retain information or be present for their students: I can't recall so much of what I recorded if you want to know the truth, because issues with students come up all the time, and how they affect me comes up all the time. But being on the chopping block … sort of all my headspace is right there right now. While the participants in this study enacted care (recognizing, responding, redirecting) regardless of risk, some of their colleagues (who did not participate in this study) could be classified as bystanders (White & LaBelle, 2019), those who become paralyzed at the recognition stage because of fear and perceived risk (of legal challenges, of making a mistake, even of potential violence from students). Acknowledging this and working to reduce that risk would demonstrate a level of caring of these instructors even as they may not be ready or able to engage in the entire caring process. It is perhaps intuitive, then, that the factors that inhibit instructors in their ability to care are those that work against community and connection, and either ignore or exacerbate the risks of enacting care. The next section unpacks these factors in more detail. 7.2.2 Factors That Inhibit Caring Caring as an ethical orientation is not the same as customer service, it is a bringing together of scholarly work with emotional thought and feeling (Lynch, 2010) and attention to the whole well-being of students (Keeling, 2014) as well as instructors (Shrock, 2020). The institution must 219 acknowledge that it is not enough to advance narratives of care; it must dismantle “environments that otherwise thwart caring approaches” (Jackson, 2024, p. 8). It is challenging at Polytechnic Institute, however, to dismantle the environments, structures, and processes relating to care. Polytechnic Institute has a mission, and a vision, but lacks a strong definition of core values (Schussler & Collins, 2006) common ground understanding (Hunter et al., 2021) or a “purpose of care” (Tronto, 2010). The mission of the Institute is “partnering learners and industry for success through workforce development” with stated values to achieve excellence, embrace innovation, champion diversity and inclusion, pursue collaboration, and engage with respect26 (Polytechnic Institute, n.d.b). These stated (but perhaps not yet practiced) values are not incongruous with a purpose of care; however, they do not yet explicitly make space for caring. The organizational functions of caring Tronto (2010) identified are: caring about (attentiveness), taking care of (responsibility), care giving (competence), and care receiving (responsiveness). These must be enacted as a whole, which Tronto conceded is challenging as “care involves conflict” (p. 137). One of the places participants stated this conflict occurred was in the environment at Polytechnic Institute that echoes that named by Ong (2017) as “fast-paced, regarding both activities and interactions, where “if you’re not the ‘norm’, you’re out” (p. 20) with some describing having heard labels like “weak,” “lazy,” “dangerous,” or “attention-seeking” ascribed to students with mental health conditions (p. 20). The fast-paced culture at Polytechnic Institute includes significant workload, in particular in full-time programs, and 73% 26 In 10 years of working at Polytechnic Institute, five of those as an academic leader, I have only seen these values expressed on one of the walls of a single meeting room. They are not currently used in any of our operations, initiatives, or frameworks, and none of the participants mentioned these values (or derivatives thereof) during the course of the study. 220 of the students surveyed in the Canadian Campus Well-being Survey (CCWS) cited difficulties with academic workload as a barrier to their success, compared to 64% citing personal or family problems. While this workload is challenging, it is not necessarily tied to credit hours, but it is an embodiment of an ethos at Polytechnic Institute, as “the school of hard knocks,” one that is at odds with care. 7.2.2.1 The School of Hard Knocks If slow scholarship is the antidote to a fast pace and “cultures of care … counteract the damaging effects of neoliberalism” (Bozalek, Zembylas, & Tronto, 2021), it will be important to acknowledge, address, and dismantle the current culture at Polytechnic Institute to make way for institutional caring that enables all members of the campus community to take responsibility for caring (Brower et al., 2021). Similar to the findings in the CCWS, my research participants found Polytechnic Institute lagging in the areas of providing a supportive learning environment, using effective teaching strategies, providing opportunities for students to explore their full potential, and inspiring confidence in program completion despite challenges. One of the participants spoke to Polytechnic Institute’s approach to trauma-informed learning as one that sees trauma, neurodivergence and other challenges from a deficit perspective, rather than as a starting place for transformation and change. Creating a supportive learning environment is not the responsibility of instructors alone, nor can it be the priority for one department or office (e.g., Student Life), but rather represents the need for Polytechnic Institute to establish and communicate a value system that acknowledges care as an orientation that can help mitigate these challenges, appreciates significant systemic pressures, 221 and honours the lived experiences and challenges faced by all members of the campus community. The absence of a supportive learning environment at Polytechnic Institute has not only been felt by students. Many faculty start teaching at the Institute with no orientation to the Institute or to their department, let alone to the risky, challenging, and very real likelihood they will encounter a distressed student. As explained by one participant: We provide [new instructors] with keys … we say ‘here’s where the light switches are’. I had to hunt around even for the light switches! So that was okay, I can do that. But then I have to hunt around for, ‘where do I send a student when they're talking about being suicidal?’ One of the participants suggested that new faculty be paired with a mentor, one who has successfully navigated challenges with students in distress: Here's an employee who did what you're doing, who started new in this role, similar role to yours two years ago. So their knowledge of how to kind of get up and up to running is up to speed, and they're your peer. And like, just assigning people on a voluntary basis, like, here's somebody who did this, what you're about to do, and here's somebody, you can ask them questions, they've agreed, it's like, hey, you know, you can send me a text at 7pm. 222 Mentoring would enable more experienced instructors to support others; in this study as in the work of McKendrick-Calder and Choate (2024) the more experience instructors have, the easier it is for them to carry that confidence into future interactions with distressed students. Holistic mentorship (one that considers mentor selection; relationship development; and the role of administration) has also been acknowledged by Squires (2019) as a means to support teacher wellbeing, and a step towards PLC (professional learning community) where there are shared goals, collaborative work towards these, and fostering of belonging and community even while celebrating the diversity of the participants (p. 261). This type of mentorship could also solidify an institutional acknowledgement of this part of the faculty role: I agree that probably there's a lot more of that student interaction that is on the more difficult aspects, that actually isn't part of our job description. It may also help address the tension between instructors as colleagues, power differentials, and management. Between instructors, there can be a tension that arises when there is, as mentioned by one participant, a “kind of dichotomy around those two approaches, like all the way through both of our teaching styles.” Some instructors felt they were oriented towards caring, and others described colleagues who stated that this has nothing to do with their profession; these are the bystanders described by White and LaBelle (2019). In the case described here, this was a disagreement between two people with differential power; one was an instructor, and the other was a program head. Roles and the lack of direction for these roles are discussed in the next section. 223 7.2.2.2 Fragmentation Instructors do not do their jobs in isolation, and they are not the only ones responsible for student well-being. They are part of a campus community that not only comprises other departments, but also other human beings enacting care. An institution-wide approach should integrate functions so that care doesn’t reside solely in one office, while acknowledging the differences between services as experienced across campuses. Polytechnic Institute’s services are traditional at best, and in some cases minimal (Coniglio et al., 2005, as cited in Russel, 2010). The horizontal and vertical fragmentation and hierarchies at Polytechnic Institute (Jones & Weinrib, 2022) prevent instructors from being “all-rounders” (Macfarlane, 2011) even as they assume ever-expanding responsibilities and pressures to produce (Museus & Sasaki, 2022). This runs counter to myriad recommendations for integration and clear communication (Ogrodniczuk et al., 2021; Ong, 2017; Russel, 2010; Squires & London, 2021). Inside an ethic of care, there needs to be a deliberate connecting of these people and functions, as described by the following participant: There are some structures that support students, like the Indigenous Education Office and stuff that I assumed existed, but wasn't sort of formally kind of told, “Hey, this is what's here, these are the things that are offered,” [and] if my Associate Dean had actually walked me down to a place like that, and introduced me to people, I don't think that 10-minute introduction would be too much out of the Associate Dean's day, and I think it'd be a really valuable thing to do. When Schultz (2022) spoke of the pressures on academic leaders, as well as the impact of care as a set of “everyday decision-making, choices, and practices” (p. 8) for administrators, she also named organizational obstacles including hierarchies, and reference groups (p. 38) and indicated 224 that some career administrators may be too removed from teaching to connect with care (p. 39). This suggestion, to reconnect the Associate Dean with the teaching faculty, and for academic administrators to participate in actively connecting members of the community in care, could help to bridge these obstacles. This instructor comments on the heavy workload of support services teams also getting in the way of making personal connections: I know counseling, ever since I've been here, always says it's crazy, at all different points of the term. In the old days, in my start of using it, there were more opportunities for me to actually interact with a lot of these other support services. But I think it's become really busy that you know, I don't see a lot of these people, I don't know a lot of these people now [and] all the people that I used to work with retired. In addition to consciously breaking down these barriers, it is important to acknowledge the different contributions and capacities of different community members, rather than to make assumptions: I think it's assumed if you're a member of a certain profession, or you have certain education qualifications, then that makes you capable of knowing or maybe acknowledging, and I would suggest that that's not the case. And I would suggest that as a part of [an] institution-wide education … they make it mandatory. 225 Institution-wide education could also be an opportunity to provide testimonials for Early Assist, as well as a proxy for reciprocity: It'd be pretty awesome if a student would come and talk and say, “Hey, this happened to me, and the early intervention thing happened, I'm comfortable talking about it, and, if your student expresses something [similar], you can use [these services]” … some way of onboarding folks [to create] a little bit better uptake would have been great, because I sort of discovered some of this stuff by accident, as an instructor over three years of being here, and not being able to get my job done. Institute-wide training and education could help campus community members understand shifts and changes, in particular around policies and procedures. One participant said: I did kind of complain a bit about this new policy regarding the credentialing. I think that if they're using wellness as a main driving points, there's some definitely some issues about how this is going to go about and be brought together. And where gaps or ambiguity exist, to provide clarity: I know there was some mention regarding the attendance policy that is being revised, due to the aspects of human rights and fairness for everybody. And I agree, that's a good point, too. But when we don't know where we can stand, or what we can tell the students or ask students in terms of attendance … it leaves us kind of hanging on a cliff. 226 Clarity around implementing policy could be complemented by better resourcing of faculty to immediately address needs as well as refer students out for additional help. Additional clarity extends to clarity around roles, in this study repeatedly expressed in discussions around instructors and program heads. It is imperative that program heads understand the depth of their responsibility and become well-versed in student challenges, the various approaches to dealing with these, and the real toll these take on faculty. Clarity, however, does not call for increasing the silos between roles, and across departments. It encourages conversation between individuals and organizational units so that progress can be made. It should meet instructors where they are – leveraging their professional and personal strengths and respecting their boundaries. One of the ways boundaries could be better established, and maintained, would be to ensure that the program head role is more clearly defined. Program heads are referenced in the FSA collective agreement under article 1.8.11 as “Departmental/Program Administrative Positions (Program Head, Coordinators and Other Supervisory Personnel) Within the Bargaining Unit” (p. 5); and under 5.2.4.4. “Establishing, or altering, or continuance of job descriptions and functions … shall be subject to mutual agreement” (p. 24). This has created a legacy at Polytechnic Institute of variable descriptions (including the absence of descriptions) which as relayed by participants, has led to a role that is pseudo-supervisory, and yet also critical as part of the referral stage of the process. To embed an ethic of care would require a reimagining the pace and pressures of work for both faculty and students, and in society at large. Just as care work need not be fragmented, neither does the institutional approach to the world of work. A collective slowing down (similar to that 227 suggested by Museus and Sasaki, 2022) could open up spaces for radical care. Polytechnic Institute, and the two teaching unions within it, does not use the traditional tripartite (research, service, teaching) compensation, competition, evaluation, or professional development scheme. That said, the Institute’s mission is partnering learners and industry for success through workforce development; the Institute forms part of the economic engine of the province and therefore we collectively, but unconsciously, subscribe to beliefs of what workforce development means. Based on the comments from participants, the dominant belief at Polytechnic Institute is that employers value a workforce driven by commodification, quantification, measurement, and comparison; and that our programming, processes, and language should embody these values. Explicitly calling our beliefs and values into question at the departmental, School, and institutional level (through strategic and educational planning, for example), could be a good place to start in converting a school-of-hard-knocks to a caring community. This section has outlined the institutional factors that promote caring as: creating and fostering communities of care; providing clear communication and support for augmented teaching practices; and reducing risk for instructors engaged in caring. It has also called out the “school of hard knocks” ethos as a barrier to establishing care, and the structural challenges of fragmentation at the Institute. The next section will address broader, societal forces, and the potential for Polytechnic Institute to engage with these if the Institute is to shift towards a caring orientation. 7.3 Societal Forces The second call of the Okanagan Charter is for signatories to “lead health promotion action and collaboration locally and globally” (International Conference on Health Promoting Universities 228 & Colleges, 2015, p. 3). Polytechnic Institute is likely at an interim stage – not yet ready to move into a leadership role in this field. In the Squires and London (2021) review of leading institutions, they discussed the factors that contribute to institutional growth, and those that inhibit it. Like the institutions that struggled to uphold the Charter, and as discussed in the previous section, Polytechnic Institute is experiencing siloed approaches, communication and visibility deficits, under resourcing, and a “difficulty broadening the focus beyond students and student services to classroom experiences and to employee well-being” (p. 108). 7.3.1 Forces That Promote Caring One of the ways that Polytechnic Institute could dismantle these silos and bridge the institutional and the systemic is by engaging in a conversation about the “real world” for which they are preparing students, one where Gen Z is poised to take over. As mentioned in the previous section, participants noted that Polytechnic Institute, which has a ministerial obligation for workforce preparation, is an overly strenuous environment that in the words of one participant “does not mimic the workplace, that mimics far worse than the workplace.” Institutional leaders should be looking to the workplace of today, one that recognizes Charter rights; one where there are accommodations for these rights; and one that takes into account generational differences while understanding that these do not represent the absence of values. 7.3.1.1 Acknowledge the World is Changing At the writing of this chapter, a reported 45% of Canadians say rising prices are greatly affecting their ability to meet the daily costs of living (Statistics Canada, 2024b); only 40.4% of Canadians are reporting high life satisfaction (16/41 of the OECD countries that report on this metric); and 229 food bank visits have reached an all-time high across Canada (Food Banks Canada, 2024). This last issue is echoed in food insecurity statistics that emerged as a significant concern from the Canadian Campus Well-being Survey (CCWS) at Polytechnic Institute: 31% of domestic and 47% of international students reported some food insecurity. The Polytechnic Institute Student Association has taken steps to mitigate the impacts of this insecurity by providing a Food Pantry service and community fridge, these are stocked with donations that culminate in an annual Food Drive each November. In their examination of caring in education, Clemens and Robinson (2021) noted that “social determinants of health are … a mediator of toxic stress” (p. 139) in that when students are housed, have good nutrition, and strong social connections, stress can be lessened, and when they are not, their stress is significantly augmented. Thus, similar to the recommendations made by the Canadian Medical Association that governments and medical practitioners understand the impact of social health determinants (including housing, food security, employment, social safety net, social inclusion, and health services) on physical and mental health, so too could the Polytechnic Institute learning community be made better aware of the significant impact these determinants have not only on students’ physical and mental health but also on their ability to engage with learning. One participant with a health sciences background explained the importance of distinguishing these variables, and their manifestations, as different from personal or professional shortcomings: Social determinants are being … disregarded. And it is very well known how these [impact] mental health and physical health. And yet they [instructors, administrators] 230 have decided, let's just not talk about it. There are some learners who will be labeled unprofessional. No, they're just stressed. If you make it to term 6-7-8-9 and you have been professional until now, there is no switch at night to turn and say “unprofessional.” If [a student is] unprofessional you will have picked that up in term one. But if they go to higher terms, with a higher workload they are just stressed … does the faculty understand the difference between a personal characteristic and stress, labeling somebody unprofessional or whatever? Starting from this place of understanding could help the Institute to transition to a more caring organization. The leadership team has taken steps to address these statistics, first in 2023 by sharing this data at the Academic Kick Off event attended by Program Heads, Associate Deans, and Deans, and then in 2024 at the presentation of an IDEAS lens (Indigenization, inclusivity, diversity, equity, accessibility, and sustainability) at the same annual kick-off event. While sharing of data and introducing frameworks like IDEAS at these gatherings is a start, more needs to be done to advance the conversation across the Institute. For example, there is a persistent lack of understanding of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which applies both in the workplaces outside Polytechnic Institute and within Polytechnic Institute. As explained by one participant: Civics is like, this big pyramid and at the top of the pyramid is the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. And then we have federal laws and statutes, then we have provincial laws and statutes, and then municipal, and then contract law. And it's like, the actual top of the 231 pyramid says that you have to have to accommodate this person for their enumerated ground, like race, medical, religious affiliation. And you're sitting in this meeting, saying, you can't? ‘I'm not going to pay attention to their accommodation letter that someone on staff at Polytechnic Institute has written.’ And, and you're saying this in a meeting publicly, it's like, I'm embarrassed for you, right? I'm embarrassed for you. Which is not what I say because obviously, that's not politically expedient. But to be able to actually have some regard for people as individuals, as you get to this common standard, is what we need to be doing. And mental health is a great way to open this conversation. If, instead, an instructor in this type of conversation, felt emboldened to address or name (an embarrassing, but present) narrative in their department that accommodations can be disregarded, and to challenge those types of statements, it would be a powerful first step. It may take many of these conversations, and perhaps confrontations, to shift the institutional language (symbols, rituals, practices) like these that currently inhibit care. It may not be politically expedient to tell someone that you are embarrassed for them, but it may become increasingly possible to draw attention to problematic statements and practices like these if concerns are raised, and this type of dissent from the norm is empowered. 7.3.1.2 Challenge Neoliberalist and Capitalist Assumptions Polytechnic Institute has a provincial mandate to support economic growth through workforce development. This mandate suggests that Polytechnic Institute, as an assembly of departments, 232 and as a collection of individuals, necessarily supports capitalism. In this way responses to students, and to the instructors that support them, are grounded in expectations of qualities like self-efficacy, hope, optimism, and/or resilience (Yin, 2023) that reinforce what Lynch (2010) would associate with a view of education as commodified and careless. This acceptance of what Fraser (2016) calls a public discourse around a caring crisis “linked to ideas of ‘time poverty’, ‘family-work balance’, and ‘social depletion’” (p. 99) is exacerbated by the interlinked “economic, ecological and political strands” (p. 99) where economic production and social production (community building, raising of children) are held separate in an unsustainable tension. As part of the provincial labour market engine, Polytechnic Institute’s leaders need to acknowledge that the current emphasis on economic production comes at the expense of a devalued social system (Fraser, 2016 p. 103), and that the boundaries between public and private life (Tronto, 1993) are porous and untenable for instructors who engage with distressed students. In the Polytechnic Institute (July 2022) institutional accountability plan and report, the cover letter reads in part: Polytechnic Institute connects education, industry, and government in building an agile workforce. We provide career-ready, skilled graduates to a diverse range of industry sectors. In doing so, we make a unique and important contribution to the economic and social prosperity of British Columbia. 233 The Institute can play a leadership role in helping to reimagine what it means to contribute to BC’s economic and social prosperity; prosperity that could be built on a collective responsibility to make visible the connections between the economic and the social, and of the untenability of imaginary boundaries between the personal and the professional. Foundational conversations, about beliefs relating to both the workforce, and the institutional environment, as driven by commodification, quantification, measurement, and comparison, could influence myriad practices and decisions. Conversely, when the Institute takes a targeted and selective approach (for example in the reduction of the minimum credit counts for diplomas and certificates) we have yet to see an impact on students or instructors with regards to facilitating care. This is likely because these types of decisions are originating and operating inside a narrow paradigm that is not yet addressing other social and structural barriers to care. 7.3.2 Forces That Prohibit Caring In order to broaden the possibility of care at Polytechnic Institute, it is important to acknowledge the challenges that are inherent in the ways care is currently enacted, if we are to move into a period of more meaningful (perhaps even radical) care that moves beyond ‘self-management’ and acknowledges what Hobart and Kneese (2020) call “the political, economic, and ideological structures that do the work of marginalization” (p. 5). 7.3.2.1 Individualism Authentic caring immerses instructors, staff, and administrators in the communities in which they work, moving beyond the individual to the relational from the institutional to the systemic (Rolón-Dow, 2005). Each member of the Polytechnic Institute community could be invited to 234 situate themselves in complex interconnected perspectives, understanding that caring is not pitying but embodying a personal relationship (Antrop-González & De Jesús, 2006) that “incorporates interpersonal and institutional care and emphasizes the dynamic interplay of familial, intellectual, and critical care” (Curry, 2016, p. 884). Community members can contemplate their ability to create space that fights against neoliberalist views of students as human capital, and as colleagues as competitors; the facets of neoliberalism decried by Museus and Sasaki (2022), who invited scholars to “resist the very dehumanization that is perpetuated by oppressive regimes” (p. 559) by checking in on those struggling. These check-ins, be they amongst instructional peers or with students, or as administration to both groups, could be facilitated by structurally allocating time within meetings and other institutional touchpoints to build relationality. In order to facilitate care, then, individuals and organizational units within Polytechnic Institute need to challenge gendered, racialized, and professionalized assumptions about care. Conversely, an enactment of these assumptions will create further barriers to caring at the Institute. 7.3.2.2 Enactment of Societal Assumptions About Care Female academics tend to be called on to do more caring work (Lynch, 2010); report less satisfaction with their jobs (Weinrib et al., 2013); view service as part of their community orientation rather than an obligation or necessity for advancement like their male counterparts (O’Meara, 2016); and experience more severe impacts of employment precarity as a result of balancing care work with career advancement. Ivancheva et al. (2019) found this is exacerbated amongst precarious or non-tenured female faculty. Neoliberal worldviews tend to frame the 235 additional burden of caring work as a challenge for individual women rather than a systemic one (Nash & Churchill, 2021), even as the academy maintains a “false gender neutrality” (Gaudet et. al, 2022, p. 75). The same has been documented for racialized faculty (Davis et al., 2022) and leaders (Johnson, 2024.) In this study, four of the six participants were women, perhaps suggesting that women self-select into caring roles. Two of these women expressed unique challenges in dealing with distressed students related to trauma responses (thinking of Ecole Polytechnique when faced with an aggressive student, thinking of their experiences in an abusive relationship). Two of the female participants also spoke of the impacts of their experiences on their home life and familial interactions. Four of the participants in the study were white and the other two identified as Mixed-Race Eurasian and Chinese-Canadian. None of the participants commented on their racial identity at any point in the study, although one white participant shared that her experiences as a student abroad had an impact on her reaction to an international student’s experience. The context of systematic imbalances and differences in experiences (both lived and professional) must be acknowledged before change can occur. 7.4 Caring Conversations This study has examined what it is to be an instructor and what it is to have a caring relationship with our students. It has led to conversations about the immediate institutional context as well as the broader social influences on the interaction. This chapter has discussed the individual, institutional, and societal forces that either foster or inhibit caring at all levels. The final chapter summarizes the study and provides potential recommendations based on this discussion. 236 Chapter 8: Conclusion and Recommendations This study sought to better understand the experiences of some Polytechnic Institute instructors in their first responses to students in distress and how they might be better supported in these interactions. In this chapter, I will present a summary of the dissertation as well as offer up recommendations that Polytechnic Institute could consider as an initial step towards providing better support for instructors and towards fostering a more caring institutional community. 8.1 Summary of the Dissertation The purpose of this qualitative study was to identify and describe the similar and different ways some Polytechnic Institute instructors experience encounters with students in distress, in order to offer better support for instructors, to centre their voices, and to acknowledge that instructor well-being is important in its own right. This study was framed from the perspective of care ethics, where care is a quality of the relation between the instructor and student (e.g., Noddings) as well as affected by organizational factors and broader social structures (e.g., Tronto, Fraser). Using Thorne’s interpretive descriptive framework, the study incorporated approaches from phenomenography and solicited audio-diary methods, to create an outcome space that illustrates the ways Polytechnic Institute instructors experience encounters with students and the forces that influence that experience. The findings present an expanded view of DiPlacito DeRango’s 3R framework, into a 5R framework of recognizing, reacting, responding, redirecting and (presence or absence of) reciprocating. Beyond this, it illustrates institutional influences on the caring relation and beyond 237 these, the impact of systemic and societal forces around necessities, cultural influences, and global events. 8.2 Answers to Research Questions The overall question for my study was: “what are the experiences of some Polytechnic Institute instructors when they are the first to respond to students in distress and how might they be better supported in these interactions?” Figure 12: Outcome Space (Recognize, Render, Redirect from DePlacito-DeRango, 2017) 238 The 5R framework and additional layers of the outcome space illustrate the internal experiences, as well as external influences, on the caring relation. It suggests that instructors require support at each stage of the interaction: recognition, reaction, response, redirection and (to cultivate and support) reciprocation. Institutionally, a coordinated approach that addresses levers relevant to the caring relation would address factors including, but not limited to: student workload; the availability of appropriate support; clarity around instructor, program head, staff, and administrative roles; fostering of caring department culture; addressing enrolment pressures; and thoughtfully considering the ways in which cohort program structure could be a beneficial container for student support. A response would also require a collective appreciation of the challenges for instructors and students today including increased scarcity of necessities (housing, food, cost of living, healthcare); the influence of sociodemographic factors (gender, race, culture, DEI); and the very real impact of global events (wars, pandemic). The recommendations section of this chapter suggests some practical ways that Polytechnic Institute could address these factors. The overall question of the study was supported by four sub questions. The first of these was “What types of contact do Polytechnic Institute instructors have with students in distress? Where, when, and how are these encounters taking place?” 8.2.1 Contact with Students in Distress Instructors encounter students in distress in a variety of contexts and spaces: in class (both in-person and online) prior to and after instruction; during office hours; or in conversations prompted by instructors reaching out to check on attendance or assignment issues. The first 239 contact with students in distress is noted in this model as the phase of recognition; one that speaks to an attentiveness discussed in both Noddings’ and Tronto’s work. 8.2.2 Ability to Respond With Care The next sub question was: How do Polytechnic Institute instructors experience their (in)ability to respond with care in those encounters? What are the commonalities and differences in these experiences? Instructors conveyed that they were inconsistently able to respond with the same level of care, and that the variability has to do with factors internal to the relationship, as well as institutionally situational, and influenced by broader systems and society. To be clear, the instructors in this study were all able to respond with care to students in distress; none of the participants cited a complete inability to care. This is unsurprising given the recruitment process, as this is unlikely to be a representative sample. That said, the care delivered was highly variable by instructor as well as by situation. Instructors’ experiences were unique as they moved through each component of the inner caring model, but the phases of the model speak to common experiences of: recognition, reaction, response, referral; however the speed with which they moved through these, and the particulars of each were different. The differences were most noticeable as participants spoke to their reactions to student distress – a combination of their identities (e.g., parent, cancer survivor, woman), their memories (e.g., having had a controlling partner, having lived in a foreign country) their level of experience and expertise (in counseling and conflict resolution), and their influences (family, friends, 240 counselors). Another notable variable was the presence or absence of reciprocity: at times instructors could glean success through body language (a smile), seeing a student back in class, passing a student in the hallway, or being told explicitly that their care had made a difference. Other times, they were left wondering about the impact their attempt to care had made. Overall, the similar forces that seemed to promote caring in the student-instructor relationship were attentiveness; orientation to, and capacity for, caring; and strong relationships with colleagues. The most significant differences between the instructors’ experiences of caring, as well as the speculative factors that may inhibit caring (lack of caring orientation; stigma and shame; lack of preparation; and treatment of students as homogenous) were tied to the next sub question: How do institutional, social and societal structures and systems facilitate or hinder Polytechnic Institute instructors’ caring responses to (and/or caring relations with) students in distress? 8.2.3 Structures and Systems That Facilitate or Hinder Caring One of the most mentioned hindrances to providing care was that of student workload; instructors felt this contributed to student distress and had a negative impact on the care they were able to offer. Surprisingly, not one of the participants mentioned their own workload or compensation in this process. Instead, they named challenges around maintaining professional boundaries and spoke of either supportive colleagues (program heads) and department cultures, or ones that stifled their ability to respond. Some, but not all participants, spoke about enrolment pressures relating directly to retention, and that this had an impact on their responses to students. 241 Other participants found the program structure (e.g. cohort model) enabled them to have more contact with students, which also facilitated better chances of reciprocity. Based on the reflections of the participants in this study, one could say that the participants themselves were able to respond with care, but that Polytechnic Institute is, as an institution, not currently caring well, per Tronto’s (2010) seven warning signs, as summarized below: Table 2: Six Participants’ Perceptions of Care at Polytechnic Institute Sign (from Tronto, 2010) Polytechnic Institute Example Misfortune causes the need for care (p. 163) Care is focused on times of distress; little is done institutionally to establish care as an orientation or to proactively equip instructors with the internal and external resources to cope Needs are taken as given within the organization (p. 163) Polytechnic Institute identifies symptoms of students needing care: attendance, behaviour, safety concerns, credit counts per credential, academic performance; and sets the policy agenda for what needs are to be addressed Care is considered a commodity, not a process (p. 164) Care is offered as a patchwork; officially providing care is limited to one function/office (student success) and the care work of instructors is invisible to the Institute Care receivers are excluded from making judgments because they lack expertise (p. 165) Students are not involved in designing the processes through which they receive care; they are not extensively consulted on policy or practice changes that may (positively or negatively) impact them Care is narrowed to care giving, rather than understanding the full process of care (p. 165) Care is not comprehensive; it is currently limited to ad-hoc care-giving (called a “patchwork” by participants) rather than through a cohesive, coordinated, collaborative, and explicit process Care givers see organizational requirements as hindrances to, rather than support for, care (p. 165) There are concerns about how to best interpret institutional policies and a lack of direction from the Institute on how to respond in situations; some concerns about the limitations of 242 Early Assist and other student life services; instructors with ideas and qualifications to help are told to focus on teaching Care work is distributed along lines of class, caste, gender, race (p. 166) Outside of the scope of this study; see limitations at the end of this chapter Outside of these institutional barriers to care sit broader conversations and impacts of (reduced) access to the necessities of life, cultural impacts, and global events. Most of the participants named external, systemic, societal pressures that hindered their ability to care – in that their response or referral to outside help could not overcome a scarcity of necessities. More than one participant spoke about the influence of cultural factors (gender, race, culture, DEI) on the conversation around care, but did not identify this as either a help or a hindrance. Others identified global events (wars, pandemic) as also exacerbating student distress, but not as a mitigating factor in their ability to deliver care. Some differences emerged due to the particularities of disciplines. For example, engineering was described as having its own culture (empirical, quantitative) that was not conducive to caring. The particularities of nursing included concerns about whether students could be authentic about their own mental health or knowledge shortcomings; the notion of fitness to practice was specifically named as a hindrance to providing better care (e.g., because to provide care might call into question a student’s fitness to practice), and this was exacerbated by enrolment pressures that tied directly to ministry demands on FTE production (e.g., a need to graduate nurses into the workforce). In summary, the institutional forces that inhibit care are an Institute-wide “school of hard knocks” belief system and fragmentation of services and responses; conversely, forces that could promote care are communities of care; clarity of communication and augmented teaching practices; and the reduction of risk. These risks are discussed in the next section. 243 8.2.4 Risks for Instructors The last sub question was: What are the personal and professional risks involved (either perceived or actual) for Polytechnic Institute instructors engaging with students in distress, and how might these be mitigated? Risk was briefly named by three participants, but not in the way that I expected given my own experiences. I had anticipated that participants would speak to legal risk, specifically, as this was raised by colleagues when I sought help addressing my own first encounter with a distressed student). DiPlacito-DeRango (2017) refers briefly to legal cases in the intro to her mapping study; whereas Kalkbrenner (2021) (who she references) does not. Interestingly, I did not find any reference to legal risk or liability in my interviews or in the diaries; even when prompted about risk, this did not come up. Instead, the risks experienced in the study group included emotional impacts (anxiety, sleepless nights), as well as professional repercussions (conflicts with leaders, non-renewal of contracts). This risk seemed to be greater for precarious (contract) faculty, and lesser for instructors approaching retirement. One participant spoke about how, earlier in her career, she may have been more reluctant to hug a student or demonstrate an emotional response, but that this was not a concern for her at this phase of her career. Negative student evaluations were not perceived as a risk; this may be because these are not formally part of the faculty review process at Polytechnic Institute. Conflict with managers, however, was mentioned by two participants whose contracts were not renewed at Polytechnic Institute (hiring managers comprise 50% of any FSA union 244 hiring committee); some of those conflicts were directly related to instructor responses to students and a differing of opinions on care and how this should be rendered. 8.2.5 Summary of Findings All of the instructors who participated in this study clearly demonstrated an ability to respond with care. Based on this small sample, it would appear that participants were disposed to care based on their personal experiences, value systems, and their extensive teaching expertise. Care was facilitated in the student-instructor relationship where there was attentiveness; a caring orientation; and strong collegial relationships and could potentially have been hindered by a lack of caring orientation; stigma and shame; lack of preparation; or treatment of students as homogenous. Within the Polytechnic Institute environment, communities of care; clarity of communication and augmented teaching practices; and reduction of risk would immediately support instructors in the caring relation; and a critical dismantling of the ‘school of hard knocks’ ethos and fragmented structure would create better institutional support for care. There is an additional opportunity for Polytechnic Institute to acknowledge that the world is changing, and an opportunity to challenge neoliberalism and capitalist assumptions; as well as to move away from individualism and an enactment of gendered and racialized views of care. Given the complexity and variability of these factors, the approach to facilitate better caring relations between faculty and students will be nuanced and multi-factored. As a promising start, institutional conversations are gaining momentum about the critical importance of instructor support for students. In early 2024, the Polytechnic Institute Student Wellbeing Advisory Committee engaged in a review of draft principles for their new wellness strategy. A concept 245 called “Every door is the right door” (borrowed from a 2009 CMHA discussion paper on addiction support) was touted as a potential ethos for the framework. This means that, if a student approaches them, any member of the Polytechnic Institute community should be ready to respond. If every door is the right door, Polytechnic Institute needs to be ready for individuals to answer the call, and as this study centres specifically on instructors, their experiences, and their voices, the next section provides some recommendations on how to immediately provide better support to Polytechnic Institute instructors in their care for students in distress. 8.3 Recommendations To start, I acknowledge this was a qualitative study of a small sample of self-selected participants, which is quite possibly not representative of the larger body of instructors at Polytechnic Institute: it comprised instructors in cohort (not flexible) programming, in three technology Schools, and the limitations of this sample are addressed later in this chapter. The recommendations below are made cautiously, as steps Polytechnic Institute can consider; they are not prescriptions. That said, based on the literature and study findings, and feedback from study participants, the following recommendations could help support Polytechnic Institute instructors in these interactions: 1) Initiate a Conversation Around a Purpose of Care 2) Honour Instructor Voices: Acknowledge the Work Being Done 3) Clarify Roles and Embed Care into Responsibilities 4) Provide Appropriate Training to Instructors 5) Make it Easy to Share Information 246 6) Increase Available Supports to Match Program Constraints and Cultural Contexts These recommendations are grounded in suggestions from participants discussed in the previous chapter and are expanded in the next section of this chapter. 8.3.1 Initiate a Conversation Around a Purpose of Care According to the members of this study group, the current conversation at Polytechnic Institute is that we are a “school of hard knocks,” an orientation that is heavily influenced by our mandate to prepare students for the workplace, but at odds with establishing a community of care. These types of belief systems can be challenging to shift. As an initial step, it would be helpful to engage in cross-campus conversations about the nature of work in the present, and to explicitly question the ways in which our “boot camp” mentality may be at odds with the future of the workplace. Conversations at the department, School, and Institute level can unpack our beliefs about what students need to get ready for the workplace, and how a caring approach might fit into that picture. These conversations can also begin to challenge the neoliberal view of students as consumers and advance a recognition of both students and instructors as whole beings and an understanding that care for instructors is important in its own right. Further, it can be a starting point for critical inquiry into the capitalist structures that inhibit care both at Polytechnic Institute and in the industries it purports to serve. One of the places where care is already being enacted is within the cohort model at Polytechnic Institute. Cohort-based education gives students an immediate social network, which was one of the help-seeking models put forward in the Eisenberg (2012) study. To improve the social 247 network and build sense of community, program areas could consciously create supportive and connected cohorts from the outset of the program. Within these communities, instructors can help influence the health beliefs of students, reduce stigma (Ong, 2017), and leverage the network that surrounds students towards helping them advance. The CCWS data indicates Polytechnic Institute is lagging in the areas of providing a supportive learning environment, using effective teaching strategies, providing opportunities for students to explore their full potential, and inspiring confidence in program completion despite challenges. Part of that conversation led to the reduction in the number of minimum credits for diplomas from 110 credits down to 75 credits. It is not yet clear how this will be operationalized, and whether the credit reduction will have the intended impact. The findings of this study suggest that Polytechnic Institute address student workload as part of the challenge. However, credit count alone will not accomplish this; this involves myriad institutional actors and departments (accessibility services, Early Assist, the library, the Learning and Teaching Centre, the registrar’s office). Conversations would ideally be grounded in an ethic of care, that is, centred on the notion that instructors and members of these departments are whole human beings with various experiences and perspectives to be shared. These conversations would have to acknowledge the larger systemic conditions, pressures, and changes to both the workplaces the Institute serves and society at large. It is important, however, to acknowledge that different campus members have different capacities and are differently situated within those social frameworks. Lastly, any conversation must include instructors as part of the solution. 248 8.3.2 Honour Instructor Voices This work serves as a call for Polytechnic Institute to recognize the lack of caring orientation and support for care described previously. There is a need to raise overall institutional recognition of instructor encounters with students in distress, and to share the ways in that these are more complex and involved than a referral. It could be helpful to share this work with policy makers (e.g. Education Council, Board of Governors, senior leadership) in order that they better understand the impacts and intersections of policies and practices on faculty specifically. White and LaBelle and DePlacito-DeRango asserted, and the responses from my participants confirmed, that it is imperative for the institution to acknowledge that not all instructors will be able, equipped, or willing to offer care in a particular way. Some instructors may move quickly through the interaction steps and into redirection out to institutional supports. However they respond, all instructors are impacted in some way by these experiences, and by the cumulation of these, and to date these impacts have been largely ignored. As discussed in the previous chapter, an acknowledgement that this work is going on, and that instructors care for students in this way, would be an important first step towards humanizing this work (Museus & Sasaki, 2022) by moving past a notion of instructors as conveyors of institutional productivity. 8.3.3 Clarify Roles and Embed Care Into Responsibilities In the study, several tension points arose when roles were not clearly defined, as in the case of program heads: faculty by letter of the collective agreement, yet ascribed pseudo-managerial responsibilities. Anecdotally, some institutional leaders have already been advocating for more clarity and explicit language around program head duties, and given the potential benefits to their 249 members, it is time to reengage the unions on a conversation about this. The “all-rounder” (Macfarlane 2011, p. 61) ethos is a noble one, but tension arises when faculty are called to perform functions that are typically performed by other offices; careful allocation of these functions can help support appropriate boundaries and free instructors up to provide care. For example, while instructors can initiate academic integrity investigations, it would be helpful if they were not the ones carrying these investigations out, nor adjudicating the consequences. An investigative role presents a barrier to care and adds to the risk and precarity for instructors. The dominant model elsewhere is for these investigations to be carried out by an independent office, and this is already the case for non-academic (conduct) code violations at Polytechnic Institute. Continuing to be clear about roles and responsibilities, and creating constructive boundaries, will help unencumber instructors engaged in caring. Within these established boundaries, there can be the deliberate adoption of caring practices, and to extend these beyond instructors to their managers and leaders. At Polytechnic Institute, a caring component to academic management has yet to be discussed institutionally; it is not yet part of the conversation about what an Associate Dean or Dean does. Enquiring into the nature of these roles, and caring within them, could (similar to the work of Schultz) yield opportunities to transcend organizational obstacles, and ensure administrators are reconnected with instructors and with conversations about the type of care needed. One conversation could include expanding administrator roles to explicitly include routinely checking in on faculty about their experiences providing student support, ensuring dedicated time on departmental and institutional meeting agendas to talk about these challenges and triumphs, and supporting faculty to create “kinship networks, and communities” (Museus & Sasaki, 2022, p. 559). 250 Mentorship could also be formally built into instructor workloads and advancement opportunities; and should extend back through to administrators like Associate Deans in “tridimensional relationships” built on mutual trust (Squires, 2019), ones that may further contribute to the development of PLC (professional learning communities). By providing structure, clarity on roles and responsibilities, offering programming (like mentoring), and tangible recognition, instructors could feel more supported in their caring endeavors and empowered to customize these based on their own capacities. This development of a caring community could also provide a supportive framework within which additional training could be provided. 8.3.4 Provide Appropriate Training to Instructors In order to tap into caring capacities, it is clear, both from participant responses in this study and from my own experience, that instructors require more training, not just in relation to caring for students in distress, but on the whole. Until July 2024, there was no formal instructor orientation program at Polytechnic Institute. As the Institute begins to acknowledge the importance of onboarding as a fundamental practice for new instructors, they could acknowledge from the start that encounters with students in distress can be part of the instructor role, undoing what DiPlacito-DeRango (2015) called “sidelining” of instructor and student wellbeing (p. 15) by foregrounding this as a part of the work alongside industry experience, subject matter expertise, and pedagogical competence. This type of orientation process could be relational as well, creating connections between instructors and other departments that deliver care, if only to introduce instructors to the various departments that may be involved when a student requires care. 251 In 2024, Polytechnic Institute launched a short-form credential specific to aspects of the Polytechnic teaching role, with courses in instructional skills, instructional strategies, assessment of learning, use of educational technology, and online learning, as well as a final course designed to help instructors reflect on their professional practice. Adding content to that program, as well as to the professional development catalogue (in shorter formats) could be done collaboratively, similar to the work of Bozalek and others in South Africa (2014), and use open-source resources similar to the examples found in Appendix A. As stressed by DiPlacito-DeRango and White and LaBelle, it cannot be assumed that certain instructors have more bandwidth, capacity, or experience when it comes to responding to distressed students. This was illustrated when those study participants who had mental health, counseling, and conflict resolution experience called for more professional development in this area. Based on their feedback and comments from other participants, it seems reasonable to say that this gap should be substantively addressed by the Institute. Training (both at onboarding and throughout instructors’ careers at Polytechnic Institute) could help provide a channel for feedback to the Institute on material implications of policy decisions and gaps in policy language. As instructors are participating in training and mentoring practice, and participating in communities of care, they could suggest ways that policy or practice could be altered, as well as ways in which care could be more clearly communicated. Ensuring feedback as a mechanism here could open up opportunities for institutional dialogue about a current lack of performance measurement and coaching for faculty in general, as well as help the Institute to carefully revisit the role of student input into teaching performance through 252 mechanisms like feedback surveys, which have been largely disregarded and unused since the move to online surveys in 2019. This work – dialogue, mentoring, training, and feedback – will not be impactful, however, if the availability of supports to students is not increased. The next recommendation centres on ensuring that supports are matched to program needs and constraints (delivery model, campus location), as well as adapted to suit particular cultural contexts. 8.3.5 Increase Available Supports to Match Constraints and Contexts The Andersen Behavioural model suggests that students will be more likely to seek help if barriers to care are reduced. The 2023 Read, Lutgens, and Malla scan of mental health services found strong practices at a small minority of institutions including: ensuring short wait times for first contact (under 72 hours from inquiry to first service), 24-hour hotlines, and availability of continued (multiple) therapy sessions (p. 1). Unfortunately, when instructors are referring students to supports, many of them spoke of long wait times, conflicts with cohort schedules, or challenges with locations where support services are offered). In line with the recommendations in that 2022 scan, it would be advisable for Polytechnic Institute to look into reducing these barriers, including increasing the amount of Early Assist case supports available and ensuring case support is available in languages other than English and modalities other than email or phone (e.g. WhatsApp chat). It has been documented that international students in particular are not able to read and understand emails from institutional service providers (de Oliveira Soares et al., 2024) and this was specifically mentioned by study participants as a barrier to their students accessing care. Service areas would speak with, and listen to, both instructors and students in an 253 effort to create intimate connections to the communities (Rolón-Dow, 2005) before making updates to supports. Instructors have spoken highly of aspects of Early Assist and other student supports. Others have alluded to a patchwork of care that is disconnected. A reduction of fragmentation and silos (Jones & Weinrib, 2022) in support roles would benefit instructors’ ability to respond with care. In addition to increasing supports, or widening these patches, another means of better stitching together the patchwork of support could come through the sharing of information. 8.3.6 Make it Easy to Share Information One of the models for information sharing could be borrowed from community nursing. As explained by a participant who came from this field, community nurses are resourced to deliver care, but also to refer appropriately and to enable patients to self-resource through accessing external reports. This speaks to a (currently overlooked) opportunity to celebrate the ability of Polytechnic Institute instructors to bring forward best practices from their fields, where this relates to enacting care. Similar to the communication practices at the height of the pandemic at Arizona State University (prearrival videos, social media posts, web content) Polytechnic Institute could leverage tools like the Learning Hub (the learning management system for all courses) to embed resources for students and for instructors and express that care is a priority. Instructors need not have specific counseling or health experience, however, to make good suggestions, as in the case of the instructor who has a standing message in the learning hub to ensure students know how to ask 254 for help (if only to send an email saying simply “I need help”). These cross-departmental conversations would promote community building, if they are approached as building relations first, and resources second. It would be especially helpful if they were facilitated in a way that brings together multiple departments including, the library, tutoring (O’Shea & Meyer, 2016), Learning and Teaching Centre and language support services, all currently housed in different departments across the Institute. Once connections are established, a directory of supports could be updated regularly and (digitally) housed on the Polytechnic Institute website. These resources need to keep in mind the language and cultural barriers for some students and should ideally be available in students’ languages of choice so that distressed students are able to better access the information. This final tactical piece could be the first physical expression of care discussed in the first recommendation. 8.4 Scholarly Significance of the Study Some of work on the topic of instructors in the first responder role in Canadian institutions has been advanced by DiPlacito-DeRango; using her initial research with instructor participants (2015) to develop and advance a 3R (recognize, render, refer) framework and then situate these using document and policy analysis (2017, 2022). To this end, the new proposed framework from this study expands the 3Rs to 5Rs to capture the instructors’ reaction (external and/or internal) as well as the absence or presence of reciprocity. This highlights some of the realities of practice that haven’t been possible through document analysis as well as updates the model using care ethics as a specific theoretical perspective. 255 Whether the responsibility of the instructors or the institution, or both, much of the fieldwork examining care in higher education has centred on classroom learning and teaching activities. For example, Anderson et al. (2020) found that “good teachers” care about the discipline (p. 6); have “passion” for the subject; are entertaining as a means to connect with students; care about teaching (and learning); understand teaching is a dialogue; and demonstrate they care about students. While this last point is expressed “through attentiveness, openness, awareness of students’ lives” (p. 11), the examples are grounded in classroom cues and on students’ abilities to understand and learn, rather than interactions outside of the formal learning paradigm. Their study specifically highlighted student perspectives, and not the instructor experience. The UK study by Spear, Morey and van Steen (2021) and the previous work by Hughes et al. (2018) did present instructor voices and make some recommendations. These studies were conducted in the UK, where the legal and policy frameworks for institutional and individual responsibilities for responding to students in distress are different from those in Canada. Additionally, these were not studies situated in the unique context of polytechnic environments. Further, however, these studies were based on retrospective perspectives gathered during interviews. This study has contributed to our understanding by capturing timely impressions recorded in proximity to the encounter between student and instructor. By generating data both from audio-recorded comments immediately after an encounter and from interviews that allow for retrospection and reflection, my study has contributed to the scholarly body of work around the unique roles of post-secondary instructors and their experiences inside and outside of the classroom. This addition of diaries to the data gathering process led to several helpful 256 breakthroughs. It captured the micro-moments that make up an instructor’s day including those encounters that may not be memorable in hindsight, but that have had an impact; this created a fuller and richer description of the phenomenon that would have been lost had I gathered data solely through interviews. It also offered additional methodological advantages (including support with bracketing) that have been noted earlier in the dissertation. By incorporating immediate responses into the data gathering, focusing on an ethic of care, and situating this study at a polytechnic, this is the first study of its kind. My qualitative findings offer a foundation for future research into this phenomenon along several lines as we grow our collective view of this first responder role in Canada, across various types of higher educational institutes, and as caring frameworks are collaboratively constructed, embedded, and trialed in the post-secondary context. 8.5 Limitations of the Study Faculty in this study were from cohort-based, full-time technology programs in three Schools: Academic Studies, Science and Engineering, and Health Services. The participant group did not include any instructors from trades programming, nor from the Schools of Built Environment, Transport, or Media and Business Studies. None of the instructors were teaching in Flexible Learning programs (course-by-course, non-cohort). None of the instructors were new to teaching; all participants had extensive teaching experience, with most having spent at Polytechnic Institute. None of the participants identified as LGBTQ++, and none of them were under the age of 50. As this was a qualitative study with a limited number of participants, none of the data gathered can be considered representative of instructors across the Institute, or at 257 other institutions, although the outcome space; findings; and discussion may resonate in these other contexts. 8.6 Future Research Opportunities Given these limitations, there are several interesting avenues for future research. A study of faculty in different disciplines, Schools, and programmatic styles and delivery methods may produce different findings and lead to different recommendations. For example, a study centred specifically on programs in health and related service professions might be able to delve further into the tension between help seeking and fitness to practice – are nursing or social work students less able to disclose a need for care? Although not by design, the participants in this study were members of a relatively gender-balanced faculty.27 Given that within the other teaching union at Polytechnic Institute the balance is quite different (235 men to 18 women), it would be interesting to examine these issues in those departments, one that might ask whether using a feminist caring ethic in these male-dominated disciplines could help contribute to transformation in that industry (e.g., increase the the number of women in the trades). Polytechnic Institute’s Flexible Learning offerings do not have cohorts, repeated contact time, and the program heads role is different, and so future research could explore whether in the absence of these structures, the 5R model still resonates. Not a single participant brought up money or financial compensation for their caring work. This was surprising to me as an academic manager who has been engaged in conversation around 27 Polytechnic Institute tracks only gender (not age, or ethnic background) of faculty: of the 985 permanent FSA faculty at Polytechnic Institute in 2022, 51% were male, and 49% were female; whereas of the 253 BCGEU instructors, 93% were male. 258 shifting the compensation for program heads in our School to facilitate more support for students. Much of the literature (Gaudet, Schultz, Lynch, Museus & Sasaki, Ivanycha) focuses on academic work in tripartite, tenure-based institutions where productivity is measured in publications, and teaching and service work are frequently undervalued. This is not the compensation nor professional development framework at Polytechnic Institute; therefore, research that takes this model and these observations into those environments (tripartite, tenure-focused institutions) might produce different findings, discussions and recommendations. There is an immediate opportunity for better recognition of this often-invisible labour, as well as opportunities to delve further into the (relatively unique) compensation structure at Polytechnic Institute. A study that looks at the intersection between compensation and this work would help provide more specific context for these conversations. It would be interesting to conduct a similar study in an institution with a tripartite compensation model (teaching, research, service) in order to see whether compensation, career prospects, or job advancement (and other career-related themes) come through, as these did not emerge in my study, but have been extensively discussed in the literature. Of the six participants, four identified as white (Caucasian, Eastern European, White English Speaking Canadian, Anglo-Irish), whereas two identified as Mixed-Race Eurasian and Chinese-Canadian. None of my participants identified as LGBTQ2+. Four identified as female, and two as male (whereas women make up 49% of the permanent FSA faculty); and while none of the women specifically addressed a gendered nature to their care, so much of the literature speaks of social, institutional and personal pressures placed on women academics and to the gendered nature of care work. The literature also suggests it would be beneficial to attract additional 259 faculty from racialized and other marginalized populations to future studies, or to focus a study specifically on their experiences, in particular because the work of Tronto (2010) and others speaks to care work that is distributed along lines of class, gender, and race (p.166). Additionally, all the participants who came to this study were engaged in caring work – they had either self-identified with the issue or had been referred into the study. Thus, a study of instructors selected using different methodology may produce different results and would potentially be a good test of the outcome space. One of the recommendations initially was to cultivate a culture of care; however, to ascribe culture to an organization is a complex concept; one that has been criticized by social scientists and anthropologists as generally oversimplified (Meek 1998). As this study is neither founded nor grounded in organizational theories and their discussion, it may be interesting to pursue a study that does, in fact, explore concepts relating to organizational culture, ethos, or collective practices in institutions and how these may (or may not) be conducive to care. Through the process of developing this work, I have been asked how the definition of reciprocity in this model (which is borrowed from Noddings) differs from the term used by Kirkness and Barnhardt (1991). Their work was not top-of-mind in my research, theoretical orientation, or data analysis. However, towards the end of the process it was highlighted for me that Kirkness and Barnhardt use four R’s to describe a future for Indigenous learners in which there is a “higher educational system that respects them for who they are, that is relevant to their view of the world, that offers reciprocity in their relationships with others, and that helps them exercise responsibility over their own lives” (p. 1). There are intersections between what Kirkness and 260 Barnhardt call the distinction between the “physical and social environment of a typical university campus [as] intended to protect faculty and students from “the real world” … [as] a reality unto itself” (p. 6) and my own recommendations that the Polytechnic Institute community work together to create ongoing practices of, and orientation towards, care. A study and practice that is based in care and grounded in Indigenous ways of knowing and being could be framed in a way that respects and acknowledges what Kirkness and Barnhardt call “the holistic integration and internal consistency of the Native world view” (p. 7), and could contribute to the Institution’s efforts towards Indigenization. 8.7 Concurrent Impacts on My Practice During the study period I worked as an Associate Dean at Polytechnic Institute. The impact of hearing participant experiences in the study influenced my work in a number of ways. First, I was officially appointed as the key contact in the School for student wellbeing. As part of that role, in 2023/2024 I created the first ever directory for instructors seeking support for students (Key Contacts) as well as a slide deck and PDF handout to distribute to students at orientation. The creation of these resources as supports were directly inspired by a participant describing tools used in community nursing. This official role also led to my seat on the Student Wellbeing Advisory Committee where I was able to be engaged, from very early on in the conversation, with the new Student Wellbeing Framework. Polytechnic Institute’s first wellbeing framework is four years old, and a new framework is well overdue. I found myself raising the study in these discussions and meetings with other committee members (students, staff, admin) as an advocate for the instructor voice. I was also motivated to run for Chair of the Polytechnic Institute Education Policy Standing Committee and my term began in fall 2024. One of the first orders of 261 business has been an examination of our bylaws, with a motivation to increase faculty representation at the Education Policy table, again, as an attempt to raise faculty voices. 8.8 Instructors Need Care Schussler and Collins (2006) concluded their study by stating “that students want to be cared for seems so obvious that it is trite” (p. 1488). I would similarly argue that instructors want to be cared for, and to come out and say it seems so obvious that it is trite. But I will say so again. Instructors want to be cared for. To that end, it seems fitting to finish this dissertation in the words of one of my participants, from an email he sent after my last member check. He said: Hi Morgan, Thanks for sending this on. I read every word! I continue to hope that Polytechnic Institute can find a way to energize a literacy of regard for students’ mental health challenges. I had a wonderful term with my students, and it restored my faith in our collective endeavor somewhat. Although I still feel that schooling the school-of-hard-knocks underwrites our institutional bias, there are signs that change is possible when I read your chapter. Thanks for that. Thanks for sending your work. It’s meaningful to be a part of it. 🙂 262 References Akerlind, G. S. (2005). Variation and commonality in phenomenographic research methods. 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Qualitative Research in Psychology, 19(1), 1-19. https://doi.org/10.1080/14780887.2018.1545061 286 Appendices 287 Appendix A: Postsecondary Resources Related to Student Mental Health This non-comprehensive list catalogues resources and frameworks I encountered while researching this proposal. Resource Type Name Organization Responsible Purpose Key Components How Instructors are Involved Policy Framework Post-Secondary Student Mental Health: Guide to a Systemic Approach (2013) The Canadian Association of College and University Student Services (CACUSS) and the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA). “a framework for addressing student mental health in post-secondary institutions” (p.4) • Introduction • Institutional Structure: Organization, • Planning, and Policy • Supportive, Inclusive Campus Climate • and Environment • Mental Health Awareness • Community Capacity to Respond to Early Indications of Student Concern • Self-Management Competences and • Coping Skills • Accessible Mental Health Services • Crisis Management • Campus Engagement, Planning, and Action Instructors will be impacted if the policies, operations, programming, and training of their institution is aligned with these recommendations. Policy Framework Okanagan charter: An international charter for health promoting universities & colleges (2015) Outcome of the 2015 International Conference on Health Promoting Universities and Colleges “1. Guide and inspire action by providing a framework that reflects the latest concepts, processes and principles relevant to the Health Promoting Universities and Provides key principles on how to achieve: • Use settings and whole system approaches (p.10) • Ensure comprehensive and Instructors will be impacted if the policies, operations, programming, and training of their institution is 288 Colleges movement, building upon advances since the 2005 Edmonton Charter. 2. Generate dialogue and research that expands local, regional, national and international networks and accelerates action on, off and between campuses. 3. Mobilize international, cross-sector action for the integration of health in all policies and practices, thus advancing the continued development of health promoting universities and colleges.” (p.3) campus-wide approaches (p.10) • Use participatory approaches and engage the voice of students and Others (p.10) • Develop trans-disciplinary collaborations and cross-sector partnerships (p.10) • Promote research, innovation and evidence-informed action • Build on strengths (p.10) • Value local and indigenous communities' contexts and priorities (p.10) • Act on an existing universal responsibility (p.11) aligned with these recommendations. Policy Framework Student Well-Being and Resilience Framework 1.0 (2020) Polytechnic Institute’s Student Wellbeing Steering Committee: • Student Life Office • Counselling and Student Development • Accessibility Services • Recreation Services • International Student Services • Student Association • Respect, Diversity, and Inclusion Office • Indigenous Services • Registrar’s Office • Faculty representatives “This initiative exists alongside, and is complementary to, Polytechnic Institute’s commitments to maintaining academic standards and academic integrity. To support Polytechnic Institute in realizing its commitment to the well-being and resilience of its Lays out eight dimensions of well-being model: • Financial Well-being • Psychological Well-being • Physical Well-being • Intellectual Well-being • Occupational Well-being • Spiritual Well-being Instructors will be impacted by the framework if, when, and as the three pillars are addressed by the institute (e.g. through enhanced “faculty, staff, and student awareness of existing services and supports” and 289 Student representatives community of learners, Polytechnic Institute’s Student Wellbeing Steering Committee engaged in a process to create the Polytechnic Institute Student Well-being and Resilience Framework.” (p.3) • Social Well-being • Environmental Well-being And provides a three-pillar framework to address these: Pillar I: Policy and Procedures “By redesigning processes, systems, and structures, we can embed sustainability into the learner experience and into our well-being initiatives.” (p.7) Pillar II: Training and Education “By investing in faculty and staff development and providing these employees with the training and resources that they need to support students, we are leveraging the power of a familiar, personal, and trusted presence on campus for many students” (p.8) Pillar III: Support Services “The Framework affirms the importance of enhancing equitable access to support services that meet the unique needs of each of the specialty campuses.” (p.9) “training [for] faculty and staff to equip them to support student well-being” (p.9) Policy Framework National standard of Canada for mental health Mental Health Commission of Canada and Standards Council of Canada “an instrument to ignite further action … the committee sought to provide guidance “provides a foundation for a socio-ecological framework for the development, implementation, and The technical committee for this standard was comprised of 290 and well-being for post-secondary students (2020) with an emphasis on continuous improvement to address the factors relevant to the mental health and well-being of post-secondary students” (p.9) continuous improvement of policies programs, environments and initiatives including a) promotion of student well-being through enhancement or creation of sustainable environments which reduce modifiable stressors or risk factors; b) recommendations for a systemic or holistic approach … c) articulation of roles and responsibilities; d) protective factors to consider; and e) indicators to measure success” (p.10) educational stakeholders from across Canada, including faculty. Instructors will be impacted if the policies, operations, programming, and training of their institution is aligned with these recommendations.. Guidebook for a Facilitated Workshop Capacity to Connect: Supporting Students’ Mental Health and Wellness BCcampus’s Mental Health and Wellness Project, funded by Ministry of Advanced Education and Skills Training; advisory group of students, staff, and faculty from B.C. post-secondary institutions “to provide access to education and training resources for faculty and staff to better enable them to support postsecondary students with their mental health and wellness” (p.ix) OER Guidebook to a two-hour session that covers: • Wellness • Mental health knowledge • Three Rs framework: recognize, respond, refer • Maintaining boundaries • Practice scenarios • Summary and closing Can participate in, or facilitate, a workshop; can implement the tools from the workshop into their practice. Uptake outside of UVic is unclear. Guidebook for a Facilitated Workshop Let’s Talk About Suicide: Raising Awareness and Supporting Students BCcampus’s Mental Health and Wellness Project; adapted from initial UVic workshop by Dawn Schell, Jewell Gillies, Barbara Johnston, and Liz Warwick As above; and “training was developed to reduce the stigma around suicide and to help faculty and staff acquire the skills and confidence to ask if a OER Guidebook to a two-hour session that covers: • Why we need to talk about suicide • Exploring our own feelings about suicide Can participate in, or facilitate, a workshop; can implement the tools from the workshop into their practice. 291 student is considering suicide, listen to that student in a non-judgmental way, and then refer them to appropriate resources” (p.1) • Observing and recognizing the signs • Responding • Referring • Scenarios • Maintaining boundaries • Summary and closing Uptake outside of UVic is unclear. Guidebook for Individual Implementation Creating Conditions for Well-being in Learning Environments SFU Health Promotion and The Centre for Educational Excellence As part of “working with instructional staff to create conditions for well-being within learning environments [t]his print-friendly resource outlines some suggestions for creating these conditions” (p.1) • Personal Development • Flexibility • Social Connection • Optimal Challenge • Positive Classroom Culture • Civic Engagement • Instructor Support • Services and Supports • Real Life Learning • Inclusivity Provides instructors with definitions and examples of each of these concepts. Instructors can use this guide in their curricular design and course delivery. (e.g. for Personal Development; “Encourage students to seek co-curricular and volunteer opportunities (for example Passport to Leadership, Mentorship Programs, or Peer Education)” (p.2) Handout Assisting Students in Distress University of Victoria Student Wellness Centre A four-page handout to provide a quick reference to faculty and staff. Includes • Campus Resources (directory) • Overview of the “identify, respond, Instructors can refer to this guide when faced with a student in distress. 292 refer” approach (p.2) • Schematic with a triaged approach to connecting students with resources (e.g. matching the situation to the action required) • Information about SupportConnect (see below) • Information about faculty and staff support: “helping a student in distress can affect your personal well-being. It may be important to debrief with supervisors or colleagues or to contact the Employee and Family Assistance Program” (p.4) Handout Responding to Students in Distress Employee Guide April 2021 Polytechnic Institute Office of Student Life A four-page handout to provide a quick reference to employees. Includes • Examples of reasons students may experience distress • How can we help? (Recognize, Respond, Refer, Reconnect) • Responding to students in distress — A flowchart for Polytechnic Institute Instructors can refer to this guide when faced with a student in distress. 293 employees (triaged streams) • Information about EarlyAssist (e.g. in all cases, file an Early Assist) • Internal contacts • External contacts Referral Service SupportConnect University of Victoria Student Wellness Centre “free, confidential mental health support service for UVic students. Get connected with qualified counsellors, consultants and life coaches anytime, anywhere.” (n.d.) “SupportConnect offers short-term solution-focused counselling with the same counsellor. You and your counsellor will work together through a set of sessions to assist you in moving forward. SupportConnect is available 24/7 by phone and online. They also offer video and in-person options.” Instructors can refer students to this service. Workshop Student Mental Health Literacy Program (SMHLP) University of Victoria Student Wellness Centre For faculty, sessional instructors, teaching assistants and staff to learn how to: § recognize early warning signs for students experiencing difficulties § recognize when a student may be in distress § support and refer students who are at-risk or in distress § refer students in distress or in crisis Level one: Basic training in mental health awareness and response. We’ll ensure faculty and staff have the information they need to identify, respond to and refer a student to appropriate resources. Level two: Detailed information, tools, scenarios and case studies. This level is geared to groups of faculty and staff who more frequently respond to students in distress. Level three: Advanced training in mental health concerns. This level is for selected groups of faculty Instructors can register for this training through institutional HR. 294 to campus resources and staff who work in areas that regularly respond to students in distress. Training includes supporting students in crisis, emergency protocols and suicide intervention. Workshop Mental Health First Aid (MHFA) UBC Human Resources Self-directed and webinar for staff and faculty, “particularly those in front-facing or first-responder roles.” Course participants will learn how to recognize signs that a person may be experiencing a decline in their mental well-being or a mental health crisis and encourage that person to: • Talk about declines in their mental well-being • Discuss professional and other supports that could help with recovery to improved mental well-being • Reach out to these supports • Assist in a mental health or substance use crisis • Use MHFA actions to maintain one’s own mental well-being Instructors can sign up for this program (8 hours) through Human Resources. Workshop Preventing Burnout: Managing stress, emotions and our tendency to give UBC Human Resources This session will examine the very real impact of a variety of factors on our mental health, and explore the Self-paced online class where participants leave with “a set of supportive strategies for recognizing and preventing burnout before it takes hold.” Instructors can participate through HR 295 signs and indicators of burnout. Workshop QPR Training UBC Human Resources “an internationally recognized suicide prevention program designed to help you question, persuade, and refer. It acts as an emergency mental health intervention designed to save lives.” “Participants will learn how to recognize suicide warning signs, approach someone who may be at risk, persuade the person to seek appropriate health services, and connect the person to resources that will help resolve crises. Suicide is preventable.” Instructors can participate through HR; online program (2.5 hours) is also available to staff and students Support Group Polytechnic Institute Student Recovery Community Pilot 2022 Polytechnic Institute Office of Student Life “an inclusive, compassionate, and accepting space for students who are in recovery from a substance or behaviour addiction, or curious about their relationship to substances and/or other addictive behaviours. Examples include, but are not limited to, alcohol, drugs, disordered eating, gambling, gaming, and more” • Pilot with small group meetings “designed to facilitate connection and peer-support among students who are on their individual recovery pathway” • Meetings led by students with personal experience in recovery to be held Wednesdays at the Polytechnic Institute Burnaby Campus from June 8 to August 10th • “All recovery pathways – from harm reduction to abstinence – are welcome!” If successful, the pilot will be expanded. Unclear how instructors will be involved in connecting students to the program. Referral Service From Intention to Action (FITA) Carleton “an integrated program with the explicit goal of addressing both mental health and retention” (Eisenberg, 2016, p.90) “The program involves 12 weekly meetings with a FITA coordinator, focusing on bolstering well-being and academic performance. Students who began FITA with poor mental health have had improvements in both mental health and course Instructors can refer students to this program. 296 grades, allowing them to avoid academic suspension” (p.90) Referral Service Student Support Network (SSN) Worcester Polytechnic Institute-led, also implemented at • Amherst College • Boston University • Castleton State College • Connecticut College • Oberlin College • Saint Michael's College • University of Maine • University of Nevada, Reno • University of Southern Maine • Wesleyan University “a training course designed to provide college students—who may find themselves in the role of trusted listener or helper for their peers—with knowledge, skills, destigmatizing perspectives, and connection capabilities” (n.d.) “Student groups meet once a week for a total of six sessions. Here, they learn to recognize warning signs of distress in their friends, gain insight into common mental health challenges, practice bringing up their concerns—in an sympathetic, nonjudgmental way—and build expertise at connecting friends to other support resources, such as the campus counseling center.” Instructors can refer students to the program for help or to participate as peer supporters. 297 Appendix B: Recruitment Poster (institution name and details redacted) 298 Appendix C: Sample of Email to Program Heads Hello Program Heads: Morgan Westcott, an AD in Business and Media Studies is conducting a study on Responding to Students in Distress as part of her doctoral work at UBC. Faculty are invited to participate. Morgan is looking for participants for a study called “Polytechnic Institute Instructors as First Responders to Student Crises: Using Solicited Audio Diaries to Centre Faculty Voices”. The study is seeking to better understand the ways Polytechnic Institute instructors experience encounters with students in crisis, in order to lay the groundwork for potential support for instructors in this part of their role. The attached poster has the full details. Could you please share this with faculty in your areas? Thanks, AD Name 299 Appendix D: Meeting Agenda Time Topic Notes 13h – 13h10 Review of study purpose and parameters. Thank potential participants for coming and ensure they know they will be given time after this meeting to reflect and recommit. Recognize he vulnerability of the faculty present and of those who choose to participate. Share personal story of how the study was inspired. Set the tone: this is a common problem facing many instructors but is underexplored, and together we might be able to lay the groundwork for solutions. 13h10 – 13h20 Anonymity, data generation, sharing of recordings with researcher. Review different tools for recording diaries (Dictaphone, voicemail on their phone), provide example of when/how to record an audio diary. Be explicit that recordings should not contain student names, program, year of study, course names or other specific identifiable information. Provide options for sharing of recordings. Clarify that this is not an incident report, this is a sharing of a lived experience. Provide an example of an audio recording (record an example from my own practice prior to the meeting and play for participants). 13h20 – 13h30 Check-ins and final interviews Options for arranging check-ins and scheduling the final interview. This is driven by participant preferences – each person can choose what works best for their comfort level. 13h30 onwards Open Q and A Allow for questions about previously-presented content. Thank participants for coming and explain an email with more details and consent forms will be forthcoming shortly. 300 Appendix E: Diary Prompts Thank you for agreeing to help us with this study, which is being conducted by me in my capacity as a UBC doctoral student. You have been asked to complete a voice diary entry every time you experience an interaction with a student in crisis or distress. If you miss an interaction and don’t have time to record it, please record other instances as you are able until the end of the study period. Some guidelines: 1.Before beginning please familiarize yourself with the Polytechnic Institute Office of Student Life guidelines of what to do when a student is in distress: Responding to students in distress_V3.pdf 2. This is not an incident report; this is a reflection of your lived experience. That said, you are encouraged to capture as many different experiences as possible. These are your experiences of interactions with students in distress, which may take place in class, in the hallways and other campus spaces, during office hours or outside of working hours or off campus. These may take place as an in-person exchange, over Zoom, text, email or other platforms. They may be initiated by you, or by the student, or be something you are observing. I will be relying on your perception and interpretation of what qualifies as a student in distress. If you find you are not experiencing any encounters to document, consider the prompts on the next page. If at any point you have questions or concerns about this part of the process, please reach out to me and we can discuss. 301 3. This is your diary. The study would like to know as much as possible about your experiences, thoughts, physical sensations, emotions and questions as you are able to share in the moment. 4. I recognize that as a busy instructor you have little time to yourself so please share as much or as little as you are able and feel comfortable to share. 5. Please ensure you identify which recording tool you will be using, which sharing process you will be using, and how frequently you want to submit recordings, ahead of starting the study. I will be as flexible as possible in order to accommodate what works best for you. 6. Because we are working with the stories of students, please remember the following confidentiality guidelines: Record the diary entry in a space where you cannot be overheard by others, such as an office with a closed door, an empty classroom, or your car. Do not record your interactions with students; only your own comments on the experience. Do not use the student’s name, but rather their initials, and do not identify their program, year, or other people mentioned by the student, in the recording. Note that only the final dissertation will be shared with Polytechnic Institute and that no specific instructors will be identified in this report. All participants will be also given an advance copy of 302 the dissertation as a “member check” to ensure that their anonymity and the confidentiality of students is maintained. Diary Prompts: a) How did I feel in my encounters with students today? (calm, threatened, happy, engaged) b) Have I encountered any students who were upset today? What was the nature of their upset? c) Did I receive any complaints or special requests from students today? How did I handle these? d) Were any of my students acting differently than they have in the past? How did I notice this? e) Did I have any interactions with other individuals or departments regarding a student challenge? If so, how helpful was their response? f) Did I experience any personal or professional challenges because of an interaction with a student? Thank you for your participation and for contributing to our body of knowledge in this area. 303 Appendix F: Interview Questions OPENING INTERVIEW Thanks for agreeing to meet with me today. Before we begin, I want to acknowledge that participating in this study and this interview may raise some challenges for you. At any time, we can stop this interview, and at any point in this study, you can decide to stop participating. I’d also like to remind you that there are trained counsellors available to you through Polytechnic Institute’s mental health plan. Finally, I am a doctoral student engaged in research and this conversation will be anonymized and used for my study. What we discuss here will not be shared or repeated outside of this room except as anonymized quotes, and as part of a visual map/diagram called an outcome space. You will also have an opportunity to review your transcripts, where you can ask for content to be redacted if necessary. 1. What drew you to participation in this study? 2. What questions or concerns do you have about participating in this study? (Review the diary entry process and come up with a plan for recording and sharing information. Make note of the preferred process for this participant and set up a schedule for transferring of recordings.) CLOSING INTERVIEW Thanks for agreeing to meet with me today and for your participation in this study and diary collection process. Before we begin, I want to acknowledge that participating in this study and 304 this interview may raise some challenges for you. At any time, we can stop this interview. I’d also like to remind you that there are trained counsellors available to you through Polytechnic Institute’s mental health plan. Finally, I am a doctoral student engaged in research and this conversation will be anonymized and used for my study. What we discuss here will not be shared or repeated outside of this room except as unattributed quotes, and as part of a visual map/diagram called an outcome space. You will also have an opportunity to review your transcripts, where you can ask for content to be redacted if necessary. Probes (from Barnard et al., 1999): • Can you explain more about that? • What is an example of that? • What did that feel like? • How did that occur to you? 1. I’d like to start with a reflection back on the study period. What incidents, if any, stand out to you? Was there a pattern of similarities between the interactions? 2. In reflecting on your experiences, in what ways did you interact with others at Polytechnic Institute around these incidents? Were there other individuals or departments involved? How helpful was their response? 305 3. How do you think these incidents impact your career as an instructor? (Probe about risk). 4. Looking back, what do you wish you had known before these encounters? 5. Are there any specific challenges, either emotional, personal, or professional, when you’re responding to students in these situations? 6. Is there anything else you want to say about the ways in which you interacted with your students over the study period, or the impact this had on your personally and professionally? 306 Appendix G: Outcome Space “Member Check” – Your Input Needed Hello “Instructor Voices” Participants! For some of you, it’s only been a couple of weeks, for others a couple of months, but all of you completed my interview-diary-interview data gathering process and I am so grateful for your input. As we discussed, rather than send you transcripts, we decided instead I would send some of my draft work. Attached is a piece of that draft work – the very draft work – that outlines the process used to create my outcome space, as well as a tour of that space. I’d like to ask you to have a skim or read through and identify: 1. Whether or not this chapter resonates with your experiences 2. Which version of the outcome space (also separately attached) better represents your experience 3. Any words or phrases that should be redacted 4. Any additional feedback that I should consider before moving forward The other draft contents of the dissertation will be an introduction (to the topic and Polytechnic Institute); a literature review (that details the current scholarly knowledge); a methodology chapter; and a chapter of your voices (that will expand on the categories established in the outcome space and highlight more of your stories and quotes). I will absolutely also send a draft of the "voices" chapter when it is ready. In the meantime, please do have a read through of the attached with my sincere thanks for being on this journey with me so far.
Thesis/Dissertation
eng
Educational Leadership and Policy
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Graduate
Ruitenberg, Claudia
Polytechnic instructors as first responders to student crises : centring faculty voices
Text