Open Collections

Westcott, Morgan

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.

Text

2025-04-10

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/90624

Educational Leadership and Policy

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/