By Kasey Hermens, April 2021<\/p>\n
The year of 2020 was defined by the COVID-19 virus, Zoom meetings, and masking up. Many conversations were centered on the student experience, and rightfully so, but there wasn\u2019t much chatter about the impact on faculty members, as they zigged and zagged through the labyrinth of adaptation to a global pandemic. I wanted to shed some light on the perspectives of faculty, and open up the conversation to include both professors and pupils alike.<\/p>\n
I interviewed two instructors and we spoke about both the hardships and the silver linings the past year made.<\/p>\n
![\"Travis](\"https:\/\/in.ewu.edu\/honors\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/57\/2021\/05\/Travis_Masingale_1-239x300.jpg\")
An associate professor at Eastern Washington University, passionate about teaching Visual Communication Design courses and helping students achieve their goals. He considers himself a Bauhaus fanboy, a child of postmodernism, and a \u201cspecialist in obscure details.\u201d He loves spending time reading books that get him thinking, spending time with his family, and escaping outside to hike the bluff.<\/p>\n
Kasey:<\/strong>\u00a0Thank you for meeting with me, I really appreciate your willingness to let me ask you some questions. Hopefully you have some insights that you\u2019d have fun sharing. I\u2019d first like to ask, what did your expectations look like when this transition to virtual learning happened about a year ago?<\/p>\n Travis:<\/strong>\u00a0Oh, my expectations were low. I really lowered them\u2026 For myself, they were high because that\u2019s just who I am but they were shifted to take care of the students and to provide space for the break from our normal routine. [I] really backed off and provided a space for reflection for the students, especially in our Design 200 class\u2026 [t]rying to create ways to tether students to school; to keep them coming back to the Zoom class, stuff like that.<\/p>\n T:<\/strong>\u00a0I\u2019ve been meditating since the summer of 2016. I had a nervous breakdown and it was either get on more meds or stop meds and meditate. I started meditating and I had a pretty regular practice but I\u2019d usually fall off at 90 days. So, last May was like, the lowest of low and I stopped meditating because I just couldn\u2019t get out of bed in the mornings. I would just doom-scroll.<\/p>\n So, June 1st I committed and started [meditating] and a month went by, and another month, and then I was into August and was like, \u201cOh my God, I\u2019m going,\u201d so I decided, \u201cI\u2019m gonna do this for a year in the morning.\u201d I haven\u2019t stopped since June 1st .<\/p>\n I have my struggles too but my meditation practice in the past month has really grown about love and acceptance, and meeting people where they\u2019re at. It\u2019s hard in a student-centered space because we have this dual role as teachers where we\u2019re supposed to push you as hard as we can to get students to do more than they expected they can. At the same time, we\u2019re not supposed to break you. It\u2019s this fine line of a balancing act, you know?<\/p>\n K:<\/strong>\u00a0I know a lot of students have felt like they\u2019ve missed out on the community aspect of college or university. Do you feel like faculty has missed out on that as well since everything has been remote learning?<\/p>\n T:<\/strong>\u00a0For sure. In the fall and spring, it was like someone tied my arms behind my back. I am very empathetic, I read people, I\u2019m sensitive, you know, if you will. Not being able to like, look at people\u2019s faces, not being able to judge body language, and then not to have the community of students to get to know, it was really hard. Without that [sense of community], students would just be names on a roster and I don\u2019t get to know their quirks. I get to know, maybe, their work visually but I don\u2019t get to know them.<\/p>\n K:<\/strong>\u00a0Is there anything you\u2019re looking forward to?<\/p>\n T:<\/strong>\u00a0I\u2019m just looking forward to this summer. I think\u2026 a bunch of us faculty, we didn\u2019t take last summer off. I normally don\u2019t work in the summer, I do personal research. We planned for fall quarter hardcore, and I know I\u2019m looking forward to a breath of space and to not be on Zoom all day and worry about 90 human beings and whether I\u2019m doing enough for them.<\/p>\n Kasey:<\/strong>\u00a0I appreciate that you\u2019ve taken some time out of your day to meet with me. My first question is, what did your expectations look like when the transition to virtual learning happened this time last year?<\/p>\n Sarah:<\/strong>\u00a0Boy, if it had been\u2026 if COVID had hit any other quarter it would have been awesome. Spring quarter, for me, was really the worst possible quarter to try to put those classes online, especially the program planning class, which I feel really takes a lot of work behind the scenes to do that well online. I\u2019d become very, you know, dependent on seeing you guys every, you know, two days, right? Being able to really push our two hours together as far as I could. When I\u2019m planning something online, you don\u2019t have as good of a feel for the timing of it, right? You don\u2019t want to overburden the students, but at the same time, you know, you have to get through a lot and you don\u2019t want to undercut it. So, I was pretty much upside down a year ago this time. This spring is going a lot better. It was a learning experience.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" EWU Faculty Perspectives By Kasey Hermens, April 2021 The year of 2020 was defined by the COVID-19 virus, Zoom meetings, and masking up. Many conversations were centered on the student experience, and rightfully so, but there wasn\u2019t much chatter about the impact on faculty members, as they zigged and zagged through the labyrinth of adaptation…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":433,"featured_media":7450,"menu_order":0,"template":"","class_list":["post-15812","stories","type-stories","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","stories_categories-honors","stories_tags-honors","stories_tags-honors-stories"],"acf":{"subheading":"By Kasey Hermans | April 2021","featured_image_format":"cover","display_byline":false,"display_date_published":false,"featured_video":"","Links":false,"Resources":false,"page_hide_sidebar":false,"page_enable_page_nav":false,"display_featured_image":true,"page_override_title":"","page_persona_bar_default_tab":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ewu.edu\/cahss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/stories\/15812","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ewu.edu\/cahss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/stories"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ewu.edu\/cahss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/stories"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ewu.edu\/cahss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/433"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.ewu.edu\/cahss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/stories\/15812\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":89936,"href":"https:\/\/www.ewu.edu\/cahss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/stories\/15812\/revisions\/89936"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ewu.edu\/cahss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7450"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ewu.edu\/cahss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Travis](\"https:\/\/in.ewu.edu\/honors\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/57\/2021\/05\/Travis_Masingale_2.jpg\")
K:<\/strong>\u00a0How have you managed your mental health during this time? I know mental health has been a big topic of discussion lately.<\/p>\n![\"Travis](\"https:\/\/in.ewu.edu\/honors\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/57\/2021\/05\/Travis_Masingale_3-240x300.jpg\")
I can\u2019t imagine being a student right now, with the amount of technology that\u2019s been thrown at students per class. Every faculty member is making this [stuff] up on their own, every department has some loose guidelines. As a student, the resiliency and the ability to adapt among this section of students for the past year\u2026 they are set for the modern world. They strengthened up that area of their mind and way of knowing the world. I think that all of us have atrophied this social aspect.<\/p>\nDr. Sarah Mount<\/h4>\n
![\"Sarah](\"https:\/\/in.ewu.edu\/honors\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/57\/2021\/05\/Sarah_Mount_1-226x300.jpg\")
Sarah is the program director of the Undergraduate Public Health Program at Eastern Washington University, teaching an array of public health education courses; ranging anywhere from program planning, to health disparities, to grant writing. In her free time, she enjoys teaching herself instruments like the banjo and ukulele, playing board games like Ticket to Ride, and being outdoors with her new addition to the family, her puppy named Otter.<\/p>\n