The COVID-19 pandemic provided education researchers with a natural experiment: an
opportunity to investigate the impacts of a system-wide, involuntary move to online teaching
and to assess the characteristics of individuals who adapted more readily. To capture the
impacts in real time, our team recruited college-level geoscience instructors through the
National Association of Geoscience Teachers (NAGT) and American Geophysical Union (AGU)
communities to participate in our study in the spring of 2020. Each weekday for three
successive weeks, participants (n = 262) were asked to rate their experienced
disruption in four domains: teaching, research, ability to communicate with their
professional community, and work-life balance. The rating system (a scale of 1–5, with 5 as
severely disrupted) was designed to assess (a) where support needs were greatest, (b) how
those needs evolved over time, and (c) respondents’ capacity to adapt. In addition,
participants were asked two open-response questions, designed to provide preliminary
insights into how individuals were adapting—what was their most important task that
day and what was their greatest insight from the previous day. Participants also provided
information on their institution type, position, discipline, gender, race, dependents, and
online teaching experience (see supplemental material1).
When it was evident that disruptions would continue through the 2020–2021 academic year, we
issued a one-time follow-up survey to participants (n = 109) in October 2020 to
inquire about teaching practices in the fall semester (see supplemental material). Survey
questions asked about usefulness of supports available to faculty (i.e., instructional
designers, internal and external colleagues, online resources) using a Likert-scale (1–5,
with 5 as very helpful). Participants also responded to short answer prompts regarding what
has been most helpful and what they have learned and will continue to do. From this group,
we interviewed 22 participants in early 2021 to gain further insight into the challenges and
triumphs they had experienced over the previous 10 months (see supplemental material). Data
from both surveys and the interviews were analyzed through a grounded theory approach,
iteratively coding the data and extracting themes. Here, we address one question that
emerged from our work: How did disruption to teaching and capacity to adapt
evolve over the course of the pandemic?
Real-Time Disruption Early in the Pandemic
In the spring 2020 15-day survey, average ratings of perceived teaching disruption (one of
the four domains about which we inquired) were moderate (mean = 2.98, SD = 1.28). It is
possible that the moderate disruption level is biased, and that those faculty experiencing
the greatest disruption were less likely to complete the daily survey. Regardless, we found
patterns that provide insight into individuals’ capacity to adapt.
Levels of reported disruption did not differ significantly by participants’ institution type
or by their experience: In fact, disruption to teaching was pervasive and experienced even
by those with extensive online teaching experience. On the other hand, non-tenure-track
(NTT) faculty reported increasingly more disruption over time than tenure track (TT) faculty
(increases over the 15 days of 0.37 and 0.03, respectively, t = 1.69, p
< 0.10).
We hypothesize that the greater disruption experienced by NTT faculty results from a sense of
the precariousness of their positions, a theme seen in open responses such as this one:
My career plans may have to drastically change, even though I love
teaching. I am on an 18-month contract, and I doubt the academic job market will look good
in Jan/Feb 2021 when I planned to look. … universities around the world are losing money,
implementing hiring freezes, and laying off employees. —Female Geology Faculty, NTT,
Doctoral Granting Institution, Day 12
Data collected later showed that ~90% of faculty members remained employed throughout the
COVID-19 pandemic, with the highest rate of unemployment being among students and
post-doctoral fellows (Gonzalez and Keane, 2021). However, during our spring 2020 survey,
long-term outcomes were unknown and weighed on the minds of respondents.
Though at least one study has shown the negative long-term impacts of the pandemic on female
faculty (NASEM, 2021), using two-way ANOVA, we found no statistically significant
interaction between the effects of gender and dependents on level of disruption reported by
instructors (F(1,96) = 0.449, p = 0.504). Respondents mentioned children and
childcare often as the “most important thing” they needed to do that day (as below), but the
frequency of such responses did not correlate with gender identity, nor did gender correlate
with number of dependents in disruption ratings:
I needed to re-arrange my schedule to do extra childcare this week
because my wife (also an academic) has more commitments this week. Every week ends with a
conversation about how to balance both of our schedules. My wife is pre-tenure and I’m
tenured, so every plan is run through that filter as well because we need to maximize her
time more than mine. —Male Professor, Doctoral Granting Institution, Day 2
This male participant’s family unit was making decisions about childcare grounded in the
tenure process rather than traditional gender roles. A female participant described another
non-gendered approach: Her extended family moved closer so that four adults could rotate
responsibility for the children, increasing each adult’s dedicated working time.
The survey specifically asked faculty to report dependents under the age of 15, but
participants also reported caregiving for teenagers, adult children, and aging parents:
Our son is depressed and it’s getting harder and harder for him to
find any joy with online learning in high school. Being around him all day I can understand
how isolating this type of education is. I don’t recommend it for a single child. —Female
Professor, Doctoral Granting Institution, Day 15
Family caregiving therefore extended beyond the typical gender roles and age ranges normally
examined.
Ongoing Disruption
College-level teaching comes with inherent variability as courses and students change each
term. In our interviews, participants reported that the advance notice and time over the
summer to prepare for the fall influenced their perception of the fall as less disruptive
than the preceding spring, particularly when re-teaching courses. One participant reflected:
I spent the summer working with the instructional design people, they
helped me redesign my Blackboard shells, so I have them organized. —Female, NTT Geology at
Doctoral Granting Institution
For some, summer allowed time for preparing new materials, learning new tools, and thinking
deeply about instructional needs.
However, some participants did not recall fall as more or less stressful, saying the two
semesters were incomparable. When asked, they described the two as “apples and oranges”
(Female Associate Professor, Geology, Doctoral Granting Institution). This was due to
changes in course type, class sizes, and level of students. When surveyed in the fall,
participants reported a higher level of disruption to teaching responsibilities when the
delivery format for two or more courses changed (mean = 3.80) rather than for a single
course (mean = 3.31) (F(1, 98) = 5.83, p < 0.001). However, neither the timing
of the decision to change the delivery format, nor the level of involvement in making the
decision to change the delivery format, predicted disruption ratings, both p >
0.05. In other words, advance notice did not help those who were teaching different courses
or multiple courses feel less disruption in their teaching when format changed, despite the
experience of the previous term.
In addition, participants reported minimizing or even completely ignoring their research
agendas to be able to adapt to teaching and that greater amounts of time spent grading was a
common theme. These shifts in the amount of time dedicated to teaching are not unexpected in
a new course or setting but are not sustainable in the long term.
Preparing for Future Disruptions
A better understanding of how participants’ disruption and capacity to adapt evolved over
time can help departments and institutions better support their faculty in future
disruptions. Our data show that capacity to adapt to disruption was influenced by the entire
family unit’s capacity to adapt: Individuals with strong family networks were able to
establish new systems for childcare, for example, but when caregiving responsibilities
extended beyond childcare to older children or parents, the system was less adaptable. In
addition, our data show that a variety of physical, social, and cognitive resources aided
faculty in adapting to their evolving situation, including instructional design
professionals, digital learning communities, quality learning management software—and that
not everyone needed the same thing. Departments and institutions need to pay particular
attention to NTT faculty, who may experience greater despair in the face of perceived
uncertainty.
Not surprisingly, a common theme in the qualitative reports is time. When provided the summer
to prepare to teach their specific geoscience course online, most participants felt less
disrupted, yet they still reported dedicating more time to teaching. Departments and
institutions can do some things to give faculty time, such as making decisions early about
course modality to allow faculty to prepare, but this is not always possible. Other ways to
provide time include extending the tenure clock and hiring graduate students or post-docs to
support teaching.
We continue to analyze this data moving forward to examine the ways in which faculty have
described the dilemmas to teaching (Windschitl, 2002) in their daily diary responses. We
hope from this in-progress analysis to offer more detailed support structures for geoscience
faculty to navigate future disruptions to teaching.
References Cited
- Gonzalez, L., and Keane, C., 2021, COVID-19 Impacts to Academic Department Operations,
January to August 2021: American Geophysical Union:
https://www.americangeosciences.org/geoscience-currents/covid-19-impacts-academic-department-operations-january-august-2021
(ac-cessed 13 Nov. 2021).
- National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), 2021, The Impact of
COVID-19 on the Careers of Women in Academic Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine:
Washington, D.C., The National Academies Press, https://doi.org/10.17226/26061.
- Windschitl, M., 2002, Framing constructivism in practice as the negotiation of dilemmas:
An analysis of the conceptual, pedagogical, cultural, and political challenges facing
teachers: Review of Educational Research, v. 72, no. 2, p. 131–175,
https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543072002131.