This week, I will have the pleasure of hosting the Social Work Coalition for Anti-Racist Educators #SWCAREsChat, Ensuring Equity in the Online Classroom. Prior to hosting the chat, Laura Hoge, LCSW and I met to discuss the topic overall. Below is a reposting of that conversation:
Q&A With Host, Stevara
As a result of the Coronavirus pandemic, social work programs across the United States have had to move all of their courses online. This radical shift was done with a variety of courses and led by professors with varied experiences teaching online. Prior to this episode in our lives, there were some faculty staunchly against distance education, who indicated a lack of congruency between remote learning and social work education. Those individuals are now being asked to produce and facilitate online classes with little to no experience. Now that every social work program is offering remote education, faculty (regardless of experience or motivation to use online platforms) must navigate their schools’ Learning Management Systems (LMS) and provide an education to their students. We at SWCAREs wondered how this quick paced and forced move online, impacted social work students (particularly those students who are Black and PoC). Technology and expectations for availability, is founded on assumptions around consumption based in white supremacy culture. Many students did not have access at home to the internet nor a personal computer, creating significant barriers for those students who were already facing challenges while pursuing their education. SWCAREs spoke to Stevara Clark, Program Coordinator and Assistant Professor in Teaching at Virginia Commonwealth University about the impact of abruptly shifting from face-to-face instruction to digital education, specifically on our marginalized students.
Laura Hoge: Before we start, I want to thank you for taking the time to speak with SWCAREs. I know this is a stressful time, and so I am hoping we might start with a check in. How have you’ve been managing these last few weeks?
Stevara Clark: I don’t even know if it’s really managing. I think for me, every day has felt somewhat like that movie Groundhog Day. I’m a full-time employee, and I’ve been taking on some extra projects at work. I’m also a full-time single parent of a 6-year-old who I’m essentially homeschooling. I’m also in a doctoral program, and so I’m wrapping up the semester of two classes myself. I think what has been helpful for me is ensuring that I’m going to sleep at the time I normally would and keeping some sense of normalcy in my schedule. So that’s making sure I’m playing games with my daughter, that we’re going out for a bike rides, and that we are still making our cookies or doing our pancake Saturdays – just something that feels normal to her because I think that if this was more disruptive for her, it would be even harder for me. And she’s a trooper. I don’t think I’m in a place of really thriving. It’s more of surviving and making it through each day and just being thankful for the ability to be able to do so.
Laura Hoge: Yes. I think a lot of us are experiencing a similar type of reality right now, and I so appreciate you talking about the importance of structure and also finding balance in, you know, being a little more flexible with some of our roles, and even acknowledging how they’re going to be a little bit more fluid and run into one another from time to time.
Stevara Clark: You know, I think that first week or so, because I was able to work from home one day a week before coronavirus, I found myself apologizing for asking for a moment to help my daughter with something, and you know I’m not apologizing for it anymore. Being a parent is a part of who I am. I didn’t sign up to be a stay-at-home parent and working parent, but that’s just the reality of where I’m at. And I’m not going to apologize for having to parent my child while also working.
Laura Hoge: I think it’s such a great model for our students too and for the people we work alongside. We get to embrace our needs and push back against unattainable expectations from the systems in which we are positioned.
Stevara Clark: Yeah, and I think for me, because I don’t know how to not give more than 100%, I think this has been a wake-up call for me to say to myself, you know, you’re doing too much. You’re being “Team Too Much” right now. It’s okay to take a step back and just prioritize the important things. And for me, that may mean spending two hours with my daughter playing with LEGOs. And, you know, just having those moments where I’m on the floor with her, because what I realized was during those first two weeks or so, I was working 13-hour days, and I said why am I doing this? All of a sudden, it’s time for my daughter to go to sleep and what quality time have I spent with her today? What quality time have I spent with myself? Right? And so, at that point, I had to sit back and reschedule my life. I am going to have to take that two-hour break in the middle of the day and that is just gonna have to be okay.
Laura Hoge: Yes. We need those breaks. And when I think about your work as a leader in social justice and online pedagogy, I can only imagine how exhausted you’ve been on top of all the other roles you mentioned. I have to ask, what has it been like for you to watch our face-to-face social work instruction moving online. I imagine it’s been quite a trip.
Stevara Clark: So, I will say, it’s been frustrating. I think it goes back to this idea that everyone is saying we’re moving from face-to-face to online. But we’re not. We’re moving face-to-face to remote learning. And I think that this pandemic is unfortunately amplifying people’s fears about online learning – that folks can just take whatever they’ve done for face-to-face and put it in a learning management system like Blackboard, Canvas, Google Classroom, and call that online learning. And that’s not what online learning is. That’s not online pedagogy. When online pedagogy is done right, and when it’s not done in crisis mode, online learning is beautiful. I think that it comes from a beautiful blend of asynchronous learning, synchronous learning, adult learning theory, and truly knowing yourself.
We’re in crisis mode right now, but most courses weren’t built to be taught online. They are built for that face-to-face interaction. What’s problematic right now is that some folks have said, “Oh, throw it online.” And so, some professors have said “Cool, I’m going to take exactly what we would have done, create online synchronous classrooms, and just get online with Zoom, and I’m going to lecture for two and a half hours or an hour 15 minutes twice a week.” And that does not work. It’s not working for faculty and it’s not working for students.
And I think, where this also becomes an issue when it’s not planned is this idea of having cameras on in class. Now, I will say that with our online program, when done right, we have two synchronous sessions where students are meeting with their classmates and their faculty live each semester where yes, cameras are on, but those are pre-planned for the whole semester in advance and students have the opportunity to be somewhere where they’re not going to be disturbed. They have reliable internet access and they can have that privacy. But now, you’re asking students and faculty to have their cameras on to be engaged to learn, and you have faculty teaching from their cars and students who are learning in their closets because that’s the only space that they have that may be quiet. It’s highlighting inequities for students or faculty. I think that that’s been the most frustrating piece.
And again, I think this ultimately amplifies those voices that say online education is not valuable, and specifically that you can’t teach social work online. We’ve come so far from that, and I fear that because of this pandemic and because everyone is just throwing things online, that it’s really going to harm the idea of online learning moving forward.
Laura Hoge: I love what you said about the difference between online instruction and true online pedagogy. Because you’re right. What’s happening now isn’t thoughtfully prepared online pedagogy. It’s face-to-face learning that’s been thrown into a digital space. And it can’t really be thoughtful when we do it that way. And particularly with social work education, the absence of thoughtfulness is really dangerous. How do you see the state of our online education currently intersecting with inequities in social work education?
Stevara Clark: I think I’ll come at this from two different perspectives, I think that education overall is exacerbating the equity gap, so the students who are already falling behind are going to continue to fall further behind. What we’re going to find is that they didn’t have the resources at home to be successful, and they don’t have family member support. I’m actually doing a literature review right now that talks about specifically Black students – I know we’re talking about minority students but my focus area is specifically on Black students – and Black students, they need the community, they need support, they need those parental/familial/community supports to be successful at Predominantly White Institutions. And so, we’re essentially now taking the students away from their campus environment, which has potentially become a de-facto family, where they found mentorship with Black faculty, staff, and student organizations. We’ve sent these students back home, where maybe they are the first to ever go to college, and they’re the first person to own a laptop, their internet access isn’t as reliable, and now they’re also thrown back into the scenario where they’re parenting their younger siblings or now financially responsible for their household because their mom, dad, brother or sister have lost their jobs. And so, I think that the gap is going to continue to grow.
I think where social work education has a unique opportunity to be a leading voice is to really focus on how we support the whole student and how we support the community so that we can then support their learning. I think that some schools are doing that well, other programs are getting there, and then there are some programs that aren’t even considering that.
You know, it’s interesting. A couple of weeks ago, I was re-listening to the episode that you and Charla did with Doin’ the Work Podcast with Shimon, and I was really thinking through this idea that programs have these social justice courses, but really social justice should be infused throughout the entire curriculum, and so I’ve been working with my program to really say – okay yeah, we have this course because it’s a part of the curriculum and with our accreditation, but how do we take the beginning knowledge that everyone’s learning in this one course and infuse it throughout the rest of the curriculum. And it really hit me as I was redesigning the course last semester, and I’m continuing to redesign the course to really focus on inequities in community and education and just all facets of life, and talking about anti-racist policies and really, again, changing what the field of social work has looked like from a non-white lens.
You know, we talk about Jane Addams, but we don’t talk about the other folks. So, I’ve been doing that. I really have been leaning on the expertise that other program scholars have and making sure that I’m bringing those Indigenous voices, Latinx voices, LGBTQ+ voices into the conversation, because I think none of us can inherently know everything there is to know about social justice. None of us can say, I don’t have bias, whether it’s explicit or implicit. I truly think the problem is that when you have programs and faculty and scholars, and even students, who are trying to readjust and reframe what social justice should look like in the curriculum, it falls on the shoulders of those who are minority in some type of way. We are the ones who end up having to teach it, and we are in classrooms where the vibe is off or it’s not safe anymore.
Laura Hoge: Right. So here we are in a classroom setting and incapable of having these difficult conversations. I’m thinking now of how that might manifest in a digital classroom. We’re already struggling to do that face-to-face, and now we’re in this online platform where I think we’re struggling even more. I wonder if you might speak to what you’re seeing now and what you’d like to be seeing as far as online instruction is concerned.
Stevara Clark: I want to come at this from three different perspectives. So, I’ll start first with me being a doctoral student. My program has been a fantastic program, but the majority of the program is asynchronous learning, and so there have been a lot of discussion boards. I had an experience last spring in an equity and leadership class where we were debating the merits of this one institution where a faculty member said the N-word. We talked through the institutional response to what happened – students voted they wouldn’t use any racial epithets in the classroom and the faculty member was removed from the classroom and fired. And I remember having to have that debate in written format, and how there were a couple of students in the class who talked through why they felt it was okay to use the N-word because the faculty member was just quoting from a book, and you know it was really hard for me to sit there and receive that as a Black woman. I mean, I’m one of only four Black people in my entire doctoral cohort, and to have to see that, and no one checked it. And I knew, in that moment, that I would not be that faculty member. I would have to directly call that out. At that point, I was teaching in field education, and from that moment, it made me highlight even more issues of inequity and how we talk about people in our written communication. I felt so strongly impacted by that experience.
I ended up having a conversation with the faculty member afterwards because those responses were allowed to sit there all semester without being challenged. I said to them, you know, “You never came back around to it. You didn’t participate in the chat. You did not call in that student to have a conversation about how that was harmful to those who are Black and Brown in the classroom.” And so, from my faculty perspective it made me think about how I need to change my practices. And as an administrator, it also made me think about when we are hiring – I don’t get to make decisions about hiring full-time faculty – but when I bring in an adjunct to teach in our online program. I give them case scenarios, and I have them walk me through how they address issues. I think for me, it’s really seeing how body language changes when we start having these conversations. Are you comfortable saying “I don’t know. I’ve never had that experience,” because I promise you that you have had the experience, but probably just overlooked it. So, it’s been really important for me to pull those pieces out of the conversation. And to say, “Hmm, is this person going to cause more harm in the classroom, then the curriculum itself. And is that the risk that I’m willing to take as an administrator of this program.”
Laura Hoge: You know, as a White social worker, I’m sitting here going – it really does speak to the importance of being self-reflective in the work of saying “I don’t know,” and also “I really should know” and “why don’t I know?” And I think what I’ve seen especially among White women and social work is a resistance to doing that because it challenges the idea of being a good person. And so, when we are challenged with our “goodness” causing harm, I wonder how many of us really have the ego strength to hold that, and what that means. And also, how is this currently manifesting in our digital learning environments right now? What are the action steps here?
Stevara Clark: So, I’m coming at this from two different perspectives because I think that, again, I have this student perspective, and I try to follow up on all the technology pieces. And, I think that there’s a gap. I think when I look at bridging this gap of digital learning, we have to take a step back ourselves as social workers and also as educators to say, well, what’s my comfort level with digital media and digital learning and thinking about that. And this has to be outside of the portals we use to submit conference proposals, or research journal articles, or submit our journal articles. What does it really mean to be a consumer of digital media? Do I understand it? Am I putting out good digital media myself? And I don’t think that some folks have taken a moment to reflect on that.
I think that even as we think about what’s happening right now with COVID 19, you have folks who have to teach online, and they don’t want to accept the help, or they don’t want to acknowledge that they don’t use their *LMS other than having their students upload their assignments, but then they’re still going to print it off and do the handwritten notations. I think that there’s this piece where we have to continue to be lifelong learning educators and that we can’t teach what we don’t know.
When I started in this position, I had to take a step back and say that even though I know all these things about technology – I can build a website, I can do all these intricacies with coding and all that stuff – but do people truly understand the meaning and the intent behind what I’m putting out? And when we think about this idea of impact versus intent with digital learning, this idea that you have to put so much content out there to make sure students are learning and they’re doing, I wonder how much are we actually checking on and how much do students truly need to know to be successful in this program and as a practitioner. Are we putting an extra burden of work on our students that they’re not going to go back and apply as a practitioner?
I think that we have to continue to educate ourselves on digital learning and teaching online, but also be willing to be on this learning journey with our students. I think that being in the position of power of being the faculty member and “in charge of this class” on paper must come with the perspective of learning from and with each other. So, while I may be the content expert – and that’s a big maybe – because I’m the one whose name is on the course in the system, I have to be willing to say “hmmm, what’s happening in today’s world that may demand I modify this lesson plan to be able to apply it.” And how can I be open to my students teaching me what’s happening in their communities, without doing additional harm. Students should be allowed to be in the classroom and be learners. They shouldn’t have to be the educator because you don’t know the content. I think it’s that balance of making sure students feel comfortable speaking up and infusing their lived experiences and content from other courses in the classroom, but not being expected to lead that discussion because your faculty member doesn’t know. Unfortunately, that’s hard for some people to grasp and be on board with.
Laura Hoge: It seems that social workers should inherently embrace the concept of collaborative learning. To be able to acknowledge the wealth of knowledge and power from our students is so in line with our values. As an educator, I know that I can read a lot in a book and share that information, but lived experience is so critical to my understanding, and we are never done learning that, ever.
Stevara Clark: Exactly, and that’s one of the things that I try and teach my students. I am the faculty lead for our social justice course. And when we talk about this idea of community engagement and working with communities, I’m really trying to instill in my students that you are never going to be able to come in and empower the community if you haven’t been invited in. So, you don’t speak for the community. You have to learn how to engage with the community so they feel comfortable talking to you, so they can invite you in, and so you can do the work with them, not for them.
And I think that that’s an area that I continue to want to grow myself because I think that what I’m seeing is that students are okay when we’ve infused African-centered social work practices and knowledge into our social justice class, but then they’re never exposed to it again, and after their first semester of the full-time program. So, for me it’s talking to my colleagues about how we make sure that we’re still talking through that experience and providing space and opportunity for students to infuse their upbringing and their lifelong learning into the classroom and into all that they are doing. When we talk about this idea of social justice work, a lot of our students, or at least a lot of our Black and Brown students, go back to work in their home communities. It’s important that they feel that they have the knowledge, but then also that it’s applicable for the context of their community.
For online students, they never really leave their communities. They’ve been in their home doing the learning or at the local library, and during the learning while they’re trying to manage their job and being a part of a community and learning about how to empower their community. And so, we need to make sure we provide an opportunity to say, you belong here (in social work). And when we are thinking through publishing and conferences, if we aren’t doing work with people in our community and amplifying their voices and putting their names on bylines and tag lines and the like, and having them be part of our conference proposals, are we actually benefitting the communities or are we benefitting ourselves?
Laura Hoge: Exactly.
Stevara Clark: I think that that’s a hard balance, and when we take it back to online education, we have a similar need to self-reflect. I’m just fearful that folks are going to think that what is happening this spring semester is what online education is, and specifically as we think through social justice, we have to talk about academic freedom. How should academic freedom be put on hold for the benefit of the student right now?
For me, my whole teaching philosophy and leadership philosophy talks about compassionate communication and being a part of a competent community culture. So, I’m not just gonna continue to do things as I was doing during this pandemic. My whole course was built online pre-COVID, and I still made adjustments, because I have to make sure that I’m giving my students grace, I’m giving myself grace, and that we’re able to take a pause and see what’s most important for this course to be successful. We need to find a balance so that we can ensure students are able to be successful, provide them with education that meets the demand of their tuition dollars because we don’t want to just give students an A, but we also don’t want to overburden them right now.
Laura Hoge: It’s a delicate situation right now. Students are consumers in this moment. They’ve paid for this education. If we were to not change anything, and expect our students to be able to rise up right now in ways that are probably impossible, we aren’t really teaching them social work. I love the way that you phrased it as giving our students and ourselves grace. We really are pushing back against this capitalist “produce produce produce” mindset that our work, at its best, espouses.
Stevara Clark: Yes, I mean I’ve struggled with that with myself even as a student in an online program. I’ve had to just level with my faculty and say “You know I do good work, hell I do great work. I overextend myself often. You’re not going to get that out of me for the end of the semester. You’re going to get the best that I have. And I’m just going to trust that it’s enough.”
Laura Hoge: And I think that’s an important lesson in compassionate and trauma-informed education and, quite frankly, living.
Stevara Clark: When I think about that for myself, I also think about that with my students. This is why. You know, I have my students emailing me that they’re running a little bit behind because they’ve got this going on or that going on. And I’m like, okay. Just communicate with me. You’ve got something going on and need to turn it in a little bit later. That’s fine. That’s totally fine. Just let me know what’s going on so that I don’t worry about you. We have to be mindful that our students right now might be balancing additional caregiving responsibilities and taking care of themselves. We shouldn’t be adding additional unnecessary stresses.
I don’t know if you were going to ask me this also, but thinking through the future of how programs are going to manage summer semesters and fall semesters, we need to be thoughtful and take a lot into consideration. Thinking about our code of ethics, we need to center on our students’ self-determination – that they can make the decision that online learning is not for them, especially if it’s remote learning by faculty who have not been taught how to teach online appropriately or how to build a course online appropriately. There’s a reason why students didn’t apply to the online program, and even knowing that there are still students who apply to online programs who don’t truly know what online education is because it’s a lot of self-led instruction and having to be able to manage your time and teach yourself appropriately, with support.
So, when we go through this whole idea of what equity looks like in online spaces, we have to think through what vantage points are we coming from, and ask ourselves if we are thinking about what’s best for the student based on their personal goals or are we thinking about what’s best for us as a program/university because we want to make sure we’re hitting our standards and our benchmarks for retention and graduation?
What I’m looking for is, when are we going to have town halls with students and with our community members? How do we meet students where they need to be to graduate – to be effective for what our community and their communities need them to be?
I’m not seeing a lot of these conversations happening. And I mean, honestly, I’m hoping once my semester wraps up that that’s something that I’ll be doing with my program. You know, town halls for students and trying to balance knowing that students have other things going on and also the importance of hearing from them and for them to be part of this conversation. How can they provide feedback to the program?
Laura Hoge: You know what keeps popping up for me as you’re talking, and maybe it’s the trauma therapist to me, is the question of how are we as educators showing up in a trauma-informed way right now. I live right outside of Newark, NJ and the people I love who live there are experiencing completely different impacts of COVID-19 than my friends and family in more affluent suburbs here in the state. It’s as predictable as it is heartbreaking. And so how are we, as educators, acknowledging that in our expectations on students right now. In the midst of all this grief, I’m not sure we even know yet the impact this is having on our students. I’m not sure we know how to create learning experiences right now that consider this collective trauma we are all experiencing, and the disparate impact it is having specifically on marginalized students.
Stevara Clark: Yeah, it’s been interesting. I’m here in Richmond, Virginia. And I don’t know if you saw it, but all of the coronavirus deaths in Richmond, have been Black. And at my university here in Richmond, our graduate program is predominantly White women having to work in a Black city. I don’t think that at this point we’ve fully grappled with what this fallout is going to be for this next year or two in our community, specifically for our program. Our online program is more diverse than our on-the-ground program, but I think what COVID is going to teach us is who actually wants to be change agents with communities and who maybe just joined social work because they want to do therapy. I think that’s a lot of where this profession is harming, and I’ll just call it out.
I think that there are a lot of folks thinking they just want to do therapy because that sounds cool and they’re missing that whole community engagement piece that is necessary before getting to the therapy. I think as we continue to go through COVID-19, it’s really going show us those folks who are truly called to serve and want to be part of all that social work is versus those who just want to do therapy. And I’m not saying therapy isn’t good because it’s needed. Everybody should have therapists – even therapists should have a therapists.
Laura Hoge: Absolutely.
Stevara Clark: But I think that when you think about Black and Brown communities who have already had an aversion to therapy, and then you have a profession that’s predominantly White women and they’re not looking inwardly to see what harm they may be causing. I’m wondering if we are going to have a gap of providers to be able to work with our community or are we really going to be on the forefront of how we evolve the profession so that we have additional pathways for those who wouldn’t typically have come to social work because we are inclusive and they can be themselves and do good work. I’m hoping that we’ll be on the right side of this pandemic, and we’ll see that social work has got to get off its high horse and be open to other thoughts and viewpoints.
Laura Hoge: Yes. And led by them.
Stevara Clark: Yeah, so you asked me at the beginning how I’m managing and it is because of silver linings. It’s focusing on the bright spots of where we can learn and grow from this. And yes, there’s going to be a lot of trauma, and a lot of grief, and honestly, this may be a first for those who are not Black or Brown. This may be their first time dealing with something on this level of an ongoing traumatic experience. Not all, but some. And I’m wondering if they will then be able to lean into that experience and allow it to influence their learning and their interactions with most Black and Brown communities that have been having trauma and grief since 400 years ago, honestly.
Laura Hoge: I agree. It’s going to be interesting to see if we – and when I say we, I mean White people – it will be interesting to see if we will be able to truly examine our instincts during this time, and to see if we have been closing in and hoarding, or if we are opening up and, you know, linking arm and arm with our communities. And honestly, I think it’s long overdue that we have these kinds of conversations and I can only hope that we can start to have them online, you know, because this is happening right now.
We have to be prepared to say, “I made a mistake in what I said and I’m willing to learn from it. I’m going to choose to learn and grow from it and not continually make the same mistakes.”
-Stevara Haley Clark, MSW
Stevara Clark: Yes. I think faculty need to be prepared for how to have these conversations appropriately. I think that there is value in having online conversations, public like you would have in a classroom with certain topics. I don’t ascribe to safe spaces because I feel that as a Black woman, I’m not safe in many of the spaces I walk into, but I’m still expected to have the conversations and I’m expected to engage and do the work. I don’t like the terminology of brave spaces either, so I think it’s more a blend of the both. I think we need to acknowledge that there are going to be uncomfortable conversations that many people have to have.
We have to be prepared to say, “I made a mistake in what I said and I’m willing to learn from it. I’m going to choose to learn and grow from it and not continually make the same mistakes.” Because I make mistakes. My students make mistakes. But we have to go back to that intent versus impact. “I didn’t intentionally mean to do it. I understand the impact that my actions had on you and my promise is to continue to grow from it so that I’m not continuing to hurt you.”
Online, I think that sometimes students don’t put out what they truly mean on their discussion boards because they’re so worried about the APA or the scholarly citations, or they’re wondering how someone’s going to take their tone. Let’s remove all those barriers and say, we’re all going to make mistakes. Let’s just put it on the table from the beginning, and say that we’re going to value each other for our whole person, the experiences that we bring, the hurt that we may cause, and we’re all committed to learning and growing from whatever we experience in this class.
Laura Hoge: It is just such important work. I can’t thank you enough for the embarrassment of riches that has been this conversation. I know that so many people are going to benefit from all you’ve had to say.