Toward a New Community of Care: Best Practices for Educators and Administrators During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The onset of COVID-19 left people feeling unsettled, confused, and afraid of what tomorrow may hold. As university professors specializing in health communication, we too were left with these same feelings. As health communication scholars, we focus on issues surrounding illness, risk, crisis, care, health inequities, and wellness. COVID-19 is a health crisis, yes, but it has also changed the way we operate not only in higher education but in daily life. We begin this essay with an overview of COVID-19 and its impact on students, educators, and administrators. Then, we suggest four best practices to foster a community of care in the classroom during and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Wait, I can’t do that anymore!”: pandemic teacher immediacy in college communication classes

“…In order to build relationships in the pandemic classroom, the instructors in this study recognized that such relationships can be built beyond the face-to-face atmosphere through the use of intentional pedagogical tools, consistent with a community of care framework advocated by other scholars (Clemens and Robinson, 2021;Tang et al, 2022). These strategies and behaviors were not different in type from earlier conceptions of teacher immediacy by Gorham (1988) and others (e.g., Richmond and McCroskey, 2000;Beebe and Mottet, 2009;Dixson, 2010), but they did differ in how they were embodied and enacted in the synchronous online and pandemic-restricted face-toface or HyFlex environments, being more similar in nature to the work done on "social presence" and rapport in the asynchronous online classroom (cf.…”

“…The communication discipline is inherently a discipline which has historically relied on embodied curriculum (Nguyen and Larson, 2015;Dixson et al, 2017), with its past including elocution and public speaking, and its present emphasizing the building of relationships using communication across various dimensions (Dixson et al, 2017;Hudak et al, 2019;Brophy et al, 2021;Clemens and Robinson, 2021;Foutz et al, 2021;Morreale et al, 2021). The communication instructors in this study worked "to create the classroom as a location of possibility, " thus "recentering engaged pedagogy" (Wiant Cummins, 2023, p. 2) during the pandemic.…”

“…They did this by using "many forms of presence" (Nieuwenhuis and Strausz, 2023, p. 619), which included multiple technologies and communication channels. The instructors in this study embodied strategies and behaviors others have called for, such as valuing opportunities for shared vulnerability (McElroy and Jackson, 2021), focusing on the wellbeing of their students (Clughen, 2023;Wiant Cummins, 2023), creating interactive classrooms with opportunities for support (Clughen, 2023;Nieuwenhuis and Strausz, 2023), using digital collaboration tools (Gopinathan et al, 2022), and incorporating empathy and holistic care in policies and interactions (Clemens and Robinson, 2021;Tang et al, 2022). In doing so, they reconceptualized teacher immediacy for the pandemic classroom as embodied pedagogy (Nguyen and Larson, 2015), with the acknowledgement that we bring our bodies into virtual interactions by using a variety of technological tools to build relationships and decrease the physical and psychological distance between teachers and students.…”

“…Consistent with "embodied pedagogy, " researchers have looked at the importance of building a community of care in the pandemic classroom (Clemens and Robinson, 2021;Tang et al, 2022;Carte, 2023), focusing on how teachers demonstrated care to students as they transitioned into different modalities. Clemens and Robinson (2021) provided four best practices to create such an environment during the pandemic, including employing "supportive communication practices" (p. 136), practicing "collective sensemaking" (p. 137), fostering "inclusive pedagogical practices" (p. 138), and engaging in mindfulness. They advocated that these practices continue in the postpandemic classroom environment.…”

Being Dr. Mom and/or Mom, Ph.D.: Autoethnographies of MotherScholaring during COVID‐19

“…The onslaught of changes the COVID‐19 pandemic has on the lives of academics continues to unfold and its impact on work and family circumstances continues to be explored (Collins et al., 2020; Stephens et al., 2020). Research (Clemons & Robinson, 2021; Stephens et al., 2020) emerged during the first 10 months of the pandemic to examine the longevity of the global pandemic and the subsequent uncertainty that academics faced; yet, the pandemic continues to impact academics within our homes and our relationships with our universities. As academics, we struggle with making decisions regarding our teaching and managing our students’ needs; as moms, we struggle to find the balance between our children, our maternal responsibilities, and self‐care.…”