To Parent in Person and Teach Asynch
by Patricia Akhimie
Editor’s Note: The companion piece on funding and research is available here.
Right now, with two small kids at home, I have an unpredictable schedule (understatement of the year). Until quite recently, I had not spoken to a person on the phone during daylight hours in months because I could not be reached while actively parenting and when I did try to talk on the phone my daughter considered it an act of outright betrayal punishable by immediate screaming. In Zoom meetings when I cannot coordinate with my co-parent, my colleagues have been treated to my son’s non-stop wiggles and indefatigable desire to press buttons and my daughter’s best “nanny nanny boo boo” faces and efforts to violently slam closed the laptop clamshell while I attempt to pry it gently back open again.
I am a good teacher, I like to think, but I’ve learned that I am not that good at teaching my own child. Neither is my spouse, who is also a Rutgers-Newark faculty member. Over the summer of 2020, we ended up doing a mix of worksheets and activities designed by our daughter’s beloved preschool teacher for remote learning (we engaged her in late spring to cook up lesson plans for a modest weekly fee). It was haphazard at best, though I was proud of my makeshift “science and engineering” curriculum in which we built a marshmallow-toothpick house, a small helicopter, a parachute, a zipline, and a working-ish pulley system. When these attempts petered out about midway through the summer, we fell back on educational apps on the iPad. Khan Academy Kids was a huge hit and actually very effective, though I am still feeling shame about the uptick (skyrocket?) in screen time. In truth, we watched a lot of television (mostly the — surprisingly cool — superhero action show Miraculous and the timeless classic Avatar: The Last Airbender).
While I would describe my attempts at homeschooling as something like an epic fail, the Spring 2020 “pivot” — as we have been calling it — from in-person to online teaching was one change that did not feel overwhelming for me. This is likely because I was already teaching online. I began teaching some classes online back in 2016, the year after my daughter was born, as I was finishing up my first monograph and coming up for tenure. I took an online course “Designing Quality Online Courses,” which was offered through my university’s IT office. To my surprise, I found that I really enjoyed designing online courses and teaching online. More to the point, I found that online teaching allowed me to better balance research, writing, teaching, and parenting, a change that would prove invaluable as I raced to finish my book with a toddler in tow.
In my training in online instruction, I was learning to teach in what’s called an asynchronous format, which is to say I provided all of the content, assignments, and assessments online with no live “synchronous” meetings scheduled. While there is certainly plenty of debate about the most effective format for teaching remotely, as well as how to meet the wide variety of students’ needs in online courses in different disciplines, in my own experience asynchronous teaching is highly effective and can be an ideal mode for a faculty parent like myself.
In some ways, I have found asynchronous teaching to be more effective in terms of student engagement and outcomes than classroom teaching, while in others it is less satisfying (but I’ll save that shop talk for another day). What’s important to say here is that asynchronous teaching saved my butt, because, while other industries have found ways to accommodate workers with children during this time with flexible scheduling, in the education industry synchronous teaching silently became the expectation despite the difficulties it presents for both faculty and students working from home and living with, and caring for, family.
Teaching asynchronously is teaching with dignity in my mind. Not only can I present my most professional self, recording my micro-lectures and responding to student work in blessedly uninterrupted moments at whatever time of the day is convenient, but I can also do so with some enthusiasm and joy. I find I can actually devote more time to my teaching prep and to engaging with my students, when I don’t have set teaching times because I can email, video chat, and interact on the course site at frequent but irregular intervals throughout the week.
I have pursued my passion for online teaching by devoting time to thinking about online pedagogy. I completed a Rutgers TLT Certificate program in Online Teaching, and a Quality Matters Peer Reviewer course last year. This year, with gratitude, I am listening to and learning from the seemingly endless workshops various universities, organizations, and ed tech companies have provided, boning up on how to be an even better teacher.
The challenges to professing while parenting and parenting while professing aren’t new, of course, but some of the solutions are. As we continue to face uncertainty in how we teach, I hope that we will see more robust interest, engagement, and support for asynchronous teaching from our institutions and our fields. For those of us who need such flexibility with our teaching, and for our students who need such flexibility in their lives, asynchronous teaching should continue to be a viable option even after we’ve returned to our normal lives, whatever “normal” looks like in a post-pandemic world.
Further Reading
- The Caregivers Survey, administered and analyzed by the Visionary Futures Collective.
- Darby, Flower. “8 Strategies to Prevent Teaching Burnout.” The Chronicle of Higher Education (Jan 13, 2021).
- Kramer, Jillian. “The Virus Moved Female Faculty to the Brink. Will Universities Help?” The New York Times (Oct 6, 2020).
- Magner, Denise K. “The Quick Tip: How to Prevent Teaching Burnout.” The Chronicle of Higher Education (Feb 2, 2021).
- Miller, Claire Cain. “The Primal Scream: Working Moms Are Struggling. Here’s What Would Help.” The New York Times (Feb 4, 2021).
- McMurtrie, Beth. “The Pandemic is Dragging On. Professors Are Burning Out.” The Chronicle of Higher Education (Nov 5, 2020).
- Pettit, Emma. “Covid-19 Has Robbed Faculty Parents of Time for Research. Especially Mothers.” The Chronicle of Higher Education (Jan 25, 2021).
- St. Amour, Madeline. “The Moment Is Primed for Asynchronous Learning.” Inside Higher Ed (Sept 16, 2020).
Patricia Akhimie is “in residence” this year as a 2020–2021 Chancellor’s Scholar with Rutgers University Newark’s professional development center, the P3 Collaboratory, working to build resources for faculty parents and writing the blog series “The Faculty Parent” which chronicles the highs and lows of juggling parenting, research, and writing in uncertain times. She is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark, where she teaches Shakespeare, Renaissance drama, and early modern women’s travel writing. She is the author of Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference: Race and Conduct in the Early Modern World (Routledge 2018). She is co-editor, with Bernadette Andrea of Travel and Travail: Early Modern Women, English Drama, and the Wider World (University of Nebraska Press 2019). She is also the mother of two kids, ages five and one.
