Friday Fragments, March 12th
A reflection on the pandemic-anniversary, enrollments, multilingual learners, and who can really "cure" burnout.
What I’m reading…
It’s been a year. And, it’s been a year. Cate Denial has a lovely post this week, A Breath, on how to mark this pandemic anniversary.
Spring enrollments are down about 4.5% across the country (9.5% at community colleges) A New Term, the Same Enrollment Losses
I attended a very interesting talk by Dra. Alyssa Cavazos, Examining Linguistic Bias: Building Linguistically Inclusive Spaces for Teaching and Learning; her paper, Encouraging Languages Other than English in First-Year Writing Courses: Experiences from Linguistically Diverse Writers, focuses on the experiences of multilingual learners in first-year composition classes.
Only Your Boss Can Cure Your Burnout makes a simple argument about who has the power to end employees’ feeling of being burned out, and outlines six essential reasons why we feel burnt out:
Workload—having way too much to do.
Autonomy—how much control we have over our work.
Recognition—a lack of recognition or reward for our work.
Culture—is your workplace more like a community or a viper pit.
Fairness—whether policies and practices are administered fairly.
Meaning—work that doesn’t create meaning or value can lead to burnout.
Rather than article after article suggesting more or better “self-care,” the author argues that the answer is both simple and hard to do:
Place fewer demands on people, give them more control over how to handle those demands, and provide support to handle them. All three are within your boss’s power.
Burnout is a topic I’ve address before - encouraging colleagues to set healthy boundaries while feeling frustrated with the many articles about self-care (even back in August) that just seem to miss the mark. I continue to be very concerned, not just looking at where we in higher ed are right now, but looking ahead to what the fall semester might look like. The work instructors will potentially be asked to do for the second summer in a row, to be ready for two or more different and as-yet-undecided course modalities, is daunting.