100+ Camosun Stories!

contributed by Martha McAlister and Pat Parker

In honour of Emily Schudel’s 100^th Faculty Story, Pat Parker and I decided to ‘interview the interviewer’ to find out how the project has evolved over time, and what stands out from the years of collecting these incredible stories.

Q: Why did you start writing these stories? A: “Picture the year 2020. It’s the fall, and everyone has moved online for teaching. We finally are coming out of the worst part of the pandemic pivot, and we are still working flat out with faculty to help them teach and support their students online. I’m hearing all these stories of faculty and their struggles, and they’re doing amazing things, working so hard to support students. I started wondering, why aren’t we capturing this? How do people find out what everybody’s doing? Because it was crazy amazing what people were doing in spite of being really stressed out about everything going on. So, I decided to start capturing their stories… and I had no idea what was going to happen… I just felt it was really important to capture the stories of people who were doing this work under really horrible conditions, and not – as far as I could see – being recognized in a larger sense.” Over time, this has become an SD project for Emily.

Q: How has it evolved over time? A: “The focus has changed. As faculty started coming back to campus, the question about how you are adapting to a new environment became less relevant, and I shifted to asking – what are you taking from that experience and bringing forward into your teaching now? Because it was clear that people had learned lessons. Lately the questions seem to revolve more around how they are supporting students with EDI, UDL, challenging behaviours, or a specific focus based on that person’s area of interest… like trauma-informed teaching or team-based learning.”

In the beginning Emily was picking people she knew, and trying to get people to volunteer. Now with the Teacher Recognition Awards, the Open Education Awards, and the Accessibility Certificates, she contacts everyone who was recognized each year and asks if she can interview them. But every once in a while, someone will reach out to her to say “hey, you need to talk to so-and-so because they are doing something really amazing”.

Q: How do you think the process of being involved with these stories has impacted you and the people you’ve interviewed? A: A comment Emily has heard a lot from people she has interviewed, especially during Covid, was how nice it was to have someone listen to them and to have a chance to share what they were going through. At that time people were really struggling, feeling so isolated, and often felt imposter syndrome – like they were failing. It’s a bit different now, but people are still eager to share. They’re starting to get to know Emily and trust her with their stories. In addition, she says that the interviews have improved her skill as a listener. “I’m very conscious it’s not my story and I want to honour what’s in their story. I try not to miss anything important and want to be respectful. But sometimes they’ll say ‘don’t include that in the story!’ I tell them upfront what will be shared, and they get to edit the whole thing before anything goes out… Everyone’s been really generous!”

Some people easily talk for long stretches and others need to be drawn out more, but a common thread for almost everybody is they will start off the conversation saying “I don’t know if I have anything interesting to say…” and Emily will say “Let’s just see where things go…” There’s always a nugget and she always know when she’s hit it because “that’s when they can’t top talking. Because they really get excited about what they’re doing.”  Emily has benefitted by being an ear to the ground, and being able to know a bit more about what’s going on across the college, helping to cross-pollinate ideas and connect people together.

In the beginning, she talked to people who were very reticent to do anything online but after Covid, everyone was doing more with D2L. “Some of it was still pretty small, and some people really wanted to get back to the classroom which wasn’t a surprise, but every single person I talked to had kept something. Even the people who were adamant that they didn’t want anything to do with D2L at all. It wasn’t just because students were asking for it, but because they recognized it had value. It was fun to watch that transition.”

Emily was able to see wider patterns and how transformational things were during the Covid time. And it wasn’t just about D2L.  “Faculty also said things like: ‘I now realize what it’s like for my students when they come into my class and they don’t know what they’re doing.’ That pivot online was a great equalizer. A lot of faculty now tell me that they learned to be more flexible in their teaching, assessments, and deadlines. It really opened their eyes and helped them recognize that students have lives, and have challenges. One person said ‘I saw into their lives.’ It gave them a lot more empathy.”

Unfortunately, Generative AI has started to erode some of the flexibility that was gained during that time, though many instructors are exploring how to mitigate that fear, while recognizing it is a lot of work. Emily wants to share these stories, hoping someone else will read them and realize maybe they can do something differently.

Q: Where do you see this going from here? What’s next? A: Emily definitely wants to keep doing these stories. She’s working now on putting something together that is a bit more interactive. She’s collecting stories for the deans to make sure they are aware of the recognition faculty within their schools have been receiving – including the Faculty Stories, Teacher Recognition and Open Ed Awards, etc. She sees this might be valuable particularly with the college’s restructuring, because deans will have different faculty and this could be a way for them to get to know some of them. Maybe this might help that transition a little bit.

Emily has interviewed faculty from every school and department across the college and also some CUPE employees and college leaders. She’s learned through these stories that many of Camosun’s services have completely changed their approach to student support since Covid. And she’s had the most fun with group interviews, where it ends up being a deeper a conversation, so she’d like to do more of those as well.

One of the big rewards for Emily in the end, is when she hears back from people who have read one of the stories and want to know more. While she doesn’t really know how much the stories are being read, she sees some of the connections that are being made. For example, people on the BC Teaching and Learning Council have given her positive feedback, she has presented about the Stories Project at an ETUG conference (Educational Technology User Group) and apparently, even Camosun’s Board of Governors has read them!

But it is not just the 100+ stories that Emily has written. She has also written a number of Open Education stories, which sprang out of the Open Sustainability project funded by BCcampus, and now is writing stories based on the Zero Textbook Cost metrics she has gathered for the Strat Plan. She’s very adamant that it is not the metrics that are most important and impactful, but the stories. She has other ideas for stories, such as how to create communities and mutually support each other within the schools, but doesn’t want to reveal it all here just yet, so stay tuned!

She ended by saying she could talk all day about this, but that she’s really surprised she had anything to say!