Tag Archives: workplace

grieving

Caregiving and Being Unprofessional

My husband has a major surgery this morning. The surgery itself is scary and the recovery will be long and painful. He needs this surgery because of a brain infection. We are not looking forward to it and we’re not sure how long and how painful the recovery will be, only that it will certainly be longer and more painful that we would like.

Being my husband’s caregiver often requires me to live with uncertainty and uncomfortable feelings. The uncertainty makes it difficult to plan for the future—even next week—which can impact my ability to meet deadlines or show up to meetings. The uncomfortable feelings can make me impatient, irritable, unfocused, and weepy.

The person I’ve just described—someone who can’t meet deadlines, cancels meetings at the last minute, and is impatient, irritable, unfocused, and weepy—sounds like a terrible employee or student, don’t they? The very definition of “unprofessional.”

When I’ve had employees or students who exhibited these traits, I’ve sometimes thought that they need to develop time management skills, or they need more accountability, or they need to learn how to manage their emotions. Now that I’m the person in question, I can see that while these assumptions seem reasonable, they are completely off base. My time management skills are great and I have plenty of accountability. I think the emotions I’m experiencing are completely normal given the circumstances. There is nothing “wrong” with me. I don’t need more or different strategies; the fact is, I am living in a difficult situation and struggling with it is normal and healthy.

My assumptions about what causes “unprofessional” behavior were not just inaccurate, but they sometimes kept me from being the faculty member or supervisor I want to be. I thought, “Well, I’m not going to put in more effort than they are. If they don’t care about the assignment, I’m not going to knock myself out giving detailed feedback.” I was sometimes dismissive or less invested in their success.

As a professor and supervisor, I want to more consistently do the following:

  1. Ask the person in question what is behind the behaviors I’m seeing rather than assuming it is laziness, lack of discipline, disengagement, unprofessionalism, and all the other negative traits that I now see are euphemisms for “someone who has a complicated life that I don’t understand and actually have no right to the details of.” And if they don’t want to talk about it, accept that it’s really none of my business.
  2. Put my energy into supporting the person rather than devising “appropriate consequences.”
  3. Find ways to maintain boundaries around my own time, energy, and other resources that don’t hinge on assumptions about what drives the behavior of others.
grieving

Thinking About the Needs of Disabled Folks in Classrooms & Workplaces

As someone who teaches rhetoric, I am always noticing how the ways we talk about something shape the ways we think about that thing. I recently discovered The Squeaky Wheelchair, the blog of Kathleen Downes, a woman with cerebral palsy, and found myself nodding emphatically to every sentence of her post “It’s Your Job Too: Dismantling the Myth of Specialness and Making Inclusion a Community Responsibility,” in which she argues against using the word “special” to describe the needs of disabled people.

Downes notes that

Calling our needs special isolates them from the rest of human needs, and in the process shrouds them from the body of general knowledge. When needs become special, they are tucked away in special departments run by special people who specialize in specialness. Disability becomes its own hidden corner of the universe as it is implied that only those with a related job or a family member with a disability should ever bother to explore the issues that come with living a disabled existence. The responsibility to learn about and be aware of our lives is seemingly confined to the world of specialists and people who “have experience with those kind of people.”

https://www.thesqueakywheelchairblog.com/2014/10/its-your-job-too-dismantling-myth-of.html

She goes on to explain that the needs of disabled people are not “particularly special . . . We need to eat, sleep, get dressed, bathe, go to the bathroom, breathe, and a whole bunch of other painfully ordinary things.” As both a disabled person and the caregiver of a disabled person, I can attest that it’s true: our needs are pretty mundane. Most of our needs can be met by almost anyone. For example, I’ve written before about how one of my needs is to have someone read a hotel room number to me—no special training needed, no special skills, nothing special at all.

In academia, we adapt things for able-bodied people all the time. My faculty colleagues often brag in their retention, tenure, and promotion applications about how willing and even enthusiastic they are about meeting the needs of a diverse group of students. But those same colleagues can also often be heard complaining about the “special needs” of students registered with our disabilities services center. When faculty think of students having diverse needs, they take pride in meeting those needs. But when they think of students as having “special needs,” suddenly those needs become above our paygrade.

The truth is, the needs of those students are often the same needs of any other student: being able to read the slides or the assigned reading, being able to hear the professor and peers, being able to sit comfortably in the classroom, having enough time to process instructions and follow them. The needs themselves are not special, and even the ways those needs can be met are not special. Switching from a low contrast to a high contrast slide template isn’t special. Giving everyone in the class two hours to take an exam instead of one isn’t special (your class is only 75 minutes long? Then put fewer questions on the exam).

When I informally polled a class in fall 2019 (pre-pandemic) about their ideal testing situation, more time, a distraction-free environment, and no fluorescent lighting were the top three requests of the students, regardless of disability status. The only request on this list that was the least bit surprising to me is the one about lighting, and I realized that I could easily make a fluorescent lighting-free environment available to my students by making all exams take-home (this is hypothetical—I don’t actually give exams in my classes), allowing students to take the exam outside, at the library, at home, etc. Although these requests are not at all strange or exotic, think about how differently these two sentences strike you:

  • “Susan needs extra time on tests, a distraction-free testing environment, and no fluorescent lighting.”
  •  “Susan has several special needs: extra time on tests, a distraction-free testing environment, and no fluorescent lighting.”

Susan sounds like a fairly typical student in the first sentence, but in the second sentence, she sure sounds high maintenance, doesn’t she? Simply by calling needs “special,” they become more exotic, more inconvenient to provide, and potentially even unreasonable.

We could play further with the sentence. What about this one?

  • “Susan performs best with extra time on tests, a distraction-free testing environment, and no fluorescent lighting.”

Now Susan sounds pretty unremarkable.  

You may be thinking, well, none of this matters much for me, I don’t work with disabled students or colleagues (or students/colleagues with “special needs”). Not so fast. Because of issues I’ve recently discussed, including how exhausting it can be to ask for accommodations and how expensive, difficult, and time-consuming it can be to get documentation of disabilities, you likely have more disabled students in your classes or colleagues in your workplace than you realize. Why wouldn’t you want everyone to be able to perform at their best?

Downes argues that because of the way we talk about (and thus think about) the needs of disabled people as “special,”

the responsibility of people outside of the direct disability community to include and think seriously about access issues is shifted away based on the belief that “special services” will deal with it.

https://www.thesqueakywheelchairblog.com/2014/10/its-your-job-too-dismantling-myth-of.html

But it is actually everyone’s responsibility. And it isn’t difficult most of the time. The suggestions I’ve offered for making classrooms and workplaces accessible aren’t hard to put in place or particularly “special.” For many people, implementing my suggestions simply means being deliberate about things you may already be doing. My suggestions aren’t that you do anything “special” for “special” people with “special” needs, but that you think about making your classroom or workplace accessible. Not special, but accessible. Or even inviting, or responsive. Play with words you like until you find one that resonates with you and your teaching practice and then aim to make your classroom [whatever that word is].

grieving

8 Things You Can Do to Make Your Workplace or Class More Accessible

Because disability is not stable, making a workplace or a classroom accessible is not a “one and done” endeavor. The concept of “accommodations” certainly implies that accessibility is about making one or two tweaks to an environment and then moving on, but that idea is based on an ableist idea of disability as stable.

Here are some specific actions you can take to make a workplace or classroom more accessible:

  1. Regularly give people the opportunity to tell you how you can make the workplace/classroom more accessible. Ask everyone, not just the folks you know are disabled. This is for a couple of reasons: first, people with disabilities may not have disclosed them to you for many reasons (I’ll write more about this at some point, but for now, you can check out this), and second, disability isn’t stable, so even if you’ve had this conversation before, the accommodations you may have in place may not be the ones a person needs now. People without disabilities also benefit from these regular conversations, as many of the so-called accommodations for disabled people actually make a space or experience more accessible for everyone. For example, although my hearing is fine, I often find subtitles helpful for when I space out for a moment during a film, my dogs are barking during a critical moment, or I am hearing an accent unfamiliar to me.  
  2. If you use a form for people to RSVP to events, include a question about what you can do to make the event accessible to the person RSVPing. Again, this will benefit everything attending. When I’ve asked this question, I’ve often received great ideas about how to improve the event that go way beyond accommodating for disability, such as ways to make introverts feel more comfortable speaking to the group—or even better, ways to respect introverts’ desire to not have to speak to the group.
  3. If you meet with students or employees individually on a regular basis, build into your meetings a question about what you can do to make the workplace or classroom more accessible to them. Again, this will benefit everyone, not just the folks with disabilities.
  4. When people do ask for an accommodation, don’t ask why they need it or if they really need it. Don’t ask if they’ve tried that thing you read about last week or the thing a friend of yours tried that was super helpful. Just do your best to offer the accommodation. If you can’t provide the accommodation yourself, reach out to HR or the disabilities services center for help.
  5. Don’t worry about the name of the disability being accommodated for. If someone says they need wide and clear walkways but they appear able-bodied to you, don’t worry about it. If someone says they need large print handouts but they appear to you to have normal vision, don’t worry about it. For one thing, no one is required to tell you what their disability is. For another, disabilities occur on a spectrum and your ideas about what a mobility challenge looks like may be based on faulty assumptions.
  6. If you think you can’t provide the accommodation, see if you actually can. For example, my students last semester asked for a break during our 75 minute class. I typically run out of time in my classes, so the idea of giving up even 5 minutes “to do nothing” felt impossible. But I tried it. And guess what? With the break, folks were more engaged and we got just as much done. Yes, people came back late from the break sometimes. It was messy. But you know what? It was messy without the break, too, only I didn’t know it because it wasn’t messy for me. But my goal as a teacher is to make things less messy for learners, not for me.
  7. Recognize that folks may have a hard time identifying what they need for accessibility. As I said in my last post, I found myself struggling to identify what my daughter needed most of the time she was in high school, regularly asking for what would have helped in the last situation rather than in the current situation. It can be helpful to adopt a spirit of problem-solving or trial-and-error.
  8.  Model identifying and asking for the support you need so that folks who don’t know how to do it can learn. Talk explicitly about how you have asked for changes to be made in workplaces or classrooms. This provides guidance for other folks and also normalizes asking for support. Whether or not you are disabled, you have probably at some point asked a boss, colleague, professor, or classmate to do something differently to make success more possible for you—talk about it. You might talk about how you asked someone to reschedule a meeting for a time when you are more alert, or how you requested that the IT department deviate from the standard issue software or laptop to make your computer better suited to you, or the time you suggested a different timeline for a project to avoid being stretched too thin.

All of these suggestions boil down to acknowledging that one-size-does-not-fit-all, inviting feedback, and then trying to act on the feedback. Ideally, you are a professor or workplace supervisor because you want people to succeed, so having these conversations about what folks need to attain success should align well already with what you’re doing.

grieving

Specific Actions to Change the Way Caregiving is Understood in (Academic) Workplaces

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I was both heartened and saddened by the responses I received to my last post on being a caregiver in academia. Many fellow academics and plenty of folks in other fields reached out to me to say that they, too, are caregivers and they wish that part of themselves didn’t have to be so compartmentalized. With that in mind, this post focuses on specific actions we can take to change the way caregiving is understood in academic (and other) workplaces.

Before I get to those recommendations, however, I want to mention a piece on caregiving that the New York Times published just a few days after my post: “The Costly, Painful, Lonely Burden of Care” by Mara Altman. Altman reports that the economic value of caregiving by family members is upward of $470 billion a year, and the bulk of this work is performed by women. This means that women are more likely to suffer the consequences I mentioned last week—stigmatization and professional isolation—as well as burnout, social isolation, financial consequences, and “negative health impacts.” Altman interviews Kate Washington, author of a new book on burnout, Already Toast: Caregiving and Burnout in America, about these costs. I was particularly struck by a statement Washington made on how the economic value of all the free caregiving provided by mostly women is minimized:

There is a narrative that the caregiving work we do is invaluable and the gift of caring is its own reward, but the flip side of something being priceless is that you paradoxically strip it of all its value. It’s so valuable that we can’t put a monetary price on it, which then takes away the economic worth.

Mara Altman, “The Costly, Painful, Lonely Burden of Care”

Because we live in a neoliberal society, we are conditioned to devalue anything without economic worth. You would think that academics, of all people, because so much of the work we do we do for “free” (all that service!), would be sensitive to this, but no, neoliberalism is in the air we breathe and so we are conditioned to not notice these discrepancies.

Which brings me to those specific actions I want to focus on:

  1. Talk about caregiving in your normal voice. Former First Lady Rosalynn Carter highlighted how normal caregiving is when she said, “There are only four kinds of people in the world: those who have been caregivers, those who are currently caregivers, those who will be caregivers, and those who will need caregivers.” It is very likely that every one of us will be or need a caregiver in our lifetime. In other words, caregiving is normal, not strange or embarrassing or the result of poor choices. Acknowledge caregiving as a valuable activity. If you are not a caregiver, talk about it in your normal indoor voice rather than a hushed one. Every time you talk about caregiving in a hushed voice, you imply that it’s something that should be kept quiet. If you are a caregiver, and if it feels safe to you to do so, talk about caregiving the same way you talk about your other non-work activities. If the only time we mention that we are caregivers is when we need support, the idea that caregivers are needy drains on productivity is reinforced.
  2. Notice and label ableist tendencies that stigmatize caregiving. These tendencies include bragging about not taking leave, shaming folks who do take leave, and assuming that all time that is not accounted for by time-bounded work activities is “available.” When I catch myself doing these things, I find it helpful to identify the assumptions I’m working from and fact check them, so I might say to myself, “Seeing that colleague as lazy for taking so much leave assumes they don’t work hard when they are not on leave. Is that true?”
  3. Connect with others who are caregivers in academia. This is tough because, as I said last week, we don’t talk about caregiving in academia and folks without tenure and others in vulnerable positions may feel the risk involved in making the caregiver part of their identity visible is too much. When those of us who do have job security and other privilege make the caregiver part of our identity visible, we make it easier for others with less privilege to do it. I’ve added the word caregiver to my twitter profile and website tagline to make that part of my identity more visible and make it easier for other caregivers to find me.
  4. Create workplaces that support caregivers. One of the simplest yet most powerful ways to support caregivers is to talk about caregiving. As I said last week, when we don’t talk about caregiving, it becomes harder to talk about caregiving. The opposite of that is also true: when we talk about caregiving, it becomes easier to talk about caregiving. When it’s easier to talk about caregiving, it’s also easier to identify caregivers in the workplace, and it’s easier for them to ask for the support they need. For faculty, one of the most challenging forms of support we need is teaching coverage; when I became a caregiver, a colleague who is herself a caregiver told me she was available to cover my classes if I needed it. When such a program doesn’t exist, the free labor of caregiving leads to the free labor of kind colleagues who are willing to cover classes. All that free labor tends to be women’s free labor. A formal program to make teaching coverage available to those who need it would go a long way toward supporting caregivers and closing an equity gap in academia.