I want to try writing some analysis of our Audio for Inclusion audio narratives to prepare for a journal paper. The two lenses by which I will be commenting are: 1) the figured worlds (or cultural worlds / social worlds) that students experience (and that faculty may not see or misunderstand) and 2) the critique and critical narrativization students employ when telling these stories (that provide feedback or reframing useful for faculty).
Srihari identifies her major salient identities as immigration or international status, mental health, and disability. She mentions how mental health is both particularly important to her and important for all students, indicating some of the relative spectrum and continuation that these identities exist on, and the more discrete way we each either do or do not identify. Srihari has epliepsy / seizures that are triggered by stress, but the stress was more minor when she lived back home (outside of the US). She identifies living in the US as increasing her stress and symptoms, in part because of her difficulties getting appropriate medical care and support in the US. In line with thinking in terms of the theory of intersectionality, Srihari’s description of her experience highlights how her experience as immigrant / international, mental health / stressed, and experiencing a medical condition / disability (epilepsy) are all more challenging and more unique than simply the sum of the parts. Her mental health is made more challenging due to her lack of medical care and support due to being an immigrant / international; this stress in turn triggers her medical condition more.
While she identifies having friends nearby, having her “actual family” far away during this time of need is more challenging. Her parents suggested she come home during Covid so she could concentrate on her studies while they took care of her. While Covid created new stresses for many (likely including Srihari), it also opened up Srihari’s thinking about how to handle the otherwise ordinary life stresses of in person schooling in a country far from home. These shifts in our thinking about our own context help show how the worlds students and faculty inhabit are “figured” and open to interpretation and reinterpretation and reconfiguration, creating different arrangements for students’ identities and support.
[1:25] As Srihari points out, “every school has an international center, but international students need more resources.” She draws out more of the confluence of circumstances at the intersection of international status and mental health or medical concerns: when asked to get a physicians note, being told that the student-accessible school health center is not an acceptable physician’s note. She notes this as a prominent part of her critical feedback, suggesting this puts international students in a difficult and irreconcilable position while they are sick and alone, and suggesting that having contacts around who can help is one way of ameliorating the challenges. Providing lists of acceptable providers who will accept international students’ insurance and can provide basic and specialized care. You can sense Srihari’s disappointment at the answer to “we don’t have [a neurologist]”: “That’s not the response I want!” While other participants were sometimes reluctant to reimagine the world and would sometimes see things as just the way they are, Srihari’s insight and resistance to an unfair system is a resource to those looking to make improvements. “I want, ok, come over, we’ll see what we can do to help.”
[2:35] Srihari then shifts into the figured world of the engineering classroom and engaging engineering professors. She finds her medical and mental health situation a lot to explain to professors because “they wouldn’t see the causes.” She goes on to explain situations of an unreliable partner and extensions and felt dishonest because she was put in the position of asking for the extension / accommodation on behalf of a team when she was not the one who needed it / was not the one behind on her work. Srihari brings up important aspects of what is in view and understood by professors and what is not– even in situations where the professor is accommodating and helpful she can find herself stressed (“feel…not great”) by a peer interaction and team situation that is dishonest. Her language “just can’t take advantage of people like that” makes clear her critique of her peers as well, even though she has not generated a particular alternative at this time. She highlights the invisible nature of many disabilities (discusses people judging people for using handicap parking spaces) and how many people don’t understand disabilities.
A second challenge Srihari brings up was a student who plagiarized on a group assignment and she received an F on the assignment because her name was on it (“which was really unfair”). This student perspective does add interesting nuance to a situation faculty often encounter from their own perspective– faculty may presume that because all student names are on the assignment all students were equally knowledgeable and even complicit within any acts of plagiarism or academic dishonesty. For various reasons this may not be the case. Here we can imagine engaging the student perspective and the realities of the classroom to brainstorm new systems that could make sense to both students and faculty.
(As an aside, this is a reason as a faculty I run plagiarism checkers on student draft work so that whatever issues we may have we can work out in a fairly minor assignment and they receive feedback that plagiarism is unacceptable before turning in their final. If all teammates become alerted to the plagiarism and still ignore it, I then would see any consequences as “fair.” This strategy sort of comes from my own prior thinking about cultural construction of disability / failure– if you can remove the situations and structures that are consistently creating failure, dishonesty, and other undesirable relative social identities, and if you can scaffold students towards honesty, success, growth, etc., you can have more people within your system avoid overly negative consequences.)
She finds “guilty until proven innocent” the most “backwards system” and notes the messages sent by the Honor Court and the faculty’s communication as causing undue stress. She notes how having anxiety and stress on top of the communication ends up triggering her other medical symptoms further. She felt like “at that point we had no support” — she could call her parents but they were so far away, perhaps feeling a disconnect by time and distance, but perhaps also the cultural and social distance they have from the figured worlds of the US school systems. She mentions legal help and advice as a possible need at this time but not easy to get. She also mentions her parents losing sleep over the situation, clearly a mutual worry and stress– she is worried that they are worried and vice versa.
Srihari also remembers a professor who said he reported 60% of 800 students for cheating, which she finds “not really great.” She points out that if you think that many students cheated maybe “the assignment was to hard or you didn’t teach them well enough” etc. That is, Srihari reframes the individual problem of cheating as a structural problem with the course and expectations. While a professor could see Srihari’s complaints as unfounded, cheating is cheating and even if 60% of students do it it needs to be addressed, we can also see in Srihari’s perspective a productive critique that could lead towards course reforms.
Srihari mentions in accommodation policies professors usually suggest 24 hour notice, but this doesn’t work for her accommodation / disability. Her seizures can come on suddenly and without warning. This is another helpful reframe of the world of the student– the professor reasonably is busy and wants a policy where the student needs to give a heads up in order to receive help or accommodation, but the students’ reality is different. Given the somewhat impersonal nature of communication in the engineering academic setting, you can imagine these messages are given in syllabus only, that Srihari is carefully parsing the words to adhere to policies that affect her a lot, and that a professor may not be trying to create undue stress or marginalization on Srihari but that she is stressed that her situation will not fit in with the policy. Perhaps a feature of the figured world of engineering education is this somewhat stilted conversation, and a feature of being a marginalized person within any figured world is to look for and be concerned with the messages delivered, even subtle / implicit / unintended ones.
Srihari mentions another challenging team situation where her partner was not turning in their part on time and she asked for an extension, but the professor didn’t reply until a week later. She didn’t get the extension. This situation changed how she felt going to that professor for help or for anything, she felt uncomfortable. Although we don’t know what the emails said or what the professor may have been juggling at that time, we can imagine the professor perhaps reasonably being behind on emails and perhaps not wanting to grant extensions on group projects at the last minute. But we can hear in Srihari’s recounting (“i’m losing it”) that there was a lot of stress and essentially a cry for help in this moment and her perception that the faculty did not care made her write this professor off as a source of support. Srihari herself points out how prominent this feeling was “I’m not sure I want to go to a professor who won’t respond to my requests until a week later.” Nevertheless, “[she] still did” go to the faculty member for support and she’s glad because she thinks “their relationship got better because of it.” We can imagine this story playing out the opposite way, a professor missing an email and not granting an extension, the student avoiding the professor at all costs and harboring bad feelings about it, the professor not having a chance to better understand these circumstances and learn how better to support the student. I have a feeling this is the more common situation in the world of engineering education, particularly in large class settings, where personal communication and knowledge are relative limited. In this happy ending, Srihari mentions how she did well in the class and the professor was very accommodating, even including carefully telling her her final course grade cognizant of her travel schedule so it would stress her the least.
[7:42] As advice for faculty, Srihari makes a pitch to try to put yourself in the student’s position. She highlights the prior experiences and asks what if you were the anxious student who receives no communication or troubling communication about cheating without details. “You’re blindsided.” She suggests talking to the student first and try to understand the situation before you take official actions. She summarizes it as “empathize with your students.” We too think that empathy, perspective taking, and communication are probably the root solutions for reconnecting the figured worlds of faculty and students and helping support them and reduce marginalization. When empathy becomes harder and less innate, some active cognitive perspective taking could help, when that is also limited or impossible, direct communication can also help professors realize the student perspective in similar ways to Srihari has shared.
We would highlight that not every student is equally as anxious as Srihari or has the same reactions to emails– some students might ignore an email over a weekend, never read an important email, or not be particularly threatened by the same emails. So professors still have to balance their approaches based on both the average and the individual student, the norms and the exceptions. But keeping in mind the possibilities of student anxieties, and learning about specific student anxieties as you get to know your students, will be a helpful (and more generalizable) approach.
Finally Srihari points out she also had one professor who helped her realize she wanted to keep going because he was so passionate about what he was doing. She encourages other professors to also put their passion into teaching, that the students can see it and feel it.