Educators reflect in 2021 on the "triple pandemic" in higher education: COVID-19, racial injustice, and crises in higher education

Download your copy of On the Vocation of the Educator in This Moment

 This book captures a specific moment in time as educators across the country and around the world were called to rethink their pedagogical strategies and vocations. We were, and still are, caught in at least three crises: a global pandemic that upended education as we know it, heightened awareness about racial injustices that motivated people to take to the streets in protest, and crises in higher education that have been building for some time but have now erupted. This moment, of course, started in the spring of 2020 and still reverberates today. 

In the early winter of 2021, dozens of educators of all kinds across Marquette University’s campus accepted an invitation from the Center for Teaching and Learning to reflect on this moment from their own perspectives, expertise, and experiences. This book is the result of their work in the spring of 2021. Here, educators in diverse departments and from distinct vantage points write in their own voices about the trinity of crises facing education. Some chapters are deeply personal; some are academic in tone; some are interrogative in nature. All are written with great heart and a desire to make some sense of this moment now. 

This volume is also a call to all educators and the institutions that house them to enter into this new vocational moment. Educators, administrators, staff, and students are called to be still, be engaged, be transformed, be connected, and be Ignatian. As etched in these pages, being called in these ways requires great humility and heart, compassion and strength, trust and forgiveness—not so that we can return to “normal,” but instead so that we can continue to carve out new meaningful paths not only with students, but also with each other. 

 

Contributors: Noel S. Adams, Kim Jensen Bohat, Louise Cainkar, Mary Carlson, Sumana Chattopadhyay, Dinorah Cortés-Vélez, Alexandra Crampton, Scott Dale, Michael Dante, Deirdre Dempsey, Megan Heeder, Jennifer Henery, Erin Hoekstra, Thomas Kaczmarek, Marcella Kearns, Conor M. Kelly, Laurieann Klockow, Gary P. Klump,/ Jon Metz, Leatha Miles-Edmonson, Danielle Nussberger, Caroline Oas, Michelle A. Rodrigues, Karen Ross, Melissa Shew, Lynne Shumow, Theresa Tobin, Sarah Wadsworth, Mahmood Watkins, Marisola Xhelili