Redefining Resilience: A Critical Examination of Minoritized Faculty’s Pedagogical Response to Student Needs Amidst the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

In this chapter, we provide a critical reflection of our pedagogy and university service during the COVID-19 pandemic as three faculty of East Asian heritage. Although our collaboration highlighted here occurred during the pandemic, there are relevant implications for the flourishing of minoritized faculty that extend beyond this period. During this time, our students experienced compounded stress based on their social locations while they navigated a digital campus and resurgence of racism. In response, we applied our expertise as clinical and counseling psychologists of color to dismantle barriers that impede the health and wellness of our students. Examples include sharing written statements with students, collating resources to fight against anti-Asian racism, facilitating virtual listening groups, mentoring students on their authentic responses against social injustices, and facilitating a mindfulness-based course. We assert that these efforts as minoritized faculty were simultaneously sources of stress and ways of coping during a tumultuous time. As faculty co-create a caring community with students, they require such a community themselves. There are limitations to an ethics of care that presuppose faculty to possess limitless resources or to remain immutable to their life stressors based on their social positions. As such, we reflect on an ethics of care for ourselves as faculty of color while counting the cost of our affective, and often invisible, labor.