A Wider Web of Care

Covid and Radical Collegiality

My husband has slept on the couch since Tuesday. I suggest that it would make for a better story if we were having a really extended fight. He smiles at me with his eyes, the rest of his face covered with a mask. He’s the last man standing, striving to keep at bay what took me out for the count at the start of the week. Our seven year-old tested positive two days later. Frankie and I have spent much time since Tuesday comforting each other with covid-covered hugs while Clifford hangs out in another room with the cat.

These were supposed to be the last glorious days of my secondary school teaching career. I had great ambitions of writing a Good Enough this week that would showcase in some culminatory way all that had grown from 20 years of educational caregiving and receiving. I already had tree of life metaphors and garden images bookmarked on my laptop. Instead, this concluding chapter of my school year has ended with nary a green leaf in sight. I am working really hard over here to find a reframing angle to help me see things more positively, but the struggle is real!

Caregiving as an educator means helping others through their struggles. It’s just part of the gig. For five years I taught in Humber College’s SWAC program where I spent my days helping capable but struggling students to recover missing high school credits in the hopes that they would be inspired to give post-secondary a try. The program was two things at once: closure and a fresh start. In that same program I also supported the college professors who were tasked with introducing post-secondary school life to these students. To me the young profs responded a little like the students did to them - with wariness. I was a not-quite colleague, an outsider looking in. In my efforts to build rapport, I did lots of reading and stumbled upon the term “radical collegiality.” As defined by Michael Fielding, this idea is made up of three components: teachers learning with and from each other, the mutuality of learning between the teacher and the student, and finally those in education embracing what is offered by parents and other members of the community. Everyone’s struggle in the SWAC program was real and we all needed a balance of closure, fresh starts and some seriously radical care to make it through.

This week I found myself returning to those Humber College memories and some of what I learned from them. I remember clearly taking this picture on a walk around the Humber arboretum, in awe that a Blue Heron would deign to land in the middle of (an albeit large) garden in Rexdale! If I had the eyes to see something striking and new in that space, can I not use a similar insight and apply it to my struggle now?

Here’s my attempt:

Catching covid right before the last week of school has forced upon me a closure that I was still building up to. But it has also carved out some space for a fresh start. And in the midst of both, an opening and closing, radical collegiality has been extended - in the form of supportive texts sent by school colleagues, in emails I’ve received from concerned students, and even surprising moments of care shown by neighbours. A radically collegial connection to a wider web of care has proffered me a new way of seeing potential in the world. Beyond the classroom who will be my colleagues? What will caregiving and receiving look like in my new reality? Beyond the classroom the learning continues.