The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics

Jessica Estep

Keywords: pregnancy, childcare, teaching

Categories: Parenting and Possibility in Impossible Times; Teaching as Carework, Teaching as Dangerous Work

“Persons are treated in an ethical manner not only by respecting their decisions and protecting them from harm, but also by making efforts to secure their well-being.” --The Belmont Report: Ethical Principles and Guidelines for the Protections of Human Subjects Research, 1979

In March 2020—a month that needs no introduction—I was seven months pregnant. One evening, my husband and I sat across from each other in our living room tallying our resources: one box of garbage bags, a half-filled jug of bleach, and maybe eight newspapers we could collect on the Sundays before our baby was born. Our midwife had just warned us in a visit-turned-phone-call that if people infected with this new coronavirus filled up the hospitals, high-risk pregnant people might spill over to the birth center, their few birthing rooms quickly overrun. Where would we go? We weren’t sure. So my husband and I decided that if we had to—if we absolutely had no choice—we would deliver our daughter on our own.

That same month, I cobbled together an Institutional Review Board (IRB) proposal to collect my first-year composition students’ final reflective projects, the topic of which I’d hurriedly changed to an open-medium and open-ended question about their new lives as students in a global pandemic. I was determined to capture, archive—and, through a future publication, once the pandemic was over—amplify the voices of these students. I could not allow their heroic, mournful, and anxious reflections to be lost. Their stories needed to be told, and as a feminist researcher, I would do my best to give their stories the space they deserved. I also needed a project to distract me from my own worries. So, during my toddler’s nap time (sometimes the only daytime hours I could work), I propped my laptop on my big belly in my La-Z-Boy chair and emailed back and forth with the IRB Chair.

Receiving expedited IRB approval proved onerous; there were new ethical questions about coercion. In the pandemic circumstances—my four courses all moved online—how could I best obtain permission from my students to access and analyze their writing without pressuring them into it? I couldn’t have a fellow professor enter my classroom, armed with printed informed consent forms, which she could then explain to the class, collect, and lock away from me until final grades were posted. So, how could I keep my students safe from me, and from my own self-interestedness as an academic? If I knew which students had chosen not to participate, the IRB Chair recognized that I could be—inadvertently or intentionally—retaliatory. This is a key function of the IRB: to protect the subjects under study from abuses of power or dynamics of fear. To ensure beneficence and respect for persons.

The IRB Chair finally approved a plan in which I would send out a Qualtrics form that explained the study and sought the students’ signatures, and I would not access the form and view the participants until after final grades were posted. And I’ll be honest, in mid-May 2020, when I finally opened up the survey to see who had signed the forms and decided to participate, I was disappointed. Several students had refused access to their photography, their songs, their poems, and their essays. But, as they had all already received their final course grades, IRB protected them from my disappointment.

A few days later, on May 18, 2020, I gave birth to my second child. My husband and I didn’t have to deliver her at home, though she did burst into the world in two hours and thirty-nine minutes—and subsequently struggled to take her first breath. I was glad to be surrounded by capable midwives, one of whom reached for the aspirator. That was a thing we did not have at our house.

Like most of us, I thought for sure the pandemic would wane by the time my daughter was born, or not too long after. Certainly by the winter holidays in 2020. Certainly by her first birthday. Now I look at her and think, “I guess this is about how old the pandemic is.” She is a pink-cheeked and giggly toddler, big enough to run after her brother in our kitchen, to tackle his waist in a hug.

And since her birth, I’ve done almost nothing with the archive of student writing: compositions from March and April 2020 that give us a glimpse into the frightened—but unified and determined—people we once were. There is, of course, the burden of childcare that has stretched on for two years; my four-year-old and one-year-old’s school closes intermittently, without warning, for Covid cases, and we have to isolate ourselves for days from grocery stores, playgrounds, friends, and family. And somehow work outside the home, too. But when I do have time to sit and write, it is hard for me to even look at my students’ musings from that period. I don’t know what conclusions to draw from the texts. The uncertainty present in March 2020 still exists for many of us, but the sense of unity from that early pandemic period has largely been replaced by apathy.

I walk into a classroom now, in January of 2022, and I am vaccinated—but my children are not. They are not eligible, though every other person is. My daughter is too young to even wear a mask. The statistics tell me most of my students are not vaccinated either, though I’m not allowed to ask. The Omicron variant is raging, following the much scarier storm that was the Delta variant; cases are higher than they have ever been before. In public colleges in Georgia, where I teach, vaccines are “encouraged.” Masks are “encouraged.” Colleagues flippantly say that everyone who wants to be vaccinated is, so we should just move on already. For six months now, I have watched students file into my classes without masks, despite my requests, my encouragement; and all I can see are my unvaccinated children. I have shown my students pictures of my children. I have tried to tell their stories. I have been ignored. When a college system embraces policies that are detrimental to me and my family, and when students choose to act in ways that could be detrimental—it is hard not to feel like I am teaching in an environment drained of respect.

Perhaps we as writing professors bear some responsibility for helping create this environment in the academy; though we teach our students in first-year composition how to string ideas together into good sentences, we rarely take the time to introduce them to the ethical framework of this world they have entered. Nearly two years after my last IRB submission, trying to teach these ethical frameworks feels insincere, if not downright phony, when the health and safety of another person has been cast as their problem, and not mine or yours, and when many professors feel vulnerable and voiceless. But I believe we are still obligated to try. It is our responsibility to ensure our students understand the pillars of ethical knowledge-making: how the concepts of do not harm and respect for persons were created to guard us from our own self-interest and cruelty and to force us to regard the humanity in every person.

Sometimes I wish I could return to the world that is archived in my students’ writing in March of 2020. I wish I could tell myself that my daughter was born safely, no trash bags necessary, into a society that became better for having faced this great social trauma together. I wish I could tell her that I am stronger and more resilient as her mother, as a teacher, as a human being. But the truth is that the powerlessness I felt upon realizing my husband might be the only person available to help me deliver a baby has never really abated. Maybe that is why it is so hard for me to open that archive of student writing, because I am just exhausted. My singular focus has been protecting my two small children for almost two years now.

Soon they will be eligible for a vaccine, I know. Maybe the pandemic will become endemic and less virulent. Maybe Covid will evaporate altogether—wouldn’t that be nice? But no matter what, the knowledge will remain that we chose not to protect each other when we could, and that knowledge will hurt. Would masks or vaccine mandates or tenure or paid leave for child care solve every problem? No, though these things would help tremendously—but so would an ongoing, and unmandated, commitment to mutual respect and a shared ethos of care. We should expect the academy to be both a safe and principled place to teach and learn—and we should try our best to treat it as though it is one, until it is one.

Bio

Jessica Estep, Ph.D., is an associate professor of English at Georgia Gwinnett College, and a mother of two.