The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics

Sarah E. Polo

Keywords: parenting; insurrection

Categories: Parenting and Possibility in Impossible Times; Arting/Crafting/Making in a Crisis

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, like many parents in academia, I found the spheres of my personal and professional life intersecting at less-than-ideal levels. When my college moved online in March 2020, I was in my second semester as a new assistant professor at a small women’s college. I was teaching four undergraduate courses (three in first-year writing and one in multimodal composing), as well as serving as WPA of the college’s first-year writing seminar program. In an already-challenging first year on the tenure track, I had to abruptly shift my courses to online formats, and I had to do so while at home with my husband and then-two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, whose daycare temporarily closed due to state and local mandates.

In many ways, I was (and still am) in an extremely privileged position. I am a white, cisgender, able-bodied woman in a pre-tenure position. I have a spouse who shares caregiving responsibilities. And, although I didn’t know this would be the case at the time the pandemic began, the virus’s spread has thus far remained relatively limited in our small community. Further, our daycare eventually resumed operations, unlike so many others that closed permanently, and I was able to again have full-time, out-of-the-home childcare by the time the 2020-2021 academic year began.

Even with these many identities and circumstances of privilege, I struggled to balance my work—grading, recording asynchronous videos for my students, attending meetings on Zoom, performing service and research, and carrying out WPA duties—while working in a two-bedroom house with my spouse and toddler. I likewise struggled emotionally and mentally, plagued with worry about the pandemic’s scale, uncertainty about its long-term impacts, and fear for the safety of friends and family.

Within (and maybe even because of) the minor chaos of my home/work situation, the increased carework it brought, and the larger worries running through my mind, I felt strongly compelled to document our family’s pandemic experiences, even in a small way.

Drawing on the encouragement I was giving my multimodal composition students that very semester to experiment or even play with new modes, genres, or forms of composing, I used a new (to me) form of composing to create a sort of archive documenting some of my family’s experience with the COVID-19 pandemic. This entailed the production of six informal videos featuring members of our small household (most often myself or my husband and I, though sometimes also our daughter) talking about how things were going. We recorded four videos in the early days of the pandemic (March, April, and May 2020), one video on January 7th, 2021 (the day after the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol), and a final, reflective video in March of 2021. For two of these videos, I prepared a short list of questions for my husband and I to converse in response to, but the remainder had no advance preparation.

Initially, I opted to call these videos “video logs.” This term seemed more fitting than “vlogs” (video blogs) because, to me, at least, the latter term carried a connotation of public distribution. Rather, the audience I most envisioned for our video logs was our future selves; I imagined my daughter growing up and asking us what the pandemic was like, having been too young herself to remember. I also knew and expected that the passage of time, including the ongoing mental demands of parental carework, would dull my husband’s and my memories. Now, in the summer of 2022, we have just added a new baby daughter to our family, and I envision her also growing up to ask for our perceptions of these particular moments in history. I imagine our video logs as a rhetorical response to that future exigence.

Though my main goal was to document our experiences to aid in future recollection of the pandemic, in many ways, these video logs also turned out to be a more specific record of the highly interconnected nature of carework and writing during the early weeks and months of COVID-19. Video logs were a multimodal genre I experimented and played with in the days of simultaneously working—doing the professional work required by my assistant professor position—and entertaining and helping care for my young child. This simultaneous play, work, and experimental composing occurred in the same physical space the three of us occupied together. Likewise, playfulness and seriousness run concurrent through the video logs themselves. For example, sometimes my husband’s and my highly serious thoughts about what was going on in our community or about the larger public memory of the pandemic were interrupted by our daughter laughing or singing in the video itself or in the background. In the second video log, we paused the recording to answer a phone call from my husband’s parents. On multiple occasions, we paused recording to check on our child’s progress toward sleep. The May 21, 2020 video log was recorded because I had been working on a welcome video for incoming students to my college’s first-year writing program, and my daughter’s interruptions and requests for attention prompted me to pause and make her feel like part of the work I was doing. I began a new recording, played and talked with her on camera, and then let her watch the recording, which delighted her. On this occasion, the video log itself was a way to spend a few moments being together in between my work tasks.

In total, my family’s six video logs comprise over ninety minutes of video. My family and I plan to save these in full. But, with my family’s permission, the following are approximately eight minutes of selected clips from these video logs. Acknowledging Barbara Schneider’s comments in volume 4.1 of the Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics (2019) that curation is both a “material practice” and an “exercise in authority,” I carefully combed the full videos and specifically chose segments that showcased the interconnected nature of writing/working and carework that was going on in my family’s life. I specifically omitted segments that were highly personal or that we were otherwise uncomfortable sharing with the larger public. The result is a series of curated, multimodal snippets of writing and carework, of work and play.

Video Transcript

References

​​Schneider, B. (2019). I am cleaning out my attic. Curation: A Multimodal Practice for Socially-Engaged Action, special issue of The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics, 4(1). http://journalofmultimodalrhetorics.com/4-1-issue-schneider-pryor

Bio

Dr. Sarah E. Polo (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of English at Cottey College, a women’s college in Nevada, Missouri. There she also coordinates Cottey’s First-Year Writing Seminar program. She teaches courses in areas such as first-year writing, professional writing, multimodal composition, writing pedagogy, and archival research. Her research focuses most heavily on histories of Rhetoric and Composition, rhetorical genre studies, and writing program administration.