About this Project

Our goal for this site is to preserve the voices of educators, students, and administrators of the University of Michigan during this crisis through documenting their actions, reactions, statements, and artifacts, to capture the COVID-19 pandemic’s effects on pedagogy at the University of Michigan. 

In the event of a future situation that could drive another rapid, systemic shift in University of Michigan operations (ie, another pandemic, threat to university faculty/staff/students, etc), our hope is that the archived information will provide valuable details on addressing the situation at hand. Through documentation of organizational decision-making and hierarchy, internal and external communications, cross-department coordination (or lack thereof), financial impacts, and other similar responses and outcomes, Administrative Users in future could determine what worked best during the COVID-19 pandemic as well as what did not work well. This information could shape future responses and actions, enhancing University of Michigan responsiveness and effectiveness in providing safe, accessible, and equitable education during times of crisis.

 

Copyright and Permissions

All records contained within this site were obtained through open sources or social media sites such as Twitter or were donated by the original creator with full permission to include in the archive.

Twitter Terms of Service: By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods now known or later developed (for clarity, these rights include, for example, curating, transforming, and translating). This license authorizes us to make your Content available to the rest of the world and to let others do the same.

 

Our Choices

As this is an event unfolding before our eyes, it was challenging to identify relevant artifacts that could be used as records. Our hope is that by identifying and collecting records as they are created and shared publicly we build a picture of perspectives uninfluenced by hindsight bias. In order to find our records, we first searched as broadly as possible to see what existed and was accessible to us. We found a large number of news stories, both local and national, chronicling the pandemic and its effects on schools. We found very little focusing on the pedagogical implications - because this change is ongoing, it seems these studies simply have not been done yet. 

We knew from the beginning it was important to show this information in the format of a timeline as we’re still in the middle of this rapidly evolving event. This conversation very much needed chronological context in order to provide background information on the rapidly evolving progression of this emergency. 

We originally planned to focus on the purely pedagogical effects of the pandemic. We went looking for records on the history of HyFlex postsecondary education, but ultimately decided to focus specifically on UMich pandemic education because the resources were readily available and we found this narrative compelling and valuable for future research.

We pulled out three primary voices: educators, students, and administrators. We originally planned to focus on teachers, parents, and students, but found this positioning inadequate as the focus of our project shifted. Not only did it leave out the official voices of administrators who made many of the large-scale decisions that affected all of the other stakeholders, but the additional focus on parents seemed inaccessible due to our limited timeframe and also secondary to the story that we are trying to tell in this moment. The parent voices may be more appropriately incorporated into future narratives of pandemic education. The switch from thinking of ‘teachers’ to pulling out the voices of educators more generally meant that we could include not just traditionally tenured faculty voices, but also those of Lecturers, Graduate Student Instructors and other important educators who hold important positions of power on campus. Much of the advocacy for increased COVID-19 precautions, transparency, and more protective considerations came from GEO, the graduate students’ union, and similar organizations. 

While the university is not a governmental agency, there are still some expectations of transparency and right to information from faculty and staff, as well as parents and students attending the school. “Transparency is a wider concept that includes making public affairs open to public scrutiny so as to enable citizens to understand the actions of their governments” (Shepherd, 2017, p. 249) which applies also to expectations of university, as evidenced by the Graduate Employees’ Organization strike in 2020 over institutional pandemic response transparency concerns. This is helping guide our ethical decisions and obligation determinations on what to include in our archive.

 

Missing Perspectives and Potential Improvements

If we had the time and ability to expand on this project, we would focus on including additional perspectives.  In particular, the perspectives of various sorts of minoritized students, parents, local businesses, and the local health department are all missing from this archive but very much relevant to this conversation. 

This project would also benefit from additional work in more roundly representing the voices of the populations we covered. For example: official comunications do not represent the views of every administrator, and many educator and student voices are also left out of this repository. We have explained above the necessity to limit our scope for this project, but more time would enable a more full accounting of the conversations depicted here. 

With more time, we would also engage this community in collaboration. One luxury in the very difficult and complex process of contemporary preservation is that these communities are still thriving and, we think, would willingly engage with this project. These community members would provide additional metadata tagging and commentary, additional resources to bolster this limited collection. Eventually, we would love to add longitudinal records to show the impacts to the pandemic and the University of Michigan's responses to it have impacted educational achievements/outcomes. 

 

References

Callo, E., & Yazon, A. (2020). Exploring the factors influencing the readiness of faculty and students on online teaching and learning as an alternative delivery mode for the new normal. Universal Journal of Educational Research, 8(8), 3509-3518. https://doi.org/10.13189/ujer.2020.080826 

Yakel, E., & Bost, L. Understanding Administrative Use and Users in University Archives.The American Archivist 57, no. 4 (September 1, 1994): 596–615.

Garcia, P. (2021, October 20). [Lecture slides on Cultural and Legal Contexts]. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1rXkw4WGNyZ0MP-RYyeKfXD2dGB7y41zgQ1kMiAiRsqw/edit#slide=id.gf9b3e8abab_0_61 

Graduate Employees’ Organization. (2020). GEO’S Demands for A Safe and Just Pandemic Response for All.  https://www.geo3550.org/2020/09/04/geos-demands-for-a-safe-and-just-pandemic-response-for-all/ 

Hirtle, P. B., Hudson, E., & Kenyon, A. T. (2009). Copyright and Cultural Institutions: Guidelines for Digitization for U.S. Libraries, Archives, and Museums. Cornell. https://hdl.handle.net/1813/14142  

Shepherd, E. (2017). Right to Information. In Terry Eastwood and Heather MacNeil, Eds. Currents of Archival Thinking, (2ed, pp. 247-269).

Twitter Terms of Service. (2021). https://twitter.com/en/tos

U.S. Department of Education. Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. (2021). https://www2.ed.gov/policy/gen/guid/fpco/ferpa/index.html