Teaching in a world of bleakness 

An undergraduate student recently shared their desolate perspective on the state of the world with me: “Things are just going to get worse and worse. It won’t stop.” Students have a number of worries these days. They express concerns about themselves and their futures, and also about the future of democracy, human rights, international relations … the list goes on and on. For many students across many disciplines, the world and the future appear bleak.  

How, in this context, can universities be a point of light and hope for them? 

To explore this question, I am joined by Christie Schultz, who researches care and leadership in higher education and currently serves as dean of the Centre for Continuing Education (CCE) at the University of Regina. In this column, Christie and I consider opportunities for instructors to support students through a care-based, relational approach. This column relates thematically to our previous work on emotional labour and academia (“Acknowledging the emotional labour of academic work”; “The skills of care: navigating emotional labour in academia”; and “Leading with care: emotional labour and academic leadership”), and we encourage you to (re)visit those columns as well.  

How instructors can empathize with students 

We encourage instructors to approach students with empathy. This may involve reflecting on one’s own experience. Today’s students are not the only cohort to face challenging times. In recent memory, one can look to the COVID cohort, the 2008-09 recession cohort, and the 9/11 cohort as examples of times of particular student stress and anxiety. For instructors who were themselves students during periods of upheaval, it is possible to think back and recall the feelings of uncertainty. 

At the same time, today’s students are distinct from past cohorts. Many students are now what universities used to call “non-traditional students”: our classrooms include single parents, full-time professionals, neurodiverse students, and individuals from all sociodemographic backgrounds. As Debora L. VanNijnatten writes, “It is not clear that we have fully come to terms with these complex human beings that are our students, and we need to devote time and expend resources in figuring out how to reach them.” Further, and as discussed previously in this column (see “Teach the students you have, not the student you were”), many of today’s students came of age in a period of social media, pandemic lockdowns and growing mental health stress. As they complete their studies, they are challenged to keep up with rapidly changing AI tools and rules and related academic integrity implications.  

Simply put, as instructors seek to empathize with students, it is important to keep in mind that students are likely concerned about things that may not occur to you. Here are some questions that may be causing stress for your students: 

• How do I continue to pay for tuition, food, and rent? The cost of living is high for many students, and students must grapple with issues of food insecurity, high housing costs, and rising tuition rates. As the Canadian economy faces a potential downturn due to U.S. tariffs, students may be rightfully concerned that rising costs could impede their ability to complete their studies. 

• How do I use GenAI without violating academic integrity guidelines? The GenAI context is messy for students and instructors alike. AI detection is inherently flawed and students often face different rules for AI use across courses. Further, the implications of an academic misconduct finding can be severe, particularly for more vulnerable students; as Shannon Dea writes, “In Canada, theft of under $5,000 does not result in deportation, but an academic misconduct finding on an assessment worth 10 per cent of a course grade can lead to [an international] student losing their visa.”  

• What kind of job market and cost of living will I experience when I graduate? Employment futures are important to today’s students. According to Dr. VanNijnatten, “students display a noticeable instrumentalism in attitudes towards the role that education plays in their lives. Successive years of survey data from the Canadian University Survey Consortium shows that the primary reason students apply to university is to get a job and gain upward mobility. The actual learning experience is decidedly secondary.” The economic disruptions anticipated due to U.S. tariffs, automation, and AI create job market stress for students. There are also concerns about cost of living in the face of rising costs. While it is not exclusive to students, a 2024 Environics survey report finds Canadian perceptions of intergenerational mobility are increasingly pessimistic, with 18-29 year olds in particular feeling worse off than their parents were at the same age. 

• What kind of society will I experience? In a context of political polarization, science skepticism, and anti-intellectualism, some students may worry about an emerging society that does not align with their personal values. For students engaged in research (particularly graduate students), there is reasonable concern about the future availability of research funding and potential constraints on research topics, as is being experienced in the U.S. 

Of course, students are not alone in finding the current world bleak. Canadian university instructors worry about many of these things as well. Further, instructors in tenure-stream positions worry about how increasing financial pressures on universities will impact their workloads and quality of work, while instructors in contract positions worry about how these same financial pressures will impact their employment. 

How instructors can contextualize for students 

Students and instructors alike are concerned with and distracted by our current challenging context. We are all “in the soup” together. But instructors have a particular opportunity and — we respectfully suggest — responsibility to support students through empathy, context and skill development. 

For instance, many of us will be familiar with various frameworks for thinking about what’s in our control — and what’s not. Now’s a good time to remember this distinction. We and our students can control, for example, our own attitudes, work ethic, behaviour and how we communicate. We cannot directly and individually control the past, others’ actions and behaviours, the weather, or global politics. Writer Shawna Lemay points us to our individual “3 meters of influence,” which is a significant amount of influence in our daily lives, perhaps especially when encountering challenging times.  

Expanding on this idea of influence, we suggest reminding students to think about what we can control, what we can’t — and, then, what we can influence. In this liminal space of influence — between what we can and can’t control — there’s room to play, to hope, make a difference, have fun, experience delight, and to imagine and work towards a future that’s better than today. (In a similar vein, Mattea Roach’s recent interview with Imani Perry highlights the “extraordinary human capacity to find beauty in the face of devastation.”) As we do this in our classrooms and beyond, we create a bit of agency for ourselves and our students in times like these.  

By approaching our support for students in this way — with empathy and experience-based context — we are also reminding ourselves that we, too, have been through tough times, that we can do hard things, and that we have survived — and that we have the capacity to thrive anyway.  

How instructors can help empower students  

Expressing empathy for students and helping students place the current context into a larger historical frame is necessary for students to feel seen, heard and understood. Instructors can build on this to help students feel less helpless and more empowered by connecting their studies to the larger world. Here are some suggestions for how to do so: 

• Ask students how, if at all, they feel the current context is relevant to themselves, their futures, and their area of study. (It may be useful to review and adapt the helpful strategies in the 2024 University Affairs article, “Navigating the Israel-Palestine debate in the classroom”, many of which are applicable to a variety of potentially contentious classroom discussions). 

• Hold classroom discussions to help students collectively identify areas in which they have agency to influence or create outcomes related to their area of disciplinary study.  

• Use classroom activities to foster discipline-relevant civic skills (such as critical thinking, science literacy and communication) and discuss with students how these skills are relevant to their future careers and lives as citizens. 

• Use reflection activities to support students to identify how their skills and knowledge can transfer to a variety of future employment and societal contexts.  

Engaging with your students in these ways does not need to require much in the way of classroom time and may help them feel a bit more prepared for the future. 

Continuing the Skills Agenda conversation  

What are you hearing from your own students about our current context? Please let us know in the comments below. And for additional teaching, writing, and time management discussion, please check out my (Loleen’s) Substack blog, Academia Made Easier. 

We look forward to hearing from you. Until next time, stay well, colleagues.