If you are like me, you may be getting truly tired of the cliché of 2020: “the new normal.” I’m not really sure what it means, and I imagine insofar as it means anything, it means different things for different people.
Bottom line, though, is that we are going to have to make some changes now that we have firsthand experience of how disruptive a pandemic can be, both personally and professionally. One of the benefits of COVID-19 has been the time and space it has given us all to reflect, and when I have time to reflect, I invariably start thinking about how I can do better.
How I can do better includes what I need to change. When we think about change, leaders often make a mistake in assuming that as long as they have a compelling vision, people will just naturally fall in line because they share in the excitement and possibility of the change. What seems obvious in my mind, however, may not seem obvious to others, and the more I challenge the status quo with which people have become comfortable, the more resistance I may get.
Ironically, those of us in the teaching and learning business are often the most reluctant to change. We repeatedly tell students that part of our role at the university is to nudge them out of their comfort zone. Discomfort shakes their assumptions about the world and makes learning possible.
I had to admit earlier in my career that although I knew a tremendous amount about the literature of medieval Spain, perhaps I did not know everything about teaching. I have a Ph.D. from a prestigious university, but that does not mean I know everything. When I became a dean, I also had to learn new skills, and when I moved to Hilo, I have had to learn how to do my job in this new environment. I have had to be willing to learn in order to grow, and the one constant in all these learning experiences has been the need to change.
Higher education generally engages in evolutionary change, slowly adapting to changing circumstances, but COVID-19 and its budget impact are making us speed up the pace somewhat and that understandably creates anxiety. So many things will need to change, but change can be a good thing if it allows us to do better by our students and our community; what does not change is our kuleana to both.
Those of us who are usually in the role of teacher now find ourselves in the role of learner: What can we do better online? What do we know about our students and how they learn? Which majors does our island need us to support because there are jobs waiting for our graduates? What are the obstacles that our students are facing? Who is working most efficiently? How can we learn from one another? And most importantly, what are we going to need to change in what we do and how we do it to survive and thrive?
In the coming months, you will hear about changes at UH-Hilo. I am not giving any spoilers here because discussions are still going on within the campus as we all try to learn how best to move forward. We have learned that we cannot do everything for everyone that we might like to do, but we know that we have to change. Some of these changes will be difficult, but our students and our island deserve our best.
I have a colleague in California who once asked a very provocative question: “How far out of our comfort zone are we willing to go for the sake of our students?” I ask myself that question almost every day. Try to fill in the object of the sentence with your own idea: How far out of our comfort zone are we willing to go for the sake of our ‘aina? How far out of our comfort zone are we willing to go for the sake of our community?
Do we have the courage to learn? Do we have the courage to change?
Bonnie D. Irwin is chancellor of the University of Hawaii at Hilo. Her column appears monthly in the Tribune-Herald.