I first started working at BC in August 2020. As a professor in Academic Technology, it was a huge challenge to explore ways that I could support faculty as they worked to teach online during a pandemic. Thankfully, Bakersfield College (BC) was able to participate in the Humanizing Online STEM Academy in both the initial round of the grant as well as a grow partner during the scaling stage. At our campus, humanizing helped faculty build relationships with students to ensure continued rigor during online teaching.
Humanizing gave professors the permission they felt they needed to prioritize relationships with students. By participating in the Academy, faculty began to see how they could provide students flexibility while still ensuring student success and learning. Importantly, faculty also began to accept that they didn’t have to be perfect teachers and create the perfect class. Instead, imperfections became an opportunity to build relationships. When I first started teaching at BC, my daughter was five years old. She has always been quite vocal and able to project. During the craziness of COVID, I would often record videos for faculty from home while my husband supervised bath time. And, of course, I could always hear my daughter singing in the background of the videos. Instead of stressing out about creating a perfect video that did not acknowledge the reality of my life at that time, humanizing gave me the permission to embrace this in my videos. I would simply say, “There’s my daughter singing again. It’s bath time.” Even to this day, faculty who watched these videos still ask about my daughter. We’re all collectively surprised that she’s already nine … time really does fly.
In working with faculty at BC, it’s clear that the humanizing principles learned in the Academy have helped faculty to allow themselves to be human in their teaching. Faculty are not stressed by striving for an unachievable perfection and they are able to leverage imperfections to build meaningful relationships with students. The Humanizing Online STEM Academy presented faculty a way to improve their teaching to better support students, but it also helped faculty to do so in ways that fueled their love of teaching. As educators, we know that relationships are at the heart of our work. The Humanizing Online STEM Academy acknowledges the importance of the work we do as educators to build relationships and has demonstrated how relationships and an embracing of imperfection can help not only students, but faculty as well.
It’s been over four years since BC has had the pleasure of learning and growing from the Humanizing Online STEM Academy. We have had over forty faculty successfully complete the Academy. While we have had a high-adoption rate in STEM, the Academy has really transformed our campus culture. Humanizing has become a standard of high-quality teaching and an institutional norm for folks beyond STEM departments. For everyone on campus, humanizing has helped faculty build relationships with their students and with their colleagues as well.
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