Please join us in congratulating Morgan Westcott who successfully defended her EdD Dissertation on March 21 of 2025.
Title:
Polytechnic Instructors as First Responders to Student Crises: Centring Faculty Voices
Abstract:
The purpose of this qualitative study is to identify and describe the ways some instructors experience encounters with students in distress, to better support instructors, centre their voices, and acknowledge that instructor well-being is important in its own right. While there is a significant body of literature representing the challenges for students in post-secondary education, there remains little research specific to instructor experiences. To contribute to an emerging body of work on the faculty viewpoint, this study is framed from the perspective of care ethics, where care is a quality of the relation between the instructor and student (e.g., Noddings) as well as affected by organizational factors and broader social structures (e.g., Tronto, Fraser). It uses Thorne’s interpretive descriptive framework, incorporating approaches from phenomenography and solicited audio-diary methods to identify and describe the ways a group of polytechnic instructors experienced encounters with students in distress. Through a process of manual encoding, diary and interview data was grouped into themes and presented as an outcome space (map) of the phenomenon. This expands a previous 3R framework (DiPlacito-DeRango) of instructor responses to distressed students (recognize, render, and redirect) to 5Rs (recognize, react, respond, redirect, and reciprocate) and situates these components within an organizational and societal context. The study shares instructor responses in their own words to highlight various themes and discusses the factors that facilitate, and inhibit, caring relations along individual, organizational, and systemic lines. It concludes with a set of recommendations to the Institute to better support instructors in their enactment of care.
Chair of Examination Committee:
Dr. Jillianne Code, Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy
University Examiners:
Dr. Deirdre Kelly, Department of Educational Studies
Dr. Sabre Cherkowski, Okanagan School of Education
External Examiner:
Dr. Vicki Squires, University of Saskatchewan
Supervisory Committee:
Dr. Claudia Ruitenberg
Dr. Alison Taylor
Dr. Amy Metcalfe
Congratulations Morgan!