Coping with grief, loss, and well-being during a pandemic: A collaborative autoethnography of international educators during COVID-19

Abstract

In this collaborative autoethnography, international educators based in Australia reflect upon their experiences of coping with grief and restrictions during COVID-19. The authors explore how their sense of belonging and home has been affected through stay-at-home directives and how they have developed community among other international social work/development educators.

Responses to COVID-19 in Major Social Work Journals: A Systematic Review of Empirical Studies, Comments, and Editorials

“…“ While people around me either lost their jobs, or were plagued by nervousness about losing them, I continued my studies, my job, and my volunteering ” (Semmens, 2020, p.516). Gates et al (2020) conducted a study on the well-being of international social work educators. They highlighted the importance of continuing institutional support for international colleagues, for example, extra counseling, compassionate leave, and emergency leave for traveling abroad when deemed necessary.…”

“…These articles were contributed by scholars from more than 40 different countries and yielded 212 citations ( M = 0.8; SD = 2.0) as of February 1, 2021. Due to the limitations of the pandemic, academics came up with more innovative ways of conducting research, for example, collaborative autoethnography (Gates, Beazley, & Davis, 2020) and photovoice using remote methods (Liegghio & Caragata, 2021).…”

Internationalization, community, and pandemic pedagogies: a reflective case study of a highly international university during the COVID-19 pandemic

“…Specifically, CAE refers to a method in which "researchers work in community to collect their autobiographical materials and to analyze and interpret their data collectively to gain a meaningful understanding of sociocultural phenomena reflected in their autobiographical data" (Chang, Ngunjiri, and Hernandez, 2013). Throughout the pandemic, numerous CAE studies have documented the lived experiences of students, faculty, and staff affected by disruptions to teaching, learning, and research activities, using their unique experiences of navigating the pandemic to delve into the social impacts and its effects on higher education (Roy and Uekusa, 2020;Gates, Beazley, and Davis, 2020;Kim, Zhu, and Weng, 2022;Godber and Atkins, 2021;Kohnke and Jarvis, 2021;Peters et al, 2020;McFadden et al, 2020). In this way, Roy and Uekusa (2020) describe CAE as a "useful, ethical, and self-empowering research method".…”

Reflective Design in Action: A Collaborative Autoethnography of Faculty Learning Design

“…Teams adopting an analytical approach commonly use emergent codes to identify key themes and consider what data means in context (Anderson et al, 2020b ; Chang, 2013 ; Garbati & Rothschild, 2016 ), often using individual journaling, discussion and collaborative writing in iterative cycles (Anderson et al, 2020a ; Vans Katwyk & Seko, 2017 ). Scholars have used CAE as both a research method to examine experiences in within higher education (Gates et al, 2020 ; Roy & Uekusa, 2020 ) and an “authentic learning activity” (Lee, 2020 ).…”