In Search of Silver Linings: Strategies for Preparing Future Faculty During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

In this article, we describe our experience as a racially and disciplinarily diverse, relatively junior program team who embraced the opportunity to transform a 20-year-old professional development seminar for graduate students into a remote offering in response to COVID-19. Our efforts to support our participants and champion an institutional move toward equitable and effective virtual programming are situated alongside the psychological tolls of remote work, a global health crisis, and ongoing racial violence across the United States. We recount our experience using, as a helpful metaphor, Lewin's change model, which describes the process of "unfreezing," "changing," and "refreezing" long-standing assumptions and practices to bring about positive cultural changes within an organization. In particular, we highlight the tools and practices we implemented to increase equitable online engagement while also offsetting the burden on program facilitators who were constrained in time and resources. We then offer some reflections about possibilities afforded by intentionally designed, community-centered virtual professional development programs for graduate students and beyond.